H and I were looking to upsize mildly and were going round a flat we liked with a real estate agent. The barely twenty-year-old weasel was doing the hard sell; it’s a great location, we were told—he bought his own place on the road behind. This made it all the more depressing; an embryo in shiny nylon could spare the cash to buy a flat somewhere we could barely afford. Was I in the wrong job? Or was a real estate agency like a thrift shop, where the staff got first dibs on everything that comes in?
