by Adam Thorpe
‘Apologies,’ says Sheena, suppressing a smile. What a pretentious shrivelled-up wanker. Literally. It probably gets caught in his beard, like cobwebs. Ugh. To think she waves to him almost every day, despite getting a bare nod back. She’s much too nice. Solidarity my foot. ‘I’ll buy it right now,’ she adds, taking out her purse. She can’t possibly fall out with him. It would make life on Totter Hill a daily ordeal. She’s known retailers get nervous breakdowns with the strain of avoiding the glance of the enemy opposite.
‘You can’t,’ he says. ‘You’ll just hand the said book over to her.’
‘Exactly what I intend to do.’
‘Appalling lesson for a juvenile.’ He alights from the stool with another grunt, slapping his hands free of dust. Presumably never exercises. She’s dependent on her weekly workout at the gym club for her sanity. ‘Reward for thieving, insulting an adult? The stolen goods.’
Sheena sighs away her desire to thump him. ‘Oh, come on. She’s a street kid. Dysfunctional and impoverished family. Fiery temper. A redhead!’
‘That’s a myth,’ says Mike, going over to the door and turning the tatty OPEN sign to CLOSED. ‘Like the myth of impoverishment. Free school, free healthcare, free transport to school, free council house, free school trips, just about everything. And what do I get? Higher and higher rates, charges for this and that, and bloody Oxfam selling used books. Even book tokens for Christmas have gone out of fashion. Ergo, the final retailing day of 2011 is a complete washout. I could be at home in front of the fire.’
‘I can see,’ says Sheena, who unfortunately could not disagree with his basic thrust, ‘that Fay will remain disappointed.’
‘And don’t try to get anyone else to buy it for her, as Listening to Your Dog is not on the shelves any more. It reminds me of what was a very unpleasant and even shocking experience.’
Sheena feels for him, suddenly. Fay could pack a punch. She has a tongue on her, as Mum would say. Nothing like that has ever happened in this shop, she realises. It is an earthquake in an earthquake-free zone. She can see the books tumbling off the shelves.
‘I think it’ll teach her the appropriate lesson,’ she concedes. She is very good at conceding. And they are both on the same side, as retailers. Sticky fingers, large pockets. Mike says nothing, only nods. With a touch of impatience. He is a sort of Paul Cannon type, but the bad version. Paul is the good version. The grumpy but good angel. And hot too.
A week later, and no Fay. Of course she isn’t feral, she’s a suffering creature. A victim. God, we all hope Mike didn’t do something when she was alone in there; he’s a bit of a dark horse. One little public hint of that and the local vigilantes would burn down his shop, or at least heap his books up in front of the cathedral and torch them. With a sign on it, misspelt: PEEDO. And him on top, his beard catching first. Whoosh. Full of dust and dry gravy and dried spunk.
Sheena considers contacting Fay, but by now she isn’t sorry that the girl is temporarily (she presumes) absent from her life, as the latter has taken an unexpected turn. Previously on Sheena’s Diaries …
The young dark-haired customer in Paul’s shop that time was seated at the bar in the Short Straw during the lunch break, when frankly the world might have suffered an apocalypse, it was so quiet. Despite the sales, she had had the second worst day of the year, as she joked to Hannah, whose creative ideas (for example a blackboard bearing a stick of chalk below YOUR NEW YEAR RESOLUTION?) draw the masses. Crap!
So what’s good about January? A young man raising his glass at her. She went over, ordered hers (Pinot Grigio spritzer with a hunk of lime), sat on a stool and remarked on his steel-capped black-leather boots. ‘Glad you found a pair.’
‘Vegan,’ he said, keeping straight-faced, looking down at hers rested on the brass bar rail. His eyes lifted, burying themselves in her ample cleavage. The boil on his nose (for such it appeared to be) was subdued by the low light – a gloomy lunchtime, and Clive refused to recognise the need for artificial light until nightfall, like a Victorian lamplighter. As, no doubt, her forty-something wrinkles and sags were softened. He was positively pretty, with fine features, bony cheekbones, his jet-black hair transformed thankfully into a sort of 1920s cut, sleek and neat. And Sheena liked men with eyes so dark the pupils vanished into the iris, giving the gaze a hypnotic quality, if a little like those black gobstoppers you used to get. He was twenty years younger but clearly fancied her. Sheena needed this. No woman teetering a couple of years off from fifty did not need this. It was Sheena’s mother who had said, a generation earlier, ‘No man ever looks at a woman over fifty.’
