Her face showed that she had been crying a lot lately. She looked a bit cold, the coat she was wearing seemed a bit too summery for this day. "Is it okay if I get in?", she asked, even with that sad face it sounded more like an order than a request.
"Of course", I said and stepped aside to let her go in and closed the door behind her. "Do you want to hang your coat? Maybe you would like coffee or tea?"
"First question yes, the others NO THANK YOU", she tried to be relaxed and joky. I just nodded and accepted her coat and hung it on one of the hooks of the coat rack. She was already walking into the living room, not waiting for further invitations. She stopped abruptly when she saw the people sitting around the dining table, looked at them and walked on to the back of the room where the wood burner was. She sat down on one of the recliners and rubbed her hands. "It's nicer over here, than outside."
I took the other recliner and looked at her. She took a handkerchief out of the sleeve of her top and blew her nose. "Who are these people?" She nodded towards them, one of them was searching through my record collection. "Oh, these are squatters from the Regent Street, they have been knocked out of the house and everything was smashed by goons of the new owner of the place. They stay over here until they find a new place."
She pulled a face, obviously it would not have been her idea to invite people like that into her house. Every time I saw her it amazed me that we ever had something going on between us. My parents still asked about her, probably because she was decent, she was a teacher.
"So how are you doing?", I asked, trying to keep the conversation going. The question was not really needed, she was obviously not doing well. Her eyes filled with tears and she blew her nose quite loud. The squatter who was searching through the records showed one to his mates and they all laughed. It didn't bother me; I already was being told enough that I was bourgeois, not a revolutionary. I didn't mind, the world order would not be changed by me or by this lot. They still had their dreams.
She was ready to answer: "I'm so fed up with it all. He is using all our money to gamble. I can't even ask him to do some shopping, he takes the money and immediately runs to a betting agency. The bastard!"
I had heard it before, had asked the question before: "So why don't you kick him out?" She started crying openly now, the hanky could not stop the tears. "Because I love that bastard", she sniffed. I raised my hands in surrender: "That forces you to accept everything he chooses to do. It's still your own choice, I can't help you with this. I will not have another talk with him."
The squatters put a record on the player, I recognised it immediately: Rose Royce's "Love don't live here anymore".
She got up and almost ran out of the living room, I followed without really catching up with her. The squatters were observing the scene. When I reached the front door she was already closing it from the outside, through the glass in the door I could see her putting on her coat. I could hear the squatters laughing.
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