TIME DIFFERENCE

‘Thought you’d moved,’ he said when I walked in to the laundry ready to take my washing form the washer and put it in the dryer.
‘Why’d you think that?’
‘She said she hadn’t seen you about for a while so I checked with the Coucil if you’d moved.’
‘And they told you?’
‘Yes.’
I thought a moment. ‘One thing I noticed is that since the new lift’s been done I’ve met less people in it than the old one and I reckon it’s because it’s faster.’
‘Faster?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I timed it.’
‘You timed it?’
‘Yes. It takes twelve seconds less to get from the bottom to my floor in the new lift than it did in the old one.’
He looked at me.
‘Forty-five maybe forty-seven in the old and thirty-five in the new. That’s about a quarter difference in time. And I don’t meet so many people because of that difference. I used to come in there’d be a crowd waiting but that doesn’t happen now...or not very often...or as often as it did.’


THIRTY-SEVEN WINDOWS

‘Did you hear about the man smashed the windows?’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s in court next week.’
‘I’d just got back from seeing Rita up the road and he’d just finished and they had him in the back of the car.’
‘Yeh, they got him just outside my flat.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘You know what triggered it off?’
‘You see the car parked where it shouldn’t be on the yellow lines?’
‘Yeh, there were four or five men stood around it when we got back. All the windows’d been broken.’
‘Well he didn’t like the way it was parked.’
‘Didn’t like the way it was parked?’
‘It shouldn’t’ve been parked there.’
‘Even so...’
‘So anyway he smashed thirty-seven windows and it cost the Council eight thousand pounds to replace all of them.’
‘Took their time over the caretaker’s office.’
‘That’s bullet proof glass, that is.’
‘I thought they were bullet holes when I first saw them.’


PINK TOWELS

‘You want to watch that pink towel or Jay’ll steal it.’
‘You mean the small guy comes in here after us?’ I said.
‘Yes. He nicked one of my towels was pink. That’s how I know.’
‘You sure?’
‘I put it the wash, went away, came back and it was in the dryer with his stuff.’
‘You say anything?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like it anyway. It was one of a set of five was bought for me. Well, the girlfriend bought them for me except they were really for her. It was her way of trying to move in.’
‘Pink towels?’