Dad bought his shoe shop when he finished in the army. The lease on the shop was for sale along with the business and the stock, so he had the lot. He talked about inheriting clients, saving hard work by taking over something that already existed. What mattered more to him, though, was going into his father’s trade. I could tell it was important from the way he never mentioned it had happened. It stared him in the face that he was working in his dad’s trade, but he never wondered aloud what Grandad would have made of things, and that was how I knew he cared. I’m always shy about the things I care about most as well, so I understood. I was pleased to realise I must have got my shyness from my dad; I love anything that makes me like him. I used to think Dad must be proud to have shifted his family a few rungs up the ladder of the trade he was in. Not a bad last line to a life, even if you never did anything else.
The shop was on Winchester Street next to the barber’s. Dad mostly sold to people much older than him or to men in pinstripes, so the stock was old-fashioned and I suppose you could say straight-laced, if you were the punning type. It gave the room a sombre air. The shop was very light because of the big window in the front. There was a bell over the door, which rang out when someone came in. The walls were painted white, with a green bar running round them at waist height – it had been like that when Dad got the place, and every now and then he touched up the paintwork, but he had never changed the look of the room. The floor was a dulled red linoleum. The lino was shiny and slippery in places where weatherproofer had been sprayed on to new shoes without newspaper being laid down. I used to slide along those patches like they were windows into another world I could get through if I threw myself hard enough at them, launching at the floor where it shone in the light from the street and skidding across the room in my socks. Sometimes I used to fall over into the displays, and Dad would get angry.
There was a display of brogues and sensible flat shoes for women in the window, and hanging from the back of the white display shelf, so it was only visible from inside the shop, was a collection of shoe laces, boot laces, polish, weatherproofer, stain remover, chamois leather, brushes, insoles, all in varying shades from buck to black. The arcane curios and magical potions of the shoe shop world. There was a little cupboard room, where he kept all the new shoes in their boxes. Sometimes I would help him with a stocktake, rummaging round in there and trying not to knock over the kettle he kept on the elbow-height shelf with his plate for his lunch while he called out different styles and sizes, startling the dust on shoe boxes with my hands so it made lacing patterns and loops around me.
The back of the shop was its glory. Here, behind a wooden counter, Dad had a collection of machines for fixing shoes. Most of his customers were the kind of people who preferred repairing what they wore to replacing their old shoes with new ones, so Dad had learned the finer crafts of cobbling when he took over the business. This was where he spent most of his day, doing the same work his father had once helped others do, and this was where I found him the day I dropped in to visit, wanting to talk about love; a pair of goggles over his eyes, neck bent in loving concentration, running the leather of a shoe through one of his machines and the room rich with the thick smell of oil and leather and the sharp smell of metal parts heated up from moving. He looked up when he heard the bell go, smiled when he saw me, and welcomed me in.
‘Dad?’
We were having tea over the counter at the back of the shop. I had lost his attention to a piece in the paper about Salisbury City. Steam from the teacups curled up to our faces in an intricate dance. He looked up and his eyes met mine. I thought my throat might have dried up and I wouldn’t be able to speak, I felt so shy.
‘Yes?’
‘How did you know the first time you’d fallen in love?’
He smiled, as if I were about to tell a joke and he was gathering his laughter for the punchline.
There was once a boy who was embarrassed by everything.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘And once you knew, what did you do about it?’
He leaned into the conversation, and even as I hated him for the knowing smile he gave me, I loved the attention, loved suddenly being the only thing he was thinking about.
‘Have you met a girl?’
I shook my head but couldn’t keep looking directly at him. I carried on, this time speaking with a sinking feeling.
‘What did you say to her? Did you plan it, or did it just happen by accident?’ He laughed now, rocked back on his stool and away from me.
‘I won’t tell you a thing till you tell me why you’re asking.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Tell me then.’
‘No, I mean it’s literally nothing. I was just wondering.’
‘Were you now?’ He watched me, still smiling.
‘Are you really not going to tell me?’
‘Not if you don’t tell me her name.’
‘Whose name?’
‘Very funny. Is she in the choir?’
‘No.’ I felt myself flushing red. I wished I hadn’t asked. I had thought he might have wanted to tell me the story; I should have known he would have wanted me to tell mine first. ‘I was just interested, that’s all.’
‘Course you were.’ He took a sip of his tea. ‘Where’s your rehearsal tonight?’
‘St Mark’s.’
He nodded.
‘Maybe you’ll get to walk her home if you’re lucky. That’s a fair way out, isn’t it? Do you know where she lives yet?’
‘I was just interested!’ I said.
He laughed and shook his head, turning back to his paper. I watched him for a moment.
‘Are you really not going to tell me?’ I said again.
He shrugged, grinned, but didn’t look up.
