Free After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell Page A

converted Victorian terraced house in Finsbury Park. The area was pretty rough and the rent cheap literature charities do not pay high salaries. The house would have been beautiful once and its existence was testament to the fact that the area had been prosperous at one time or another. But somehow the street had declined and all the other houses, save this one terrace of nine or ten houses, had been replaced with sprawling seventies estates. The terrace looked abandoned and forlorn, an island of gentility among shabbiness and depression.
I had just left Jason, a music teacher I had been living with for a year or so, and I moved there because I had nowhere else to go. It was the first flat I'd seen, after days of poring over the tightly spaced columns of Loot. The landlord was a mean-spirited bastard, never answering my calls when the cistern flooded the tiny bathroom or when I demanded some furniture for my so-called furnished flat. For months I had no curtains and no chairs in the kitchen. I got used to eating standing up with my back leaning against the humming fridge.
There were three flights of stairs up to my door. I was on the top floor in what would have once been the servants' quarters, but were now renovated, partitioned and divided beyond recognition. In the whole time that I lived there, I never once saw any of the other people who lived in the building. Because I hated being in the flat, I arranged to be out every night. I led a frenetic social life where I would be out with my friends in Soho or Covent Garden or organising literature events and would return and fall into bed, exhausted, after midnight, only to rise and leave the flat at eight in the morning. I knew other people were living there only by the bass-lines of their music and the rhythm and frequency of their
orgasms. The whole building was, in truth, a death-trap. The front door was always bolted and double-locked to prevent burglary, which was all too common in the street; there were no fire-exits and I was a hundred feet off the ground. If there had been a fire, I would have died, unable to escape. I used to lie in bed at night after my evenings out and wonder about the people living in the floors below me. Were they the sort of people who smoked in bed, or who lit candles and forgot about them, or who left their gas rings on by mistake? They kept me awake, these faceless people and their imagined pyromaniacal exploits; I had inadvertently trusted them with my life.
     
'Hello, this is Alice Raikes.' Alice fiddle with a paperclip as she speaks. From across the room, Susannah pulls a face. Alice ignores her.
'Hello, Alice Raikes.' He sounds amused, cocky. Alice dislikes him instantly. 'This is John Friedmann.'
'Can I help at all? You're doing a profile on us, I believe.' 'Yes, I am. Are you speaking to me from up a ladder or have you come back down to earth now?'
'Er,' she experiences a stab of irritation, 'we have just moved, you know.'
'So I hear. How do you like your new offices, Alice?'
'They're just fine, thanks,' she says impatiently. 'I didn't know yours was such a caring, sharing newspaper.Ifl'd known, I'd have asked you to come and help lift a few boxes for us.'
He laughs. 'Right. OK.' She hears him scuffling about in his papers. 'I don't know if your colleague mentioned anything but I'd like to do a piece about the Literature Trust - your move, your new aims, and so on.'
'Fine. What would you like to know?'
'Well, I was wondering if we could go over your plans for the next year . . .'
     
'OK.'
' . . . and also
'Yes?'
'. . . whether you could confirm for me that your grant's been stopped and your director's been booted out.'
Alice sighs. 'I was wondering when you'd come round to that,' she says.
'Can you confirm it for me? Has your director been given
the sack? Why was he sacked? Do you-'
'People like you really piss me off,' she interrupts him. 'Pardon?'
'The Literature Trust has been doing public arts projects for almost fifty years now.