LITMIR.BIZ

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I laugh to myself with a small snort now, making the people seated at the few tables around me in the café look over again. Magnolia Lodge, different. That’s the understatement of the new millennium.

      The thing was, the rest of Magnolia Avenue consisted of trendy little townhouses with big wooden decks, cosy braziers, remote garages and low-maintenance courtyards. Scattered in between these were dinky little cafés and shops that only ever sold one kind of thing—designer products for pampered pets, frozen life-on-the-go takeaway gourmet meals, five hundred kinds of scented candles, and so on.

      Well, ‘and so on’ kind of stopped at Magnolia Lodge. Magnolia Lodge was tucked up right at the end of the street, hidden in the corner as if it were a decrepit old organ that was being rejected by the rest of the street’s sprightly young body. The fact of the matter was number 36 was not so trendy, not so hip and definitely not so young. It was actually more like a pensioner palace—a thirty-apartment block full of old people and…

      …me.

      The token young person.

      Well, at least it was a politically correct apartment block.

      I could see the ‘this wasn’t what I was expecting’, mouth hanging open, shocked surprise written all over Jasper’s face when I opened my front door. At another time I probably would have had a laugh about it and asked him if he was trying to catch flies or something, but the truth was I’d just about had it with finding someone to rent the spare room in my apartment for some extra cash. This was the third Saturday that I’d been ushering people around the place. And those were the polite ones—the ones who hadn’t done a runner when they finally found the apartment block behind all the shrubbery.

      ‘Hi, I’m Charlie—Charlie Notting.’ I stuck my hand out.

      He shook it. A good shake that made me lift my eyebrows. It wasn’t like most of the soggy Weetabix handshakes I’d been getting in this doorway lately. ‘Jasper Ash,’ he said.

      I invited him in and offered him a drink, which he declined. Instead, he just stood in the middle of the living room and looked around.

      ‘Not what you were expecting, hey?’ I got right down to it.

      ‘Never—’

      ‘Never even knew it was here.’ I finished off the sentence I’d heard from just about anyone who’d ever knocked on my front door. I tried not to sound too defensive as I said it.

      He nodded.

      ‘Nobody does.’ I sighed then, wondering just how many more times I could do this before someone’s blood ended up on the carpet and I lost my bond money. ‘Would you really like to see the place, or are you just being polite?’

      He turned and looked at me then, and I felt bad. I hadn’t meant to snap, but I’d just about got to the end of the line with this whole showing people around thing. This was my home. I liked it. And having several people every Saturday for three weeks in a row slag it off wasn’t my idea of a good time.

      I think Jasper might have got what I was really saying by the tone of my voice, because he shook his head then. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice—the apartment. Just didn’t know the street went up this far.’

      I started to warm to him a bit when he said that. This guy—Jasper—he was perhaps a bit nicer than the other people I’d shown through. He seemed sincere, anyway—as if he really did think the apartment was nice—which was a start. I took a deep breath in and tried to quell my nasty side. ‘Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.’

      We did the whole thing. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the two bathrooms, even the garage, despite the fact that Jasper didn’t have a car. Eventually we headed back inside and stood on the balcony overlooking the garden and, beyond that, the river.

      ‘Wow. Really is a river view, isn’t it? It’s magnificent.’

      ‘Yep.’

      ‘What’s that?’ He pointed at something down at the end of the garden.

      ‘Oh, that’s the shed. It used to be a boat shed, but the people who live here are mostly too old to be messing about in boats now, so they let me use it instead.’

      ‘What for?’

      ‘I’m a sculptor—that’s what I do. When I’m not waitressing to pay the bills and trying to finish off my degree, that is.’

      ‘You’re a slash person too, huh? Probably a good sign.’

      I gave him a look. A slash person? ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I hoped he didn’t have a machete stuck down his pants.

      He laughed. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Just that everyone our age seems to be a slash person these days. Waiter-slash-actor, waiter-slash-writer, waiter-slash-artist. I’m a music tutor-slash-songwriter myself. A waiter-slash-sculptor-slash-uni student, yeah? That’s great. Never met one of those.’

      I had to laugh when Jasper had finished explaining this to me, because it was true. Everyone did seem to be a ‘slash person’, as he called it, these days.

      Personally, I was trying to cut my slashes down and just be a waiter-slash-sculptor by finishing off my last subject at uni—the last few credit points before they would finally give me my BA in Fine Arts. Finally. I’d stuffed around here and there, and left all the subjects I didn’t fancy but had to do till last. While I should have graduated last semester, there was one subject—a Modern History one—that I couldn’t quite seem to pass. Mostly because of the vast number of dates the subject required me to store in my brain. There was just something about dates and my brain that didn’t click. Anyway, this was my second attempt.

      I was about to tell Jasper as much when there was a knock on the door. I went over to find that it was Mrs McCready, who wanted to let me know they were about to have high tea and a game of croquet on the lawn in a moment or two.

      ‘Wonderful,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve got a lovely tin of lavender shortbread that I’ve been saving. I’ll bring it down with me.’

      When I closed the door and turned to head back to the balcony, Jasper had moved and was now standing facing me. ‘Lavender shortbread?’

      I stopped in my tracks, right there in the middle of the living room, as I realised that my quelling-the-nasty-side thing obviously wasn’t permanent. It didn’t seem to matter how well we’d been getting along, talking about slash persons. All it took was this one little comment and a tiny smirk from Jasper to bring the past weekends rushing back at me, pushing me over the edge into shrew territory. I put my hands on my hips then and let it rip.

      ‘You know, I like it here. It’s a bloody great apartment for the price, and the people here are really nice. So what if they’re old? They care about each other, and that’s more than I can say for any of the apartments I’ve lived in before this.’ I paused for a breath. ‘God, I could have died in one of those places and no one would have known until the smell wafted out or someone’s cat coughed up my eyeballs. If you had any guts you’d come downstairs with me and actually have some lavender shortbread and maybe play a game of croquet. It wouldn’t kill you.’

      Jasper just smiled an amused smile. He leaned back on the balcony, calm and composed. As if he owned it, really. ‘No idea what you’re talking about. Just never heard of lavender shortbread before, that’s all.’

      I took my hands off my hips, uncertain. ‘Oh.’

      ‘I’ll play a game of croquet. Have some of that lavender shortbread too, if you’re offering.’

      There was a pause. I cleared my throat. Cleared it again. ‘OK, then. Let’s, um, go.’ And I grabbed the tin out of the kitchen, trying to avoid his gaze as I passed by. Then, together, we trundled off downstairs.

      Down in the garden, Mr Nelson was setting up the trestle table and the ladies of the Lodge were hovering around him, waiting to put their darling little china plates of miniature

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