‘At first I thought “Who’d have thought it, eh?” I mean—you’d hardly expect Him to be living in Kentish Town, would you?’
At this I found myself looking up, unable to stop myself. The man smiled genially at me, jaws still working. Seeing him properly for the first time, I saw that he was somewhere in his mid-forties, dressed in a dark and elderly suit with a grey sweater underneath, a generic blue shirt and an old but neatly knotted tie. His hair was grey around the temples and his face was rather red, either through an afternoon spent out in the cold or a couple of decades propping up bars. The whites of his eyes were a little grey, but not ostensibly insane.
‘I mean, sounds a little odd, doesn’t it?’ he said, tilting his head and waggling his bushy eyebrows in a way evidently meant to indicate the world outside the window.
‘Hmm,’ I said, indicating cautious agreement. Kentish Town, I should explain for the benefit of those unacquainted with it, is a smallish patch of North London just above Camden and below Highgate and Hampstead. Many, many years ago it had the distinction of being at the very edge of London proper, a last stop before the countryside—and at that time was of considerably more note than, say, Camden. The Assembly Rooms pub, just across the road from the tube station, used to be a staging post or something. Nowadays Kentish Town is just part of the sprawl, and a not very attractive part at that; it has little of the cohesion of surrounding areas, and is instead a rather vague lumping together of roads, rail tracks, pubs and people. It’s an interstice, a space between other places that has been filled by accident rather than design—like the corner of a cupboard which gets stuffed with the things you can’t find another place for. It has none of Camden’s joie de trendiness, and is a long, long way from Hampstead or Belsize Park’s easy wealth. It’s just a bit of London, and I live there because it’s cheap.
‘But then I thought about it,’ the man continued, ‘And it makes perfect sense. Very convenient for the centre of town—just a couple of stops on the Northern Line—cheaper than Camden, quite a good little minimart down past the Vulture’s Perch pub. And the food here’s not bad, of course,’ he added, winking at the little girl behind the counter.
‘You’re saying God actually lives here, in Kentish Town?’ I asked, in spite of myself.
‘Oh yes,’ the man said comfortably.
I looked back at him levelly, trying to work out whether this made him more—or less—mad. In some ways it was preferable to born-again religious mania; simpler and less grandiose, at least. On the other it was clearly not the pronouncement of someone who had all his dogs on one leash.
In the background one of the woks hissed suddenly as the owners strove to fulfil a telephone order.
‘Where abouts, exactly?’ I asked.
The man looked at me for a moment, nodding, as if conceding this was a reasonable question. ‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘Never been able to follow him all the way home. But it must be around here somewhere. Convenient.’
‘Why convenient?’
‘Because this is where he has his shop,’ he said. ‘Just round the corner from here, in fact.’
‘His shop,’ I said, thinking I was beginning to understand. ‘You mean, like, a church?’
‘No, no,’ the man said breezily. ‘Electrical shop. Second hand mainly, though there’s some newish stuff in the window. None of it’s exactly state-of-the-art though.’ The italics were his, not mine. He uttered the phrase as if aware he was being rather conversationally daring, and hoping that I was as up with the times as he was, and could follow his meaning.
I nodded slowly, wishing I’d had the sense to keep my mouth shut. Remembering that I had some Hot and Sour soup, I opened the polystyrene carton carefully and spooned up a mouthful. I have a tendency to eat all of my courses at the same time, which has driven more than one ex-girlfriend to distraction.
‘You must have seen it,’ the man said. ‘Near that, oh, what d’you call it. That restaurant. Spanish. All those little plates of food. Quite good, in fact.’
‘The tapas place,’ I said.
The man smiled happily. ‘That’s the one. Forget the name. Between there and the Estate Agents, little way up from the Assembly Rooms pub. You know the one I mean?’