There was once a starling who thought it could fly and touch the sun in the space of a single afternoon, if it only wanted to. One afternoon it decided to try. It broke away from its cloud of brothers and sisters and buzzed alone towards the great white heat in the distance, thinking it would be back before nightfall with a story to tell. But hours passed, and the sun was no closer. The starling felt sure something must have gone wrong, because after the first couple of days in flight it couldn’t understand why the sun hadn’t set yet. It wondered whether that was because it was getting closer to the thing it wanted, so it kept on flying. What the starling didn’t know was that the world turned round, and that it was flying around the world, flying itself to death, never getting any closer to the sun in the sky.
Sophie. I knew I had to do something about her. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of her, and everything falls apart when you can’t sleep. You wake up later; you go to bed later because of how late you wake up; you pad round the house in the middle of the night looking for things to do that don’t make any noise; you spend your time alone with your insecurity and arrogance and madness. Since I had first spoken to Sophie Lawrence I had gone to bed every night only to lie there for hours wondering whether I had gone mad. I could hear her voice in the room with me. I imagined the thrill of touching her neck, the softness of her face, what her hair might feel like in my hands. I imagined asking her out, holding her hand. I tried to imagine taking off her clothes.
This, for me, was unmapped territory. I’d never had a girlfriend. I’d never undressed anyone in my life. I didn’t yet know there was a trick to bra straps, let alone what it might be. There was only one computer in the house, so the world of Internet porn was closed to me. You could hardly access it on the landing. I could never have bought anything from the sex shops on Fisherton Street. I had gone into one once and had to walk straight back out when I saw how bright and colourful the racks of DVDs were, blaring out from the walls. There was nothing secret or surreptitious about them. Sometimes boys brought magazines or playing cards with women on the back into school. Usually it was the unpopular boys trying to impress everyone else. They would pass them round under the desks, and after about half an hour someone woul
d grass on them for a laugh. It was fun seeing those boys humiliated. Perhaps it made us feel more secure about our own positions in the pack to know there was someone below us. That was about the standard of humour in my classroom. It was a laugh watching a teacher go through the locker of a boy who had been caught with porn. They would gather the magazines or posters or pictures under their arm and take them to the staffroom. No one seriously imagined they ended up on the walls in there, but that was something to make a joke about as well. Otherwise we all had to go back to hitting each other with rulers or playing coin football or chucking Warhammer models around or talking about football or music or football to pass the time.
Sexual fantasy, then, was something I attempted with the stabilisers still on. I didn’t have much of a repertoire to run through. I had gone to a sleepover in year nine and sat with half a dozen other boys in sleeping bags to watch a classic scenario, the plumber who comes to fix the pipes, on a DVD our host had nicked from his older brother. It had been too awkward for words, and we were all relieved when someone switched it off halfway through. I had liked the way the woman’s breasts moved, but watching porn with six other boys is not the best time for detailed anatomical study. When I thought of Sophie I would try to think of the woman in the video, superimpose one head on the other body, but it wasn’t much fun. Sophie wasn’t like that. She was purer than that. If there’s one thing all boys have in common it must be the way they think of girls as purer than boys are, too beautiful and good to be human, to be spoken to by the likes of them.
I walked to rehearsal through the Greencroft, past the Wyndham Arms and the firework shop, over the roundabout at the edge of town where fifteen years ago a boy from my school had been hit so hard by a car his head came off. St Mark’s was at the top of the London road, a big church, good for concerts.
The joint schools concert happened every year. The boys’ and girls’ grammars got together to do a big choral piece. Last year had been Handel; this year we were doing the Fauré Requiem. In years seven, eight and nine the concert was mostly memorable for the challenge of getting to the end of the evening without fainting. You had to stand up in massed ranks for hours in a church overheated by the bodies pressed into it and shout your head off. Someone always had to sit down in the last movement. When I was in year eight the boy who had to sit down was me – a lightness had flooded through me, like standing up too quick, that swept my legs away, and I spent the last section with my head between my knees, hidden from the view of my concerned parents by the other singers around me.
From year ten onwards the concert was memorable because of the girls. It was practically the only time of year when I spent any time around them. The moment of socialisation, when the friendship groups that built up in classrooms began to move out of uniform and focus their lives on house parties, holidays, evenings knocking round parks or the bus station, sniffing glue or making snakebite, had passed me by. I told myself I didn’t have a friendship group because I didn’t live near anyone else in my class. It was easier for the boys in the villages. They came into school on Mondays with stories of time spent together in fields, making fires, smoking eighths, playing guitar. I was a bus journey away from anyone I liked, and because I had no group to hang out with I never found ways to meet girls. You couldn’t just go up to them on your own. People mixed together easier in packs and groups and crowds. Friends would have girlfriends who introduced you to their friends. It was all closed off to me. That was what I told myself, anyway. I tried not to wonder whether it was really because I was too afraid to risk myself in anything as exposing and vulnerable as a conversation.