His name was Gavin. She didn’t think he was drugged up. He was also in the retail sector, an assistant manager in a convenience store, day off today, but had other ambitions. ‘Like?’ He smiled modestly but winningly. Pleasant, lilting voice. Hidden depths. ‘To make the world a better place.’ An idealist. Sweet. She smiled back, raising her Pinot Grigio. ‘It’s 2012. Go for it.’ They touched glasses. ‘And how would you go about it, Gavin? Improve your face-to-face transaction skills?’ She was on her third spritzer by now. Their fingers touched when they simultaneously went for the peanuts in the little bowl that Clive always had to be asked to provide. His skin felt cold only because hers was overheated. She felt twenty-something because that’s what her heart still was. Her face too, when she forgot.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said, sticking to her with his gobstopper eyes.
‘No time to tell it now, then. I’m opening in fifteen minutes. A wee bit pissed too.’
‘I could tell you, like, this evening?’
‘We can resume our acquaintance at five thirty. Come to the shop. Ring the bell on the rather flaky green door to the right. That’s my private entry, as it were. You know where it is, I’ve seen you loitering in front of Chapter Seven.’
He frowned. ‘I never loiter. You know what I do? I stand in a state of high expectancy, very alert.’
‘For what? Shoplifters?’
He was taken aback for a moment, then understood and found it funny. The thread became (yet again in her case) the curse of shoplifting, which was of mutual interest, he being an assistant store manager, and they shared stories. Wealthy kleptomaniacs were her area. Disturbed. Pocketing cardies for their nieces or nephews, possibly imaginary. His were the offshoot of poverty or generational tradition (not just grimy travellers) or bloody students. ‘And I’m a bloody student! Part time, though. Currently pausing to earn my bread so as I don’t starve.’
He didn’t pay her tab, but then men were forbidden to be gentlemen, these days, and he was saving up. As she left, pausing at the door to glance back, he gave her a thumbs-up and a meaningful look, like the handsome stranger in a film to an innocent young woman stranded in a one-horse town. Except that this was Lincoln, and he was (judging from the very slight twang of an accent) a county native, so he didn’t quite pull it off. Not everything can be perfect, but it made him even more munchable.
Completely ridiculous, but she returned up the hill with a spring in her step. God, you’re only young once, and that felt longer ago than it actually was, pushed back into the past by a daily intake of youthful mumsies. Even those who’d put their careers first and waited to their mid-thirties, and now looked drawn and worn. Even they seemed young these days.
Gavin turned up after closing time only ten minutes late, pressing his face against the plate glass to see inside. She had just switched off the lights after tidying, the interior a dim and sickly yellow in the overspill from the lane’s sodium street lamps. Otherwise the shop was a stage or a T V screen. No privacy for a retailer; it’s all public. He was a thin shadowy form, and she thought she saw Mike bloody Watkins beyond, on the other side of the lane but as close as ever, fiddling with his bargain box. Unlucky.
She ushered Gavin into the narrow hallway. ‘I’m upstairs,’ she said. ‘Cup of tea?’ She cast this back over her shoulder on the way up the crooked little stairs – brightly, despite a sudden q
ualm that was part embarrassment, now the spritzers had settled to a sticky pool in her head. What was she up to? She felt about as sexy as a bed-and-breakfast landlady.
He was just behind her on the tiny landing. ‘What’s your name again?’
She wanted to laugh. ‘Sheena. Old enough to be your grandmother,’ she added, testing. Actually, only old enough to be his (young) mother.
Gavin liked the flat. He liked the wood-and-brass ship wheel on the wall and the big landscape and the bright metal butterfly (souvenir of Sandro). She made him tea. ‘I’ve got wine in the fridge,’ she said. No, he’d have tea. She pulled a face. ‘Have you got a headache too?’ ‘Look, Sheena, I think you’re mega-sexy and I only want tea first because I’m thirsty. Have you got a biscuit? I like digestives but anything’ll do.’
