A Dysfunctional Success
Eric Goulden
Revised and revitalised with a new foreword written by the author
​Publishing Date May 17th 2024
by Ventil Verlag

BELINDA AND STEVE WERE YOUNGER than us but they looked older and they didn’t want a drink. Belinda may have accepted a small glass of wine, meaning a normal-sized glass of wine, given that Philippa used to drink it in half pints, but Steve abstained because he was driving. He had on casual, driving-a-car shoes that just covered his toes, leaving an expanse of white sock between the shoe and the bottom of his peg-leg slacks. Steve was an accountant. Belinda was a voluptuous Jewess with bubbly brown hair. She wore a coat with a fun fur collar, and shaggy black leg-warmers. Her voice was a husky adenoidal croak that spoke of forty cigarettes a day.
  They were my first experience of neighbours. In the fly-by-night world of rented accommodation I never had neighbours – just people living above, below and on either side who complained about the noise. I’d never had people coming round to ask if there was anything I needed, people of whom you could ask: ‘What day do the bin men come round?’ in the certainty of a correct reply. I was almost charmed.
  Belinda and Steve beat a hasty retreat – left us to get settled in. We were probably a bit lairy by then because we were running out of essential supplies. It was time to go back to the pub.
  By the following night, with the aid of a couple of flagons of cider and four bottles of Black Tower, we were well and truly settled in. There was knock at the door – the second in the space of two nights. It was Belinda. This time she was wearing a figure-hugging brown tracksuit. They wanted to invite us into their house the next afternoon for a drink and some ‘nibbles’ so that we could get to know one another.
  We scrabbled around for some smart-looking clothes so that we wouldn’t create too bad an impression. We needn’t have bothered. Belinda was wearing another tracksuit, a purple velour effort, and Steve was wearing the same sort of thing in beige.
  They’d had their house knocked through into one – the downstairs was a big indoor playground and leisure zone with an open-tread staircase and a kitchen off the back. The room was carpeted in brown shagpile. It crossed my mind that it was lucky Belinda wasn’t wearing yesterday’s brown tracksuit or we wouldn’t have been able to see her.
  Today Belinda and Steve were relaxing. They had a huge four-seater settee that curved around like an oxbow lake in front of a plastic stone-finish hearth and a giant TV set. They parked Philippa in an armchair and me on the oxbow sofa, and offered us a cup of tea or coffee – or maybe we’d like to join them in a ‘drink drink’.
  Belinda parked herself on the opposite end of the oxbow, with a massive velour flank angled ever so slightly provocatively towards me. Having ascertained that I was in the music business, she fixed me with a gimlet eye: ‘So Eric, what area of the business are you actually in?’