‘He is,’ said Alexander, holding out Sidney’s glass for him.
‘Bloody silly name.’ Sidney accepted his drink, laid the bag on an arm of Alexander’s chair, and went over to the record-player that stood on tapering sky-blue legs behind the door. ‘You know this, I assume?’ he said. He lowered the arm onto the record; a muted harmonica’s wail seeped from the speaker.
‘Course, Sid. “Love Me Do”.’
‘You like this?’
‘A lot of people do.’
‘Bloody caterwauling if you ask me.’ He raised the volume gradually, grimacing as if he were subjecting himself to an electric current. ‘Enough,’ he declared, and hooked the arm away.
‘It’ll grow on you.’
‘Not any chance of that happening,’ said Sidney. ‘But,’ he pronounced, raising his forefinger again, ‘that’s neither here nor there. Like it or not, this din is the din of the future. I’ve done some homework.’ He scooped a scrap of newspaper from a trouser pocket and held it up for Alexander to observe. ‘It says here that your average kid is spending eight quid a week on clothes, fags, make-up and records. I rest my case. All our yesterdays are going to have to fend for themselves. They’ve had their chance. In a nutshell, Alex, I want you to flog that junk downstairs for whatever you can get. If anyone so much as stops in front of our window, get an offer out of them. Take anything you can get.’ Firmly he prodded the cutting back into his pocket. ‘I’ll still do a bit of trading, private like. Special pieces for particular people. But the shop, that’s going over to music. Are you with me?’
‘Well. I don’t know,’ said Alexander. ‘It’s a bit sudden.’
‘I know, I know. Have a think about it. Tell us next week. But I’d like you to stay, and if you do, you can have this flat. Nominal rent. Virtually free. I’m taking over a friend’s place. You and your girl will have somewhere decent to canoodle.’
‘We’ve packed it in, Sid.’
‘Is that so?’ said Sidney casually. ‘Thought I hadn’t heard anything for a while.’ At Alexander’s blush he stepped back, pushing his hands outwards in his pockets, making a shape like clown’s trousers. ‘Come on, lad. I wasn’t born yesterday. Two healthy young people. Nice girl, she is,’ he commented, and he looked at Alexander ruefully. ‘Packed in good and proper? Not just a tiff?’
‘Good and proper,’ said Alexander.
‘Pity. Nice girl that.’
‘She is, Sid, she is.’
‘Pity,’ said Sidney, and the sadness of it seemed to make his shoulders sag. ‘A real pity.’ He chinked his glass against Alexander’s. ‘Don’t fret about your girl, though. Plenty more where she came from. Lot more mermaids in the ocean.’
‘Aye,’ said Alexander, and he stood up to join Sidney at the window.
‘To the future,’ Sidney toasted.
‘The future,’ said Alexander, but Sidney’s words had made him nostalgic, and he was recalling Liz asleep on the settee in the back room of the shop. With fondness and regret he heard her talking to him on the steep path in the park, as he looked down on the street, where an eddy of dry leaves was jumping in a doorway like a cat in pursuit of its tail.
20. Dixon’s Discs
Alexander would remember that he had not been living in the flat for more than a month when Profumo resigned, and it was a warm Saturday morning when he moved out of the house. His father struck his head on the roof of the car as he stooped to push a box of clothes across the back seat. His mother appeared at an upstairs window. He would remember looking up from the car to see her look away and scrub at a mark on the glass with a ball of newspaper. The radio was playing loudly in the kitchen when his father closed the front door; there was a blare of trombones. His mother was at the upstairs window, stepping back.
Alexander’s father did not speak during the drive. When they arrived he followed his son up the stairs, carrying the larger suitcase. ‘Where do you want this, guv?’ he asked, and he played the taciturn porter, following his son’s directions, until everything was unloaded. Leaning against the boxes, recovering his breath, he took note of the place in which Alexander would be living, but he made no comment. He lifted a tail of peeling wallpaper, tearing another inch free of the plaster.
‘I’ll fix it,’ Alexander assured him.
‘Yes,’ his father concurred. ‘Easy enough. Doesn’t need much.’