He was so sweet. So young. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Take your coat off. Let’s give this a moment to settle.’ Her heart was alight. ‘I’m very glad you find me sexy,’ she called from the kitchen. ‘I find you extremely sexy.’
That wasn’t quite true. She found him cold and enticing. Above all she felt like teaching him something, because she knew that underneath his cool exterior he was jelly. Or maybe it just boiled down to the fact that he was in his twenties, that he was a young man, that this had to be one of her last chances to seize youth in her arms on an equal basis, and that the bloody Paul issue was going nowhere. This would make her more attractive, she knew it. Her skin would glow; her pheromones would cluster; she’d feel less like a bloody mini-roundabout in Hemel. Paul would smell it on the wind.
Happy Almost Unused Year.
She turned the fake-log fire up full, and it blazed merrily with that subtle giveaway hiss. She didn’t think music would be a good idea, as her taste would expose their age difference in an unattractive way. He looked faintly goth, or probably had been once. All that black. Mungo didn’t head for the stranger’s lap, oddly. He was usually very sociable. He stared at him with those hawkish eyes, flanks twitching and tail flicking as they did when he spotted a bird or a bee in the tiny back garden, then disappeared upstairs into the spare attic room – a sacrifice, because it’s only heated when used, although warmed feebly by the rising air from the rest of the flat.
Gavin sipped his tea on the sofa next to her with great concentration. ‘I’m chill as a cucumber. On ice.’
Of course he was the opposite. ‘Look, if you want to leave it, Gavin.’
‘Leave what? My lovely tea? By the way, are you his woman?’
‘Whose?’
‘That gay guy in the shoe shop,’ he said, smirking.
Sheena pulled a face. ‘I don’t believe he’s gay.’ This was such a bad idea.
‘So you are his woman.’
‘No, I’m not. Maybe I’d like to be, though.’
‘I could see that. I’m pretty perceptive.’ He drained his mug, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his elegant young throat. ‘In fact, I am a sensitive. You know what that means?’
‘Gavin, would you like a whisky? I have a Chivas Regal. Twelve years. Or ordinary Tesco’s, but you don’t notice if you have enough.’
His face lit up. Poor soul. ‘The former. Neat. No ice, yeah. A wee dram.’
He watched her as she glugged the stuff into her best tumblers. They clinked and he took a considerable gulp. She felt the Scotch course through her fierily, so fierily. The bottle had dust on its shoulders. Why had she deprived herself? His hand was now on her knee, on the hem of her skirt, gripping rather powerfully. He did not come across as someone strong, or heedless of his own strength like other men she’d known. ‘You are beautiful,’ he said, having drained his Chivas. ‘I can’t believe my luck. I knew something really special was going to happen to me today. It’s like I’ve imagined this kind of encounter so many times? Like I said, I’m a sensitive. I can kind of literally see the supernatural, like it’s just behind what other people see?’
She placed her finger on his lips. His inane chat, snagging more and more on a local accent, was sounding childish. That’s not what she wanted. The whiff of an armpit, overlaid with some awful male deodorant smelling like rotten pineapple, both excited and demoralised her.
‘Does the idea of a joint shower grab you, sweetheart?’
‘Oh my God. I’m looking at myself and thinking, Hey, is this Gavin?’
Sod it, she thought. Live for the day.
Gavin comes round after supper. That’s how he likes it: in the evening, well after dark, in secret, like his own shadow. The lane, being steep but not famous, is virtually empty after seven o’clock. He’s been three times this week, and this is the end of the first week of the affair. It makes her feel good about herself, if a little more tired. She thought he would be tentative and shy in his lovemaking, but instead he arrives knowing exactly what he wants. ‘Motivation is my middle name, doll.’ She’s happy to oblige because she finds his lean, young and pale body extremely attractive, especially in the bedroom with the dimmer switch low or with only the odd candle to gild his limbs. He finds her opulent and mature flesh (never fat, darling) high on the ‘kissability curve’, especially the chest region. ‘These two are still holding their own,’ she agrees, looking in the wardrobe mirror. ‘Gavin, get in me.’
