They sat. Brian’s chair was caught in the rhombus of sunlight refracted by the shopfront. He dozed off in the warmth, chin on chest. He was fifty-nine, and in reasonable physical condition, apart from some routine spreading, some greying and thinning on top, and a neglectful attitude to ear and nasal hair. But he napped like an older man: a worn-out man, deep-down finished, obliterating his afternoons in miniature, reversible suicides.
The bell startled him awake. A man in shiny grey trousers and a blue shirt asked, ‘Fax paper?’ Neil began to rise, but Brian sat him down with an air-pat of his hand, creaking to his feet to show the customer to the shelf.
Almost two years — his two flatlining years since California — and, if Neil were honest with himself, nothing at all to show for them, not counting his friendship with Adam. Say what you like about Dan, down in Southampton with his child, its errant mother and his booze, at least he had escaped Collins & Sons. He hadn’t made it to Argentina or Australia but he had at least managed that.
‘Thanking you,’ Brian said, handing the customer his change. The man counted the coins and left.
In the beginning Neil had tried to persuade his father to rejig their displays. He wanted to put the biggest sellers near the door, with impulse buys, such as they were (staplers, hole punches, Sellotape dispensers), beside the cash till. Sell the customer what he wants to buy; don’t waste the customer’s time: he knew that much from the pharmaceuticals job. He would move the stock and the fittings himself, Neil had offered, he would see to it one evening after closing. All he needed was his father’s say-so. Brian didn’t see the point. The megastores had taken over, was his mantra, the high streets were just as screwed as manufacturing, but retail lacked the grandeur and the romance of industry, it missed the angry unions and the picturesque strikes, so you never saw it on the news.
A day and a half to go, Neil’s final shifts before his real life began, and still he glanced at the door every half a minute: in hope (of a break in the boredom, the joint loneliness), and pre-emptive distaste (the self-effacement that some customers expected, the impression of his own invisibility, and of his father’s, which they conveyed), and, since the robbery the previous autumn (the knife held to Brian’s ribs before he could reach the panic button), a cold undertow of fear. An hour before closing Brian took the cash and the cheques from the safe and totted them up on his antique calculator. He strangled the bills into hundred-pound bundles with grubby rubber bands, put the bundles and a deposit slip into a brown envelope and gave it to Neil to run up to the bank for the last time. Neil crammed the envelope into a trouser pocket and bolted for the door, the pavement, the sunshine.
At half-past five that afternoon Neil turned the sign on the door to Closed, stepped outside and pulled the grille halfway down the shopfront. The slot in the tessellated metal for their mail was temporarily suspended at eye level, looking to Neil like the peephole of a prison cell.
‘Just going to say hello to Bimal,’ he called out.
‘Right,’ Brian replied from the back office.
‘See you at home.’
‘Righto.’
Neil paused for a few seconds, Brian’s last ever chance to object. Nothing. The bell on the door rung him out.
Bimal was one of the very few local boys Neil had kept up with: hellos in the street when they were back from university, since then a few brisk drinks, at the most recent of which Bimal tried to recruit him to his pie-in-the-sky merchandising start-up. A plausible engagement, but in fact they weren’t meeting that evening. Instead Neil went to the video store, where he shuffled the cases in the New Releases rack and tried not to eye the Adult section too conspicuously. Next, the travel agent, where he flicked through brochures for cruises and Caribbean resorts that he confidently expected never to visit (Time-waster! the shopkeeper in his head reproached). Finally, after dawdling for long enough to evade his father, he crossed the road to the bus stop.
He couldn’t face the car journey. Somehow those fifteen extra minutes at the end of the day had become too much, obeying an alternative, decelerated timescale. In the shop they had designated roles, they were functional and blessedly interrupted. The silence in the car was heavier. Two or three times a week Neil would make his excuses and either walk or catch a bus. Nipping out to see Bimal. This needs to go in the last post. Got to see a man about a dog. If Brian saw through them, Neil hoped he would likewise see the whiteness of the lies.
Two years.
The bus from Wembley to Harrow was almost full. He found a place in the middle of the upstairs deck, next to a statuesque woman in a sari. She rotated her knees to usher him into the window seat. As the bus pulled away Neil bet himself that he could close his eyes for a minute and know precisely where he was on this overfamiliar route. He tried and failed.
Five schoolgirls clattered up the stairs, one of them shrieking when she was thrown against the plastic stairwell as the bus moved off, laughing as she recovered. The girls stood in the aisle, holding onto the upright railings and the backs of seats, a few rows in front of Neil’s.
Two black, two white, one Asian. Three of them had bunched and knotted their shirts around their midriffs, exposing the skin above their short skirts. They were taking turns to listen to a slug of pop on somebody’s Walkman, two at a time, a headphone apiece.
Sixteen, Neil estimated. They probably didn’t see him at all. He felt rebuked by their uniforms and looked out of the window, into the upper floors of the pebbledash suburban houses, at the branches and defaced trunks of the city trees. Blossom ran past his window in intermittent blizzards. Something about the girls had jarred, or chimed, one of them in particular, the nearest, standing with her back towards him. Her ponytail, or — no — the way she had raised a hand to balance on her friend’s shoulder, the other hand reaching behind her to bend her heel into a buttock. She jiggled on her standing leg, the unselfconscious gestures undermining her studiedly grown-up imprecations. The shape of her as she executed that stretch unsettled Neil. His eyes closed again.
He had scarcely been able to see her in the tent, and the visual impressions he retained from inside it were static and disordered, chiaroscuro snapshots of poles and canvas folds and unerotic body parts: her knitted brow, a shoulder, her elevated knees as she pedalled back into her giveaway knickers. His strongest tactile memory of that evening was from earlier, around the campfire. After he moved to sit beside her, when Adam and some of the others were still up, he had slipped his index finger underneath her sweater, surreptitiously touching her skin above the elastic of her shorts. She bridled, just for a second, as if he had administered a mild electric shock, then tried to relax, letting his hand stay where it was. That was when Neil knew: that she had chosen him, he had won, that she might be his.
He opened his eyes. The legs in the aisle began to recede; the girls swung themselves around the railing at the top of the stairs, practised and orderly as firemen, thudded down them and skipped off the bus. The doors emitted their steam-train hiss as they closed and the driver pulled away.
Neil rarely thought about the American girl. There was no particular reason to think about her, let alone the morning-after tears, his ten-minute dread of the thunderbolt disaster. Speaking to Adam today, and the prospect of seeing him at the weekend, must have prompted this association, Neil figured, though in fact they had never talked about her in London. Not once. As an anecdote she lacked a useful classification: the episode was neither salacious nor amusing, neither wittily self-deprecating nor aggrandising. Neil had slept with three other women since, and while those English liaisons were transient and awkward in their own ways (two of them had wanted more, the other time he had), none involved any taint or shame. There was nothing to say about that night, and after all California was their golden time, their creation story. A misunderstanding. Regrettable, but accidental. No one had done anything wrong.