by Adam Thorpe
‘Through all those thousands of nerve endings.’
He gives an amused grunt. ‘Until, one presumes, your sweaty soles have rubbed the design away. I prefer the earth, if we’re talking energies.’
‘Some folk will buy anything,’ she sighs, although she is tempted. He isn’t very good at client persuasion; just the opposite. He’ll be talking flying saucers next. She glances at her watch. ‘I’ve left yet another useless nose-pierced ado in charge,’ she fibs.
‘I wouldn’t choose conventional sandals,’ he says with professional briskness. ‘I can offer you some minimal esparto sandals made in Spain to my specification. Copies of pre-historic footwear from the sixth century BC. No heel, no arch, nothing. Very thin, tough soles. Better than flip-flops. You’ll learn to touch down on the balls of your feet rather than the heel, if you’re on a hard surface. And most surfaces are now hard, unfortunately. It’s almost as good as going barefoot.’
He presents them. They are like squashed bits of old baskets. She frowns. ‘They’re not really my thing. I’ll get calluses.’
‘Exactly. Calluses are nature’s footwear. Look at dancers’ feet. Yoga teachers.’
‘You’re talking yourself out of business.’
She tries on some Roman-looking faux-leather sandals, with curly ties instead of buckles and well supported under the sole. ‘You don’t have someone breathing down your neck, like I do.’
‘These days, no. It was my wife’s shop, originally. It came with Rebecca. Ever know her?’
She shakes her head, unable to recall Rebecca as more than that blur with a lot of hair.
‘I was floating about,’ he goes on, ‘after spending six years sick.’
‘Six years?’
‘India. I got four diseases, one on top of the other. Came back with them stuck to me like giggling schoolgirls. In bed at my mum’s down the road near Boston for nine months.’
Giggling schoolgirls? thinks Sheena, smiling uncertainly from her chair. Oh dear. In bed with his mum carrying in treats on trays. Maybe she won’t get him to meet Fay, who finishes her stint at the end of the week. ‘Scary,’ she says.
‘Nah. Frustrating. I wasn’t really sick as such, just harrowed. As we say in Boston. Harrowed. Exactly how I felt. I once knew a chronically depressed bloke whose daughter was murdered,’ he says unexpectedly.
‘Oh my God.’
‘He was never depressed again. It sort of jolted him out of it.’
She wanted to ask him about kids, but now backs off. All she knows about him for certain is that he lives out near Tupholme, very remote, drives a blue van. Their eyes meet and she feels a pleasant quiver, as if someone’s put sherbert in her blood. The door jingles and an elderly female hobbles in.
Sheena turns back into a customer, sliding off the chair and picking up her bag. She is seeing them – her and Paul – stood among vegetables growing in neat rows out of peaty earth, with mountains in the background. Maybe it is his hands, which are large and broad and furred with dark hairs – a farmer’s hands, not a shoe handler’s hands. So he is a local, in the end. That is disappointing, but she can live with it.
‘We ought to have a drink some time,’ she breaks in, touching his elbow. ‘Discuss trade and the clientele. Oh, or other things. The meaning of life, if there is one.’
‘Nice idea.’
‘Go for a Chinese?’ she pursues. ‘Pop by or give me a buzz. I’m in the book. Or I’ll text you.’
He smiles, which makes her scalp go fuzzy, and says, ‘Look forward to it.’
The cathedral’s ringing its bells. Sometimes when the wind’s right they float down here. Wedding bells! She is too old, she thinks, to be playing this sort of lark. Batting above her average. She walks towards the door and is brought up short by the shock of her bare feet against the doormat’s bristles. Forty thousand nerve endings. She can believe that. ‘Oops,’ she says, turning to him. ‘Senior moment.’
He is holding her shoes out, his fingers curling into each warm interior. She notices the heels are worn. Standing up all day. Eyes on hers, directly on hers. Holding them together.
‘Go unshod,’ he says. ‘Pad gently like the beasts.’
He’s poetic, not dull.
‘You’re putting yourself out of business,’ interrupts the elderly bitch with a stupid laugh – who, Sheena later thinks, is probably only about fifteen years older than herself and has very striking pale-blue eyes. Much more amazing than hers. Upstaged as ever. There’s always someone who upstages the bride.
‘Shooting himself in the foot,’ Sheena quips, slipping one of hers in.
