The Lubetkin Legacy

Berthold: Money Troubles

My dismal existence, already thrown into crisis by the death of my mother, imminent homelessness, unrequited love and the revelations about my criminal past, was now under attack on a new front. I had long been in avoidance about my financial situation, but the irrefutable evidence came out one day when my debit card was declined in Lidl. To my utter humiliation, in front of a whole queue of lunchtime shoppers, I was outed as a pauper.

‘Look, there must have been a mistake. I’m a regular customer in here. Don’t you recognise me? I spend hundreds of pounds … well, lots of pounds, on your crap products. I could switch my loyalty to Waitrose, you know. You’re not the only supermarket around here,’ I blustered.

‘Cash or card?’ the pretty check-out girl repeated. Her name-tag was full of zs and chs. Polish, perhaps.

I knew in my heart that I was doomed and the pound of flesh would eventually be carved from me, but you have to protest, don’t you, at the sheer pettifogging meanness of life? I took a breath, stabbed the air and bellowed, ‘Therefore, Jew, though justice be thy plea, consider this! That, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation! WE DO PRAY FOR MERCY AND THAT SAME PRAYER DOTH TEACH US ALL TO RENDER THE DEEDS OF MERCY!!!’

Why was I shouting? Surely Portia hadn’t shouted at Shylock? The girl pressed the buzzer for the manager who arrived, harassed and sweaty, in a polyester shirt with a pile of nappy boxes under his arm.

‘This gentleman is refuse to pay,’ said the girl. ‘He make anti-Semitic speech.’

The people in the lengthening queue behind were stabbing me with their eyes.

In the end, I returned the bottle of sherry and a jar of coffee to the shelves. Fortunately, I had enough cash in my pockets for a tin of tuna, a loaf of sliced bread and an iceberg lettuce. Still, it was a wake-up call. There would be no more lattes at Luigi’s for the foreseeable future.

I stumbled back to the flat with my pitiful bag of retail therapy, where another outrage awaited me, in the form of a small blue letter that had been slipped under the door while I was out.

Dear Berthold,

We’ve been watching you and we think there is something fishy going on, you are trying to rob us of our birthright. We need to resolve the flat, and we would like to come to an arrangement with you without having to involve solicitors. We are getting desparate with waiting.

Your loving sister,

Jenny

PS: Our pet bunny is buried under a cherry tree in the garden so you can see why we are despirate to come home to be near his grave. Margaret

I crumpled the letter and threw it into the recycling bin, annoyed but not alarmed. Howard had alerted me to their wiles. No wonder they wanted to avoid the law. Ha! Their bloody pet bunny of fifty years ago! And they call that despirate (sic). I could bloody show them what desperation is.

While Mother was alive, she had enjoyed three pensions — her DSS ‘old age’ pension, her NHS pension from her speech therapist years, and a widow’s pension from Ted Madeley. In other words, she was comfortably provided for, if not quite in the oligarch league, and we’d lived sheltered from the cold winds of austerity. Her pensions, plus whatever money she had received from my dad, had been enough for us both to manage on comfortably, covering the rent, living expenses, evenings out at the Curzon, and even the occasional little holiday. I felt tempted to leave the pensions in place just for a while, until my finances were on a more secure footing, but Jimmy had warned me against it.

‘You’ll get done. Besides, your finances are never going to be secure, are they?’

He was probably right. My own income was the pittance I got from Jobseeker’s Allowance augmented occasionally by short-run, ill-paid roles in small grant-funded theatres where the stage set was inevitably a table and a wooden chair and the actors could sometimes outnumber the audience — a commitment to Art which I doubt George Clooney has ever experienced.

Like many actors, I was no stranger to the dole office, but I always regarded the dole as a stopgap, not a solution. I mean, no one can really live on £72.40 a week, can they? My case worker was a handsome young black guy called Justin, with a gold front tooth and a degree in media studies. He took my case seriously, as though my appearance in a series of deadbeat fringe shows was his personal contribution to the arts. He persuaded the local Job Centre to subscribe to The Stage, and for his sake I read it regularly, and attended auditions whenever something promising came up.

My last such foray had been to audition for the part of Lucky in Waiting for Godot at The Bridge, a fortnight before Mother died. Fortunately, I didn’t get it. Who wants to spend their evenings dragged around by a rope on a draughty stage under a railway bridge in Poplar? Justin had been curious when I gave him my edited feedback.

‘So what’s it about, this Waiting for Godot? I’ve heard the name.’

‘It’s about two guys under a tree waiting for someone who doesn’t turn up.’

‘Really? That’s it?’

‘Well, it’s philosophical. About the meaninglessness of life.’

‘In my opinion you’re best off out of it, Mr Sidebottom.’

Meaninglessness notwithstanding, my situation was now so desperate I told Justin I would be glad of anything. He was sad to see my status slip from art to survival, but he informed me there were currently openings for actors dressed as Mickey Mouse to hand out leaflets at the Brent Cross shopping centre.

‘Or there’s one here that might suit you,’ he said, scrolling down his screen. ‘A funeral parlour in North London is looking for an actor with a good voice for burials and cremation ceremonies. Zero-hours contract but possibility of overtime.’

‘Zero hours? What’s that mean?’

‘It’s like that play you said, Waiting for Whatsit. Like you’re permanently on call, but they only pay you if they call you up?’

It reminded me of Mother’s story of Grandad Bob and the dockers waiting for the brass tallies to be handed out. A strong reluctance tugged at my soul. ‘I’ll look into it,’ I said.

Maybe Inna could contribute to the rent, but when I suggested this, she looked aghast, crossed herself, and told me to apply for Housing Benefit. I was reluctant to go down this road because of what Mrs Penny had said. It would open me up to a whole new level of official nose-pokery. But it did add to the urgency of transferring the tenancy agreement to me. Which brought us back to the question of her signature.

Inna tossed her glossy, newly black plaits and flatly denied my accusation. ‘Oy! You think I got crazy, Mister Bertie? Why you think I sign Inna Alfandari?’

The question of the wrong signature preyed on my mind. Was Inna really as stupid as she pretended, or did she have a different agenda? Was there a malign plan at the back of her gobabki-addled mind to register the tenancy of the flat in her own name?

I recalled that when she had signed that Tenancy Transfer form Inna Alfandari instead of Lily Lukashenko, Mrs Penny had folded it without a glance and slipped it back into the file. Where I hoped it would stay un-looked-at for another fifty years. But what if Mrs Penny noticed the wrong name when she opened the file?

I could invent another marriage/death/divorce which Inna, aka Lily, had forgotten about in her confusion. Maybe Jimmy the Dog would help with a forged death certificate — he owed me one. I could say that my mother had forgotten who she was and had inadvertently written down a friend’s name. Surely demented old people do that sort of thing all the time? Or I could simply steal the mis-signed document and destroy it. With all these possibilities roiling in my mind, I put on a clean shirt, attended to a call of nature, gathered together my birth certificate and Mother’s marriage certificate to Wicked Sid, and prepared to brazen it out with Mrs Penny.