The Lubetkin Legacy Page 6

  At twenty-one I was on the stage, under the name of Burt Side, in a succession of provincial reps, gradually progressing into leading roles. I didn’t mind the long hours and the grind – I had found my vocation, I worshipped the Immortal Bard, and I had dedicated my life to Art. George Clooney, meanwhile, played a supporting role in The Return of the Killer Tomatoes. In the same year that Clooney landed his first big role as Dr Doug Ross in ER, I was an acclaimed Antony at the Blackfriars Theatre in Boston (Lincs), recently married to beautiful actress Stephanie Morgan and new father of Meredith Louise, our baby daughter. I auditioned for the RSC and was offered a three-year contract.

  Then in 2001 Meredith died, and everything went into free fall. In 2002 I split up with Stephanie and had a breakdown. While George Clooney moved on from O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Ocean’s Eleven, I underwent my first course of Prozac treatment. Four years later, when George Clooney won an Oscar for Syriana, I came out of the Friern Hospital and moved in with my mother on the top floor of Mad Yurt.

  The sun peeped out briefly from behind the clouds as I walked across the grove, daffodils nodded all around me and white blossom was drifting from the cherry trees. For a moment my spirits lifted again. It wasn’t paradise, there were rats and graffiti. But even Lake Como must have its downside.

  Some white A4 notices were stuck with sticky-tape to the lamp posts. Someone had lost a cat. It happened regularly. The residents of Madeley Court weren’t supposed to keep pets, so unfortunate animals were hidden away indoors, always on the lookout for a chance to break free. ‘Answers to the name of Wonder Boy.’ The black and white cat in the picture looked cross and confused. I peered into the shrubby area where the feral moggies dwelled, but I knew the cat, like my bike, would never reappear.

  ‘Hello, Bertie!’ called Mrs Crazy from her balcony. ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘Fine!’ I shouted back.

  ‘I saw her took away in an ambulance.’

  ‘Just a twisted ankle. Nothing serious.’ The lie sprang easily to my lips – too easily, as it turned out.

  Mother and Mrs Crazy had once been friends, but the latter had bought her flat from the Council in 1985 with some small savings from her late husband’s gambling proceeds, and Mother had never forgiven her. She claimed that all the troubles in Madeley Court dated from the break-up of public ownership when private speculators had got their claws into the estate and started it on a downhill spiral, for which grasping coiffure-obsessed fruitcakes like Mrs Crazy and Mrs Thatcher were personally to blame.

  Mrs Crazy’s pretensions once she became an owner-occupier were particularly annoying to Mother, the wrought-iron window guards, the hanging baskets, the royal-blue front door and ostentatious brass knocker an affront to Lubetkin’s purity of line. The final blow came when Mrs Crazy, with support from Legless Len, mounted a coup that ousted her from the Chair of the Tenants Association. She’d always regarded Madeley Court as her personal fiefdom because it was named after her first husband, Ted Madeley, who’d wooed her and married her in 1952. Or 1953. She was vague about the dates, but his photo, framed in walnut, still hung on her bedroom wall. He was a big good-looking, dark-eyed man, who bore an eerie resemblance to moustachioed George Clooney in The Monuments Men. In fact he was only a few years younger than her father when she’d first met him at a Labour Party rally in Finsbury Town Hall in 1951. She was nineteen years old, sitting in the audience with her dad, and Ted was up on the platform smiling darkly alongside Harold Riley, Aneurin Bevan and Berthold Lubetkin, who was firing off on all cylinders about the right of working-class people to a decent home for life. Labour lost the election in 1951, but Ted Madeley won Lily’s heart.

  ‘It was love at first sight,’ Mum reminisced, sherry glass in hand, half a century later. ‘Only problem was, he was married with two girls, twins they were, Jenny and Margaret, dark haired like gypsies. You’d have guessed he had a bit of gypsy in him.’

  They had moved into Madeley Court together soon after. ‘Berthold got the flat for me,’ said Mum. Later I read that the block was not completed until 1953. There were other inconsistencies in her stories, but as a boy, I was swept along by the glamour of it all, and never stopped to question the details.

  I took the photographs down from the walls one by one and stowed them in a cardboard box with her papers in the boiler cupboard. There were bright squares on the faded wallpaper to mark where they’d been. Inna Alfandari, I supposed, would have her own photos to bring.

