Читать книгу Class of '79 - Chris Rooke - Страница 21

Anyway, I eventually left Pepe’s and moved into a large shared house in a rather unfashionable area that boasted rooms – with breakfast! The landlord, who I dubbed ‘Mr Man’ had hit on some tax loophole or other, as he discovered that by offering not just accommodation, but breakfast too, the house was officially classed as a Bed and Breakfast, and apparently the tax paid on a B&B was far less than that on a straight rental property. So every morning at 7.30am, Mr Man would arrive with his wife and daughter, remove the padlock from the kitchen door, go in and prepare breakfast, and then serve it to the residents in the dining room at 8.00am sharp.

The rooms all had at least two beds in them, including at least one with bunk beds, and the students there were all foreign students from India or Pakistan; I was to be the exception. Now, the thing to realise, and it’s hard to remember as you get older, but when you’re young you don’t consider things like impoverished accommodation with loads of foreign students, all sharing one bathroom and all being forced to be up at the same time as being a nightmare, you just look at it as being perfectly normal – your acceptance level is much higher.

And so it was, that despite some misgivings, I was happy to move in (especially as by that time I was desperate to free myself from the increasingly irksome burden that was David).

The day finally arrived and I moved in, but there seemed to be a little confusion amongst my fellow inmates (I use the term advisedly) and this led to Mr Man being summoned. When he saw me he looked slightly shocked and taken aback. He then proceeded to explain, in a slightly embarrassed manner, that as I hadn’t been back in touch in the two weeks since agreeing to take the bed (I can’t say room, as they were all shared) he assumed that I’d changed my mind and he had therefore let the bed to someone else, and they were already there.

In retrospect I guess it’s fair to say that I probably had a lucky escape, as the place was so weird, but in the short term it gave me a major problem – I was suddenly and unexpectedly homeless!

Luckily, though, Mr Man clearly felt rather responsible and said that I could live in the dining room of the house, sleeping on the (velour) sofa – at full rent! With no idea of what else to do, I accepted and moved into the dining room. The dining room contained a very large table with sufficient chairs for all the tenants, and the aforementioned sofa. Luxury! I was provided with a few blankets, a couple of sheets and a pillow and this was my new accommodation. I began longing for the old fashioned carpets and comforts of home.

The only real item of note that happened in the short time I was there, was that we held some kind of party and various people who nobody knew turned up. One of the unknown students to arrive was a bloke who was studying French, and he had with him a French exchange student who didn’t speak much English. I had reasonable spoken French having done a French Exchange at the end of year 10, with Frederique in Strasbourg, and I chatted away with the exchange student as best I could in my pigeon tongue, and I was quite proud of the fact that I managed to converse quite well.

It was only after they left that one of the other lodgers at the house, Rikki, a trainee chef from India, told me that it was obvious to everyone but me that the second guy wasn’t an exchange student at all, and they had just been pretending he was French for a laugh. All they needed was to find someone gullible enough to believe them ......

Rikki became my friend after that, but I have to say that he was rather a ‘toxic’ friend, as David had been, but in a very different way and he was always using me to get something or other that he needed or wanted. By the end of the year I had largely managed to shake him off, but it was another friendship that I wished I’d never had. In modern parlance, I guess you'd refer to his friendship as being 'toxic'.