There was once a stalactite hiding in the dark of a huge crystal cave. The stalactite thought the floor of this cave, which glistened with magical rock formations, was the most beautiful thing it had ever seen, and all it wanted was to touch that ground. So it set out to do so. It knew getting there would take a very long time, thousands of years even, as the stalactite grew drip by drip ever longer, but it decided it didn’t care how long it took. This was all it wanted. This was going to be worth it. And it is still there to this day, for all we know, down there in the dark, pouring incredibly slowly towards the thing it loves. And it is probably hardly any closer. But it hasn’t changed its mind. It is still heading in the same direction.
The concert was magical because the choirs mingled before and after singing and during the break. The other tenors knew girls who lived near them, so if you stood in the right groups, you might be introduced to girls. I would try to stand in the right parts of the hall, convinced no one in the history of the world had found social interaction as difficult as I did, and wait.
As I walked to the rehearsal I tried to think of interesting facts I could share if I got to speak to Sophie. I was uncomfortably aware that I didn’t know any. I wondered whether I ought to have bought a newspaper that morning and made sure I had a view on the major events of the day. Should we be in Afghanistan? Were we still in Afghanistan? I didn’t give a toss, really, but perhaps she did. I wondered how you found that kind of thing out about people. In Scouts we used to wear badges signalling what we were good at and what we liked. The trick, I supposed, was to bring things up and then go quiet, let the other person talk till you knew their opinion, then agree with it in such a way that they talked some more and believed they were having a conversation with you. But such tactical masterstrokes felt much further down the line than I should be thinking of yet. What I tried to imagine as I walked to the church was a way of saying anything at all without coming across as a potential serial killer.
We had met at the previous rehearsal, standing next to one another in one of those awkward clots of strangers that form among kids while everyone tries not to look like a loser. I had tried to make conversation about the music we were there for. To my amazement, she had seemed to want to talk to me. Today she was already there when I walked in, laughing with three other girls by the music folders. I watched her for a moment. People reveal so much of themselves when they don’t know anyone’s watching. Unselfconscious, unaware of anyone else’s eyes, the way a person stands or smiles or listens or tucks her hair behind her ear can show you a whole life that might be hidden during conversation under the glossing layers of what they want you to think they’re like. We’re only ourselves when we’re alone, and silent. The rest is performance. When you’re talking to another person you will usually find your life reduced, all your personality focused into the facet of yourself you think is appropriate for that conversation. Or, sometimes, contact with another person can make you more than yourself, make a new soul that hangs in the air between you. But you’re never just yourself with someone else. So I love watching the way another person holds themselves when they are alone and thinking. Their actions and postures are windows into the vast and secret worlds below the surface of the day around me, the lives of others.
I knew at a glance she felt no insecurity around her friends, that they all liked her, but that she was never the first to speak up, never the leader. I knew her intelligence, which made her look like she was holding herself back, as if she was always thinking of something else, but could not be mistaken for lack of interest because of the way she watched the faces around her, diligent, inquisitive. I knew she was careful and methodical and tidy – I saw that in her hair and the way she stood. She was the kind of person who drank enough water and got enough sleep.
‘Sam.’
I looked up, afraid I had been caught staring, and saw Adam Morris coming into the church, still in his uniform, shirt untucked. I sat next to Adam in rehearsals. He was in the year above me and good at music, and when I got lost in difficult passages of song I would follow his voice. I could never tell whether he knew I was doing it, but he was always kind, as if he was aware he looked after me in some way.
‘Hello, mate. You all right?’
I shrugged, trying to be casual. ‘Yeah, how are you?’
‘Yeah.’ He started to walk towards the music fo
lders and I fell into step, pulled along in the wake of his conversation as he told me about an argument at the bus station. I tried not to look at Sophie again as we approached. It was because of Adam that we had been introduced. He caught the bus to school with one of her friends. I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. He wasn’t speaking for my benefit anyway, he just wanted to express his frustration at some boy in his year who was trying it on with his girlfriend, so all I had to do was nod and agree occasionally. My ear was caught by the liquid voice of a clarinet sounding an angular, elegant line of melody as we made our way to our seats. A cellist ran a bow quickly over the strings of their instrument. We sat and watched the petals of the band unfurl. It crossed my mind that Fauré would have got a thrill from this moment, realising that his idea might turn into so many minds and mouths and voices, so much hardware and time and talent and light reflecting from the brass and the woodwind and the strings before us, from the glasses of the lead violinist and the trombonist’s watch, from Sophie Lawrence’s hair as she turned her head and seemed to look, for just a moment, in my direction.
Mr Richardson, our music teacher, mounted the conductor’s podium and shuffled through his score as if he had lost something between the leaves. The rehearsal began, and by surreptitious glances I established that Sophie was still in my line of sight where she sat among the sopranos, her eyes fixed always on Mr Richardson’s baton, on his face when he spoke to correct us. I longed for that attention. I almost hated him for being able to stand there so easily, to be the centre of the room.
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Page 5