‘A lick of paint all round.’
‘Yes,’ said his father. ‘Not much more than that.’
‘Thanks for the help, Dad.’
‘Not at all,’ said his father, and he pressed the curl of wallpaper flat. ‘One last thing,’ he said, as though at an afterthought. He descended to the car.
Through the cracked window, which would never be repaired in all the years that he was to live there, Alexander watched his father reach into the glove compartment and extract a small parcel wrapped in red paper. Already embarrassed, he withdrew to the kitchen to wait for him.
‘From your mother,’ his father said. ‘She thinks you’re going to starve without her.’ His right hand, having released the gift, moved sideways and rested on the controls of the stove. A plastic dial rattled under his fingers. ‘This thing safe?’ he asked.
Alexander held the Marguerite Patten cookery book in both hands, high in front of him, as though it rested on an invisible lectern. ‘Never harmed Sid, as far as I know,’ he said. ‘Not that he ever gave it much cause to harm him. Bottle of stout and half a loaf of toast is Sid’s idea of a meal.’
‘I’d have it checked, if I were you,’ replied his father. He plucked the dial from its spindle, replaced it, turned it clockwise a quarter-circle and turned it back.
‘I will,’ said Alexander.
‘I’ll give you a name. A reliable chap.’
‘Thanks,’ said Alexander, and he looked at the book again. ‘This’ll be useful.’
‘Good.’ His father found something to look at: Sid’s picture of a Varga girl, still taped to the door of the cupboard. ‘You’ll be redecorating, I imagine,’ he observed.
‘Sooner or later,’ said Alexander. Like strangers in a museum, they looked together at the Varga girl.
‘Well, good luck, son,’ his father said, and he shook his hand, as he had done on the morning that Alexander left home to begin his Basic Training, and on no other occasion.
Two days later, when the carpenters were on their break, his mother appeared at the shop. ‘Anyone there?’ he heard her call. ‘Alexander, are you there?’ He came out of the back room to see her picking a path through the shavings and the stray screws and the turquoise perspex letters that would spell ‘Dixon’s Discs’ on the shopfront. ‘Everyone working flat out, I see,’ she observed. With the toe of her shoe she pushed aside a sluglike tube of glue.
‘They’ve been at it since six, Mum,’ he told her. ‘You can’t expect them to go all day without food.’
She looked at the walls of the shop, which now were clad with vinyl tiles in a chequered pattern of white and blue. It was a greenish blue, the same colour as the travel-sickness pills she used to make him take.
‘Thanks for the book,’ he said.
As if affronted by their proximity to her, she regarded the perspex panels that leaned against the new counter. ‘My pleasure,’ she said. ‘What’s all this in aid of?’
‘For the booth. Where you can listen to the records. It’s going there,’ he explained, indicating a corner.
She pointed at lengths of timber that lay on the floor in the doorway to the back. ‘And that?’
‘Racks for the stock room.’
‘It looks like a municipal swimming baths, Alexander,’ she said. ‘With a shower cubicle.’
‘It’s modern, Mum. Bright.’
‘It’s that all right.’
‘But you didn’t like it before.’
‘It was like a hovel before.’
‘Wait till the records are out. The album sleeves. And I get the pictures up. It’ll look good.’
&nb
sp; ‘Look better, certainly.’
‘Do you want to see upstairs?’ he asked. ‘My flat?’
‘If what your father says is anything to go by, I’m not sure that I do, Alexander.’
‘If what my father says? What did he say?’
‘Don’t make a fuss, Alexander,’ said his mother. ‘You know how he likes to exaggerate.’ She held out a hand to him, as if stepping across a stream on slippery stones. ‘Come on. Let’s see for ourselves.’
He put a note on the door, locked it, and led her up the stairs. ‘I’ll replace the carpet soon,’ he volunteered, bending to snap a thread of backing from the rip on the edge of a tread. His cases and boxes still littered the living room, so he took her into the kitchen. She advanced one pace beyond the doorframe; she seemed to make her eyes see only the air within the room rather than the room itself. ‘I’m painting it next week,’ he told her. ‘Plain white, I thought.’
