Rossiter nodded, edging nearer the counter, ready to shout his order. 'Too true. We all look forward to getting married just so that we can have our six square metres.'
Directly in front of them, two girls turned around and smiled. 'Six square metres,' one of them, a dark-haired girl with a pretty oval face, repeated.
'You sound like the sort of young man I ought to get to now. Going into the real estate business, Peter?'
Rossiter grinned and squeezed her arm. 'Hello, Judith.
I'm thinking about it actively. Like to join me in a private venture?'
The girl leaned against him as they reached the counter.
'Well, I might. It would have to be legal, though.'
The other girl, Helen Waring, an assistant at the library, pulled Ward's sleeve. 'Have you heard the latest, John?
Judith and I have been kicked out of our room. We're on the street right at this minute.'
'What?' Rossiter cried. They collected their soups and coffee and edged back to the rear of the bar. 'What on earth happened?'
Helen explained: 'You know that little broom cupboard outside our cubicle? Judith and I have been using it as a sort of study hole, going in there to read. It's quiet and restful, if you can get used to not breathing. Well, the old girl found out and kicked up a big fuss, said we were breaking the law and so on. In short, out.' Helen paused. 'Now we've heard she's going to let it as a single.'
Rossiter pounded the counter ledge. 'A broom cupboard?
Someone's going to live there? But she'll never get a licence.'
Judith shook her head. 'She's got it already. Her brother works in the Housing Department.'
Ward laughed into his soup. 'But how can she let it? No one wilt live in a broom cupboard.'
Judith stared at him sombrely. 'You really believe that, John?'
Ward dropped his spoon. 'No, I suppose you're right.
People will live anywhere. God, I don't know who I feel more sorry for - you two, or the poor devil who'll be living in that cupboard. What are you going to do?'
'A couple in a place two blocks west are sub-letting half their cubicle to us. They've hung a sheet down the middle and Helen and I'll take turns sleeping on a camp bed. I'm not joking, our room's about two feet wide. I said to Helen that we ought to split up again and sublet one half at twice our rent.'
They had a good laugh over all this. Then Ward said good night to the others and went back to his rooming house.
There he found himself with similar problems.
The manager leaned against the flimsy door, a damp cigar butt revolving around his mouth, an expression of morose boredom on his unshaven face.
'You got four point seven two metres,' he told Ward, who was standing out on the staircase, unable to get into his room. Other tenants pressed by on to the landing, where two women in curlers and dressing gowns were arguing with each other, tugging angrily at the wall of trunks and cases.
Occasionally the manager glanced at them irritably. 'Four seven possibility two. of worked argument it out twice.' He said this as flit ended all 'Ceiling or floor?’ Ward asked.
'Ceiling, whaddya think? How can I measure the floor with all this junk?' He kicked at a crate of books protruding from under the bed.
Ward let this pass. 'There's quite a tilt on the wall,' he pointed out. 'As much as three or four degrees.'
The manager nodded vaguely. 'You're definitely over the four. Way over.' He turned to Ward, who had moved down several steps to allow a man and woman to get past. 'I can rent this as a double.'
'What, only four and a half?' Ward said incredulously.
'How?'
The man who had just passed him leaned over the manager's shoulder and sniffed at the room, taking in every detail in a one-second glance.' 'You renting a double here, Louie?'
The manager waved him away and then beckoned Ward into the room, closing the door after him.
'It's a nominal five,' he told Ward. 'New regulation, just came out. Anything over four five is a double now.' He eyed Ward shrewdly. 'Well, whaddya want? It's a good room, there's a lot of space here, feels more like a triple. You got access to the staircase, window slit - ' He broke off as, Ward slumped down on the bed and started to laugh.
'Whatsa matter? Look, ii' you want a big room like this you gotta pay for it. I want an eara half rental or you get out.'
Ward wiped his eyes, then stood up wearily and reached for the shelves. 'Relax, I'm on my way. I'm going to live in a broom cupboard. "Access to the staircase" - that's really rich. Tell me, Louie, is there life on Uranus?'
Temporarily, he and Rossiter teamed up to rent a double cubicle in a semi-derelict house a hundred yards from the library. The neighbourhood was seedy and faded, the rooming houses crammed with tenants. Most of them were owned by absentee landlords or by the city corporation, and the managers employed were of the lowest type, mere rent-collectors who cared nothing about the way their tenants divided up the living space, and never ventured beyond the first floors. Bottles and empty cans littered the corridors, and the washrooms looked like sumps. Many of the tenants were old and infirm, sitting about listlessly in their narrow cubicles, wheedling at each other back to back through the thin partitions.
Their double cubicle was on the third floor, at the end of a corridor that 14nged the building. Its architecture was impossible to follow, rooms letting off at all angles, and luckily the corridor was a cul de sac. The mounds of cases ended four feet from the end wall and a partition divided off the cubicle, just wide enough for two beds. A high window overlooked the area ways of the buildings opposite.
Possessions loaded on to the shelf above his head, Ward lay back on his bed and moodily surveyed the roof of the library through the afternoon haze.
'It's not bad here,' Rossiter told him, unpacking his case.
'I know there's no real privacy and we'll drive each other insane within a week, but at least we haven't got six other people breathing into our ears two feet away.'
The nearest cubicle, a single, was built into the banks of cases half a dozen steps along the corridor, but the occupant, a man of seventy, was deaf and bedridden.
'It's not bad,' Ward echoed reluctantly. 'Now tell me what the latest growth figures are. They might console me.'
Rossiter paused, lowering his voice. 'Four per cent. Eight hundred million extra people in one year - just less than half the earth's total population in x95o.'
Ward whistled slowly. 'So they will revalue. What to?
Three and a half?'
'Three. From the first of next year.'
'Three square metres? Ward sat up and looked around him. 'It's unbelievable! The world's going insane, Rossiter.
For God's sake, when are they going to do something about it? Do you realize there soon won't be room enough to sit down, let alone lie down?'
Exasperated, he punched the wall beside him, on the second blow knocked in one of the small wooden panels that had been lightly papered over.
'Hey!' Rossiter yelled. 'You're breaking the place down.'
He dived across the bed to retrieve the panel, which hung downwards supported by a strip of paper. Ward slipped his hand into the dark interval, carefully drew the panel back on to the bed.
'Who's on the other side?' Rossiter whispered. 'Did they hear?'
Ward peered through the interval, eyes searching the dim light. Suddenly he dropped the panel and seized Rossiter's shoulder, pulled him down on to the bed.
'Henry! Look!'
Directly in front of them, faintly illuminated by a grimy skylight, was a medium-sized room some fifteen feet square, empty except for the dust silted up against the skirting boards.
The floor was bare, a few strips of frayed linoleum running across it, the walls covered with a drab floral design. Here and there patches of the paper peeled off and segments of the picture rail had rotted away, but otherwise the room was in habitable condition.