I bowed my head, remembering his relentless optimism and his occasional bullshit. ‘Poor Len. Didn’t anybody help him?’
‘I give him injection but insulin kaput.’
Alas, poor Len. A black cloudbank loomed on my mind’s horizon. Legless Len, Mrs Crazy, the cherry grove, even Inna Alfandari — now that Mother was gone, those were the last living links that connected a secure past to an uncertain future. It wasn’t just the bricks and concrete that made this place home, it was the web of human spirit, that funny old-fashioned word embroidered by Gobby Gladys: FELLOWSHIP.
‘Coo-coo-coo,’ Flossie cooed from the balcony. She fluffed out her feathers and hopped up and down on her perch, turning towards the one-legged pigeon as it flapped away in the direction of the next-door balcony. Oh yes, I’d forgotten Flossie — she was still here.
‘What’s up wit devil-bird?’ asked Inna. ‘She turning into pigeon?’
‘I think she’s fallen in love.’
Berthold: Benefit Fraud
With what was left of my first-night Lucky stipend, I booked a cab for Inna to Hampstead, where it turned out she still had her old flat, which she had been subletting to friends of friends. I felt quite peeved that she hadn’t told me before, but relieved that she had somewhere to go.
These friends of friends were now visiting family in Zaporizhia, and until they came back Inna would be able to stay there with Lookerchunky aka Lev. When they returned, their rent would be paid into Inna’s bank account and would augment her tiny widow’s pension back in Ukraine. The more I learned of this set-up the less I liked it, but she had it all worked out, and as she gabbled her explanation her eyes slid from side to side in a shifty way that made me suspect that I hadn’t yet got to the bottom of it.
‘Bye bye, Bertie.’ She stood on tiptoes and gave me a peck on the cheek, then she was gone in a high-speed hobble, leaving only the trace of her distinctive spicy smell with a hint of L’Heure Bleue lingering in the hallway.
Watching through the window as she tottered across the decimated cherry grove with her bags to where the cab was waiting, a lump rose in my throat. I would miss her potty conversation and dreadful singing. I would miss the globalki, kosabki and slutki.
Then I heard: Ding dong. Ding dong!
‘Who the f—?’
A man and a woman were standing at the door, seedy nondescript types with flat lace-up shoes, briefcases and blank unsmiling faces like the Undead. I moved to close the door, but the man was resting one brown shoe on the threshold.
‘We’re looking for Mrs Inna Alfandari,’ he said. His voice was flat, brown and slightly nasal.
‘She’s not here,’ I said. Who the hell were they? Mormons? Jehovah’s Witnesses?
‘Can you tell us where she is?’ asked the woman. Her voice was also flat, brown and slightly nasal. She did not smile.
I hesitated. If they were police, they would have shown their ID. ‘Can you tell me who you are?’
‘Does Mrs Alfandari live here?’ he pursued.
‘Look, I’ve no idea who you are. Why should I tell you anything?’
The woman flicked back the lapel of her jacket to show an ID tag dangling on her low-rise bosom. It had a bronze company logo on top — i4F — and her name: Miss Anthea Crossbow, Fraud Investigator. Blimey.
‘Can we come in?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong p-p-person.’
‘We’ve been watching these premises,’ said the man. ‘We have reason to suspect she’s been living here.’
‘There’s no-b-body of that name living here. There’s just me and my m-mother. Lily Lukashenko.’
They exchanged quick glances.
‘There must have b-b-been some mix-up.’
‘We’re investigating benefit fraud.’ The man handed me a business card, with the same i4F logo and the name Mr Alec Prang. Senior Fraud Investigator. ‘We believe Mrs Alfandari has wrongly been claiming Housing Benefit for a flat she no longer occupies.’
‘Oh, how a-p-p-palling!’
So that’s what she’d been up to — the old scamp! Not poison but fraud. When you think of it, we were two of a kind and maybe that’s what drew us together. Did they know that she had also been renting out the same flat, pocketing both the rent and the Housing Benefit? No wonder she could afford to be generous with the vodka. Should I tell them? No. A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true one to another!
‘B-but there must b-be a mistake, Mr P-p-prang? She definitely doesn’t live here.’
‘Maybe we’d better recheck the Hampstead address,’ murmured Miss Crossbow to Mr Prang.
‘That would seem like a good idea.’ I smiled to myself. By the time they got there, Inna would have arrived in her taxi to confound their suspicions.
‘Would you please contact us if you discover any information about the whereabouts of this individual?’ Mr Prang bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile, and I assented with equal insincerity.
‘Thank you for your time, Mr … er?’ Miss Crossbow was fishing for my name.
‘It’s been a pleasure.’ I closed the door.
I heard the clunk of the lift and waited by the window for them to emerge in the grove, but they did not appear. Where could they have got to? Panic struck me as I reflected on their visit. Were they keeping me under surveillance too? While investigating Inna, had they twigged my own irregular situation and my mother’s demise? I stepped out on to the rear walkway just in time to see an unmarked white van with two figures hunched in the front seats, pulling away at speed from behind the bins. Presumably they had been staking out the back of the flats. Still, I smiled to myself, if they went back to Hampstead now, they would be just in time to realise their mistake.
Though I was miffed that Inna had pulled the wool over my eyes, I felt a sneaking admiration for her too. She had fooled everybody — even me, even Mother, who would never have guessed her friend’s duplicity and might have been horrified. On the other hand, Mother was generally tolerant of human weakness, especially when accompanied with a glass of booze.
Inna had left Mother’s room in quite a mess so, putting on the radio to drown out the silence in the flat, I busied myself with clearing up the debris. Here was the pink corset, which I put in a carrier bag for Inna to collect, and some tattered black stockings which I binned, along with crumpled packaging, an empty bottle of black hair dye, a hairbrush matted with long black hair, a still-unopened pack of Players No. 6, which Mother must have hidden somewhere, several plastic cups containing what seemed to be green phlegm, and a stack of women’s magazines in Cyrillic script featuring plump blonde dark-eyed models and recipes that looked suspiciously like variants on kobaski, golabki and slatki.
Once tidy, the room was more than bare — it had a desolate look. From the box under the boiler I replaced Mother’s photos, covering the faded squares in the wallpaper: dashing Ted Madeley, dreamy Berthold Lubetkin, Granny Gladys with her flowerpot hat and Grandad Bob with his dog-head walking stick, and the photo of me with Howard and the twins on Hampstead Heath. They settled back on to their old hooks with a comfortable sigh. I stepped back to survey my handiwork. Even the bottle of L’Heure Bleue was on the dressing table, though it was now empty.
Out on the balcony, Flossie was flirting with her scrawny new boyfriend. Frankly, I felt she could have done better for herself — an intelligent exotic bird like that — but apparently that’s often the way with mature females. I put on the kettle — there was an almost-full jar of Lidl own-brand in the cupboard — and regretted the generous impulse that had led me to offer Inna my remaining fiver for a taxi fare rather than saving it up for Luigi. I was in a fretful mood, my ankles were itching, the cloudbank of depression hovered on the edge of my consciousness, and for a man who has just shagged a very nice woman, I felt irritable and on edge.