The other thing I’m proud of is something that’s very close to my heart, because I spend a lot of time doing short trips in my car. I have never parked illegally. Nope, never. Not even a quick double park while I run into a shop to get a pint of milk. This is because I believe that if we all start bending the rules on the road there will be travel chaos. Holding such strong beliefs is vexing in London, though. Take today, a tosspot in a Porsche Boxster has parked on the red route outside the office with his hazard lights on. This meant I had to wait for a lull in the traffic to get round him in order to park in my legal spot around the corner. So tosspot Porsche driver has made my slow morning even slower, thus causing me to be late for work. Well, not late, but not as early as I like to be. I love being first in the office, especially on a Monday. It’s a chance to put the kettle on and get my head around the week. It works in my favour, too, because lots of potential clients call before 9 a.m., when they’re on their way to work and spot one of our signs. And we all know the motto: whoever speaks to the client first, keeps the client.
I get my Make A Move key out and put it in the lock, only to find it’s already open. This never happens. I walk into the office. It’s him. John Posh Boy Whatsit, and he’s on the phone already. He looks even more attractive than he did on Saturday. In fact, he looks sun-kissed. He’s probably got a yacht. Rah rah. Pull that rope, Jeremy, rah! A badminton racquet leans against the side of his desk. Badminton. He’s such a twat.
‘Four bed, you mentioned,’ he’s saying.
He’s only gone and got a four bed already this morning. Four beds are ‘show me the money’. I feel like picking up the phone and screaming down the line, ‘He doesn’t need a four bed. He’s probably got a butler!’ but I don’t. Instead I pick up my phone and dial the number for Transport For London and ask to be put through to their parking department.
‘Hello,’ I say to the woman. ‘There’s a Porsche Boxster parked on the red route on the Chamberlayne Road, London W10. Yeah, I know. Tosspot. Driver doesn’t deserve a Boxster,’ I tell the lady. She agrees and thanks me for my call. I walk into the kitchen to put the kettle on, and when I return, Posh Boy is off the phone and looking flustered. He’s flapping about his desk looking for something. Eventually he shakes his jacket, hears some keys, mutters, ‘Thank heavens for that,’ (because he’s so posh), pulls them free, runs outside and gets into the Porsche. When he comes back a few minutes later, he walks straight up to my desk. I keep the straight back of one who has the moral high ground and brace myself for hostility, but his face looks more concerned than anything.
‘Grace …’
‘Do you want tea?’ I ask, polite but frosty.
‘No, no, I’ve got a coffee.’
I turn back to my computer. I offered him tea! Why did I offer him tea? That was far too nice of me. Don’t do it again, Flowers. Remember your balls.
‘Grace,’ he says again, ‘you don’t have to tell me what happened, but do you want a day off?’
It takes me a moment to work out what he’s on about, but then I remember the Halloween look I’m sporting today.
‘No, of course I don’t want a day off.’
My words come out sharply, and when I replay them in my head it reminds me of how my mother talks to me. Now I feel guilty. I’m rubbish at being mean. I need to get better at it if I’m going to let Posh Boy know who’s boss. Balls, Grace, balls.
He’s still standing in front of me with that concerned expression, and he’s trying not to look at my face. I soften. He’s far more sensitive than the other blokes who work here. They’ll all be like, ‘Hi, Mr Potato Head, have you seen Gracie?’ I must say sorry for sounding like a cow. I’ll feel bad about it all day if I don’t. I’ll say sorry this once and then I’ll get back to behaving as though I have the biggest balls in Britain.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. I was mugged last night.’
‘Jesus, Grace, you poor thing.’ His voice is kind. Bloody posh but very kind.
‘No, I’m OK.’
‘Where?’
‘The Harrow Road. They only took my bag.’
‘But … did they? They didn’t punch you?’
‘No, they sort of pushed my head into my car.’
‘Bastards.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Where on the Harrow Road?’