‘Not terribly practical, Alexander. In a kitchen.’ She raised a foot from the lino and gazed down at its sole, and in looking back she noticed the book on the chair with the yellow PVC seat.
‘Thanks for the book,’ he said again.
‘Tried anything from it?’ she asked, and now she smiled at him.
‘Not yet.’
‘It’s all straightforward,’ she said, hooking her arm under his and turning to leave. ‘You’ve eaten a lot of her meals and thought they were mine. Your father thinks I’m a genius with the pots and pans, but it’s not me, it’s Marguerite Patten. Hasn’t a clue about some things, your father.’ She nudged the living room door ajar and peered in, like a matron checking on her ward at night. ‘This place will be nice, Alexander.’
‘With some work,’ he added.
‘With some work,’ she agreed. ‘If you’d like a hand with the gloss, you know who to ask.’
She visited him a fortnight later, on an afternoon when Mick Radford and a couple of other people were in the shop. Seeing them, she hesitated on the step until he waved her in. Their conversation was brief; she held open her carrier bag for him to look at the cardigan she had bought for his father. On her way out she hesitated again. Standing on the pavement in front of the window, she looked left and then right before walking away. Alexander watched her dawdle up the hill, stopping at the window of almost every shop. At the zebra crossing she waited, though there was no traffic. She looked at the sky and then she crossed the road.
The next day Alexander rang to say that perhaps she might drop by that afternoon, but earlier than before, when the shop would be empty. Some new releases had been delivered by the time she arrived. ‘Perhaps you’d like to give them a listen?’ he suggested to her, opening one of the boxes. ‘Give them marks out of ten,’ he said, handing her a pen and the Melody Maker, and to his surprise she was instantly persuaded.
Sitting on the booth’s blue velvet bench, she raised a thumb to him, like a fighter pilot before take-off. ‘Dragonfly’ was the first single he played for her. When it was finished he leaned over the counter to face her and raised a questioning eyebrow. A hand lifted from her knee and hovered, palm downwards, ambivalently.
‘Another?’ he mimed, flourishing a copy of the ‘The First Time’.
She nodded quickly and her lips parted, as if she were delighted by the frivolity of the diversion he was giving her. Alexander would always remember this expression, and the fact that when the record ended she held up eight fingers to him, whereas to ‘Shindig’ she allotted seven. He would know that this had happened because he could recall, as clearly as her delight, looking at the charts in the stock room with her, a month or so later, and remarking that ‘The First Time’ had gone one place higher than ‘Shindig’, and then saying to her, as though she were his pupil: ‘You’re good at this, aren’t you?’
‘Beginner’s luck,’ she responded, but it was not. For a long time she would call at the shop regularly, albeit not as regularly as she had used to when it sold old furniture and she was with Mrs Beckwith. She would arrive in the becalmed part of the afternoon, between the lunch hour and the end of the school day, bringing him something from the café by the station. ‘So what’s new?’ she would ask, and then take the release lists and Melody Maker from him, like an office colleague taking over the day’s only interesting piece of paperwork. Her coat was folded carefully and put under the bench; the lists were placed beside her, like examination papers; from her handbag she took her black lacquered ballpoint, which she would tap against her knee or her lips if she liked the song he was playing her. While Alexander changed the record she marked her verdict: three stars for any she thought would go to number one; a pair for a top ten place; and a single star alongside the top twenties.
Alexander would remember an array of those stars, each one of them drawn as two overlapping open triangles of blue ink and each identical to all the others, in the margin of a month-old list. It was near the end of the year. There were buds of condensation on the tiles when he opened the shop that morning; the shop smelled of damp vinyl and the previous day’s cigarette smoke. The picture of Billy J. Kramer had sagged with moisture, bending his legs into waves, like a Hall of Mirrors. His mother was listening to an EP in the booth. Demurely she sat, with her camelhair coat folded behind her feet, her handbag upright beside her, singing to herself. Alexander was comparing her predictions against that day’s chart, and yet again she had been right. Dusk was coming. He reached round the doorway of the stockroom for the switch. The fluorescent light shuddered on and seemed to press every object into place around the room. His mother glanced up and smiled at him through the watery ghost of his reflection.
