‘Try again,’ I suggested, and I pulled the elastic band out of my hair and shook it loose. It was well over my shoulders now, and in need of a trim, but that was another thing that would have to wait until I’d earned some money. The two Cs both had expensive hairdos: one short and spiky, one bobbed—both bottled blonde.
‘A cardboard box?’ Jemima quipped.
‘Hampstead,’ I said with a lazy sigh as I heeled my shoes off my aching feet.
They glanced at each other, then glared at me.
‘Hampstead!’ they repeated as one.
‘’Fraid so,’ said I with a sigh. ‘But someone’s got to live there, I suppose.’
They naturally assumed that this was an example of northern humour.
‘Where are you really going?’ Fiona wanted to know, trying to smile now.
‘Hampstead,’ I repeated patiently, crossing my budget-trouser-covered legs. ‘That place with the Heath—surely you know it?’
They did another quick exchange of glances, and then seemed to lose the use of their tongues for a while. Except as an aid to swallow large gulps of wine. I watched as they fumbled for something to say, and was glad I was me and neither of them. They might have nice clothes and well-paid jobs, but they were essentially soulless. And my hair might need a trim, but at least I didn’t have to touch up the roots every three weeks. At least my almost-though-not-quite blonde hair was natural.
‘I expect there are bad parts even in Hampstead,’ Jemima eventually said, but she didn’t sound quite so cocksure now.
‘I expect there are,’ I agreed as I stretched my arms over my head. ‘But where I’m going isn’t one of them.’
It was getting on for six o’clock now. I was later back than I should have been, due to the fact that I’d spent a couple of hours mooching around what was to be my new stomping ground. Before that Mrs Audesley had shown me over the house and assured me that I was welcome to use as much or as little of it as I liked. I think she was a bit hurt at first, to discover that her one-woman African Grey had taken a shine to another. She kept glancing at me curiously, as if trying to work out what it was about me that had captured Sir Galahad’s heart. She told me he’d only taken to one other person in his thirty-nine years. This was her gardener, whom she’d said she would contact later in order to fix up a time for us to discuss our shared parrot-sitting duties.
And then she said something about her great-nephew, the one who worked at the bank with Sophie. And I’m not sure why but it was still bothering me even now.
‘So when exactly are you going?’ Jemima asked, interrupting my thoughts.
‘Saturday morning. You could give me a lift over in your car, if you like.’
Normally there would have been a stock reply to such a wild suggestion that included words like ‘dreams’ and ‘in your’, but I could see she was battling between her natural inclination to be rude and unhelpful and desperate curiosity about my apparent turn of fortune. She skilfully managed to overcome the dilemma with her eventual reply.
‘Well, if it will get you and your junk out from under our feet any quicker I don’t see why not.’
Fiona, who didn’t have a car and was a little less sharp than her partner in malice, looked and sounded appalled. ‘You’re not really going to help move her awful stuff in your car?’ she demanded of Jemima.
‘That way she gets to see my new gaff,’ I answered for her. ‘But it’s okay, Fiona, you don’t have to come.’
She got it at last, and twittered a bit before insisting on helping with the move, at which point Sophie got back and, shocked at this display of co-operation, asked what was going on.
I hadn’t got round to ringing her yet, to telling her the outcome of my interview with Mrs Audesley, and she was clearly delighted when I told her my news. But I didn’t want to go into details with the two Cs around, so I suggested we went and had something to eat at Felix’s Place. ‘My treat,’ I insisted, ‘as a thank-you for tipping me off.’
The café is handily placed on the corner of the street. It’s a genuine old-fashioned greasy spoon, which Sophie and I loved a lot because there wasn’t a bagel or French stick in sight. Just proper bread baps, the size of a side plate, that we had filled with chips and washed down with huge mugs of tea. It’s a sort of endangered species really, Felix’s Place. Somewhere you can fill yourself up for around a quid and where no single item contains less than one thousand calories. It is heaven on earth.
Felix, who runs the place with his wife and whichever one of his seven children happens to be available at any given time, has been there for twenty-two years, ever since he arrived from County Donegal with his lovely wife Angie. They live in the flat over the café and it is not unusual to hear Angie bawling at the kids, which just kind of adds to the homely atmosphere of the place. It was John on duty with his father tonight, a fourteenish-year-old Arsenal fan who flaunted his allegiance with his red and white shirt.
‘You look as if you’ve lost a euro and found a fiver,’ Felix said to me as I rolled up to the counter. Sophie had grabbed the last available table, which happened to be our favourite, and waved to Felix as she slumped triumphantly into a seat. He is one of those men who will insist on living a lie as far as his hair is concerned. The central area of his head is completely bald, but he grows the remainder just long enough to draw it up over the bare patch and then he secures it with a dab of something that could well be chip fat, but I very much hope isn’t—for Angie’s sake. With their pale skin and curly rust-coloured locks, most of the children are clones of their father, and with John at his side it was easy to imagine how Felix must have looked before most of his own hair sadly forsook him.
‘I’ve found somewhere to live,’ I told him, then ordered two of our usual specials.
‘Around here?’ he wanted to know, and I said that it unfortunately wasn’t. He seemed a bit sorry for me when I filled him in, especially when I mentioned the parrot.
‘An ould aunt of mine had one of them fellers, and her life was never her own after he cem through the door. Ruled her with a rod of iron, he did, and he had the foullest mouth that side of the Shannon.’ He’d belonged to a sailor, according to Felix, and as he piled chips into heavily buttered baps, and poured steaming tea into horizontally striped blue mugs, he gave me some milder examples of the parrot’s revolting way with words. ‘T’would make a maiden blush, some of things that he said,’ Felix concluded, ‘so it was lucky, I suppose, that my aunt was as deaf as the hinge on a gatepost.’
Felix had a fine turn of phrase that was all part of the colour and charm of the place, and even though I’d only known him a couple of weeks I felt a bit sad that I would no longer be seeing him on a daily basis. I popped in every morning for a cup of tea, and although I could rarely face cooked food at the start of the day Felix had let me take the odd snap of his mega fry-ups by way of keeping my hand in.
‘But you’ll come back now and then,’ he said as he took my money, and it sounded more of a prediction than a question.
‘For someone with your particular ambitions, you’re not exactly a gastronome,’ Sophie said when I’d squeezed past tables and put the tray down on ours. It was positioned right next to the window, which was, as usual, misted over with condensation.
Her statement was a perfectly true one but I didn’t see why it mattered. ‘Food’s food,’ I told her blithely, ‘and I’m as happy to take pictures of the humble fish finger as I am of squid à la Up Yer Posh Bum.’
‘So,’ she said as she lifted the lid of her bap and squeezed brown sauce over the pile of golden glistening chips, ‘how did you manage it? I’ve heard that the parrot is a hard bird to please.’
‘Which I note that you failed to mention,’