Read Ten Days for Free Online Page B

wall that overlooked the estate.
    The sun was just now dipping behind the furthest building, and the black of the intertwining walkways had taken on a silver sheen. ‘There’s another meeting at the centre,’ Lyndall said.
    â€˜I didn’t hear of any meeting.’ Cathy went over to stand next to Lyndall. She saw the doors to the community centre open and a handful of people filing in. ‘I wonder what it’s about.’
    â€˜Scouts against the Bomb? Mothers for Rap?’ Lyndall smiled. ‘Oh no, if that had been it, you’d be there, wouldn’t you, Mum? How about Rastafarians for a Better Quality of Puff?’
    Next to the community centre was another low-brick building that had started out life as a launderette. After it closed, a series of deluded optimists had tried and failed to turn it variously into a functioning chippie, a newsagent and, for a few mad months, a soft furnishings shop. Each reinvention had failed more spectacularly than the previous one. Now, with the Lovelace coming down, the council had given up trying to rent the space and had, instead, boarded up the building, but badly, so someone soon prised open a hole big enough for a person to get in and out. As they stood looking down, a woman climbed through this hole.
    â€˜Hold on to your wallets,’ Lyndall said. The woman straightened up, tugged down her tiny skirt, put the sunglasses that had been embedded in her straw-coloured hair on her nose and then, teetering on high heels, sashayed in a generally forward direction. ‘The pop-up brothel’s on the move.’
    â€˜Just because she uses,’ Cathy said, ‘doesn’t make her a prostitute.’
    â€˜Oh, Mum,’ Lyndall said. ‘You’re such an innocent.’
    â€˜Well, it doesn’t.’
    â€˜Yeah, yeah, and you’re the one who landed us in an estate named after a porn star and didn’t even realise it.’
    â€˜I keep telling you, Richard Lovelace was a seventeenth-century poet.’
    â€˜So you do,’ Lyndall said, ‘and I bet you also think the mistresses he writes about are all allegories.’ But she said it without much emphasis, because her attention had been caught by something else. ‘Looks like Ruben’s off on one,’ she said.
    As the tottering woman neared the edge of a building, Ruben had rounded the corner. He was holding something that, when Cathy looked harder, turned out to be a long stick. Coming abreast of the woman, he lifted the stick. She held up two fingers and flicked them, then kept on going. It was a gesture that, if Ruben saw it, he ignored. He thwacked the stick down against his palm. His lips were moving, although he was too far away for Cathy to hear what he was saying, as he continued, rhythmically, to hit his palm.
    â€˜I better go down,’ she said.
    â€˜No need.’ This from Lyndall, whose eyes were keener than her mother’s. ‘Banji’s on the case.’
    Cathy saw that Lyndall was right and that Banji had also rounded the corner. As Ruben made slow progress, Banji made no effort to catch up with him, instead matching his pace to the other man’s so he wouldn’t be seen. At one point Ruben wheeled round to stand stock-still, peering into the rapidly descending dark as if he knew someone was following him. But by then Banji had melted back against a wall so Ruben didn’t spot him.
    Banji’s such a contradiction, Cathy thought: first he steers clear of any involvement, and then, just as I decide he’s a complete waste of space, here he is, quite clearly following Ruben to make sure he stays safe.
    The door to the community centre was still open. When Ruben came abreast of it he stopped. Banji stopped behind him. Someone must have been standing near the door because, although Cathy couldn’t make out who it was, they came to the threshold and spoke to Ruben, who raised his stick arm. The someone must have