‘The dark bit opposite the cemetery. I’d just pulled up at the late-night chemist.’
‘How awful.’
‘I’m fine. My face looks worse than it feels,’ I lie.
‘It’s still a lovely face,’ he says and smiles. ‘And at least you’ll be better for our paintballing team-building event in a month’s time.’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘A paintballing, team-building event.’
‘Paintballing? Team building?’ I repeat slowly, with undisguised disgust.
He nods.
‘You seriously expect me and Wendy to run about in the grass getting pelted with paint by a load of mental blokes?’
‘You’ll be all right,’ he says, and starts to walk back to his desk. But then he stops and turns and smiles, a funny little shy smile. ‘I’ll protect you,’ he says, but he mouths the words as though it’s a secret.
John Whatsit is flirting with me. Urgh! I feel sick.
‘Oh, there’s your family,’ he says, nodding to the door. I took my eye off the door! He unnerved me with all that ‘lovely face’ stuff. Lucky they’re my people coming in or I might have missed out on some new clients.
God, he’s so annoying.
Chapter 19
The second best day of my life was the day I made my first sale at Make A Move. I felt like I was drunk on fizzy wine at lunchtime. I was giddy and smiley and I wouldn’t shut up. But it wasn’t just me who was happy, everyone involved was thrilled. Lube, obviously, because property prices were sky high at the time and he made a tidy sum from my efforts, but it was the faces on the people who’d sold their flat and the people who had just bought it from them that made it all worthwhile for me. The property was a three-bed garden flat near Ladbroke Grove. The couple selling were academic types in their early sixties, who’d raised a family there but had decided to retire to Chichester and enjoy crab sandwiches and sea walks, and they had sold to a gorgeous young newly married couple who couldn’t wait to start a family. It sounds silly, but something about the transaction said, ‘This is the right order of things.’ It wasn’t about the money, it was about a home being passed carefully from owner to owner. It was about love and laughter and memories and hopes for the future.
Funnily enough, this same flat has just come on the market again, and it’s this flat that I think will suit my nice family. The gorgeous couple who lived there had indeed started breeding rampantly and now they have three children: toddler twins and a new baby. Nightmare. Talk about never getting any sleep again. Mind you, I can’t actually blame the mother because her husband was trip-over-your-shoes, forget-your-own-name handsome. I was selling his studio flat at the same time, and when I turned up for a viewing once he answered the door without a top on. It was so exciting that the next week at the same time I pretended Wendy was a potential client and booked a viewing so she could come and drool over him, too.
I haven’t seen the property this time round. I have tried to pop over to take new photos, but understandably Claire – the mother – has been too busy. This is the first viewing and I’m hoping for an offer. You can’t get better than an offer on a first viewing, and it would show Posh Boy just how big my balls are. Especially as he’s coming along. He’s decided he wants to ‘shadow me’.
‘Grace, yah, I want to shadow you on this viewing,’ he said after my family arrived at the office.
‘I’ll show you how it’s done,’ I replied.
‘Righto,’ he answered, and I thought very hard about stapling his tie to the desk.
It’s a stupid idea for him to shadow me with this family, though, because it means there are too many of us to get in th
e car. So now we’re all stood in the driveway waiting for him to park his posing mobile.
‘Glad you could join us,’ I say when he finally appears. ‘Hope you didn’t park on a red route.’
He gives me an annoyed look, which pleases me greatly.
‘Ooh, mind the dog pooh,’ I say, deliberately too late. ‘Oh, dear. You’ll need to wipe that off your shoe before you come into the client’s house. We don’t want you walking poo through their nice flat.’
Posh Boy finds a piece of grass and starts to stamp the sole of his shoe on it.
‘Gather round,’ I say to my favourite family. ‘I want to draw your attention to this parking space. It belongs to the flat. And as this is West London, let us all take a moment to worship at the altar of that sentence. Your own parking space. I mean, on market days you’ll probably have to shoo people away from it and during carnival there’ll probably be twenty blokes from Trinidad having a barbeque on it, but it is still your parking space and it beats driving around the block for forty minutes before realising that the nearest free space is in Archway.’