But no more chuckling. When she glances back through the window from the lane, he’s nodding and smiling at the elderly faggot as if they’re hanging out together.
She is forty-eight, looks mostly younger, especially in sunglasses (not much call for those here). If they were to have a baby, there is more than an even chance it would be healthy. He is trapped. She is trapped. Together, they have this enormous potential. She would text him but doesn’t know his number. He probably doesn’t do mobiles. He doesn’t phone, anyway. He doesn’t pop by. When she goes for a Chinese, she invites Fay. ‘It looks right posh, dun’t it?’ She drives the girl back home afterwards, somewhat nervously. She turns off Burton Road into the estate. There are a few gaunt blocks, but the brick houses are neat and rather sweet, with gardens in front. Some have upmarket cars parked outside. Well, the state’s paying the rent, tenants decently salaried, or just plumbers and whatnot overcharging. Admittedly several of the gardens are rubbish sites or overgrown with weedy bushes, but it is nothing like she imagined. Fay’s is a maisonette, no more than three storeys, in red brick with big concrete balconies and a thick hedge encircling a lawn. It is almost dark and the autumn breeze has a chill on it. Maybe she’ll be invited in. Meet the damaged mother, the dodgy stepfather. Both on state benefits, of course. Victims or scroungers? Like the eastern Europeans. Some work hard. Some steal. Boozers too. Crunchy glass underfoot the next day.
Sheena gets out of the car when Fay does. No invitation. They give each other a little hug. The girl feels bony and slight. Sheena squeezes her a bit closer out of affection. Fay lets her. This girl needs so much love, Sheena thinks. They are hugging when a slash of bare-bulb light appears on the first-floor balcony and someone emerges. Standing there behind the handrail is the man with a tattoo on his neck, the guitar player in front of Smith’s. Who used to be in front of Smith’s. The busker. A bit of a dish. He peers out at them in an old T-shirt. He must be freezing.
‘Oh, it’s the wonderful busker.’
‘Yeah, everyone says it. His head’s a mess, though. Bye, Sheena. I’ve gotta go cos he won’t be doin nefin or else. Guess who’s the cook tonight?’
‘Tell him from me that I love his music, Fay.’
‘Tell him that yersen and he’ll start coming on to you right warm.’ She laughs.
‘Better not, then.’
‘Makes no difference that you’re old enough to be his gran, not with our Ken.’
‘Not quite that ancient, hun.’ God, this is how Fay sees her: the withered granny. ‘Nevertheless, feel free to come back on Saturdays. As I said, yeah? A bit of extra pocket money. No need to warn me beforehand. Just turn up.’
As she gets back into the car, she hears Fay get an earful from the balcony and pauses before starting the ignition. They’re only half an hour late; should she explain? She hovers for a minute as Fay disappears round the corner. The door shuts, the shaft of light vanishes behind a curtain. A group of lads are hovering across the way, hooded and menacing. She turns the ignition and tries not to get the hell out of there too obviously. Blinking the odd tear from her vision.
Fay returns at eleven on the Saturday following, out of uniform. The coat with its fur-trimmed hood is slightly too large for her, the cuffs hiding her knuckles. She’s excited. ‘Tennyson had a fire.’ ‘Sorry, angel?’ ‘Tennyson block. At school. Burnt out two classrooms. What? You think I d
one it or what?’ Sheena asks if anyone was hurt. ‘Nah, it was at night. Some nobheads got kegged for defo. I dunna who. Can’t say or they’d kill me. Slowly, like.’
Sheena worries that she’s been too forward. Most teenagers would loaf about in bed till midday, but the girl has this restlessness. She’ll go far. She is good with the toddlers, makes them laugh, talks to them in a sing-song voice that is a little loud. It is busy, and Sheena is on an adrenalin high.
She sends Fay off to do some shopping for the weekend, handing over a twenty. Fay is totally trustworthy. She comes back with the bill and the change, but Sheena doesn’t bother to check it. They eat lunch together upstairs, Mungo smelling the dog on Fay’s jeans. The mumsies look at Fay down their noses because, apart from her broad Lincolnshire twang, she is so obviously dressed in bottom-of-the-range clothes sparking with artificial fibres: orange leggings with a drawstring fastener, a long-sleeved T-shirt with a WEST COAST CALIFORNIA logo, leopard-patterned trainers laced in neon pink. The coat is a touch grubby and was once red.
