Free The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

new holiday flatlets; she probed the unexpected social mixes tucked behind the funfair and the holiday façade of the town; she showed them the acres of urban blight, the concrete of urban renewal. ‘Of course it’s a problem town,’ said Ella. ‘Oh, they’d like to pretend it isn’t, that might discourage the tourists. But anywhere that brings in people for the holiday trade in the summer and then dumps them on unemployment pay in the winter is going to have problems, and they’ve got them.’
    â€˜Any radicals?’ asked Barbara. ‘Plenty,’ said Ella. ‘It’s full of hippies and dropouts. All these places are. It’s a town you can run to and disappear. There are empty houses. Visitors are soft touches. Lots of marginal work. No, it’s a good place.’ She gave some directions and brought them into the slum clearance area. ‘Of course nobody wants to see this, but here’s what they ought to rub their tourists’ faces in,’ she said, pushing her way into an empty old house where meths drinkers, drunks, addicts and runaways came, she said, to spend the night. You could see they did; the Kirks penetrated through the back door into the chaotic brokenness of the house; its stair-rails were snapped, and there was excrement in the corners, litter on the floor, bottles smashed in the bedroom, gaping holes where the glass had been knocked out from windows. Barbara stood in the bleak spaces, holding the baby on her shoulder; Howard wandered around. He said: ‘We could get some permanent squatters into this.’ ‘Why not?’ asked Ella, ‘this one’s going to be around for a long while yet. They’ve not got the cash to pull it down.’ Barbara, sitting down on the bottom stair with the baby, said: ‘Of course we could squat in it ourselves.’ ‘Well, we could,’ said Howard. ‘Maybe this sounds immoral,’ said Ella, ‘but you could even do it legally. I think I could fix it for you. I know all the people in the council to talk to.’ ‘It’s a good scene,’ said Barbara. ‘You couldn’t really call it a property,’ said Howard.
    So Ella and the Kirks walked out, through the broken back door; they stood and inspected the remnants of the curved terrace in which the house stood; they looked across to the castle and down toward the promenade. It was the debris of a good address. They drove back to the council offices, and Howard talked to people, and said he was going in there anyway, and he made an arrangement to rent the property, for a very small sum, promising to be out when it was all to be torn down, which would not be until two years’ time. And so the Kirks ended up with an unpropertylike property after all. So, in that autumn, they rented a Willhire van. Howard drove the van, and Barbara tailed him in the minivan, and they moved all their stuff south and west down to Watermouth. When they came to load the van with their things, it was a surprise and mystery to them to see the amount of it; they believed they had almost no possessions, being free-floating people. But there was the cooker, the stereo system, the television set (for by now they had bought one), the blender, the wickerwork rocking chair, the Habitat crockery, the toys, the two filing cabinets and the door that Howard laid across them in order to construct his desk, the many books that he found he had accumulated, the papers in their files, the index cards, the Holorith system, the demographic graphs and charts that came from Howard’s office at the university, the table-lamps, the rugs, the typewriter, the boxes of notes.
    They had an official key to the house in the curved terrace; they turned off the main road, parked in front of the terrace, opened the house, and unloaded. It all made a modest presence in the decrepitly fine rooms, with their filth and chaos. They spent three days just cleaning