Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewycka Read Free Book Online Page A

which wisps of mud-coloured hair protruded. From the way he’d been banging at that typewriter, she’d expected a muscle-bound Titan.
    ‘Hi, I’m Fred.’ He extended a hand, gripping the edges of the towel together with his other hand.
    ‘Hi, I’m Doro,’ she said, averting her eyes, fearing the towel might drop.
    Fred the Red, as he was known, played classical guitar and had an occasional sleep-in girlfriend who was also thin and pale with close-cropped mud-coloured hair. Marcus said they were both Althusserians, and Doro nodded, having no idea what he was talking about but imagining something to do with mould or mud. Whichever, Doro was in love – not just with Marcus, but with the whole muddy mouldy set-up, the stained sheets, the roll-up cigarettes, weak tea and burned toast, the hours of conversation which slipped seamlessly into sex and back into conversation again.
    When Marcus discovered she was not a revolutionary but a sociology student, he didn’t seem to mind. A few months later, when she’d graduated and started her first job as a part-time liberal studies teacher, she moved into his room, leaving the Islington flat to Pete Lafferty and Moira, who got married and separated all within six months. Single again, Moira moved into the house in Hampstead, temporarily occupying the first-floor room next to Fred’s, which belonged to a student who was spending the year at the Sorbonne. The house itself was owned by a Brazilian academic who had returned home in 1963 without making any arrangements for the payment of rent. So it was free for them to live there, but the house was sliding into dereliction. None of the windows closed properly, the ceiling in Fred’s room was bowing under the weight of Marcus’s bricks and books, and the black mould in the bathroom, having colonised the grout between the tiles and around the bath and basin, was starting to creep across the ceiling. Moira, who spent hours in the bathroom with herbal shampoos and conditioners, did her best to control the mould with an old toothbrush dipped in bleach, but it was a losing battle.
    Because the house was rent free, no one ever moved out, but more and more people moved in. When the student whose room Moira inhabited returned with his French girlfriend, there was an accommodation crisis which turned into a fight. Moira refused to leave. The other couple put a mattress on the floor and moved in alongside her, probably thinking they would drive her out with their full-volume love-making. Doro tried to persuade her to find somewhere else, but Moira’s objective was to get off with the student and replace the French girl. When this failed (and Doro suspected she also tried to get off with Fred and Marcus) Moira resorted to recruiting a succession of volunteers to out-love them. The queues for the bathroom were swelled by a succession of naked bewildered guys who couldn’t quite figure out why they were there, but sensed there was an agenda other than sex. The Brazilians on the ground floor, friends of friends of the original Brazilian, also seemed to multiply in numbers and volume. The lavatory now had to be flushed with a bucket because the ball-valve lever was broken from all the action it was getting.
    One night, shortly after eleven, when everyone was in bed, and the whole house reverberated with cries, shrieks, groans, gasps, thuds, thumps, guitar music, expletives and bossa nova, Doro became aware of another sound, a subtle creaking that seemed to be coming from the floor in the corner of their attic room. Marcus was sleeping off a particularly animated half-hour of sex. She went over to investigate. As she stepped out gingerly with her bare foot, she noticed that the floorboards beneath the lino seemed to yield a bit. The sensation was odd enough to make her pause. Then the creak turned into a groan, and suddenly the floor started to slip away. She clung on to the door frame to stop herself sliding too, and watched in horror as a