“Thanks. But we’ve done the hard part now. I might as well, you know … ”
“Well, stay for tonight, then.”
But she just grimaces, and reaches for the door handle.
It’s a clumsy exit. She hasn’t got a free hand, but she tries to open the door anyway and can’t, so I do it for her, but I’m in the way, so I have to go through on to the landing to let her out, and she has to prop the door open because I haven’t got a key, and I have to squeeze back past her to catch the door before it shuts behind her. And that’s it.
I regret to say that this great feeling, part liberation and part nervous excitement, enters me somewhere around my toes and sweeps through me in a great wave. I have felt this before, and I know it doesn’t mean that much—confusingly, for example, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to feel ecstatically happy for the next few weeks. But I do know that I should work with it, enjoy it while it lasts.
This is how I commemorate my return to the Kingdom of the Single: I sit down in my chair, the one that will stay here with me, and pick bits of the stuffing out of the arm; I light a cigarette, even though it is still early and I don’t really feel like one, simply because I am now free to smoke in the flat whenever I want, without rows; I wonder whether I have already met the next person I will sleep with, or whether it will be someone currently unknown to me; I wonder what she looks like, and whether we’ll do it here, or at her place, and what that place will be like; I decide to have a Chess Records logo painted on the sitting room wall. (There was a shop in Camden that had them all, Chess, Stax, Motown, Trojan, stenciled onto the brickwork beside the entrance, and it looked brilliant. Maybe I could get hold of the guy who did that and ask him to do smaller versions here.) I feel OK. I feel good. I go to work.
My shop is called Championship Vinyl. I sell punk, blues, soul, and R&B, a bit of ska, some indie stuff, some sixties pop, everything for the serious record collector, as the ironically old-fashioned writing in the window says. We’re in a quiet street in Holloway, carefully placed to attract the bare minimum of window-shoppers; there’s no reason to come here at all, unless you live here, and the people that live here don’t seem terribly interested in my Stiff Little Fingers white label (twenty-five quid to you—I paid seventeen for it in 1986) or my mono copy of Blonde on Blonde.
I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here Saturdays—young men, always young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags—and because of the mail order: I advertise in the back of the glossy rock magazines, and get letters from young men, always young men, in Manchester and Glasgow and Ottowa, young men who seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and ‘ORIGINAL NOT RE-RELEASED’ underlined Frank Zappa albums. They’re as close to being mad as makes no difference.
I’m late to work, and when I get there Dick is already leaning against the door reading a book. He’s thirty-one years old, with long, greasy black hair; he’s wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt, a black leather jacket that is trying manfully to suggest that it has seen better days, even though he only bought it a year ago, and a Walkman with a pair of ludicrously large headphones which obscure not only his ears but half his face. The book is a paperback biography of Lou Reed. The carrier bag by his feet—which really has seen better days—advertises a violently fashionable American independent record label; he went to a great deal of trouble to get hold of it, and he gets very nervous when we go anywhere near it. He uses it to carry tapes around; he has heard most of the music in the shop, and would rather bring new stuff to work—tapes from friends, bootlegs he has ordered through the post—than waste his time listening to anything for a second time. (“Want to come to the pub for lunch, Dick?” Barry or I ask him a couple of times a week. He looks mournfully at his little stack of cassettes and sighs. “I’d love to, but I’ve got all these to get through.”)
“Good morning, Richard.”
He fumbles nervously with the giant headphones, gets one side stuck around his ear, and the other side falls over one eye.
“Oh, hi. Hi, Rob.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“No, no problem.”
“Good weekend?”
I unlock the shop as he scrabbles around for his stuff.
“All right, yeah, OK. I found the first Liquorice Comfits album in Camden. The one on Testament of Youth. It was never released here. Japanese import only.”
“Great.” I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.
“I’ll tape it for you.”
“Thanks.”
“ ’Cos you liked their second one, you said. Pop, girls, etc. The one with Hattie Jacques on the cover. You didn’t see the cover, though. You just had the tape I did for you.”
I’m sure he did tape a Liquorice Comfits album for me, and I’m sure I said I liked it, too. My flat is full of tapes Dick has made me, most of which I’ve never played.
“How about you, anyway? Your weekend? Any good? No good?”
I cannot imagine what kind of conversation we’d have if I were to tell Dick about my weekend. He’d probably just crumble to dust if I explained that Laura had left. Dick’s not big on that sort of thing; in fact, if I were ever to confess anything of a remotely personal nature—that I had a mother and father, say, or that I’d been to school when I was younger—I reckon he’d just blush, and stammer, and ask if I’d heard the new Lemonheads album.
“Somewhere in between. Good bits and bad bits.”
He nods. This is obviously the right answer.
The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted—this is what record shops should look like, and only Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat, and partly because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.
There are browser racks on each side, and a couple more in the window, and CDs and cassettes on the walls in glass cases, and that’s more or less the size of it; it’s just about big enough, provided we don’t get any customers, so most days it’s just about big enough. The stockroom at the back is bigger than the shop part in the front, but we have no stock, really, just a few piles of secondhand records that nobody can be bothered to price up, so the stockroom is mostly for messing about in. I’m sick of the sight of the place, to be honest.
Some days I’m afraid I’ll go berserk, rip the Elvis Costello mobile down from the ceiling, throw the ‘Country Artists (Male) A-K’ rack out into the street, go off to work in a Virgin Megastore, and never come back.
Dick puts a record on, some West Coast psychedelic thing, and makes us some coffee while I go through the post; and then we drink the coffee; and then he tries to stuff some records into the bulging, creaking browser racks while I parcel up a couple of mail orders; and then I have a look at the Guardian quick crossword while he reads some American import rock magazine; then he has a look at the Guardian quick crossword while I read the American import magazine; and before we know it, it’s my turn to make the coffee.
At about half-past eleven, an Irish drunk called Johnny stumbles in. He comes to see us about three times a week, and his visits have become choreographed and scripted routines that neither he nor I would want to change. In a hostile and unpredictable world, we rely on each other to provide something to count on.
“Fuck off, Johnny,” I tell him.
“So my money’s no good to you?” he says.
“You haven’t got any money. And we haven’t got anything that you want to buy.”
This is his cue to launch into an enthusiastic rendition of Dana’s ‘All Kinds of Everything,’ which is my cue to come out from behind the counter and lead him back toward the door, which is his cue to hurl himself at one of the browser racks, which is my cue to open the door, loosen his grip on the rack with the other, and push. We devised these moves a couple of years ago, so we’ve got them off pat now.