‘Oh, what a lovely building,’ the mum says, admiring the big white stucco-fronted property.
‘I know, it makes me think of a Jane Austen adaptation when young ladies come to London to find a husband. They often walk out of houses like these, don’t they? This is a great street to live on.’
‘Is that a yoga studio across the road?’ says the girl.
‘Yeah, I think it’s a good one, too. They do that hot yoga.’
‘Cool.’
‘The flat’s got its own entrance just to the side here. Are we all together, John?’ I call. ‘Have you got that poo off your shoe yet?’
‘Yes,’ he calls flatly.
‘Excellent.’
We stand like carol singers on the doorstep and I ring the bell. There’s no answer for a long time.
‘She does know we’re coming, doesn’t she?’ asks Posh Boy impatiently.
‘No, I thought we’d all pop round on the off chance,’ I sing, as though he’s stupid.
‘Maybe you got the time wrong.’
See! See, how annoying he is?
I hear movement behind the door. Thank God. It would have been really embarrassing if we couldn’t get in. I listen carefully. I think I can hear sniffing and snivelling. Oh dear, I hope Claire hasn’t got a cold. I don’t fancy catching it and having to blow my bruised nose. Ouch.
Eventually, the door is pulled back a fraction.
‘Hi there,’ I say. There’s no immediate answer, just another sniff. Finally we see Claire, but she looks terrible and nothing like the carefree former model with the handsome husband I remember from five years ago. In fact, she looks a lot like the baby she’s carrying on her shoulder. They both have big puffy red faces and watery eyes. What with my scabby face and her tears we’re not a very good advert for the area.
‘Oh, Claire, my love. Shall we give you space and come another day?’
She shakes her head and steps back to let us in.
‘This is the Hammond family,’ I say, smiling and gesturing towards them. ‘And this is John, our work experience boy,’ I add without looking at him.
We stand in the hallway. All the doors leading off it are closed. ‘Are you sure you want me to show them round?’ I whisper.
Claire nods, but she doesn’t say a word. At least I don’t think the sobbing, hiccupping sound that follows is a word.
Posh Boy looks at me as though I’m the most insensitive estate agent he’s ever seen, and perhaps I am. She did sound a little harassed on the phone, but I’d assumed that’s what women with young children sound like.
Oh, well, we’re here now. I open what I know is the lounge door. Funny how I can remember the layout of all the houses I’ve sold.
‘This is a great room,’ I say confidently as I step inside. But then I stop, suddenly, when I see it. It used to be a great room; now it’s a mess. And I have a really high mess threshold, so for me to call a place a mess it must be bad. The curtains are drawn, so this normally bright room with patio doors onto the garden is virtually black. There’s a small girl on a dirty sofa watching Come Dine With Me and eating Wotsits. I can’t get my head around how much the room has changed. It used to be a big spacious living area, with a dining area, lounge and kitchen to the side, but now there’s a nappy-changing station on the table, which explains the whiff of poo and baby wipes, and there are towels everywhere. Two potties sit in the middle of the room, bizarrely surrounded by six dining chairs. Don’t ask. It looks awful and it stinks.
‘I think we should leave her to it today,’ says Mrs Hammond, the mother of the family.
‘Yeah,’ I agree.
This is my fault entirely. I should never have shown a property I hadn’t seen for five years. Anything can happen in that time – and it clearly has. ‘Shall we just have a peep in the garden?’ I suggest, hoping at least to salvage one good impression from the property. I’ve known clients offer on a flat purely because they’ve loved the garden, such is the desperation of people to have even a square foot of grass in London.
‘OK,’ Mrs Hammond whispers.
