Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Read Free Page A

cracks. Minty had grown up with street names like that and couldn’t see anything funny about it but it had made Jock laugh. He’d only been in the area a few months and every time he saw the name he’d cast up his eyes, laugh that soundless laugh of his, and say, “Fifth Avenue! I don’t believe it.”
    Admitted, it wasn’t a very nice part, but “run-down” and “a real slum,” which were what Jock called it, were going a bit far. OTT, to use his own expression. To Minty it appeared gray and dreary but familiar, the background of her life for nearly thirty-eight years, for she’d been a baby when Agnes left her with Auntie “for an hour at the maximum” and never came back. The row of shops ran from Second to First Avenue on Harrow Road. Two of them had closed and been boarded up or they’d have been vandalized. The Balti takeaway was still there, a bathroom fittings shop, a builder’s merchant, a unisex hairdresser, and, on the corner, Immacue. It was just as well Minty had brought her key, for Josephine wasn’t there yet.
    She let herself in, put up the blind on the door, slid back the bars on the window. Some very strange people roamed Harrow Road by night. Nothing was safe. Minty stood still a moment, breathing in Immacue’s smell, a mixture of soap, detergent, clean linen, dry-cleaning fluids, and stain remover. She’d have liked 39 Syringa Road to smell like that, but she simply hadn’t the wherewithal. It was a scent that developed over years of cleansing within a relatively small space. And inhaling it was the reverse of what Minty sometimes experienced when it was her lot to sort through the piles of clothes customers brought in and, as they were moved and lifted and turned over, there rose from them a nasty odor of stale sweat and food stains.
    Exactly nine-thirty. She turned the sign on the inside of the door to OPEN and went into the back room, where the ironing awaited her. Immacue provided a shirt service and it was her job on weekdays, and Saturdays too, to iron fifty shirts before lunchtime. It was mostly women who brought them in and collected them, and Minty sometimes wondered who wore them. Most people were poor around here, single mothers and pensioners and out-of-work boys looking for trouble. But a lot of yuppies who worked in the city had bought houses nearby; they were cheap by present-day standards and near the West End, even if they were the kind of places their parents wouldn’t have looked at twice. They must be the men who wore these snowy white and pink and blue-striped shirts to go to their jobs in offices and banks, these two hundred immaculate shirts encased in cellophane and with a neat little cardboard collar and cardboard bow tie fixed to each one.
    By the time Josephine came in Minty had ironed five. Always when she arrived in the morning she went up to Minty and gave her a kiss. Minty submitted to this salutation, even lifted up her cheek for it, but she didn’t much care for being kissed by Josephine, who wore thick, waxy, dark red lipstick, some of which inevitably came off on Minty’s clean, pale skin. After she’d gone to hang up her coat Minty went to the sink and washed her cheek and then she washed her hands. Fortunately, there were always plenty of cleaning materials, cloths, sponges, and brushes at Immacue.
    Customers started coming in, but Josephine attended to them. Minty wouldn’t go out there unless one of them asked for her specially or Josephine called her. There were still some who didn’t know what had happened to Jock and who asked how her fiancé was or when was she getting married, and Minty had to say, “He got killed in the Paddington train crash.” She didn’t like having sympathy; it embarrassed her, especially now she’d seen his ghost last night. Saying he was dead and accepting the kind things they said seemed like cheating somehow.
    They had coffee at eleven. Minty drank hers and washed her hands. Josephine said, “How’re you