All's well that ends. Or in my case, all's well that's abandoned. I can't possibly live here any more, this is no place for an artist. Barchester Towers is being invaded; brats are replacing the rats. The latter were far more preferable since they kept their own hours and themselves to themselves, unlike the former, who take delight in pushing every single button in the lift in order to turn a short unpleasant journey into a long unpleasant one, or race shrieking hither and yon around, about and all over the building, or find endless pleasure in knocking on my front door and running away before I can answer. I've even come to miss that slurring malaprop Harry Purvis. At least he was a stationary danger, not one that comes hurtling round corners at crotch height with the velocity and control of an unguided missile.
The Hamidullahs, their quiet, meticulous offspring and their mouth-watering culinary aromas have departed, replaced by a perennially unemployable family of six and the smell of boiled cabbage. Purvis's flat has been redecorated and turned over to a solo mum with three screamers, and the hood who inhabited 'd' has been replaced with a pair of spaced-out seventies rejects and their ghastly teenage sons named Loot and Burn. It's all too much. I'm getting out before the violence starts. It's only a matter of time before I throttle one of the bastards.
Abandoned, too, is my novel. Ah, who wants to read a picaresque in the age of virtual reality and information super highways? No, I have in mind something much more suitable, more low-brow, less weighty, ideally adaptable to television and film, in short — in the parlance of my brother the PR prostitute — a more commercial product. The humorous story of two block-headed policeman solving a murder while wandering through a mélange of literary styles and genres. Provisional title: A Tale of Two Thickies.
This damp and gloomy spot with its constant squall of infants is no place to write comedy. I need a change, a breath of fresh air, a room or two in one of those boxes down there clustered in the light of a fading sun. I need compatriots for dark cafés, people to linger with over espressos while scratchy Billie Holiday tracks set the mood. I need encouragement and solace, intelligence and wit and, above all, a haven from these damned kids.
I visited just such a place last night. My pick of two small flats with the only downside being the horrors of early morning sun. The landlord was keen I should take the large two-bedroom place downstairs with its kitchen sink view of my former abode and its two-bedroom rental price, but I shall stick with morning sun and heavy curtains. I grilled him about my fellow tenants — current as well as prospective since he still has two flats to go — but he assured me no riff-raff need apply.
'They give me trouble in the past,' he said in his discordant European accent. 'No more.' The current sole incumbent is a clerk in the single flat downstairs at the back — 'very quiet chap, not a peep'.
It bodes well, it feels right. Disguising my beneficiary status in my customary manner, I informed my new feoffer that I was a salesman of zumbooruks.
'Getaway!' he said. 'Still they make 'em, eh?'