  Violet: Pictures

  At the weekend, Violet sorts out the photos she has brought from home: her parents wind-blown and smiling on High Low above Hathersage; her dad with Grandma Alison in front of Edinburgh Castle; her Nyanya Njoki surrounded by all her seven grandchildren; their garden in Karen with Mfumu, her dog that she’d left behind; Kinder Scout purple with heather; her and her friend Jessie wearing stupid hats on a school trip.

  As she Blu-tacks them on to the wall, she thinks about the two sides of her family, black and white, far and near, poor and comfortable. Her two cousins on her father’s side are tall, blonde, willowy girls a few years older than her who read Music and Art History at Oxford. They work in the arts, shop at Zara, laugh toothily over lunch, and are generous with invitations and free tickets. On her mother’s side, her seven cousins are thin, dark and wiry, with respectable but ill-paid office jobs and ready smiles, who shop at Jumia and never have quite enough money. She gets on with all of them; in fact she loves the feeling of sprinting like a runner along a high ridge looking down on each side into two completely different valleys. It’s exhilarating up there, but it’s scary too. There’s always the danger that she will lose her footing and slip down into the wrong valley, the poor side, the dark side.

  She steps down from the chair, and stands back to admire her handiwork. At once, the place feels more like home.

  From the flat next door, she can hear that weird tinny voice repeating the same incoherent phrase over and over again. She shudders; she definitely won’t be staying here long. She goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on, then takes her mug of Kenya roast coffee out on to the balcony to survey the scene down below. At the far end of the communal garden, a taxi has drawn up, and an old lady dressed in black is getting out.

  As she watches, a pigeon lands beside her on the parapet and turns its head to fix her with its round beady eye. It is a tatty-looking bird, with scruffy feathers and only one leg. What has happened to the other one? She scatters some bread crusts for it on the balcony and it hops down to devour them, throwing its head back as they work their way down its blue-green throat. Then it puffs out its feathers and starts to coo in a sweet warbling voice, its whole pathetic body vibrating with the sound. Cooo-coo. Cooo-coo.

  Berthold: Luxury Modern Skyscrounger

  Inna Alfandari arrived in a taxi. I’d been expecting something more formal – forms to be filled in, a home inspection visit from the shapely nurse, at least a phone call – but I looked out of the window one afternoon and there she was, a diminutive figure dressed all in black, struggling across the grove with her enormous bags, as the taxi pulled away. I ran down to help her. Thank God Mrs Crazy wasn’t watching.

  ‘Hello, Inna. Welcome to Madeley Court.’

  ‘Oy! Is council house!’ She put her bags down and clasped her hands in an attitude of despair. She didn’t seem at all pleased to see me.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t my mother tell you?’

  ‘The way she was talk talk talk about this boyfriend flat, I was expect luxury modern skyscrounger.’

  ‘Modernist. She probably said modernist, Inna. It’s very nice inside. Wait till you see it.’

  I don’t know why I was being so apologetic. I’d expected a bit of gratitude and deference from her, but obviously she was under the impression that she was the one who was doing me a favour. I pressed the button for the lift, and while I waited a thought crossed my mind. ‘How did you know the address?’

  ‘Nurse told me. She got all informations fro
m you mama file. But she never told me is council flat. Never!’

  She crossed herself and stepped into the lift reluctantly. At once, her nose wrinkled up.

  ‘Stinking piss in here.’

  What was it Mum used to say? ‘Don’t be a Moaning Minnie, Inna.’

  ‘Aha! Always keep on sunny side! Ha ha ha!’ She brightened up instantly. ‘You good man, Mister Bertie, good like you mama.’

  It was the first time she had smiled.

  When you live in a place you forget how it looks to a newcomer. The communal walkway from the lift to the flats might have been built to a sleek modernist design, but now it was cluttered with dead plants in cracked pots, threadbare mats, a three-legged chair, a discarded Christmas tree four months old, and a mystery object shrouded in black plastic that had been there ever since the seven foreign students had moved out from next door. Inna walked with her head stiff, staring in front of her like a doomed man walking to his death. Wisps of white hair were sticking out from under her scarf.

  ‘Here we are. Home.’

  ‘God is dead!’ Flossie screeched, when she heard the door open, and rattled the bars of her cage.

  ‘Aaargh!’ Inna let out a shriek and crossed herself. ‘Is voice of devil! Mr Indunky Smeet!’