We tramp through the assault course to the patio doors, and I glance at the bookcase, as I always do, searching for a copy of The Five Year Plan, hoping to meet another aficionado. I never have yet and today’s no exception. I steady Mrs Hammond as she nearly slips on a small puddle of wee, then I try to pull back the curtain, but it won’t open. It’s caught on something the other side. I tug a bit harder, but then I hear the sound of a child’s voice saying, ‘No!’
‘Hello, there, young person behind the curtain. Do you think we could have a little look at your nice garden?’
‘No,’ he repeats.
‘Please,’ I try, tugging the curtain again.
There’s some shuffling behind the material until a small boy’s head is revealed. There are two striking things about the child. One is a big green slug of snot sliding towards his mouth, and the other is something big and white that’s stuck to his head.
‘What’s that on your head?’ Posh Boy asks in a ‘talking to an under three’ voice.
We all peer at it. It looks like a badly applied bandage, but then, just as I am about to say, ‘Oh, did you bang your head like me?’ it dawns on me that it isn’t a bandage at all. It’s a sanitary towel. Thank God it’s clean.
This could well earn a place in my top ten crap viewings.
We traipse back to the hall.
‘We’ll pop off now. I’ll give you a call later,’ I say gently to Claire on the way out.
She nods and I lead the Hammonds to their car, then I run back to Claire, who’s staring into space at the door.
‘Are you all right, Claire?’ I whisper.
‘No,’ she chokes. ‘He’s left me for his masseuse. I’ve got to sell the flat to get out of here.’ She sounds desperate.
I stare at this beautiful, broken woman and I want to hug her, but she’s still holding the baby.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper. And I am. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I imagine how I’d feel if Dan left me. I’d be lost. And that’s without a load of little people relying on me.
She doesn’t say anything; she just begins to cry. Then the baby starts as well. She gives me a sad apologetic smile and closes the door.
Posh Boy’s still on the driveway checking the soles of his shoes. He looks up as I pass.
‘Well, that was a cock-up,’ he says, sounding rather thrilled.
What can I say? Nothing. It was a cock-up, and I wish he hadn’t been there to witness it.
Chapter 20
‘Shit, man, what happened to you?’
There’s no toast or Haribo today, so I have her full attention.
‘I was mugged.’
‘Shit, man. Where?’
‘Harrow Road.’
I should get it printed on a card or T-shirt really.
‘No way, man.’
‘Is
he in there? The pharmacist?’
‘He’s with someone, innit.’ She leans towards me and makes her eyes slitty. ‘What did theys look like?’
That’s an original question. I’ll give her that.
‘I don’t really know. Young probably, because they were running fast. Two blokes, not that tall. Only saw them from behind. They both had their hoods up.’
‘What they take?’
‘Oh, just my bag. A big purple bag from Primark. Do you know how long he’ll be?’
‘Nah. Shit innit.’
‘Yep. Yep, it is.’
‘Wheres on the Harrow Road?’
‘Up by the late-night pharmacy.’
She gasps. ‘Were youse getting the morning-after pill and theys take your bag?’
‘Yep.’
‘That is so shit.’
‘Yep.’
‘Shit. I’m not supposed to but—’
She pulls a bag of pick-and-mix out from under the desk and offers it to me. I accept, reach in and pull out a wiggly worm. Result.
‘Thanks.’ I smile.
‘I hope it wasn’t my brother,’ she says, and she’s serious.
I don’t have a brother, let alone one who might be a mugger, so I don’t really know what to say. I make an eek face and hope it will do.
‘Your boyfriend’s lush, innit,’ she says.
‘I love wiggly worms,’ I say, then I chomp off his head. The worm’s obviously, not Danny’s.
The chemist walks out of his Tardis with a middle-aged woman. They both spot me and the lady walks to the counter as I make my way towards the chemist.
‘We’ve met recently,’ he says, as though trying to place me, and leads me into the Tablet Tardis.
‘Yes, I came in on Saturday to get the morning-after pill, but I didn’t have any money, and then my boyfriend came in later but you wouldn’t give it to him.’
‘But you’ve had an accident since then.’
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