by Adam Thorpe
‘I think you’ve damaged my internal organs. Like, mega-bad.’
‘Fuck off,’ he says in a high voice nothing like hers. He laughs and picks up his spliff again. ‘Watch your language, princess.’
‘What’s happening, Ken?’
‘Slogged straight past the slips,’ he sighs, clicking on his lighter. ‘Umpire gives the Hitler salute. Four for the bacon sarnies.’
Sometimes she doesn’t understand a frickin word he says.
6
SHEENA
29 September 2011–25 January 2012
Whether it is the leaves turning yellow and flying off or a sudden sense of panic at her lack of fulfilment in the personal arena, Sheena senses something moving in herself one wet and windy morning, something solid that has uncoupled from its station. Her 2011 Scotland Panorama calendar in the scullery tells her that today is Michaelmas Day. Big deal. Last year she missed Australia Day in January and Tony couldn’t believe it.
She looks it up on the Internet. St Michael the Archangel, fought against Satan and the evil angels. Used to be a big deal. Very big. End of the farming year. Not much mileage in it now, though, and certainly not for retailers.
‘Raffety, don’t touch,’ drawls a loud mother with a nose like a shark’s fin. Raffety goes on touching. As his fingers and mouth have been on recent and intimate terms with Nutella, Sheena goes up to him and leans over.
‘No way, petal,’ she says in a soft and menacing tone that would freeze boiling lava. And she presses his little fingers away from the toadstool bodysuit, all thirty-five pounds worth. She is glad she’s painted her nails violet today: Raffety is clearly impressed.
When the squall of tears is safely out in the lane with another customer lost to the shop, she says to the useless part-time assistant with a bead in her nose like a bogey, ‘I’m just popping out, Brittany.’
Sheena remembers her as a weeny whiny tot. Forbidden to call her Britt. Not-Britt, Sheena secretly names her. Useless Not-Britt.
She nips upstairs to her flat to check the face. Scary, but it will have to do. She taps a sprinkling of perfumed talc into each shoe. What she needs is a pair of elbow-length gloves. Her ears are still ringing from Raffety’s squeals. They triggered her tinnitus, made her teeth ache. It will all be in some mumspace blog by tomorrow, but what does she care? She’ll leave her cleavage as it is.
She makes straight for the lower end of Totter Hill in her smartest fur-trimmed coat. Not really liking his stuff, she’s never bought anything over the years, only chatted. Itchy Feet, daft name. He looks up as the bell tinkles, a ghost of a smile. ‘Sheila. Hello, stranger.’
‘Sheena.’
‘Of course, just talking to a Sheila on the phone.’
Liar. ‘Long time no see. Happy Michaelmas.’
‘Is it? Oh. Tea?’
‘Shoes, would you believe it. Time to spoil myself.’
Paul Cannon doesn’t turn a hair. He touches the shoes as if they have no weight, scratching the back of his neck where the greying locks bunch into that Crusoe ponytail. She likes the way he handles her feet, professionally. His big hands on her small feet with their pronounced arch. She’s had boyfriends who’ve gone weak over her feet, who’ve undressed them as if they were extra women on the end of her legs. That was before her left big toe started curving in like her mum’s. Age is such a sneak. She has to wear a rubbery toe stretcher. She’s forgotten to remove it.
‘Better than the op,’ he says. ‘Better still, avoid tight shoes. Or any shoes.’
Kind man, but it’s hopeless. She glances at his own bare feet, their long toes: ‘You’re like a teetotaller in a wine mer-chant, Paul.’
An ado in a long coat comes in at this point, hands in his pockets, headphones on his ears, and shuffles about by the leather boots in the corner. Maybe not ado, maybe just young. Even thirty-year-olds are beginning to look ado to her these days. He’s jiggling his head to whatever rubbish is giving him early hearing loss. His headphones are fur-lined, as sported by those bods who wave their arms about on a runway. He’s not missing much in the shop: the music is weird, spaced out, not very suited to the clientele. Sheena is sensitive to this sort of thing. Every aspect of a boutique has to be angled towards the hearts and minds of its customers. Paul’s music is more suited to a hippy craft shop, which goes with his barefoot thing, his ponytail. Yet the decor is so simple as to be neglectful: slatted pine painted white, the only relief being a poster of an eagle hovering high up over crags.
