Asking For Trouble by Ann Granger Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t tell him that he’d hit the nail right on the head. That’s exactly what their nasty little minds were thinking.
    Shut out of the house, we were at a loose end, if that’s not an inappropriate expression in the circumstances. Nev and Squib went down the pub and I went to the corner shop to talk to Ganesh.
    I’d walked along the stretch of pavement going to and from the house or the shop at the corner I don’t know how many times. I knew every crack. I knew all the places rain collected and where edges stuck up and could trip you. I could walk down the street in the pitch dark and not put a foot in a puddle or fall flat on my face. Quite often, I had walked down it in pitch dark because the street lighting was inreliable. The council never came around and fixed our pavement or resurfaced our road.
    The reason they gave was that the area was due for redevelopment. It was as part of the redevelopment that our row of houses was scheduled to come down. I don’t know what they intended putting up in their place. Smart flats, probably, for young executives.
    If you kept going when you got to the end of the street, you got to the river. Looking across, you could see on the far side the luxury flats built in the docklands for Yuppies, before Yuppies became an endangered species, like snow leopards. Looking down the narrow defile between crumbling brick terraces towards those shining towers always made me feel like Judy Garland gazing at the Emerald City. Because of that, and the way the sun sparkled on all the glass of the high-rise office blocks, I called it ‘the Crystal City’.
    ‘Sounds like a football team,’ Ganesh said.
    ‘That’s Crystal Palace. I’ll call it what I like.’
    Sometimes of a summer evening, Gan and I walked down there and sat on a crumbling wall above the mudflats, looking across and making up stories about the people who lived there. Once, we actually went across there and walked round, but we felt like little green men just dropped in from Mars. It was so clean, so prosperous. The people looked so fit and healthy, well dressed and trim. They had a purposeful air as if they were all going somewhere and knew where it was. We couldn’t wait to get back again.
    Now the developers were starting, at a much slower rate, on our side of the river. Our houses sprawled around the edge of the cleared building sites like a shanty town or squatter camp in the Third World, clinging to the skirts of a big city. Most of the people round here had no more chance of making it across the great divide to the affluent part of the area than they could sprout wings and fly.
    It was the older ones who were bewildered. Old men who’d worked all their lives down at the docks before the work disappeared and the wharves became tourist sights. Old women who’d lived here all through the Blitz and who still scrubbed their front doorsteps. People like Ganesh’s parents, who’d come here thinking that it would be upward and onward in a new country and who had worked hard to achieve success, but who had found themselves trapped now in this urban wilderness, a far cry from anything they’d ever imagined.
    I think Mr Patel was hoping the development would bring quality housing nearer, as it had done across the river, because no one round here had very much money at the moment. If people started moving in who had more dosh, they might spend some of it in his shop. He had all kinds of plans, speciality Indian foods and so on. I didn’t like to suggest the council might decide to bulldoze his shop as well. Everyone needs a dream.
    Right opposite the shop, on the other corner of the street, was a disused chapel and burial ground. We called it ‘the graveyard’. The building was locked up, the glass in its mock-Gothic windows broken, weeds growing from cracks in the masonry. It had originally been a congregational chapel. It had changed hands and religious viewpoint several times since then. The last people to use it as