Sheena enjoys the irony of it all. They probably think the girl’s a shoplifter at first. On Saturdays the dads always come in, looking lost, clutching punnets of organic raspberries they’ve been forced to buy by the older sibling after her saxophone lesson or whatever, bewildered by the sight of their children, whom they never see in the week (the office, not marital separation, not yet) and having not a single ounce of control over them. Sometimes it’s both mum and dad – but equally lost, in this age of gender equality, without the nanny. London commuters, escaping impossible house prices, enjoying their four-bedroom stone cottage, double garage, and huge lawn for under four hundred thou. And getting raspberry juice over bloody everything.
Fay leaves mid-afternoon, home-duties-bound. She has earned a tenner and the bus fare. That was always their agreement. She seems satisfied. She doesn’t know if she can make it every Saturday. Next Saturday is frickin PJ Sports Day at her school, raising money for a frickin orphanage in frickin Romania. ‘Oh, another nice English cause, I see,’ comments Sheena. ‘That’ll be fun, running for the Roms.’ ‘No,’ says Fay, ‘I hate it.’ ‘Is that because it’s embarrassing, being in smelly pyjamas?’ Fay makes a snorting noise. Sheena wonders if the poor thing even has a pair of PJs. An acceptable pair, anyway. ‘Don’t fret about it, honey. The point is, you can just turn up. But I’m away for the last week of November.’ ‘Where you going, then?’ ‘Tenerife. Bag up on sunshine to see me through to March.’ She didn’t suggest Fay came in to help Not-Britt cope with the pre-Christmas rush, ho ho. (Retail suicide, Tony called it. ‘Tony, would you rather the murder of a client on your hands? Blood all over that lovely carpet?’)
Fay’s eyes are full of imagined sunshine. She’s been a few times to Skeggy in Ken’s van, apparently, and a school trip to Boston for coastal erosion when she was sick in the coach, and that’s it.
At the door, a leaving present of a jaffa cake melting in her hand, she turns into the moderately busy shop and calls out, in a chance lull, ‘You en’t allowed to say that, any road, Sheena.’ Sheena bustles over to her. ‘Say what? Please don’t shout.’ ‘That Romanians are Roms, like. It were racist. You’ll get Miss Crabbe after you. Discriminising.’ Sheena places a hand on the girl’s thick hair and guides her out. ‘Oo-er, sweetheart, what will I get?’ Fay ponders on the pavement, chewing on her jaffa cake. ‘Nobbut lines. You en’t smashed their gypsy faces in, or whatever.’
Sheena takes her shoes off and walks on the warm sand. She sees what Paul meant. You adjust. The surface sifts, you can feel the millions of grains. It is sexy, kind of, the sensation thrilling up from the bottom of her feet through her body to her mind. You still have to watch out for broken glass and nasty odds and sods, though, floated in from the ocean. She swims out to a rock in her sunglasses, scarcely able to believe the glittering loveliness. She lies on the rock, shivering a bit in the whiffs of seaweed, and vows to take charge of her life. Paul is a part of that life. It is just a question of being bold. She isn’t sure about the name, though. Paul. He is more a Jody. Leo. Rafe.
That evening in the hotel bar she gets through a bottle of Listán Negro. A youngish off-the-rack-gorgeous local in a white suit and aviator’s shades buys her a drink and tells her she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
‘The light is low,’ she jokes, ‘and you’ve got your shades on.’
‘I am agree.’
She laughs, which is a bit cruel. She only knows about twenty words in Spanish. He is smoking a thin cigar she likes the smell of. They go up together to her room at two in the morning and make love with an unswerving dedication to the surface of each other’s bodies, strangers to the end. She is sure she hears him whisper ‘Mama’ at one point, nuzzling her tits. He goes back to his own place and Sheena lies on the scattered pillows and cries as she watches CNN unroll the world’s miseries and injustices, though her tears are never for those.
He didn’t even stay to tidy up the bed. His mouth tasted of dung behind the toothpaste. That was the cigar. Imagine suddenly waking up, she reflects, with someone else’s mouth instead of your own.
Fay doesn’t come back at all until the week after Christmas. Her mum was bad, and Ken got cuffed by the police, a night in the station, released with a caution ‘for possession of a controlled substance’. He then got ‘very paralytic’ because he was upset, and pulled Rochelle (the mum) by the hair until Rochelle screamed and he nearly got done for domestic assault. On Christmas Eve. A single breathless sentence with the broad accent. Google translation where are you?