21. Pen
After the death of his wife Mr Beckwith became as neat as a mannequin. He wore his best black brogues in the house, and they were always polished perfectly. His trousers were crisply pressed and his shirt was as smooth as virgin paper. His cheeks had a barbered sheen. A perpetually clean fawn raincoat hung on a hanger from a hook in the hall, like a garment in a gentlemen’s outfitters.
Side by side at the French windows they would often stand, as if on the bridge of a ship. ‘Things to do out there?’ Alexander might remark, although the garden was as trim as the house.
‘If you’d like, of course,’ Mr Beckwith might reply, and he would go upstairs to change his clothes, while Alexander went to the garden shed where an overall was kept for him, and the smell of the air was the same as it had been since the day he had first talked to Mr Beckwith.
‘Do you remember taking me on a tour of the garden?’ Alexander once asked him.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Beckwith, after a pause, but it was as though Alexander had asked him if he could recall a fact rather than a day they had shared.
‘You had Lavender Cotton there,’ Alexander told him. ‘And Viburnum over there.’
Courteously Mr Beckwith regarded the places where the plants had once grown. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember. Yes,’ he repeated, in a retreating voice, as his hands kneaded the soil of the flowerbed.
Often Mr Beckwith cooked a meal when the gardening was done, while Alexander watched TV. One evening, which Alexander would always remember, a detective programme had begun and Mr Beckwith came into the room, holding a wide white bowl against his belly. ‘Is that any good?’ he asked.
‘Good so far,’ Alexander replied. ‘Why not stay and watch it?’
‘No, no. It’s underway now,’ said Mr Beckwith.
‘We can wait a bit.’
‘No. I must get on,’ he said, and Alexander, intending to check when the programme would end, leafed through the newspapers and magazines in the rack as soon as Mr Beckwith had left the room, and found a copy of the Radio Times that was six years out of date and a Woman’s World that was even older.
The moment the programme ended Mr Beckwith called him. The knives and forks were placed in perfect parallel on the laundered tablecloth. Ranks of glasses gleamed on the upper shelf of the dresser, above plates that overlapped like the scales of a cart
oon fish. ‘How was it?’ asked Mr Beckwith.
‘So-so,’ said Alexander. ‘The killer was very helpful with his clues. Didn’t need Scotland Yard. I’d have caught him.’
‘Always the case when they make it up,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘Give me the documentaries any day. Real life.’
‘But that Maigret. He’s good. You watch that ever?’
‘Oh yes, he’s good,’ Mr Beckwith agreed. ‘I like him.’
Alexander sliced the fish on his plate, and bent forward into the fragrant steam that came out of the cut. ‘But this is better than Maigret,’ he said.
‘Pity it’s not cod,’ said Mr Beckwith.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because then I could have made a quip.’ He raised an unamused face to Alexander, who gave him the requesting look that was invited. ‘The piece of cod that passeth all understanding,’ said Mr Beckwith. A partial smile made a crimp in a corner of his mouth.
‘The piece of cod,’ laughed Alexander. ‘You make that up?’
‘An old one,’ said Mr Beckwith, and he applied himself to his meal.
At nine-thirty exactly the telephone rang, and because it was nine-thirty they knew that it was Megan calling. ‘That’ll be our girl,’ stated Mr Beckwith, placing his mug of tea on the hearth. ‘You want a word?’
‘If she does,’ said Alexander.
Mr Beckwith closed the door and Alexander turned up the volume of the TV slightly, to cover the sound that would come into the room. ‘Hello, love,’ Mr Beckwith said distinctly, and then, as if he knew that these words had been overheard, his voice became quieter. Alexander leaned closer to the screen, but still he could hear the confessional mumble from the hallway. For half an hour the conversation continued, and then at last Mr Beckwith knocked on the door and called to him, as he invariably did: ‘Northern bulletin.’
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