A story written a while ago, originally published in The Walker and Other Stories
I used to be like you, leaning on a counter of my shop and staring out of the window at me walking by, you were not normal – I was. I didn’t see me in my eyes like you don’t now. You will come to understand that we are one, one day. In your world where everything has a place even me, I am the madman walking by, I am your future, you are mine.
At the end of this street I will turn left and make my way home at last. I have thought it through, it is good again. I’ll sleep tonight. It is 7 a.m. I am awake, it is still good. Time for breakfast: a cup of tea and a couple of slices of toast. I slept last night for at least five hours, that is a good night – five blissful hours of unconsciousness. Today I’ll walk to the shops again: I’ll go in to that one near the station where they sell the strong smelling tobacco, and I’ll ask the price of the chrome, Zippo cigarette lighter in the window. I won’t buy it of course, how can I? Besides – I don’t smoke, any more. First stop – the bathroom – that’s a satisfying piss, the first one of the day always is, that’s when I really need to empty my bladder; no need to stand there and shake it about nonchalantly waiting. God – I hate public toilets, always some pratt trying to see over your shoulder, as if to compare dicks. Is it a natural consequence of man’s evolution, to stand, shoulders rubbing, next to complete strangers and stare at pastel coloured walls, while down below your urine and theirs mix together before rushing on a journey that ultimately leads to the ocean and complete amalgamation? On to the kitchen: such a complicated sequence of actions to co-ordinate this morning. Items required: tea bag, cup (must be clean), milk (must be fresh(ish)), sugar, kettle, kettle lead, water, bread (not too stale), margarine, grill, peanut butter, jam, big plate, small plate, butter (or margarine) knife, another knife for peanut butter, yet another for jam, tea spoon. Will the toast burn while I’m washing the knives? What now? Turn the grill off. Shit! It’s all getting cold now. Radio on, get something to read – what’s this? Last week’s free paper – that’ll do. Chomp, chomp, delicious. ‘Test Drive the New Rover’. ‘First team lose by two goals.’ ‘Gang of shoplifters hit town.’ That’s an interesting headline. ‘Gangs of professional shoplifters are targeting stores in the town centre.’ Read on. Bullshit! Sensationalism! We’re all alone really. No such thing as a gang.
Christmas soon – the adverts tell me, I like Christmas; more people about and the shopkeepers are too busy to notice me, I can just walk all day – walk and observe, watch you in your hamster cages. There’s sly Ron in his China shop, no more than fifteen feet square. He’s beady-eyed and friendly, too friendly? Is his name really Ron? That’s what it says above the door – ‘Ron’s Best China’. Been there years, chatting up the customers, selling cheap china. Ron has got good bladder control, like the other small shopkeepers and stallholders in the market. No toilets on site, they have to use the public ones when there’s a break in custom. Like colourful coffins these shops and stalls, a fine place to spend the waking death of your middle years. Me? I’m just a walker, a walker and a watcher. I observe, I see things and I interpret them in my head. It used to be just a game, when I was younger, playing with people’s lives, my mind; but there’s a price to pay.
Open yourself up; peel away the layers of self-justification and stare at the void. The price of being different, of being aware. So, I walk, and watch, and remember, storing away all the looks on your faces. I spend many a happy hour lying sleeplessly in my bed thinking of you, recalling those expressions.
Can you picture this? A body walks down a street or in a shopping arcade – a market. It’s a man, could be a woman? Or maybe women are different. Does it have to be a man? This guy is walking. OK – you listening? He has his hands in his pockets, his head bowed, bent towards his feet – walking – he passes a shop window; you stare out from behind the counter. He lifts his head from the floor and turns it towards you. You expect an intelligent stare – an inner knowing glow – at least a mad look, something to make you shiver with unknowing. No, what you see is a blank frightened look – the face of a loser – a shambolic dirty-coated greasy-haired, pimply-skinned loser. He puts his head down and moves on, shuffling forlornly, in character, on the damp concrete floor. You sigh with relief and turn back to your life your own hope renewed. I’m still walking and watching.
Where was I? Sorry I have been walking and watching again, lost track of what I was telling you. Yes, I’m walking and watching. Past the new ethnic clothes shop at the end of the arcade. Bright enthusiastic young woman, hand written signs in black felt pen. I know the pattern: borrow a couple of thousand from the bank or from a yet-to-be-disillusioned relative for the sparkling new business venture. Choose a snazzy name – Shine Shoes or Peter’s Pots or, as in the case of the ethnic clothes shop – Global Village Fashions. Imagine a chain of colourful shops in every high street in the land, the headlines in the financial sections of the quality Sundays: “G.V.Fashions goes public”. “GV’s founder worth a hundred million.” Imagine being invited to appear on panel games on the television and one day being hit with the big red book of “This is Your Life” when long forgotten voices remind how much you’ve succeeded. The Businesswoman (or man) of the Year awards, live from the Savoy. Then the realities, slowly you begin to understand why the shop premises remained empty for so long before you eagerly snapped it up. Sitting behind the glass counter filled with pretty beads and nodding off, waiting for customers to arrive. Leaping for the phone to find that it is just another advertising salesgirl trying to sell you space in some special feature that the local paper is running about “New Ethnic Clothes Shops at the end of Arcades phenomena.” for half their normal rates. Bigger overdrafts, more borrowing, less income, more stress until one of two outcomes occurs. 1. Go out of business: either – quietly with an orderly winding up and closing down sale, or more spectacularly, in a bankrupt chaos. 2. Stay behind the counter – earning a consistently below average income – drifting into middle age and then retirement, taking a fortnight’s holiday each year. Biting your nails down to the bone worrying whether the temporary help you’ve taken on (usually a friend or relative) is ripping you off or losing your best customers. To be fair there are many other outcomes that may occur but based on the evidence that I have so laboriously gathered over years of walking and watching the above two are the most likely by far. How do I a humble walker perceive these things? I too, once lived a copy of your life, I was one of you and I will be again. I will exchange glances with you; maybe I’ll even exchange lives. Who knows?
