Not a ghost story
by A M Kirkby
Text Copyright ｩ 2012 A M Kirkby
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Also by A M Kirkby
Short stories
A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads
The Tin Heart
Sword of Sorcery
Egerius
Rise above
Novellas
Walsingham Way
Green Land
Doppelgänger
Novels
Etruscan Spring – forthcoming
Etruscan Blood - forthcoming
Children's books
Kasbah cat
Pagliaccio the opera cat
Not a ghost story
by A M Kirkby
It's not easy finding a place to live in London. I'd been moving from six-month let to six-month let for years. Everything for sale was too small, or too expensive, or I would be on the verge of making an offer when I found out it had gone, anyway.
Everyone had the same problem. My address book was a mass of scratchings out and new addresses, new phone numbers added in ever decreasing sizes of handwriting; I got used to phoning people at work, because they changed jobs less often than they changed flats. Every weekend was a trek from flat to flat, following estate agents who by now were far more enthusiastic than I was; my explorations had started centrally, but now they had spun out like an entropic galaxy, to Whitechapel, Bermondsey, Hammersmith, Tottenham. And everywhere I went, I found I was just too late; the property developers and the improvers and gentrifiers had got there first. It was a race between my salary and house prices, and however hard I worked, however much bonus I made, however many times I got a pay rise, it was house prices that won.
I didn't believe my luck when I found a two-bed flat in the back streets of the Barbican, in one of the few houses left in a street of small warehouses and factories, behind the ornate Victorian offices of the Clerkenwell Road. It was roomy; it was a top floor, with huge windows, though the view was only of factory roofs, glass that was grey and dirty by day but glowed warmly at night, and the distant gash of the Underground. It was close to the City, but far away from the gleaming steel and glass modernity that still frightened me with its soulless gigantism. (That was before the developers ripped up Farringdon to build ziggurats and monoliths; before they exiled the secondhand book stalls and Jewish diners in favour of bland banks.)
The agent sounded almost apologetic when he told me about it. "It's in a terrible state," he'd said; "It's hardly been touched since the thirties, I'd think." It had been a controlled tenancy, one of the old tenancy-for-life sort that only end on death or default; I didn't ask which.
The flat seemed grey; the windows were thick with grime. It only takes a couple of months uncleaned to do that in London. There was a single dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; it seemed to dispel none of the gloom. I thought it was broken, but then I looked at it; the filament was glowing, but the glow seemed to die out a couple of feet from the bulb.
The woodchipped walls had been magnolia once. They were grey too, now. The wires were run up the walls in copper pipes, repainted so many times they'd become crusty, like the moon's surface. The crevice between pipe and wall was furred with dust. Yet it was a lovely flat in potential. I'd get builders to do it out; rewire, repaint, double glaze, sand the floorboards.
There had to be something wrong with it. If you work in private equity you get used to doing very advanced dentistry indeed on any gift horse that comes your way. I did my numbers; for the floorspace, and a share of the freehold, even in its current state, it was far too cheap. I pressed the agent harder.
"Oh, the problem," he said. "Sitting tenant on the ground floor and basement."
"It's a separate flat," I said.
"But as long as he's there, you won't be able to smarten up the outside. Whatever work you do, you won't get a return on it."
"But that's reflected in what I'm paying?"
"Well, yes. Of course." He didn't sound too sure.
"How long has the place been on the market?"
"Six months."
That was crazy. This sitting tenant; what was I dealing with? Noisy, a drug dealer, running a knocking shop? I'd seen flats with burn marks in the floorboards where addicts had set fire to themselves; and even those had sold before I managed to put in an offer. But the tenant was just "some old bloke," the agent said; "he keeps himself to himself."
I couldn't help thinking my good luck was suspicious, that there was something wrong with the deal. Doubt gnawed at me in the long stretches of wakefulness when I couldn't sleep, but my eyes, or my mind, refused to follow the black marks on a page that would no longer reveal their meaning. I'd got the place too cheap; there would be a reckoning. But I couldn't work out what.