Blue Collar by Danny King

chips at the Ritz every night,
     but she still had a few quid in the bank all the same. See, while it turned out that thinking up ways to sell Rocket Man Sauce
     paid twice as much as it did to build houses, she also didn’t have half the outgoings I did as her flat was completely paid
     off – though not by her.
    ‘My dad bought it for me when I moved to London. Like I said, he worries about me and didn’t want me having to live in a dodgy
     area just because I couldn’t afford to buy a place somewhere nice.’
    All the same, that called for a ‘Jesus!’ if only because I wasn’t even a fifth of the way into my twenty-five-year mortgage
     to buy my ex-council flat in Catford, which probably qualified as Dodge City in Charley’s old man’s books.
    ‘It’s a bit embarrassing really,’ she sheepishly admitted.
    I thought about this before concluding that it shouldn’t be.
    ‘We’d all have one if we could,’ I said. ‘If he’s got the money and doesn’t mind parting with it, then why not? Better than
     chucking it at the bank if you don’t have to. Oh, I forgot, he works for the bank, doesn’t he? Well then, even better.’
    And I meant it too. We pay out so much money that we don’t have to when we’re skint. Take my place, for example; I bought
     it for just over ninety thousand pounds with a ninety-five per cent mortgage five years ago and if I stay alive, healthy and
     in work, by the time I finish paying it off in the year 2027, I will have paid back something in the region of a hundred and
     eighty grand for it. That’s over twice what the flat cost. I’ve checked the mortgage paperwork and it’s all there in black
     and white. Unbelievable, isn’t it? The thieving bastards. Your house is the most expensive thing you’ll ever have to buy and
     you have to pay double for it if you don’t have the wherewithal to buy it outright the first time around.
    Naturally, Charley’s old man, being a thieving bastard himself, probably worked all this out with one of his chain-linked
     pens and saw that plundering his ISAs for his daughter was actually the best way of keeping money in the family anyway. OK,
     so Charley now had his… whatever her flat cost – a quarter-of-a-million, I wouldn’t be surprised – but wasn’t she always going
     to get it anyway? The moment he popped his clogs the lot would’ve been turned over to her anyway. Charley was his only daughter,
     so what difference did it make if she got an advance on her inheritance and put it to good use while he was still around to
     enjoy seeing her put it to good use? And actually that’s not true either, come to think of it, Charley wouldn’t have got the
     lot because the taxman, an even bigger thieving bastard than Charley’s dad, would’ve had half of it away in death duties before
     she could’ve even stuck a black dress on, so if you think about it, it actually made a lot of financial sense just to give
     it to her now. If her flat had cost a quarter of a million pounds and if she had done the normal thing and got a mortgage
     and then waited for her dad to fall off his perch in order to get her hands on his money, she would’ve had to have paid out
     something like three hundred and seventy five grand to the bank and the taxman alternately to be no better off than she was
     as things stood right now.
    Put like that, who could blame her for letting her dad buy her a flat?
    Still, spoilt cow.
    ‘So your wages, what do you do with them, then? Just chuck ’em in the bank and dip into them when you want a new pair of socks,
     or do you blow the lot on taxis and holidays?’ I pried, quite improperly, but the question was crying out to be asked.
    ‘No, I have bills to pay, just like everybody else,’ she assured me, though she must’ve had radiators in the front garden
     and an extension lead running up to Blackpool’s Golden Mile to have made a dent in her fifty-grand-a-year salary, as far as
     I could make out. ‘And I