No end of women have told me the place looks like a hermit’s cell. But so what? I’ve never been on any holidays where I’d feel tempted to buy a straw donkey or a glass paperweight to bring back for the mantelpiece. I don’t have any reason to collect things that remind me of the past. And a certain sparseness means there’s less to dust. This is important when you’re a bloke living on your own, but birds don’t seem to see it. And another thing — why make the sitting room too comfortable? You don’t want a bird getting warm and cosy in front of the fire, do you? You want her keen to get out of there to the warmth of the bedroom. So the sitting room needs to be bare, and a bit cool. It’s stick and carrot, if you know what I mean.
In the kitchen, I switched the kettle on and pulled a pizza out of the freezer compartment to stick in the microwave. I didn’t look too closely at the interior of the fridge while I had the door open. There were a few cans of beer in there that looked all right, but everything else was likely to cause a major European health scare if it ever escaped. There was a milk carton that had taken up a new career as a penicillin factory, and a bit of Cheddar cheese that would have cracked the floor if I dropped it. There were other things, too, that didn’t bear looking at, and the smell was getting bad. I’d have to buy a new fridge soon.
With the kettle hissing and the microwave humming, I switched on the telly and caught the climax of an American film, all guns and screams and cars getting blown up. But the house still sounded empty, and this is what made me think of Lisa, I suppose. It never feels empty when Lisa’s there.
It’s funny, really. You see, me and women don’t usually last longer than a few weeks together. I get bored easily, and just when they’re talking about a steady relationship, I’m off eyeballing something different and it comes to a nasty end, one way or another.
Obviously, I expected this to happen with Lisa once she’d been coming round for a month or so. It’s a natural cycle, like Autumn coming after Summer. You don’t even think about it — you just start sorting the woollies out of the drawer when the drain gets blocked up with leaves and the kids start chucking sticks at the chestnut trees for conkers.
But it hasn’t happened this time, and I don’t understand why. It’s as if nature has decided not to bother with Autumn this year because it’s too messy, what with the dead leaves and all that, and she’s quite happy with Summer, thank you very much. Surely Lisa must have clocked the way I am? She’s not stupid — far from it. Sure, she gives me some hammer now and then. She has a fair old temper, so I don’t answer back much. And there she still is. She’s been around so long the lads have learned her name and even ask after her health. Every time that happens, I get this nasty feeling in my guts, like I’ve just eaten curried chips from the Bombay Duck takeaway. It’s going to cause a real problem one day soon. You see, I was so sure that Lisa would drift away like all the others, that I’ve already gone and found the next one. And, like I said, Lisa’s got a real temper.
When I first met Lisa, I’d been going around with some bird whose name I can’t quite remember now. One day she decided she wanted to visit Newstead Abbey, where Lord Byron used to live. She’d been gawping at the oak-panelled Great Hall and its minstrels’ gallery and twittering on about how grand the Byrons must have been, and how wonderful the place must have looked when they lived there.
My attention was already wandering a bit, and I was wondering whether what’s-her-name would be interested in a bit of sex down by the lake. I had also, of course, noticed the blonde bird standing nearby. She was slim and smartly dressed, with short, well-cut hair, and she had that rare quality in a woman — style. Looking sexy and dying your hair blonde is okay, but if a woman knows how to wear clothes and how to hold herself when she moves, that’s what really catches my eye. You don’t see it too often, but Lisa has it. From her expression, she was several shades brighter than the bird I was with, too. Her eyes looked amused as she listened to the twitter. I like a woman with a sense of humour.
“Actually, the fifth Lord Byron let the Abbey go to rack and ruin,” she said suddenly. She seemed to be talking to me rather than Miss Twitter. “He died in the scullery, which was the only room left in the house where the roof didn’t leak.”
“Yeah? Was he the poet?” I asked.
“No. The poet was his great-nephew, Alfred, who inherited the Abbey from him. This Great Hall was so derelict by then that he only used it for pistol practice.”
“No kidding.”
The blonde woman began to talk about the monks who lived in the original abbey from 1150 until they were kicked out by Henry VIII. Then she told us about the follies built by the fifth Lord Byron — the two mock forts by the lake, where he used to stage miniature sea battles — and his sheer bloody-mindedness in neglecting the building and deliberately laying waste to the estate. She talked about his great nephew’s riotous lifestyle and dubious friends, and his permanent money problems. She moved on to point out the cloister court, laid out as what she called a Mary Garden, with a carved sixteenth century water conduit, and then she led us into the kitchen next to the Sussex Tower, which she said had been modelled on the Abbot’s Kitchen in Glastonbury Abbey.
And something really funny happened as I listened to her talk. Suddenly I could see it. I could actually see and hear and smell everything that she was talking about. I could picture the holes in the roof, and the damp running down the walls, soaking into rugs that smelled of mould. I could see a journeyman carpenter painstakingly carving out the patterns by hand on yards of water conduit, his hands and clothes smelling of fresh wood shavings. I could hear the kitchen servants chattering to each other as they prepared yet another ten-course banquet for the eccentric poet and his disreputable friends. I could smell the sweat of those servants as much as the sides of venison roasting in the ovens and the hot, steamy aroma as the maids scrubbed stone-flagged floors on their hands and knees.
This had never happened to me before. Until then, these places had just been tourist traps, somewhere for the Americans and Japanese and a few local folk like Miss Twitter to be parted from their money in exchange for postcards and Newstead Abbey key rings. But Lisa made it real. I think it was then I knew she was going to be part of my life.
After the pizza was finished, I made a few calls. Though I was feeling good about the lorry load of gear we’d just got away, the big stuff was new to me just then. I still had my main business to run, the small scale stuff that’s done so well for me and quite a few other people, since I fell out with a system that won’t let you help out people worse off than yourself.
But let’s get this straight. Some folk think I’m a criminal. A thief even. Me, I call what I do redistribution of wealth. Wealth is the stuff that the rich gits have, and the folk who live round here don’t have. It’s always been like that, you know — right back to the time when some Stone Age bloke called Ug grabbed the best cave for himself and collected every flint arrowhead that was going and made all the other Ugs do the hunting and mammoth gutting. I’m just sharing out a few bits of flint that some modern day King of the Ugs has carelessly left lying around.