LITMIR.BIZ

      CONTENTS

       Title Page

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       CHAPTER ONE

      I do not fancy burning down the warehouse with Sidney, so when the train pulls in at Euston, I slide off home to spend a few days with Mum and Dad. Sidney takes it badly of course, but I am quite Adam Faith about it and will not be Budgied. I mean, I have been through it all too many times before. Whenever there is knavery to be done and Sid says ‘we’ he really means me. And with my luck the matches would be damp and I would try striking one on a copper’s leg while Sid was keeping watch from the nearest boozer with his back to the window.

      For those unfortunate enough to have found their local bookshops sold out of Confessions of a Travelling Salesman, I had better point out that my evil brother-in-law Sidney Noggett, needed to burn down a warehouse full of unusable empire-made, multi-purpose cleaners because it was his only means of recovering the money he had laid out in a disastrous deal with a very unworthy Japanese gentleman by the name of Mr Ishowi.

      Scraggs Lane, Clapham is the ancestral home of the Leas, although my Mum always points out to people that we live at the Wandsworth Common end of it. She thinks it sounds more refined. A much nicer class of person gets mugged on Wandsworth Common.

      When I get to the end of the road it is looking even scruffier than usual, because they are pulling down one side of the street and a lot of people have taken the opportunity of dumping their rubbish along the pavement. It looks like a holiday camp for bluebottles. I am surprised that the slipstream from the ball and chain has not knocked down our house. Sidney always said that it was only kept upright by the woodworm joining together and holding hands.

      Still, like the poet says, be it ever so tumbledown, there is no place like home, and I cannot help feeling sad as I watch the lousy old place falling apart. All these highrise flats springing up like fast-growing mushrooms from a cowpat. Only the boozers left like fish heads to remind you of the rest of the body that has been gobbled up. Go in some of those pubs and they have to have the lights on all the time because there are so many blooming great buildings leaning on them, shutting out the light.

      It is about five o’clock when I get home and I am not altogether surprised when Dad opens the front door to me. He puts in time at the Lost Property Office and brings a lot of his work home with him. So much so that he is sometimes asked to take it back again. He is also convinced that atomic tests and fluoride in the water supply are sapping his natural juices and for that reason he is dead cautious about going to work unless he feels one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent what, I have never been able to discover. Suffice to say that there are usually one or two days a week when he is ‘resting up for the big push’ as he puts it. Why the Lost Property Office have not got the big push in first I will never know.

      Dad’s face when he sees me undergoes remarkably little change except that his mouth drops by one sixteenth of an inch.

      ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it’s you. What disaster brings you home?’

      ‘Your charm school closed down for the holidays, has it, Dad?’

      ‘Don’t give me none of your lip. I know you don’t come round here unless you want something.’ Marvellous, isn’t it? I have only just appeared on the doorstep and he is within an ace of going into his ‘you use this place like a hotel’ routine.

      ‘I wanted to see you and Mum,’ I say patiently. ‘This is my home, Dad.’

      ‘Only when things are getting too hot for you somewhere else.’

      Trouble with the old bleeder is that he is usually right.

      ‘Oh, Dad,’ I say reproachfully, ‘Dad.’ I let my voice tail away like I am too choked and hurt for words, and give a little misunderstood shake of the head. Believe me, Oscars have been won for far worse performances.

      ‘Well, come in if you’re coming,’ says Dad, singularly unmoved. ‘Don’t hang about there like a great Jessy.’

      I cross the threshold and am greeted by the odour of boiled cabbage and rising damp that always spells out home – or, more appropriately, smells out home. The hall looks the same except for a large barometer hanging between the moose head and the tin hat and gas mask. Dad was an air-raid warden during the last war and does not like people to forget the fact. He and Mum live in the past, poor old sods. It was only recently that they took the strips of sticky paper off the kitchen windows.

      I tap the barometer and the glass and both hands fall off.

      ‘Oh, bleeding marvellous,’ hollers Dad. ‘You haven’t been in the house two minutes and you’ve smashed a priceless work of art.’

      ‘Come off it, Dad. I only tapped it!’

      ‘Well, don’t tap it! It’s not there to be tapped.’

      ‘Everybody taps barometers, Dad. It’s like touching things when they’ve got a “wet paint” sign on them.’

      ‘That’s not the point. That had been there for two weeks without anything happening to it.’

      ‘I can believe that. The needle was jammed at set-fair. That’s why I tapped it.’

      ‘You leave things alone that don’t belong to you. You just leave things –’

      Where

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