(1989) Dreamer Read Free Page A

a lifestyle, she thought. I’ll have a pound of salami, two melons and a lifestyle please.
    She drove down the dark street, so dark it could have been a hundred years ago, and turned right past a warehouse into an unlit parking lot. She smelled the oily, salty tang of the Thames as she climbed out, hitched her briefcase from the passenger seat and locked the door carefully. She hurried across the lot through the driving rain, glancing warily at the shadows, and flinched at the sudden rattle of a hoarding in the freshening wind.
    She climbed the steps into the porch and the automatic light came on with a crisp, metallic click. She punched in the code on the lock, then went inside, closing the door behind her. Her footsteps echoed as she walked in the dim light across the stone floor of the lobby, past the exposed steel girders that were painted bright red, and the two huge oak casks that were recessed into the wall. Warehouse. You could never forget it had once been a warehouse, a huge grimy Victorian Gothic warehouse.
    She went into the lift that you had to go into in darkness, because the light only came on when the doors shut. Creepy. Creepy and slow. She leaned against the wall of the lift as it slowly shuffled up the four floors.Lucky there weren’t any more, she thought, or you could eat your dinner going up in it. Then it stopped with a jerk that always unbalanced her, and she walked down the corridor to her front door, unlocked it and went into their huge flat. Nicky came racing down the hallway towards her, his shirt hanging over the top of his trousers, his blond hair flopping over his face.
    ‘Mummy! Yippee!’
    She bent down and hugged him and he put his arms around her and kissed her firmly on each cheek, then he looked up at her solemnly. ‘I’m a ’vestor now.’
    ‘A vestor, Tiger?’
    ‘’Vestor! I got a porthole.’
    ‘Porthole?’ she asked, baffled.
    ‘Yeah! I made three pounds today.’
    ‘Three pounds? That’s clever. How did you make three pounds?’
    ‘From my porthole. Daddy showed me how.’
    ‘What’s your porthole?’
    He took her hand. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ He looked up at her, triumph in his wide blue eyes. ‘We’re going for it.’
    ‘Are you?’
    ‘Yeah!’
    ‘“Yes”, darling, not “yeah”.’
    ‘Yeah!’ he teased, tugging his hand free and running down the corridor, turning his head back fleetingly. ‘Yeah!’
    She put down her briefcase, took off her coat, and followed him across the huge hallway and down the corridor to his bedroom.
    ‘Daddy! Daddy! Show Mummy how much money we’ve made.’ Nicky stood beside his father, who was kneeling on the red carpet in front of his little computer, a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray beside him, holdinghis whisky tumbler in one hand and tapping the keyboard with his other. A tall, powerfully built man, even kneeling he dwarfed the cluttered room. He turned and looked at her and smiled his nothing-has-changed-has-it? smile. ‘Hi, Bugs.’
    She stared at him for a moment, at his handsome, almost old-fashioned face, the sort of face that belonged more to Forties Hollywood than Eighties London, his slicked-back blond hair, his pink shirt opened at the collar, his checked braces and pin-striped trousers. Stared at the man she used to love so much, who now felt almost like a stranger.
    ‘Good day?’ he said.
    ‘Fine.’ She leaned down, more for Nicky’s benefit than for anything else, brushed her cheek cursorily against his, feeling his evening stubble, and mouthed a blank kiss, like a goldfish. ‘You?’
    ‘Bit slow. Market’s a bit cautious.’
    ‘Show her, Daddy.’ Nicky put his arm around his father’s back, and patted him excitedly.
    ‘We’ve made him a little portfolio. Put a few shares in and I’ll update them each day from the Market.’
    ‘Great,’ she said flatly. ‘What are we going to have? The world’s youngest Yuppie?’
    ‘Yippie!’ said Nicky, jumping up and down. ‘We got