Working Stiff Read Free Page B

habit of giving her month a running start, beginning a powerful inhalation before she had even lifted her cup from the coffee table.
    â€œI saw your banjo.”
    She was referring to my Fender Stratocaster.
    â€œI trust that you won’t be playing it while I’m about. I can hear everything. I’m like a hawk.”
    The theme tune to the UK’s most watched nightly soap opera began, and even from the next room I could feel that Mrs. Montague had been placated.
    â€œI say,” she shouted from the living room in a softer, sadder tone, “would you care to watch EastEnders with me?”
    And so began a ritual. Mrs. Montague would knock on my door with exactly enough time for the kettle to boil, the tea to steep, before the opening credits finished.
    I always found it interesting how my haughty housemate took such an acute interest in a gritty soap opera about the cockney underclass. I’m sure she saw it as a sociological documentary.
    â€œWould you credit it?” she cried after an unexpected turn of events, her arms gesticulating wildly. “The gall of the man! I don’t like him at all, Grant. No, not one bit.”
    Most nights, Mrs. Montague ate her supper on her lap whilst watching EastEnders with me. When I went to the kitchen to make the preshow tea, there was often a singular potato, a diminutive piece of fish, and a solitary sprig of broccoli all cooked to death in single-serving-size cookware. Prior to her tucking in, I routinely caught her eyeing me up in my peripheral vision. Content that I was engrossed in what was on TV, she pulled a Pepto Bismol–colored plate from her mouth that harbored two of her four top teeth, and placed it on the telephone table that sat between our two threadbare chairs. It was at this time that the loud rotary-dial phone would typically ring.
    â€œ God’s teeth! Who is calling me at this time?” she screamed.
    This often sent great globs of semi-masticated food flying in my general direction.
    â€œFour-oh-eight-nine?” she’d answer brusquely, her excellent diction compromised by her temporarily toothless mouth.
    Mrs. Montague was evidently still living in a world where phone numbers were made up of only four digits; 4089 became a sort of code word for my friends from home to allude to my supposed intergenerational-sex-for-affordable-lodgings trade.
    In the rare event that it was somebody worth interrupting her TV program for, she’d noisily rattle and click her plate back into place. If it was what she termed a “nonemergency” call she gummily suggested that they call back after “my EastEnders .” If it was for me she’d handthe phone to me and angrily jab her index finger at the screen. If I hadn’t gotten rid of them within the time it took for a slurp of tea, she raised the TV volume until the sound distorted, sending poor Dippy into a feathery squawking panic.
    Over the din she’d yell, “Why on earth they have to call at this time, Dippy, I’ll just never comprehend.”
    At some point within the first few months of my strange new life in west London, I must have decided that I was in no rush to leave Mrs. Montague’s flat or Thames Valley University. The nine hours of classes I was expected to attend per week meant that I enjoyed an amount of leisure time I could have only dreamed of before attending college. The classes I took were fairly eclectic, mainly due to the fact that I selected them purely based on the time they took place. My aim was to try to shoehorn everything into one bumper Wednesday. The rest of the week was spent lying in bed and puttering about the flat with my ancient housemate.
    I grew to like and admire Mrs. Montague immensely and few were the times that I rued missing the opportunity to shack up with three or four snot-nosed northerners in a damp basement flat closer to campus for three times the price. How I got to TVU and how I lived once I arrived