I nodded but didn’t say anything, mainly because I wasn’t sure I wanted to prolong this nonsense. Also because I was trying to picture the shop he was referring to. I couldn’t, quite. I knew the Assembly Rooms well—just enough of a local to be enticing, just enough not a local that you could go in there without any real danger of being stabbed, it sat where four grey and busy roads intersected in a ragged non-crossroads. A couple of shops further up the road was the bedraggled and dusty tapas restaurant. I could remember peering through the window once and deciding that it would just be too much of a health risk; and, as my patronship of the Shuang Dou shows, I’m not overly fastidious in such matters. I could also remember the Estate Agents, which stood out on that stretch of road because someone had spent a little money trying to make it look as if it wasn’t situated in some particularly depressed area of an Eastern European town. I knew there were a couple of shops in between the two, but I couldn’t picture what they were.
‘You look, next time you pass that way,’ the man said, and I realised abruptly that he was standing, wiping his mouth with a paper serviette. ‘You’ll find I’m right.’
He nodded, winked at the people behind the counter and walked back out into the night, leaving me feeling obscurely irritated; as if by quitting the conversation before I had he’d somehow made me out to be the lunatic. As I watched him disappear down the cold and lamplit street outside I spooned another mouthful of Hot and Sour into my mouth, failing to notice that it contained an entire red chilli.
By the time I’d finished coughing, and had thanked the lady owner for the plastic cup of water she brought me, the man had disappeared. When I’d finished my food I crossed the street and walked directly down Falkland Road to my apartment. It was sleeting, and getting late, and I wouldn’t have bothered going round the long way to check what was between the Estate Agents and the tapas bar even if I’d remembered.
Two days later I walked out of the tube station at about three o’clock in the afternoon, serene with boredom after a long meeting at one of my clients. I write corporate videos for a living—telling people how to sell hoovers, why they shouldn’t refer to their co-workers as ‘wankers’, that sort of thing. If someone offers you a job writing a corporate video, say no. Seriously. Just don’t get involved.
It takes about five minutes to walk from the tube to where I live. Mostly that’s a good thing. When you know that once you get indoors you have to sit at the computer and write a corporate video, it can seem less ideal. On days like that, you can find yourself wishing it was a four-day trek over mountainous terrain, involving sherpas, a few of those little horse things and maybe even an entire documentary team to shoot lots of footage of you getting frostbite and wishing you were back at home.
It was in this spirit that instead of heading diagonally across Leighton Road and up Leverton Street, I walked across the road and then past the Assembly Rooms up Fortess Road. It was only as I was passing the tapas bar, whose name I once again failed to notice, that I remembered the conversation I’d had in the Shuang Dou. Mildly excited at the prospect of anything that would delay my return home, I slowed my pace and looked at the stores between the restaurant and the sloping glass of the estate agents up ahead.
When I saw the shop I was rather taken aback, probably just because I hadn’t expected it to be there at all. I found myself casting a quick glance up the road, as if concerned that someone should see me, and then wandered over to the window.
The shop looked not dissimilar to the standard type of electrical store to be found in areas of London which aren’t aiming to challenge Tottenham Court Road’s domination of the consumer goods market. Some of the products in the window were evidently second-hand, and—as the man had said—those which did look new wer
e hardly cutting edge. Tape-radios with tinny three-inch speakers and shiny plastic buttons. Plastic Midi systems that looked like they’d fracture at low temperatures. Video recorders from the days when Betamax was still in with a shout. There were other things in the display, however. A pile of storage units, evidently for sale. A wide range of alarm clocks. A faded poster of ABBA.
Surely that couldn’t be for sale?
I couldn’t see beyond the display into the shop itself, and reached out for the door. Only when I’d unsuccessfully tugged on it did I notice a handwritten sign sellotaped to it from the inside.
‘Back later,’ it said. I smiled to myself, wondering if that’s what Jesus had left on his door way back when. Then I tugged at the door again, obscurely disappointed that I wasn’t going to be able to go inside. Probably it was still just a desire not to go back home and get on with earning a living, but I suddenly wanted to see what was there. The door was as locked as it had been the first time.
