The Two of Us by Kathy Page

Author:Kathy Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2016-07-18T19:50:39+00:00

Bees

We were waiting for the 159 bus. I wore my blue tee-shirt and my smart buff trousers with the crease: clean, but they didn’t go together. Belinda had put on my white tee-shirt and a flowery tie-round skirt. She was trying to grow her hair but it just got thicker. She looked about fifteen. I looked about forty. We had the shopping cart with us.

If there had been an office worker or a stay-at-home wife at the bus stop they’d have looked away, steered clear of us, and that’s the sort of thing which back then used to piss me right off, but now I just think: okay. Because the fact is, a person’s qualities aren’t visible from outside. To give an example: I know, because I did some tests once at the university (they pay you for it), that I’ve a very good memory for details—total recall, more or less. No one on earth could spot that just from looking at me, and that’s an obvious thing, not a complicated one, such as: I think sometimes that I see things the same way an artist does. I can imagine myself leading a revolution, or stealing a famous painting just to keep it in my living room, or jumping out of an airplane with only the silk of a parachute to keep me safe. From the outside, no one would guess any of this, not in a thousand years. And maybe I wouldn’t want them to.

For weeks I had been looking out for a fridge, and I had a feeling that I would find it that morning. It was more of a seeing than a feeling. I could picture the kind of street: smart, but not so smart that the neighbours complained if you left something outside. Fresh white paint. Plane trees. The houses would have small patches of garden in the front, where people kept their bins behind a hedge. The fences and walls would be low. Some of the houses would be split into flats, some would have converted attics. Wrought iron gates, window boxes, new roofs, entry phones, burglar alarms, Residents Only Parking. You get a nose for the right kind of place eventually, just as you can roughly tell by looking at it whether a cast-off electrical appliance will work or not.

Daley is a practical person, useful, optimistic and a good contributor to any team: Mrs. de Soto wrote that for my reference. People often patronize someone in my situation, but you learn to sift the wheat from the chaff, and that one is definitely true.

A bus came, but it was a 3. Never mind.

“I hope something good happens today,” Belinda said. She was fidgeting and her face was ghost-white from lack of sleep.

“It will,” I said, thinking of the fridge. “Cheer up.”

We’d met a month before. I was passing and I helped her to break down the door of an empty seventh-floor flat on the Beveridge estate. I don’t think squatting is wrong. I came inside to see if there was anything else needed.

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