To steady himself he stepped for a moment inside Verdi's Stores, the Asian newsagent-cum-greengrocer's, and he was faced not only with shiny red apples, but also with watermelons, and ethnic vegetables, and sacks of peas and beans, and harissa paste, and big tubs of feta cheese, and cans of olive oil and the newspapers! Piles of newspapers in a dozen different languages. And the magazines! Every taste and impulse catered for. And cigarettes. And high-energy drinks. He stood staring around, in a daze, like an idiot. Mr Singh behind the counter, wearing his turban: the bright orange of the turban. And a man who came in, who was wearing a beret-an actual beret. And a woman, who looked Mexican or Spanish. And 'Shalom!' someone was saying. And 'Arrivederci!' And 'Adios!' And other stuff in languages he could not understand and did not even recognise-Hindi? Czech? Geordie? It was too much. He had to get some fresh air. He had to walk out.
And out on the street, at a bus stop, a group of black teenage girls were talking together, the sheer uninhibited noise of them, rising up out of them, bold as brass and twice as shiny, the sound of the city. One of the women was doubling back, laughing a laugh that seemed to come from deep down inside her, almost from underground, and which made its way up through vast echoing chambers, a booming laugh, like organ pipes with all the stops pulled out; this was a laugh of a kind that simply did not exist in Tumdrum; it was a laugh that could not arise there; it would have to have stayed underground; it would have remained a distant rumble, or a polite tune on a backroom harmonium. And then a car going past with its radio on, playing some kind of music-bhangra? Bhangra! The sheer noise of the traffic. Impossible to distinguish between all the noises or to make sense of the sights. Past the hairdresser's-all that grooming!-and the nail bar next door, with false nails like miniature pelts or butterfly wings displayed in the window. And the bookshop-the bookshop where he had first gone to buy Just William books as a boy, and then the Bellows, and the Malamuds, and the Philip Roths, and he could see his reflection in the window of this shop, a shop packed full of shiny, new, good-looking books, books that you might actually want to spend money on-non-library books-and he could see his face in the window, his shop window, his wide, long nose, and somewhere behind his glasses, that was him.
And he realised-or rather, half-realised, or he felt, he intuited-that it was as if he were observing all this for the first time, that he was enjoying it as someone who was not of it. He realised-half-realised-that he had exchanged his life in London for a life somewhere else, somewhere he did not belong, and so without meaning to, without even noticing it was happening, he had become doubly foreign: he had lost his place and failed to find another. He was a stranger even unto himself. The streets were no longer his home; they were for him now merely a tableau, something for him to observe, and to consume, and all these people, all these people with marvellous teeth, and extraordinary hairstyles, and the men in their berets and turbans, and the women in their fastidiously short dresses and skirts, they weren't real to him anymore. They were a show.
And he felt insulted, as though the place had tricked him or let him down, had turned its back on him. And so he hurried on to meet his friends at the café.
Which was no longer there.
Grodzinki's, which had been a fixture on the street for goodness only knows how long, had disappeared completely, and in its place was the inevitable brand-spanking-new Starbucks. The jumbly, intricate interior of the old Grodzinki's had been completely gutted and stripped and made over into the soft-edged comfy veneers of corporate creams and browns. There were none of the old posters, no nooks and no crannies, no mirrors; Grodzinski's had been full of mirrors. You could sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's and watch yourself sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's, watching yourself sit over your coffee in Grodzinski's, ad infinitum. It was a flaneurs' paradise. Israel had grown up there.
But now-what was it now? What was it supposed to be? What did it mean? In Grodzinki's you could have imagined Carson McCullers and Karl Kraus and Frank O'Hara sitting down and enjoying some strudel together, and espresso in pure white espresso cups, but here, now, in Starbucks, the best you could imagine was Elton John getting together with the man with ginger hair out of Simply Red for a sunrise muffin and a skimmed milk latte in a stupid fat mug with a logo.
The smell of Grodzinski's-the smell of long-seated men and women of all ages, people with strong opinions and good humour-had been replaced by the smell of young people, of deodorant and of frothed milk. When you entered Grodzinski's, Mr Grodzinski would catch your eye-Mr Grodzinski, the son of the original Mr Grodzinski-and indicate to you with a nod of his brilliantined head where he expected you to sit, which table, or which booth, and then someone in a white shirt and black trousers, male or female-and often it was difficult to tell the difference, because Mr Jacobs employed a lot of little, hunched, elderly, wrinkled Lithuanians: 'So many little Litvaks!' Israel's mother would complain-would bustle over to take your order. Now you could sit anywhere, and serve yourself, but why would you bother? The place was absolutely sickening; the place was a joke. He was never going to taste Grodzinski's coffee again, coffee so strong and so sweet and so thick it was like Turkish coffee, only better, because it was Grodzinski's.
The boys were already there, drinking coffee from the big heavy mugs with the logos on them, foam clinging to their lips, Scylla and Charybdis.
'Israel Armstrong!' said Ben.
'The wanderer returns!' said Danny.
'Hi!' said Israel. 'Danny. Ben. How are things?' Danny attempted to engage Israel in an embarrassing high five, fist-knocking kind of a thing, and Ben shook his hand.
'Good.'
'You're looking well, gentlemen,' said Israel.
'You too,' said Ben.
'So, that's the pleasantries over,' said Danny. 'Now, are you buying me a coffee or what?'
Israel bought a grande-grande!?-cappuccino for Danny and a double espresso for himself and by the time he returned to the table the boys were deep in typical conversation.
'You can't rank writers like that, it's ridiculous,' Ben was saying. 'Tell him, it's ridiculous.'
'What?'
'Of course you can,' said Danny. 'Who says you can't? Firsts to the Renaissance; 2:1s to the nineteenth century; and then that leaves the eighteenth with the 2:2s and the Thirds to everything pre-Shakespeare.'
'Beowulf and Chaucer?' said Ben.
'They're exceptions.'
'Post-1945?' said Ben.
'Borderline Thirds.'
'What do you think, Israel?' asked Ben. 'He's got this idea you can mark authors like he marks his students.'
'Ha. Right. Very good,' said Israel. 'Very funny.'
'Did you read the new Pynchon?' asked Danny, his face deep in muggy cappuccino.