Jason switched off the radio and turned it over to play one of the CD’s that he had purposefully bought that morning. Personally he couldn’t stand what was collectively called ‘modern music’ – house, garage, trance, rap etc. It was all ‘jungle noise’ to him. In any case, he’d only bought the damned things to annoy the neighbours with. As soon as he had succeeded in his aim, and that was well underway now, they were all going straight in the nearest bin. Here goes, he thought – full volume, windows down, sun-roof open – the last mile of his journey home.
Home. Home was a very ordinary, 1940’s terraced box stuck roughly in the middle of a small row of other ugly 1940’s terraced boxes on the inside edge of a very bad bend that had become an accident black spot. The houses had little to commend them, he considered. Well, little except for their large gardens and the field behind.
It had been a real step down, moving into one of these terminally unappealing boxes, but it was a necessary evil. His real house was in the country – en-suite bathrooms, indoor swimming pool, mezzanines, and surrounded by lawns and courtyards. At the moment it was both rented out and mortgaged to the hilt in order to finance his latest scheme.
Driving past the row of terraced houses one day, Jason had noticed that the middle one was up for sale. With growing interest, he had pulled over and eyed up this sorry little group of dwellings. They had two things in their favour – they were all set well back from the road and they all had huge rear gardens. During the war years, when the houses had been hastily erected to accommodate bombed-out townies, these gardens had presumably been intended as ‘Dig for Victory’ allotments but now they were just overgrown, weed-choked eyesores.