I trudged round the corner and down Falkland Road to meet my doom, in the form of thirty pages of still-unwritten shite about customer care for Vauxhall dealers.
At five I sat back from the computer, mind whirling. When I’m writing corporate videos I tend to visualise the facts and opinions I’m supposed to be putting into them as recalcitrant, bad-tempered sheep, which are determined to run away from me and hide in the hills. After two hours I’d managed to worry most of them into a pen; but they were moving restlessly and irritably against each other, determined not to pull in the same direction. It was time to take a break, before I decided the hell with it and started shooting the little bastards instead.
I put on a coat and wandered down the road to the cigarette shop on the corner, stocking up on my chosen method of slow suicide. As I did so I wished, not for the first time, that cigarettes weren’t bad for you, or at least that I didn’t know they were. That knowledge made every single one I smoked a little internal battle—never mind the external battles that cropped up every now and then, when some health freak gave me a hard time for endangering their life. These people, I had noticed, were invariably rather fat, and thus were doing their own fine job of reducing their own life expectancy; but that doesn’t seem to be the point any more. What we do is fine—it’s what those other bastards are doing to us which we won’t stand for. I remembered reading a short piece in a recent Enquirer entitled ‘How to stop your co-workers from giving you their colds’. After a line like that I’d expected advice on how to prevent deranged typists from injecting me with viruses, or marketing executives from coming over and deliberately breathing in my face. But no, it had been things like ‘Have a window open’, and ‘Eat vitamin C’. In other words, advice on how to stop yourself from acquiring the communicable colds that—through no fault of their own—other people might have.
But we don’t see it like that, any more. Life’s a constant battle to stop other people doing things to us, taking as hard a line as possible. We don’t move tables or leave the room when someone is smoking—we stop them from smoking, anywhere, ever. We don’t avoid watching videos that have a bit of sex and violence in them—we get them banned. And presumably, at some stage, we don’t not read books we disagree with. We get them burned.
I recognised these thoughts as those of someone who was bored out of his tiny mind, and decided not to go back to the flat just yet. Instead I headed round the corner, sending a little nugget of goodwill to the Shuang Dou on the opposite side of the road, and walked back down towards Leighton Road. Initially I was just taking a long way home, and then I realised I’d be going past the shop again, and that now might qualify as later, and it might be open.
It was. As I approached the shop I saw that the sign had gone from the door. Very slightly elated, in a vague way, I pushed it open and walked in.
There was no-one behind the counter, and so I was free to look over what was arrayed around the shop. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Usually such stores have an air of thrift, of objects being widely spaced on shelves. This one was exactly the opposite. The area inside, which wasn’t much bigger than my ‘cosy’ living room, was piled floor to ceiling with a bewildering array of stuff. Some of it was electrical—more of the period pieces from the window—but the majority was completely uncategorisable. Old toys, piles of ancient magazines. A few posters on the walls—ABBA again, together with other seventies bands. Small, chrome-plated appliances of indiscernible function. Even a few items of clothing, tired and out of fashion. It was like a jumble sale organised with some clear but not quite explicable purpose in mind.
There was a noise behind the counter, and I turned to see that a man had appeared. He was tall, in his early fifties, and looked Nigerian. He was dressed in an old blue suit which was shiny in patches, and wore a white shirt without a tie underneath his buttoned jacket. His face was lined, and he looked nervous, as if I was intruding.
‘Hello,’ I said, feeling strangely at ease—probably because he looked so unlike the smarmy and over-confident people you usually find in electrical stores: you know the type, the ones who pronounce ‘Can I help you at all’ as one howling monosyllable and try to sell you a triple-standard VCR even if you just came in for batteries.
The man nodded cautiously. ‘Can I help you?’ he said. His voice was deep but quiet, and the words were carefully enunciated. It was a genuine question.
