LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      In which Valentina, an Italian ice cream lady, nearly garrots brother-in-law Sid and proffers exquisite retribution to Timmy after an unpromising beginning.

      ‘Fifty thousand quid a year,’ says Sid.

      ‘You what?’ I say. I thought he had dropped off over his pint but this is clearly not the case.

      ‘I’ve just worked it out,’ he says, nodding towards the ice cream van barely visible beneath a pall of kids. ‘That’s what that Frascati geezer is taking home to his old lady and the bambinos. Three a minute at an average of ten pence a time. That’s eighteen quid an hour – make it twenty to keep to round figures. Start around ten and finish at six. That’s a hundred and sixty quid a day. Six-day week. That’s nine hundred and sixty nicker a week. Fifty-two weeks in a year. That’s fifty thousand quid near as damn it.’

      ‘He’s not working flat out all the time,’ I say. ‘There’s no market in the winter.’

      ‘He switches to hot dogs and field dressings during the football season,’ says Sid. ‘Even if he was only working half the year that’s twenty-five thousand quid. Can’t be bad. I’ve always said you can’t go wrong flogging nosh – provided you work for yourself, of course.’

      ‘I never remember you saying that,’ I observe.

      ‘That’s because you never listen,’ says Sid. ‘You just sit there wondering how long you can hang onto that pint so that you don’t have to buy another one.’

      ‘I bought the last one!’ I tell him.

      ‘What does it matter?’ says Sid. ‘You’re so petty. I don’t pay attention to things like that.’

      ‘That’s what I’m complaining about,’ I say. ‘You’re as tight as a french letter on a bollard.’

      ‘What a disgusting way to talk,’ says Sid. ‘I don’t know what your bleeding mother would say if she could hear you.’ He drains his pint and sighs. ‘Oh dear, it’s always the foreigners, isn’t it? They’re the only people making any money in this country at the moment. If the Arabs haven’t bought it, it’s only because the Pakistanis and the Chinese won’t sell. You have to go the other side of Thornton Heath to see an Englishman.’

      ‘I don’t understand it,’ I say. ‘If we’re in such desperate schtuck why are they rushing to get in?’

      ‘Because their standards are much lower than ours,’ says Sid. ‘They’ll accept things no Britisher would tolerate. Cold beer, that kind of thing. What they put up with at home makes this country seem like paradise.’

      We watch an Alfa Romeo glide to a halt beside the ice cream van and a slim, dark girl get out and shake back her tawny black hair. She is wearing black satin trousers that cling to her high-hitched arse the way the outer skin of an onion is moulded to the inner layers. The pencil line of her panties runs round the curves like a contour line. She bends to get something out of the car and a parched cry of need breaks from Sid’s throat.

      ‘Blimey,’ he breathes. ‘She could have a lick of my cornet any day of the week.’

      ‘She looks foreign,’ I say.

      ‘They’re not all bad,’ says Sid ‘It’s the men that make the trouble.’

      As we watch, the bird goes to the back of the van and opens the door. ‘One of the family,’ I say. ‘You’re right, Sid. They must be doing all right if she can afford

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