Keeping Bad Company Read Online Free Page A

’Course, that’d be if someone else hadn’t turned him into rissoles first.’
     
    I said sincerely that I hoped he found them both somewhere else safer to live.
     
    After this, it was my turn at the counter.
     
    I explained I’d been told of a vacant flat. Before committing myself. I needed to know what kind of help I might hope for with the rent, being out of work.
     
    After I’d answered all the questions – and there were a lot of them – about my personal circumstances and where the flat was and what it was like (which I didn’t yet know), there was good news and bad news.
     
    The good news was that I would probably qualify for maximum benefit. The bad news, before I got too euphoric, was that in my case this would be based on what the council considered a reasonable rent for the sort of accommodation suitable for me in the area where I intended to live. Here we hit a snag. The accommodation the Rent Officer seemed likely to consider suitable for me was probably something a little bigger than Winston’s hutch. Since Daphne’s flat was likely to be quite a bit roomier, and was located in an area where vacant bedsits were as rare as hen’s teeth, and landlords could name their price, whatever I got by way of benefit wouldn’t nearly pay the rent. I’d have to find the difference myself.
     
    ‘Or find a cheaper place,’ suggested the woman behind the counter, smiling kindly at me.
     
    It was much as I’d expected and I couldn’t grumble. But it did seem that even going to view the flat would be a wasted journey. I went all the same, because I felt I owed it to Alastair.
     
    I must say the first view of the area served to confirm my fears that I’d be considered the wrong person. It was depressingly genteel. Coming from where I was living, it was like being beamed down to another planet. The house itself was tall and narrow in a long curving terrace of such houses, all white-washed, with freshly painted doors and sparkling windows. One flight of steep steps ran from pavement to front door and another down into the basement. The road seemed unnaturally quiet. One or two householders had put shrubs in ornamental containers outside their doors.
     
    That sort of thing wasn’t recommended on the balconies of my tower block. The tub and plant would disappear inside five minutes, very likely pitched over in a light-hearted attempt to brain someone on the ground below. What I saw in Daphne’s street was life, all right, but not as I knew it.
     
    One oddity struck me. At intervals along the pavement, before each house, was a round brass disc like a small manhole cover. Before Daphne’s house the brass disc had been replaced by a circle of opaque toughened glass similar to the glass skylight in subterranean public toilets. Strange.
     
    Before I announced myself, I crept down into the basement and took a look around. The entrance area was cramped because part of it was taken up with a newly constructed wall which ran between the house and the pavement above. I couldn’t see the purpose of this and it had me puzzled. There was a window by the front door and taking a look through it I saw a large room brighter than many basements because additional light was admitted through a window at the far end, which appeared to be an outlet on the garden. It was furnished with quite decent furniture. Through a half-open door, I glimpsed a kitchenette. Even this first sight revealed the place to be clean, newly decorated and highly desirable. I was amazed it was still empty.
     
    I was already certain I wasn’t the sort of person who got to live in flats like this, even with the council’s help. Daphne Knowles would probably press an alarm button or something the moment she set eyes on me. I might find a job, at some future date, that would pay a decent wage and enable me completely to transform myself and my life-style, but as of that moment I had neither job nor money and this place was right out of my