‘Just looking around,’ I said, and he nodded again. I turned away and ran my eyes over the shelves, realising I had a bit of a problem. I couldn’t just turn and walk out now. It would seem dismissive, of this man and his shop. I didn’t want to do that. He looked like he’d been dismissed often enough already. On the other hand, I found it hard to believe that there was a single object in the shop that I would want. I already had all the recording, videoing, listening and watching equipment I could possibly need, none of it more than six months old; and all of the other stuff looked like junk you’d want to throw away rather than acquire.
I couldn’t leave without at least making an effort, so I stepped over to one of the shelves and looked more closely at the objects strewn along it. Small pottery figures you might expect to find on surfaces in the room of a twelve-year-old girl. A very old copy of the ‘National Geographic’. A plastic alarm clock, manufactured back when people thought plastic was cool. A couple of 45s, by bands I’d never heard of.
I was very aware of the man standing silently behind me, and when I noticed a shoe-box full of watches I reached into it. My hand fell upon an oddly-shaped digital watch, which seemed to have been fashioned out of man-made materials to resemble what people two decades ago had thought of as ‘futuristic’. Half of its strap was missing, and no numerals were showing in the window; but on the other hand I could possibly have some fun taking it apart, maybe even getting it going and turning it into some cyberpunky inside-out timepiece.
I turned to him. ‘How much is this?’ I asked, feeling like a minor character in some very old film.
‘Two pound,’ he said.
‘I’ll take it,’ I nodded, and walked over to the counter, feeling in my back pocket for some change. He smiled shyly and found a small paper bag to put it in.
When I left the shop I crossed the road and stood there, looking across at the window. I couldn’t see into the store, and wondered if the man was still standing behind the counter. I opened the bag I held in my hand and looked at the watch. Why on Earth had I bought it? It was just going to sit in a pile somewhere in the already overcrowded flat; next time I moved I’d either have to work up the resolve to throw it away, or tote it with me for ever more. I was surprised to see that I’d been mistaken in the store—something was visible on the screen. It wasn’t numerals, or at least not whole ones, but little segments of the LCD figures seemed to be slowly flashing. Not very good news, of course; instead of simply being out of battery, it probably meant the watch was completely broken.
But when I’d been in the store it hadn’t been working at all.
An hour later the man left the store, and I dropped the chip I had in my hand and stood up. I’d been sitting in the fish shop on the opposite side of the road, drinking tea and having an early and unhealthy meal. The food was actually quite good—I’m a connoisseur of cheap takeaways in North London—but that wasn’t why I had chosen to eat there.
To be honest, I didn’t really know why I’d stayed around. I’d stood, staring dumbly at the watch for a while, and then simply decided I was going to wait. I didn’t want to hang out on the pavement where passing trucks could spray me with dirty water, so I ducked into Mario’s instead.
Now the guy was on the move, and I knew I was going to follow him. I didn’t have a reason, and I felt an idiot. But I was going to do it anyway.
I waited in the entrance to the fish bar until the man had got far enough up the other side of the street, then left and hurried across the road. Nobody ran me over, though several people had a bloody good try. The man was walking slowly, and I didn’t anticipate having a problem keeping up with him. Quite the opposite; the challenge was to make sure he didn’t see me. As discussed, I write videos for living. Tailing people was a bit of a departure for me. I walked along, head down and hands huddled into my coat, hoping this was the right sort of approach—every now and then lifting my eyes to check he was still in front of me.
The man continued up Fortess Road as far as the corner store where I’d bought cigarettes earlier, and then turned into Falkland Road. I picked up the pace a little, and made it round the corner about twenty seconds after him. By then he’d only got about fifty yards up the road, and so I dropped back again. He was walking more quickly now, head up, and crossed the road to the Northern side, heading for the junction with Leverton street. I decided to cross immediately, and by the time he was approaching the corner he was only about twenty yards ahead. It was winter dark by now, but I could still see the shiny patches on the elbows of his suit as he turned the corner. About ten seconds later I followed him round.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 19