I’m passing the pub now. The trendy, garishly-painted one with the extensively renovated interior, not that I’ve been inside, not my scene, but I’ve seen the adverts and caught glimpses through the windows. Bloody fortune spent on it over the last five years but it was worth it wasn’t it? You, the landlord, about my age, I knew you once – lad about town, painted the bumfluff above your lip with your sister’s mascara to impress the girls (or the boys?). There you are now, stretching and yawning in the late morning light, tidying up your bins. A thousand lungfulls of burnt cigarette ash and a hundred sodden, torn, beer mats – it must have been a good night? You’re still not sure of your sexuality but you soldier on, the air is chilly in the side street next to the pub; never mind, give a shrug, get ready for the lunchtime rush, Barbados in the summer. Old Fred in the corner shop, I see you too. You’ve seen it all you have, your shoulders tell it. And you say it often enough: “I’ve seen it all”. There: in your general grocers sell-anything-if-it-sells completely unprincipled shop, a dying breed, soon to retire taking your cutting wit and sour face out of the public eye. Will you shutter up your windows and eventually sell up and buy a little bungalow to sigh your way to the grave in? Perhaps you’ll don a dhoti and sit in the town hall square doling out your wisdom to aspiring passing entrepreneurs for the price of a cup of tea? What will you do with your time now Fred? Who will you moan to? Now that’s interesting I wondered what was going to open up there. Empty for nearly a year that shop’s been, used to be an Italian run greasy spoon cafe: they sold the usual British excuse for food, egg and chips, massacred cow in fibreless pastry with a tasty gravy – that sort of thing, washed down with sickly weak tea. If you read the menu properly and accidentally asked for pizza one day then the owner himself would come flouncing out of the kitchen with your order proudly displayed on a large cheap white plate. Paulo made the pizzas personally; they were a work of art, a delight to eat, once discovered, hard to resist. Then the place suddenly closed, no warning, no signs of demise – a family argument some said. Now it’s going to be another branch of a building society. Why is it when all around businesses are collapsing in the recession the banks and building societies are all opening sparkling new branches and renovating the old ones at great expense? The most expensive furniture, counters, glass, carpets and huge mature potted plants, there’s more money invested in the reception area of a provincial bank than there is in most small companies. Whose money?
I walked these streets ten years ago. Where did they go? – those ten years. Some things have changed, in fact everything has changed, yet nothing changes. I have my memories of those ten years and the ones before. Not much has happened yet I have these memories. Are they really my memories? Or are they the memories of the head I inhabit? Have I always lived here? – Looked out of these myopic eyes? Touched with these nail-bitten fingers? Or am I just for this billionth of a nanosecond conscious of this life? With its memories, its pain and its potential futures? I can’t remember anything else so I suppose this must be it – my life. How’s yours? No, don’t tell me, I know, or I will know, or I did know, anyway somewhere in time and space, there is knowledge. Do you know how many bytes it takes to make a megabyte? A mega I suppose, or is that like saying it takes a camel to make a camelhair coat? Or a mole to make a molehill? Or a delivery to make a deliveryman? But what’s a mega? I’m standing outside ‘The Computer Shop”, emblazoned on the window, in fluorescent green vinyl, it says: ‘Now with 1210 Megabyte Hard Drive.’ I’ll go in and ask the pretty girl sitting at the desk, looking intelligent. I go in, ‘What’s a mega?’ I ask. She looks at me distastefully. Sorry, I’m not in the shop, didn’t have the guts. I’m not asking the question. She’s looking at me through the window, hoping I’ll go away; I’m not exactly high tech. I move on. I like the Asian supermarket. The proprietor is a large golden-faced man who smiles, even at me. I can wander around and pick up the goods I like and then pay for them without having to say a word. It’s not the same as the large supermarkets, there’s no pushing and shoving at the checkouts and somehow a minor eccentric like me is expected to haunt such places as this. There is no expectation of verbal communication, not like the bakers, where pointing is not enough, everything is so close together, you have to spell out your requirements, too much crammed into the same space and all of it unreachable except by the assistant.
I’ve dubbed myself ‘The Walker’ not just a walker but ‘The Walker’. Do you like it? I’ve decided that I make you feel uneasy, I make you nervous. That gives me a presence, a personality, a purpose, power. It allays the sadness a little. How do you allay yours? I’ve come around the circuit; I’m looking at you again through the window of your shop; staring at you leaning on your counter. You’re not aware of me yet. Here it comes, the glance, you can feel my eyes, you turn your head and our eyes meet. You make me nervous. I feel uneasy. Why do you do that? Why do you always stand and stare at me like that? Who are you? Where are you going? Do you know that I’ve given you a name? ‘The Walker’ Good isn’t it? Now piss off and let me get on with serving my customers.
– D E A D E N D –