‘You have had an exciting time,’ says Sheena, helpless to know what to suggest. The odd thing is that the girl seems to love and even admire her stepdad, who has ‘a big heart’. He never lays a finger on the girl. Only the mother. Back in Hemel Sheena’s dad would occasionally lose his cool after a hard day supervising the buses with a biro behind his ear and slap his wife across the face. But Sheena’s mum would take her revenge ten times over by going almost mute for days. It infuriated him and he did suffer, oh how he suffered, coming back from the Green Line depot in his purple tie to that silence. Until the next explosion, fuelled like Ken’s by drink or worse (Whitbread Trophy with his mates in Dad’s case). Again, he never laid a finger on his little girl.
‘What did you do for Christmas, Sheena?’
‘Slept. Slept right through it.’ Giving out soup to the derelicts down Monks Road, like every year. Distraction. Taking her life in her hands.
Fay is very keen to go over to Chapter Seven with some of her savings in a purse. To see if they’ve got any dog books. Sheena gives her fifteen minutes off, despite her safeguarding suspicions about Mike (totally unfounded, she admits to herself ). The girl returns after twenty minutes with Dog Training, showing a retriever on the cover with a fat bird in its mouth. Not what she wanted, she says. It’s for hunting. One quid fifty. She seems disgruntled.
‘How was our Mike?’ asks Sheena.
Fay glares at her. ‘In a mard. I hate him. He’s a cruel twat.’
A mumsy looks askance, all but shielding her three-year-old’s ears, except that they already have a pair of furry white muffs on them. Sheena brings Fay away to the scullery with an encouraging arm on her back.
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing. He’s just a fucking old cruel— Mmmf …’
‘He can be ever so grumpy,’ Sheena says, removing her hand from Fay’s moist little mouth. ‘He’s famous for that. But Fay, can you not swear in my shop, please?’
‘Why don’t you shut your hole and do one?’ shouts Fay, having wiped her lips with the back of her hand. And then she’s gone. Sheena is actually trembling. The girl’s feral. You can never tame a wild animal. How very disappointing. That bloody Mike.
She goes across to see him as he’s closing up, usually an hour later than her (he claims a lot of people come along after work, but she’s never exactly noticed the queues). He looks surprised. Well, it’s her first time in. I
t’s dark and dingy, chaotic ain’t the word, old books stacked not just on the shelves but on the floor. The golden rule: never show too much stock. That’s not the only rule he’s broken. Not enough light to read, which seems self-defeating for a bookshop. And he doesn’t greet his latest customer, or not properly. A grunt and a scowl is worse than nothing.
‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ she says.
‘If you’re here to purchase, not at all.’
Is that supposed to be funny? There’s a smell, hard to define. Dead mouse somewhere. Ancient papers. Dust. Gone-off wax floor-polish. The floorboards were last painted black in the nineteenth century, it looks like, and are now scuffed back to bare wood by footfall, but not evenly. Hers are hidden by a high-quality Heckmondwike Supacord carpet, a calming aquamarine. Even resists infant vomit. You can’t arse about in a retail environment, to quote Tony.
‘My work-experience trainee popped in here today. To purchase, in fact. A slim fourteen-year-old with red hair called Fay. A sweet girl, difficult background. Popped out again rather smartly, however. Shame.’
She thought that would be enough. Mike Watkins looks down at her from a battered wooden footstool on which he is standing with a column of books hooked in his right arm. The bookcase is hopelessly full. As he is simply staring and not replying, looking over his small oval spectacles like something out of Harry Potter (the beard, the beard), she adds, ‘The thing is, I’m just checking if everything, well, that nothing … She’s not used to bookshops.’
‘So we saw,’ he says.
We? As in ‘We are a grandmother’?
‘Oh dear. What happened?’
Mike returns to his shelf-stacking like an unhelpful employee in Asda. He somehow finds room, even if it means squeezing them on top of the others. ‘What happened,’ he says, eventually, ‘is that she stole a book.’
‘Did she? She said she’d paid one fifty. What was it called? The Hunting Dog, or something.’
‘She paid for that one, yeah. But she didn’t pay for the one I saw turning her right-hand coat pocket into a kind of brick. Listening to Your Dog is the title. First edition, signed by the author. Worth twelve pounds fifty. When I pointed this out, she called me an unrepeatable epithet connected to self-pleasuring. And then some more.’