‘I always wanted to be a wildlife photographer,’ she says, nodding at the poster. ‘Hanging off cliffs somewhere remote and windy.’
There’s no reply. Maybe he has to concentrate. She refuses a pair of moccasin boots as not quite her, not quite. Too funky, too wild. She is subtler. But there isn’t a lot of choice in here. It is all a bit peculiar. There are even trainers that look like feet, with individual toes. Creepy.
‘Why sell shoes, then?’ she asks. Paul looks up from the rustling box, his hand around the calf of a bootee made out of ‘black microfibre, suitable for vegans’. As if she’s going to eat it like Charlie Chaplin in that film.
‘Why do I sell shoes?’
‘Yup. And not, I dunno …’
She can still feel his hand on her foot through the tights. She wants to say ‘cheeses’ – she can just see him in a striped, old-fashioned pinny with pockets, selling lovely cheeses on straw mats. But he’d have to wear appropriate shoes. Or you’d think the pong was his feet.
‘Go on,’ he insists. ‘Surprised I’m not selling what?’
She closes her mouth and puts a finger to her lips in thought. She encourages her dimples to appear. She raises her eyes to the ceiling. It needs cleaning.
‘Let’s see now,’ she says. ‘Old clocks?’
He snorts softly, fitting the lid back on the box, giving it a little pat, replacing it on the shelf from where he drew it five minutes ago. She has miscalculated. Maybe he has a touch of Asperger’s. Somewhere early on the spectrum. It is more and more common.
‘Books? Old books?’
‘I don’t read,’ he says. ‘Dyslexic. Can’t even spell the word.’
‘Blimey, neither can I. So was John Lennon,’ she adds, blinking quickly.
‘And Einstein. Faraday.’
She can’t quite recall who Faraday was. His jeans look great on him, considering his age. Forty-eight? Forty-five even? She hovers around forty-five like the needle on a speeding car, compromising for safety’s sake. They’ve shared the same lane for years, fifty yards apart. Incredible. Mother Hubbard towards the top, puff puff, Itchy Feet near the bottom. Since they were young enough not to find the hill a stretch. Totter is the operative word, although it’s old Lincolnshire for a lookout apparently, which makes sense. Your early thirties is bloody young. She took too long to make the first contact. Approaching forty. Maybe he was still married back then, anyway. She remembers a woman with lots of dark hair, now she thinks about it. The young man in the corner is looking at her. She wishes he wouldn’t; it makes her feel older.
Jenny of the organic deli informed her last week that Paul is divorced, not gay. Into some dangerous sport or other. Rock climbing, perhaps. Can you climb in bare feet? Maybe why he has this slight crookedness to his shoulders. Came down to earth with a bump one day. She’ll bring it up.
Paul proffers another pair of microfibre boots, long ones and black as liquorice. The youngster stirs and comes over. Black hair, very dark eyes, a crumpled Oxfam coat. He shifts the headphones onto his neck. If it wasn’t for the zit on his nose and his experimental haircut (shaven at the sides, bunched into curls at the front), he’d be good-looking. In a pretty way.
‘No,’ Paul replies to his question, ‘we don’t do steel toecaps, sorry. Try Sports Direct.’
The lad glances at her again as he leaves. Meaningfully, his black eyes twinkling. Could she still pull men young enough to be her progeny? Paul is staring at her. She shifts herself into a straight-backed, busines
slike pose on the bench, which has the unintended effect of pushing her tits out.
‘At least you don’t have coat hangers,’ she says, picking up the thread a bit late. ‘Swish and clatter. There are people with coat-hanger phobia. Kylie Minogue for one. Maybe I’m another.’
He has got down on one knee to fit her boots. Then he sits cross-legged on the little rug, all yogic, as she stands and tests them out. He is the only shoe salesman she knows who never wears shoes. Not even moccasin slippers. What about the dog shit? What about bits of glass? Soles like dark leather. Rough as sandpaper in bed, probably.
‘You do yoga?’ she asks.
He smiles for an instant as if the question is amusing. ‘Nope.’
She walks about, feeling self-conscious. The long black boots make a clicking noise on the planks. Hollow heels? His smile was affectionate, not just amused. Something has broken through. Everyone loves a client who buys; maybe it’s just that. She likes these boots, even though they’re a bit pricey and not real leather, not off a cow flayed alive by the Chinese or whatever. He is looking at her walking about, a solo fashion show. She’ll purchase these boots to remind her of this moment.