  ‘It’s just a parrot, Inna. Don’t be afraid. Come on in and say hello. See, she’s in a cage.’

  ‘Lily tell me he stealing her flat!’

  Inna advanced cautiously into the room, looking around her, sniffing the air. I sniffed too. Flossie’s cage urgently needed cleaning.

  ‘Hello, Mister Indunky Smeet,’ Inna said. ‘Devil-bird.’

  ‘Shut up, Flossie!’

  Inna looked nonplussed. ‘I am not Floozie.’

  ‘No, it’s her name. Flossie.’

  ‘Not Floozie!’ chimed Flossie.

  ‘He talk wit himself?’

  ‘It’s a girl. Female. Flossie.’

  ‘Is not girl, is bird.’

  ‘Forget it.’ I sighed. ‘Here, Inna – here’s your room. Make yourself at home.’

  I pushed open the door of Mother’s room, taking in a poignant breath of the heavy powdery air that still carried the smell of her, maybe for the last time. Inna had a different unfamiliar smell, soapy and faintly spicy. She followed behind me, as I set down her bags in front of the ornate walnut dressing table, and sat down on the stool staring at her reflection in the mirror. She took out the pins holding her silver plaits in place, and flicked her head to let them fall. Then she worked the plaits loose with her fingers until her hair cascaded like a sheet of crinkled silver on to her shoulders.

  ‘Oy, I am too old.’

  I shook my head but couldn’t bring myself to deny it. ‘Would you like something to eat? You must be hungry.’

  She didn’t reply so I brought her a tuna and lettuce sandwich and a cup of tea. She made no move to help, but sat on the stool looking around her.

  ‘I’ll leave you to make yourself at home. Let me know if you need anything.’

  I closed the door of her room with relief. Feeling somewhat agitated, I went and hunted in the larder, the hall wardrobe and the back of the meter-cupboard to see whether Mum had a spare bottle of sherry secretly stashed away, but I drew a blank. I did, however, find an ancient ten-pack of Players No. 6 wrapped in a tea towel.

  Next morning I was woken by Flossie’s voice – not her usual repertoire of greetings, she seemed to be squawking randomly. I went into the sitting room to investigate, and there was Inna, looking more ladylike than crone-like in a pale silky blouse and pleated black skirt; her diamanté-framed glasses sat square on her nose, and her long plaits were neatly coiled up behind her ears, on which two of Mother’s clip-on earrings glistened. She was trying to teach the bird to sing a folk song – ‘povee veetre’ she wailed – rewarding her with pieces of toast.

  ‘Aha! Good morning, Mister Bertie! I mekkit toast. Coffee still hot. But first we drink vodka for good luck.’ There was a small bottle of vodka on the table, and two glasses. ‘Na zdorovye!’ She tipped back a glass. ‘Lack nothing! Be merry!’ I tipped back the other, and we both laughed.

  ‘This Mister Indunky Smeet is not too intelligent. He not understand nothing.’ She put her face up to the cage. ‘Nuh, say “Hello, Inna”.’

  The bird wailed, ‘Povee! Vee!’ Then she hopped about on her perch and reverted to her usual repertoire. ‘Say hello, Flinna! First of March, 1932!’

  We both laughed again. This arrangement isn’t going to be so bad, I thought. It’s nice to have someone cheerful in the flat. It’ll stop me getting on to that downhill spiral. At least until I get through this gloomy phase and square things with Mrs Penny. After that, Inna could go home – wherever that was. I realised how little I knew about her and her life before I met her in the hospital, but I guessed we would have time enough to find out.

  The hospital had phoned to apologise for the delay in the autopsy, which was due to staff shortages, they said. I felt that until the funeral and mourning period were over I couldn’t really move on in my life. But the parrot lesson had given me an idea: before I could let Inna loose in the neighbourhood I must teach her to play the part of my mother. This would be a challenge. I poured us both some coffee. She drank hers black with four heaped spoons of sugar.

  ‘Inna, sit down. There’s something we have to discuss.’

  ‘You want to make sex wit me, Mister Bertie?’ Her eyes twinkled behind her cat’s-eye glasses.

  I wondered for a moment whether she was having me on. ‘No, I want you to play the part of my mother. When you go out. When you meet people. Remember we discussed it in the hospital?’

  ‘Aha! You want I mekkit golabki kobaski slatki? I mekkit delicious wit yushka.’

