Brad Francis, Deputy Assistant Senior Head Negotiator Of Sales Experience

New fiction

From the first time I heard his voice, I could tell Brad Francis was an oily character. It was the kind of voice that was always slipping out of your hand: one of those that, whatever their background, all estate agents seem eventually destined to end up with, a parody of well-spoken eloquence that was, in reality, entirely constructed from evasion and sickly sweet unguents and resin. If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have had to put up with the displeasure of speaking to him at all. Unfortunately, I wanted the house he had been entrusted to sell, and I wanted it harder than anything I’d ever wanted in my short life.

The idea was that I would live in the place for a year or two and hope that one day I would be able to afford to do the work it so desperately required, such as ripping out and replacing its fur-rimmed 1970s bath, incorporating its forlorn weather-lashed garage into a larger living area, installing a new kitchen and ridding the bedrooms of their unignorable odour of rotting crow. £400,000 was the highest offer I could possibly make and even that would require a loan from all three of my grandmas, a 35-year mortgage and every last penny of my savings. I suppose as a person in my 30s, in this day and age, I should have counted myself fortunate to be able to buy a house at all. But Francis was adamant that the vendors would not budge a penny below £450,000. For weeks, we did our uncomfortable little dance around our truths: mine being that I was dreaming beyond my means, and Francis’s being that the house had been on the market for a long time and the owner was clearly keener to sell than Francis was letting on.