He starts to get a little rough in the second week, slapping her buttocks or pinching her neck. This again seems to be programmed. Then it occurs to her as she is dropping off to sleep after a particularly complicated and sweaty session: he watches porn. All his knowledge comes from watching porn. He watches, then he wants it reproduced. It’s sex-by-numbers. It’s a carnal pleasure kit, rubber band included. So why does she find it so exciting? Why does her body feel replenished, transfused with new blood? Because she is depressed, probably. She has to seek out these perverse remedies. And because Paul is so bloody hopeless. Perhaps he is a closet gay. With his miserable pseudo-Buddhist talk of having to suffer, having to be deprived.
She will end the affair in a few weeks. Two months at most. When it’s the spring sales, the daffodils out in the park. It’s a temporary reprieve. It makes her feel empowered and sinful in front of all those goody-goody two-shoes of perfect mumsies. It’s a passage, not a cul-de-sac. Her brief stint with a shrink last year yielded one excellent piece of advice: Don’t try to manage the unmanageable.
January is a dull and gloomy month, we all hate January, but this one’s buffed up by the affair. Sheena has no precise idea where Gavin lives, only that he shares a small house with other young people near Sincil Dyke. She did sit down in front of her Mac one day and tap Gavin Henderson into the Whitepages directory, adding Lincoln in the address box, but it only came up with a Gavin Henderson in Swinderby, a good few miles south of Lincoln. Other possible current occupants: Maureen Henderson. His mother, from the sound of it. Sourced from the Electoral Roll 2010–11, it says. This doesn’t mean that Gavin has lied, just that he hasn’t bothered to update his details since last year. Or maybe he doesn’t vote.
The Dyke is a dead-straight concrete channel of brown water going on as far as the eye can see, so his shared house could be in any number of streets. ‘Roman, originally,’ he informs her. ‘In the time of the Romans, that is. Now it’s ex-Roman. Full of ghosts.’ Sheena’s memory of it dates from twenty years ago, when she lived in the same insalubrious area. He reassures her that it’s no longer as full of dumped vacuum cleaners, shopping trolleys, bloated corpses or wind-blown plastic bags, because the area’s being tarted up. ‘Don’t recall any corpses,’ she says. He runs a chill hand smoothly over her stomach, then kisses her navel. Even his lips are cool. ‘Have you got poor blood circulation, Gavin?’ He pauses, pulls back the sheet, points at his cock, straight as a lighthouse, and says in an American drawl, ‘Not where it matters, bitch.’
He asks her to shave her pubic hair, and she draws the line. He asks her to screw in his car, which she has never seen, and she refuses. ‘It’s January,’ she says, curled in front of the fire in her silk negligée, the one that he likes because
its delicate French lace shows her dark nipples. He presses up against her from behind, close as a spoon in a drawer, and says, ‘I can put the heating on, if the engine’s running.’
‘Mine’s only a Mini Cooper,’ she tells him. ‘And yours?’
His fingers stroke her neck but she winces: the knuckles are freezing. ‘Have you just washed your hands or something?’ ‘You’re just on heat,’ he sighs. ‘You’re really hot-blooded.’ His hard-on at least is warm, pressed up against the small of her back. She reaches behind her and lazily, casually, starts to fiddle. He groans, scrabbling around her muff with his cold hand. My toyboy, she thinks. Dressed all in black.
Mungo comes in and hurriedly slips out again as if shocked.
Afterwards Gavin says, ‘Your cat doesn’t like me. Jealous. Cats are cruel. They have cruel hearts.’
She sits cross-legged away from him, letting the flames dance in her eyes. She’s forty-eight and feels nineteen. She is firmly in control of her life. In years to come, when Gavin’s married with screaming kids to a dull woman with a double chin and stringy hair, this brief period will be his golden age. She suddenly feels desperate for a fag. She gave up six months ago.
‘Gavin, lay off my cat.’
‘I prefer fish,’ he says. ‘I can talk to fish.’
‘Whatever floats your boat,’ laughs Sheena, trying to remember where she hid her fags.
* * *
Ghastly time of year. These spots of light and warmth in the week: Gavinised! The sales season has been disappointing so far. Tony is on to her, wondering why on the phone.
‘Tony, have you noticed the recession? Austerity? Lincoln is not Chelsea.’
‘But the well-off are weller-off than ever, Sheena!’