  ‘Yes, that too. But the main thing is, you have to say you’re my mother. You have to say your name is Mrs Lily Lukashenko, and your date of birth is the first of March, 1932. Can you remember all that?’

  ‘First of March, 1932!’ squawked Flossie. ‘Shut up Flinna!’

  ‘Inna!’ said Inna.

  ‘Shut up, Inna!’

  ‘But my birthday is the twentieth of April.’

  ‘Shut up, Inna!’

  ‘I know, but you have to pretend, remember?’

  ‘Oy! Pretend remember not my birthday?’

  ‘Shut up, Inna!’

  ‘Shut up, Flossie! Yes, that’s it. Don’t worry, Flossie will remind you.’

  ‘Who is Flossie?’

  ‘Flossie the parrot.’

  ‘No, parrot name Mister Indunky Smeet. Your mother has told me.’

  ‘Listen. Listen carefully. The parrot is Flossie and you are Mrs Lily Lukashenko.’

  ‘Oy! Why for such ridiculous name? Alfandari is better.’

  ‘I know, but it’s my mother’s name.’

  Inna sighed deeply. ‘If you say so.’

  Inna went out that afternoon to Hampstead, saying she needed to retrieve some of her belongings and to pick up her mail. I gave her a key, and pointed out the bus stop, but five minutes later she was back, saying, ‘I forgot papers.’ She tucked a large brown envelope into her handbag. Why does she need papers to go back to her old flat? I wondered. But it wasn’t until later that I became suspicious of her comings and goings.

  Around five o’clock, I spotted her walking back through the cherry grove with a couple of carrier bags. I could see from my window that her bearing already seemed sprightlier, more optimistic, as if buoyed up by my small act of kindness that nature’s fragile vessel doth sustain in life’s uncertain voyage. The thought made me feel rather pleased with myself. She paused to rest near the playground, where the boy who had nearly been hit by the van was idling on the swings, toying with his phone. I wondered who he was. Suddenly Mrs Crazy appeared, heading towards the community garden. She and Inna greeted each other, then to my alarm they began to chat, leaning together as if exchanging confidences. This could be dangerous. If Inna tried to pass herself off as Lily Lukashenko, Mrs Crazy would sm
ell a rat. She knew Mother well, and I had told her she had twisted her ankle.

  A few minutes later Inna’s key turned in the lock.

  ‘Hello, Mister Bertie. Look! I got cabbage for mekkit dish from my country, best in world.’

  That evening, we dined on mashed potatoes with yuksha, a type of gravy, and globokli. These turned out to be boiled cabbage leaves stuffed with a mixture of minced meat and rice. Inna had picked up the ingredients in the market at Hoxton and spent an hour in the kitchen preparing them. It would be an exaggeration to say they were delicious, but they were more edible than the fluorescent styrofoam chunks from Shazaad that had become my staple diet. This arrangement was working out just as I’d hoped.

  ‘Lovely, Inna,’ I said. ‘You’re an excellent cook.’ Which was perhaps a slight overstatement, but I thought she’d be pleased.

  Instead she burst into tears and buried her face in her apron. ‘Oy! Oy! My good husband, he was saying same exactly thing!’

  I laid a hand on her wrist. ‘Hush. I’m sure he is in heaven looking down on you.’

  Sometimes a white lie can mend matters, but this one clearly opened up a wound.

  ‘Not in heaven! Dovik is Jew of Sephardim, I am Christian of True Believer! Oy! We will never be together in heaven wit Lily and Lenin and Khrushchev!’

  ‘I don’t think Lenin and Khrushchev will make it to heaven, Inna. Religion and politics have slightly different rules.’

  ‘Not so different. In my country first we have religion, everybody dead, then we get communism, everybody dead, then we get religion again, still everybody dead. Always everybody dead!’

  She crossed herself in a display of fervour which culminated in a violent coughing fit. Not wanting to risk another green phlegm eruption, I quickly changed the subject.

  ‘Never mind, Inna. What’s past is prologue. I saw you met one of the neighbours today – the lady in the purple coat. Her name is Mrs Cracey, but we call her Mrs Crazy.’

  ‘Aha. Yes, very nice lady, she told me husband was bishop. But dead. I say why for bishop living in council flat?’ Her nose wrinkled up. ‘She said he come from East London lost all money at poking. I said my husband come from East Ukraina lost all money at smoking. Ha ha. Men always good for losing money.’