As she pays him, she notices the small picture in a frame propped next to the till: a bishop with a mitre stroking a swan. ‘I didn’t think you could stroke swans,’ she says. Blimey, he is a born-again Christian.
‘He’s a saint. Saint Hugh of Avalon. Bishop of Lincoln way back.’
The name rings a bell, but not as loud as the real bloody bells, tolling the time da-dee-da-da bong bong bong, or clanging away all at once. And that’s just the rehearsals. ‘I like the carols,’ she adds. ‘It’s Michaelmas Day today. End of the harvest, in the good old days when folk went to church. Archangel Michael versus Satan.’
‘The patron saint for you and me.’
Her heart leaps. ‘You and me?’
‘Shoemakers. Well, in the old days cobblers sold shoes too, so I think we’re counted in.’
‘I only do a small selection of footwear. Accessories, really. Minute moccasins, hand-stitched suede bootees from Italy.’
He’s waiting for the machine to do its thing. ‘I was in India for two years, on a course, learning the tabla.’
That was apropos of what? ‘Is that those funny drums?’
‘Twenty-odd years back.’ He nods. ‘Cross-legged. Bare feet only. As in a Hindu temple. Got used to it.’
She laughs. ‘Very ironic, you ending up in a shoe shop.’
‘Married into it, so blame my ex.’
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘We went round barefoot for millions of years, right? Desert sand, deep snow. You develop protective calluses. And the toes were nicely spread. No bunions. Good arches. Feels good. Thousands of nerve endings in each sole.’
‘Are you Buddhist?’
‘Nope.’
‘Show me them again.’
He has splayed toes. She hopes it isn’t a fetish thing.
‘I wouldn’t fancy it on Lincoln pavements,’ she says.
‘You just have to look where you’re going. And you become more sensitive to danger,’ he adds with a slight smile, meeting her eyes.
Blimey. Is she danger?
‘Funny, though,’ she presses on, ‘with you selling shoes.’
‘You don’t wear kiddies’ clothes.’
She’s not ever had kiddies either, though she doesn’t tell him that. All she’s had is pregnant dreams, woken up from with a sigh of relief. He tears off the receipt and she takes it, fingers touching for a microsecond.
‘Do you still drum, then?’
‘I was crap.’
‘You’re good at rock climbing.’
‘Says a little bird who’s got it wrong.’
She leaves it at that, ta-ta-ing him goodbye and nearly tripping over the sill. You do have to have the patience of a saint, in fact, to work in a shop.
He mentioned his ex. Must have been that one with all the hair and the good figure. Strange man in some ways. Nothing wrong with being dyslexic, though.
When she gets back to hers, Not-Britt is nattering to an equally well-pierced girlfriend on the pavement under a smoke cloud. ‘Brittany, have you heard of Hugh of Avalon?’
‘I’m not that thick, durr. Want to see my GCSE school project on him?’
‘Mine was better.’ Her friend laughs.
Always so loud.
She notices the dark-haired youth again, standing on the pavement opposite, in front of the bookshop but with his back to it. Because he’s staring at her. Or at Brittany and Friend, maybe. Except that when she turns round, they’ve scuttled back inside. At least they have some notion of guilt.
‘Know him, do you?’
‘Who?’
‘The pale young feller with jet-black hair and headphones over the road.’
They look out through the window, but he’s vanished. The glass needs bloody cleaning again.
Drifting down once, when he was smoking a beedi. ‘We’re almost cellmates.’
He nodded. She could see confetti. His and hers.
‘Out on parole, yeah.’
Many years ago, gesturing with her fag at his shop sign behind, she actually made him smile.
‘A little like the unfortunate name I saw in sunny Provence a while back,’ she said. ‘Athlete’s Foot.’
‘Itchy feet isn’t a medical complaint; it’s a psychological need.’
It took four years from the outset before he offered her a cup of herbal tea inside. She liked the way he prepared it, tipping the leaves out of his palm, stirring the brass pot. He is always tanned, which is a bit dodgy in Lincolnshire, outside of the farmworkers or the foreigners. Daily sunlamp? He never really goes anywhere, apart from the India business in his youth. So they talked about tea, weather and how best to clean brass.
