Free Monday to Friday Man by Alice Peterson

now and then we’d bump into one another on the stairs, but that was about it. The older I get, the worse I am at small talk. I just want to open my front door, relax and not talk to anyone.’
    ‘Lucky Flora. She must find your company thrilling.’
    He shrugs. ‘Maybe I’m too old for lodgers.’
    ‘I’m beginning to think I am too. You should have seen some of the people that turned up on my doorstep.’
    ‘Go on . . .’
    The story of Roy Haddock and his trackie bums comes first.
    Guy laughs, saying that I can’t live with a fish anyway.
    ‘Exactly. And anyone who thinks they can lounge around in their trackie bums has to be either devastatingly handsome or funny, or both,’ I insist.
    Next was Catherine the American, who worked in recruitment and fired questions at me like a tennis-ball machine. I nicknamed her Ms Clipboard. Could she leave her ‘toiletries’ in my restroom? What ‘facilities’ were near by? Did I have white labels to stick onto our preserves? Was my canine vaccinated?
    ‘They’re perfectly reasonable questions,’ Guy assesses with amusement. ‘Terrible accent by the way,’ he adds.
    ‘If I work late can I stay on for the weekend?’ Richard the consultant had asked.
    ‘Doesn’t he understand the concept of a Monday to Fridayer?’ Guy asks.
    ‘Exactly,’ I say, delighted Guy understands my plight. ‘I should have directed him back to the website to refresh himself on the definition.’
    ‘Can I bring Freddie?’ asked Jonathan, the surveyor.
    ‘Freddie?’
    ‘My corn snake.’
    I told Jonathan that the viewing was over.
    Guy shakes his head, clearly seeing my predicament.
    ‘I’ve just been dumped so can I move in permanently?’ asked Sam the headhunter.
    ‘Alexander, whose request was so urgent, never turned up.’
    ‘Can you halve the rent?’ asked Tim, the City banker.
    ‘Wanker!’ Guy exclaims at the top of his voice, just as we walk past Rita, the ex-Mayor of Hammersmith, who feeds the squirrels from her red shiny scooter that is parked close to the memorial statue. Rita quite rightly tells him he needs to wash his mouth out with soap and water and I tell her I agree. His language is shocking.
    As we complete another circuit, I tell Guy I need to be much more savvy about my questions when it comes to interviewing Jack Baker tonight. I have drawn up a list of house rules, advice given to me on the telephone by my mother’s spinster sister, Aunt Pearl. Aunt Pearl is a veteran landlady who has had more than fifty lodgers in her lifetime, including a conman supposedly called Clint, who turned up on her doorstep wearing a beige mackintosh and carrying a red rose. ‘I fell for his charm and good looks, Gilly. Don’t you go making that mistake,’ she had warned me.
    ‘Do you think it’s really sad to set a rota for the kitchen?’ I ask Guy. This was Aunt Pearl’s advice. Aunt Pearl now lives in Edinburgh, with her new boyfriend. ‘Companion,’ she’d corrected me. ‘I’m too old for a boyfriend.’ She also told me that if I had an old TV I should stick it in the spare room, keeps them out of the way.
    ‘I should get a reference too, shouldn’t I?’
    ‘Definitely.’
    ‘I need to know that each month my rent will be paid, not start noticing that things in the house are going walkies.’
    ‘That is a good idea . . .’
    I cut him off. ‘Aunt Pearl told me that she once caught one of her lodgers in the act of stealing her hedgehog trinket from the dining room. Can you imagine?’
    ‘No. Why would anyone want a hedgehog trinket?’
    Come to think of it, the portrait of the nude over my bed is valuable too. My father and I chose it together after I had graduated from Manchester with a 2:1 in English. When the gallery owner was telling me I’d made a wise investment Dad clamped an arm around my shoulder and said, ‘She’s a great girl, she deserves it.’ Dad rarely shows emotion, so when he does I can recall it vividly, every word and touch.
    I make a