Broken Homes

get the rest of the stuff into here?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘I want to check the state of the lift first,’ I said.
    I put my ear to the cold metal of the door and listened – there were some comforting rumbles and clanks from above. I stood back and the doors opened.
    It was urine and graffiti free, which is always a good sign in a lift, but it was small – an expression of the architect’s faith that the proletariat were unencumbered by such bourgeois affectations as solidly built furniture. Me and Lesley had to wrestle the sofa bed into an awkward diagonal to get inside. Leaving the rest of our stuff in Frank’s care, we ascended to our new home.
    The flats in the tower came in two basic varieties, two bedroom and four bedroom. The four-bedroom flats were on two floors linked by an internal staircase and the two-bedroom flats were stacked one on top of the other with an external staircase leading up to the top flat. Thus the lifts only went to every other floor and Stromberg had cunningly managed to combine some of the disadvantages of a terraced street with all the disadvantages of a tower block.
    When we reached the twenty-first floor we managed to extricate the sofa bed with just a bit of scuffing to the armrests and only minor damage to the lift doors.
    For some reason, Stromberg had designed a hexagonal central shaft that ran up the middle of the tower so that for the first few years you could lean over and stare all the way down to the basement level. Since it didn’t function as a light-well and it was ten times wider than needed for the building’s tuned mass damper, it was a bizarre bit of architectural whimsy even for the late 1960s. The tenants soon put it to good use as a combination waste disposal area and emergency urinal and after two suicides and a notorious murder case, the council installed heavy duty wire mesh to seal it off from the walkways.
    Our flat, of course, was right on the other side of the shaft. As we lugged our increasingly heavy sofa bed around the walkway, I noticed that half the flats on our floor had been sealed shut with steel security doors. COUNTY GARD was neatly stencilled at eye height and attached below that a legal warning to all squatters that it was a crime punishable by six months in prison or a £5,000 fine.
    ‘Or both,’ said Lesley with satisfaction.
    The front door for our new flat was a plain modern design lacking those traditional panels of frosted glass that allowed light in and your more entrepreneurial neighbours a chance to determine whether the place was occupied or not – just in case you had some big ticket items lying around unwanted.
    Inside, the flat had been painted mostly white with a hint of apple and recently enough for the walls to be clean – although we did leave a graze at waist level in the hallway as we squeezed the sofa bed in. We plonked it down in what I assumed was the living room, and sat down to recover.
    I’ve got to say that Stromberg was consistent in his architectural principles. The hallways were narrow, the rooms were too long and the ceilings were low. It also had sliding patio doors out onto a huge balcony – the size of a small urban garden. You could have added an extra bedroom to the flat and still had enough balcony left over to feed pigeons, hang washing and dump all the stuff you couldn’t be bothered to wrestle down the stairs.
    ‘Right,’ said Lesley. ‘We’d better get back downstairs before Frank drives off in search of a fry-up.’
    Fortunately he was still there when we reached him, trapped in his cab by a formidable white woman who was bending his ear. Dressed in an M&S blouse and Peacock budget slacks, she was the type of large white woman who’s been apprenticing for the role of saucy granny since late adolescence. By the looks of it, this one was going to graduate in the top two percentile.
    She said her name was Betsy.
    ‘You just moving in?’ she asked and seemed delighted to hear that we were. She introduced the junior Hoodie I’d spotted earlier as her son Sasha and sent him off to fetch Kevin – her eldest, and a bit more useful in the hefting of heavy objects department.
    ‘What happened to your face?’ asked the woman. ‘If you don’t mind me asking? Well, of course you mind. But I’m nosy, me. Was it an acid attack? Only I heard they had a couple of those down Bromley but that was an honour thing. You know, like an honour killing only with acid. Are you a Muslim? You don’t look