She doesn’t speak to him for weeks at a time, though. That’s the pattern. He is just too far along for her to wander over in a natural way, and the lane is steep – not the illustrious Steep Hill itself, but its neglected sister. Prettier, some say.
‘I’m at the posh end,’ she jokes to him. ‘We talk different up there.’
Not altogether a joke, in Lincoln.
So she is stuck with Alan and Des from the sandwich bar next door, or fusspot Marco in his poncy waistcoat at the speciality coffee house (beans only) two doors up. Who wears bright-red bovver boots. Or hipster-bearded Mike Watkins with his used books, bang opposite her, as tatty as his shop. Except he’s not a hipster: fashion has caught up with him and will move on again, leaving him stranded and more misery-guts than ever. Pretty, posh Hannah has On the Hob a few doors down. Kitchen knick-knacks. She’s a well-meaning soul. ‘Puts us all to shame,’ Des commented with his usual wiggle. Last year, for Australia Day, Hannah covered the shop in green and gold and hung up stupid koala bears and kangaroos, and wondered why she wasn’t besieged by Lincolnites. ‘It’s a long way from Lincoln,’ Sheena pointed out.
Hers is called Mother Hubbard: smart clothes for small kids. She reckons smart kids would be better, but it’s not her decision. It is housed in a sixteenth-century cottage with see-saw walls and floors, drawing the sort of mum who drives a silver Lexus RX and whose budget cares for itself. Sheena’s prices are also hand-knitted, as she jokes to friends. She put up a notice saying PLEASE FOLD PUSHCHAIRS and someone added AND WHEELCHAIRS? so she took it down. None of her customers ever call her duck or say ‘ey up’ or ‘bless’. At least there is that. A duck-free zone.
She’s sold the business to a man called Tony Bartlett, operating out of Worksop. He owns three other similar shops in the East Midlands, all called Daisy Chain, though she’s hung on to the name Mother Hubbard because of the shop’s reputation. This is pending her breakout. There is only so much you can take of toddlers, woolly rompers, tandem buggies the size of her Mini Cooper. Friday and Saturday evenings you get the yobs banging on the metal shutters – overspill from the High Street area. On top of that, like a crusty laye
r in a Beatrix Potter bowl, are the accounts. Not being her own boss is a relief. Someone else’s burden.
She’s agreed to stay on as manageress for a two-year period, until both she and the shop are sorted. She does, however, own the warren of rooms overhead, living under and between the knotty beams of oak (like the proverbial rabbit) with Mungo, her plump ginger tabby. One day soon she’ll downsize to somewhere wild, windy, idyllic and cheap. The Outer Hebrides, maybe, where some of her stock used to come from, smelling of sheep’s grease and rough seas.
Under pressure from the terrible Tony, the shop has begun to inch downmarket. He’s forced her to change most of her suppliers: to ditch the hand-knitting ladies in Iceland and the Orkneys for sweatshop machine-operators in China – the wool shipped out there soaked in pesticides, or so she read in the Mail over a steamed-milk espresso chez Alan and Des. Same prices, though. It gets her blood boiling. Tony told her to snip off the MADE IN CHINA labels and she told him to get stuffed, that she’d be done for selling counterfeit goods, but he just laughed.
‘No one can tell the diff,’ he said. ‘Can you? It’s product, not plastic surgery.’
Honestly, she shouldn’t be caring less. She’ll be gone soon. Tony isn’t bad-looking, past his nasty suits. He once made a pass, hand on bum, but she would never mix work and pleasure. It’s the thrill of the chase that interests her. Or absolutely forbidden fruit: the youngish dad, cute and hassled, mooning in the shop among knit shrugs and pointelle cardies and monkey slippers. Tony once said, ‘Sheena, it’s all about concept. You’re on the front line. It’s face-to-face transactions. You don’t need to dress to slaughter in a kids’ boutique called Mother Hubbard.’
‘It’s not the clothes, Tony,’ she replied, ‘it’s what’s in them. I can’t change that.’
The toddlers she started out with have whizzed up into lanky teenagers with spots. Not all lanky; overweight, some of them. Squishy juvenile bellies.
‘The worst’s those little runny noses meeting my nice woolly jumpers,’ she confides one morning to Paul. She spotted him smoking and wandered down with her fag. A deadly quiet day. ‘Snail trails on the collars. I’m not wiping it for them. The mumsies don’t notice, they just go on jabbering.’