The Lubetkin Legacy Read Free Page A

give us a minute, Mr Lukashenko?’
    ‘Side-b-bottom.’
    ‘Sidebottom?’
    Our eyes met, and I was struck by how beautiful hers were, large and almond-shaped, with sweeping lashes. The beast in my pants stirred. Oh God, not now. I withdrew outside the drapes, thinking I’d better find the canteen and have a calming cup of tea, when from the next bed the old woman hissed, ‘Hsss! Stay. Sit. Talk. Nobody visit me. I am all alone.’
    As a penance for my unruly thoughts, I pulled up my chair closer to her bed and cleared my throat. It’s hard to know how to strike up conversation with a total stranger who thinks you are gay. Maybe I should put her right?
    ‘You think people who wear pink are homosexual. Well, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual, but –’
    ‘Aha! No problem, Mister Bertie,’ the old woman interrupted. ‘No problem wit me. Everyone is children of God. Even Lenin has permitted it.’
    ‘Yes of course, but –’ I really needed that cup of tea.
    ‘You mama, Lily, say we must treat all people like own family. She like good Soviet woman. Always look at sunny side, Inna, she say.’
    ‘Yes, Mother’s a very special person.’ I glanced at the curtain around her bed, my heart pinched between anxiety and
tenderness. There seemed to be a lot of whispering and clattering going on. ‘What about your family, Inna?’
    ‘Not homosexy. My husband, Dovik, Soviet citizen,’ Inna declared. ‘But dead.’ She leaned over and spat into her bowl.
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ I put on a faux-sympathetic voice, like Gertrude in
Hamlet
, trying to avert my eyes from the revolting greenish fluid that was lapping at the cardboard edges of her bowl.
    ‘Why for you sorry? You not killed him.’
    ‘No, indeed not, but –’
    ‘Killed by olihark wit poison! I living alone. Olihark knocking at door. Oy-oy-oy!’ This sounded delusional. She fixed me with dark agitated eyes. ‘Every day cooking golabki kobaski slatki, but nobody it wit since Dovik got dead.’ She wiped her nose on the sheet. ‘Husband Dovik always too much smoking. I got emphaseema. Heating expensive. My flat too much cold.’ She reached for my hand with her dry twiggy fingers and gave it a flirtatious squeeze. ‘You mama tell me she got nice flat from boyfriend. Now she worry if she will die they take away flat for under-bed tax and you will live homeless on street.’ Behind the silver curtain of hair, her eyes were watching me, dark and beady. What Mother been telling her?
    Mother had lived in the flat since it was built in 1952, and she used to tell me with misty eyes that Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed it, had promised it would be a home for ever for her and her children. But since then the buggers hadn’t built enough new homes to keep up with the demand, she fumed, and the ones instigated by the council leader, Alderman Harold Riley, and built by Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had been flogged off to private landlords – like the flat next door, which had once belonged to a dustman called Eric Perkins and now belonged to a property company who filled it
with foreign students who played music all night and littered the lift with takeaway boxes.
    ‘Under-bed tax?’ Could they make me move out because of that?
    ‘Is new tax for under-bed occupant.’
    I kept mainly dog-eared scripts, odd socks and back copies of
The Stage
under my bed. Nothing you could call an occupant.
    ‘You mama very much worrying about break-up of post-war sensors. She say it make her sick in heart to think they take away her apartment and put you into street. This tax is work of Satan, she say. Mister Indunky Smeet. You know this devil-man?’
    ‘Not personally.’
    I’d heard of course of something called a bedroom tax, which Mother described variously as an affront to human decency, the final death-blow to the post-war consensus, and a pretext for squeezing more money out of poor people who happened to have a spare bedroom. But it never