Nocturne Read Free Page B

the bottom, sealing the street off from the cemetery beyond, a pitted brick wall. Adjoining the brick wall, on the north side of the street, was an end-of-terrace house, two stories, with big square bays up and down. The foot or two of garden between the house and the front wall had been covered with crudely poured concrete, and the ‘ For Sale ’ board was sagging where someone had nicked the loop of wire securing it to the gatepost, but I liked the warm red colour of the bricks and the double bays were capped with a nice piece of stonework in the shape of a Dutch gable.
    I stepped back into the road, consulting the details I ’ d picked up at the estate agents. The house had been subdivided into two flats and it was the bottom half that was for sale. The window frames needed a lick of paint, and the front door had seen better days but the road was unquestionably quiet and I liked very much the idea of being in a cul-de-sac. Best of all was the price. For a living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, the agents were asking just £43,000.
    I returned an hour and a half later with the key. Inside, while the woman from the estate agency did her best to secure a broken window catch at the back of the house, I prowled from room to room, my initial hunch confirmed. Like so many terrace houses, the property was bigger than it seemed, stretching back along a dark, narrow hall that smelled, very faintly, of disinfectant. The two bedrooms were a bit of a cheat, a crude subdivision of a once-larger room, but the kitchen was a good size and whoever had done the conversion had known a thing or two about bathroom suites. This one was in egg-yolk yellow, one of my all-time favourite colours, and it even boasted a bidet between the pedestal washbasin and the big scalloped bath. By the time the estate agent had finished wrestling with the window catch, I ’ d made up my mind.
    ‘ Yes, ’ I told her. ‘ Very definitely yes. ’
    We stepped out into the street and she locked the door behind us. It was nearly dark by now but I could see a blur of little black faces behind the curtains in the house next door. One of them offered a shy wave. I waved back.
    ‘ Know anything about the neighbours? ’ I inquired.
    The woman from the estate agency looked blank. She couldn ’ t find her car keys.
    ‘ Nothing, ’ she said. ‘ Apparently there ’ s some bloke up top but that ’ s about the size of it. ’
    I nodded, another little query answered. Nice to have company, I thought, waving at the kids again and wondering vaguely about the man upstairs.
    It took longer than I ’ d thought to move in. The mortgage people demanded a survey and the surveyor ’ s insistence on various ‘ structural adjustments ’ took my mother ’ s loan to £4,850 before 31 Napier Road was legally mine.
    By now it was early December and I ’ d se en enough of the realities of mainstream television to make the prospect of my little hideaway all the more enticing. Doubleact had become a nightmare, a never-ending series of deadlines that seemed to stretch onwards and onwards into some infinite future. Not once at university had it occurred to me that broadcast television might be nothing more than an assembly line, a machine for turning bad ideas into fat profits, but the more people I talked to, the more I realised that this was exactly the way it was. I was working in a factory - exhaustion salted with moments of blind panic - and what made it worse was the fact that I ’ d finally recognised the logic behind Brendan Quayle ’ s offer of a job. He ’ d always made it pretty plain that he badly wanted to shag me. That I could cope with, but what came as a surprise was the realisation that he was offering the same challenge to more or less anyone else who ’ d demean themselves by appearing on his wretched show. In part, poor sad man, he was using me as a kind of company come-on, a role for which three years at Bournemouth most definitely hadn ’ t