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Property Story
by Nathan
Williams
Even
in my most gutless moments, suicide never looked like an option, but I
have to say that I found myself gazing back at the calm faces on the Times
Obituary page, with something like envy. As my wife pointed out, we were
lucky that we were happy together, that the children were happy at school.
Our problems were - only financial. Only financial, sounded acceptable -
without any money, had a different feel to it.Of
course, I knew that when things get really desperate, people eventually
begin to think of gambling or crime, or of both. Character property flagship sale: Fineshade, Northamptonshire. Airport Birmingham+
Luton+ East Midlands.Nothing is such a gamble
for the law-abiding as crime. The odds, heavily in
favour
of the professional, are solidly against the amateur. True, he has no form, for the police to punch out on the computers, but he has no
experience; no street smarts. When
you are really up against it, the idea of searching for the perfect crime
does not even arise. One has to think in terms of something, which just
might work. With luck, with care, patience and courage, the odds begin to
look better. But with qualities like these, one could have made a success
legally. The prospect had never looked good.
Sitting
on a deck chair in Hyde Park, with a copy of the Economist on my lap, I
gazed out one morning at the placid ducks. Character property flagship sale: Penshurst Kent. Airport: London Gatwick + London Heathrow Usually, the
Economist cheers me.The consistently cheeky, cheerful analysis of some of
the world's most intractable problems usually makes me excitedly
optimistic that I can find solutions to my own humdrum little overdraft,
mortgage and school fees. The editor, after all, had recently
landed the number two job at the Bank of England. Haiti, Port au Prince slum dwelling But
I was unemployable. In so far as I had worked at all, I had done so for
myself. In one's late forties,
one thinks of the hordes of efficient, computer native, motivated and
experienced twenty-five year olds, whom one might not want to get to know
very well perhaps, but who would make undeniably more suitable employees
than oneself.
The ducks were
not, after all, so placid. They were evidently competing quite ferociously
at times. Squabbling over some quite trivial matter: -A female, a crust? -Certainly not leading the sort of lido existence envisaged
by Lord Shaftsbury, whose bronze plaque hung beside me on the wall.The
tourists had returned to the Emirates and Cyprus and the October sun reminded me
that at least I was still free. No one would lock me away for being broke.
One did not suffer inordinately from the occasional sneer of the twelve
year old. More wounding was the sympathy and bafflement of the eight year
old. But as the account manager at Coutts had pointed out, "You cannot live on an overdraft forever!"
To
my astonishment, he volunteered that he did not really see me as an
employee and that, in my case, getting a job probably was not a solution.
In a matter of an hour over lunch, we doubled my overdraft facility from
twenty-five to fifty thousand and descended to Christian names. Character property flagship sale: Fairford, Airport:
London Gatwick + London Heathrow.Oozing
confidence and the sort of easy charm which one so much despises, I
convinced him that the situation would improve.I pointed to various
valuable property assets (all quite unsaleable just at that moment), and assured him that all would be well. By the time
he had finished his aged Armagnac,
I was almost convinced myself. And I was drinking water.
The
ducks had settled to preening themselves at the water's edge, and I am glad
to say that the crime I was to commit, involving nothing more heinous than
a vastly inflated statement of assets and earnings, was a one-off. Character property flagship sale:Bury St
Edmunds, Suffolk. Airport: London Stanstead
Property Story by JJ.Smith
Standing outside a posh grill in the rain.-Under
the awning. I'd just lost my live-in pot-wash job. Fifteen and broke on my
arse. Bloke came out, must of seen me stare at his take-away bag. ‘Hungry?’
I ignored him. He laughed. ‘Here, take it. Didn’t cost me - I know the
owner’. When he came out with another bag for himself, I was ready.
‘Look, I just lost my pot-wash job. I lived-in. I
know you’re not a nonce. Could you let me have your couch for a
night?’ Bariga slums, Lagos, Nigeria That got me a hard stare, and then what might have been a grin.
‘Come on.’ He lived in north London. It was a
long drive and a girl was there already. Big tits, big arse, big mouth.
She didn’t like the look of me either. He kicked me out after a few
nights, but not before he got me another live-in pot-wash job at that
grill. After a year I could butcher anything. He didn’t stop by that
often, and on a day off, I looked him up on the off chance. He was in, but
he wasn’t pleased to see me. Not at all, but he made me a coffee.
‘I’m going away for a long time, bastards fitted
me up.Evidence of a cop’. I’d known, quite how I couldn’t
say, that he was some kind of gangster. The cop’s face was in the
paper he threw at me so hard it knocked the coffee over.Character property flagship sale:Broughton Gifford, Melksham, Wilshire. Airport: Bristol +
London Gatwick + London Heathrow.
Next time I saw him, he was all smiles.
‘You know what? –Someone chopped that cop. Case
dismissed. His Misses nearly caught the kid. Just a kid, he was. He ran
like hell and…’ He hesitated, and I got that hard stare. Some days
later, he stopped by and gave me an envelope.
‘Don’t lose it, and open it in private’. It was
three thousand quid. In those days you could buy a house for that. Month
or so later he stopped by again and asked me for a coffee, pulled out a
photo with an address.
‘Be a good thing if this fella disappeared,
know wo’ I mean?’ I was in a fix; I could do the job or give him his
money back. Well, it seemed like that at the time. I very nearly got
caught. After that I sub-contracted. I really wasn’t cut out for the
work at all.
One day, I was trying to pay off a cab, I dropped
eighteen thousand in cash, right in front of the cabbie.Poor neighbourhood, Caracus, Venezuela. He sort of looked
at me.‘Look mate, get yourself a passport and a holiday
in Tenerife, and think it over’. End of first week of February it was,
and I’d never had a holiday.
The hotel was three-star crap. All in. Terrible
resort full of old ladies in white cardies. I took all the bus trips, and
on the way back from one, we stopped at a terrific view in the mountains,
with a big car park and an ice-cream van. At the back of the car park was
a footpath that must of been there for hundreds of years. Big, well-set,
smooth stones.I just followed it. For about ten minutes. Round a corner,
and there was a long stone barn. All the windows and doors were gone, but
the tile roof was on.Dhaka, Bangladesh. As I walked across the terrace, I realised that
these huge stone slabs covered a water tank, and over to the left was a
big circle of stones - a thrashing floor.That’s where you would thrash
the oats, with a donkey going round and round on a long pole. I knew about
it from the previous bus trip. Inside the barn was a lot of goat shit and
a chair. That was it. I took the chair out on the terrace and gazed
through the mountains to the sea. I was home. I had a vision. Tables and
chairs and a lot of red geraniums. The sun was going down; I’d need a
wood-burner and a lot of candles. It was very cold; I was never happier.
Sitting on my terrace one evening, after the punters
had gone, it came to me that good and god, evil and devil, haven and
heaven were pretty much the same words. So, God was what was best in man.
Some things everyone seems to know, but I had to work it out for myself.
Bogota slum, Columbia. Later, a lot later, I was sat on another bus next to a classics scholar.
‘You know that bit about –Judge not that ye be
not judged?’
‘I do’.
‘D’you think that might of been miss-translated?
Could it of been –Condemn not, that ye be not condemned? He let it go
for a bit, then ‘–I think that’s entirely possible’. His exact
words: …entirely possible.
JJ.Smith,
Panama |
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Photographer G M B Akash
