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The high street was high and long. By that I mean it rose up from the railway station, past the library, and continued rising all the way on to another town with another name.
On one day, I would wait for buses to Croydon from the bus stop just up from the railway station, at the start of the high street’s journey up.
On one day, I would work in a record shop squeezed onto an island of other shops about halfway up.
Across from the island was a shop where I would buy my mother expensive household items, like bowls and candlesticks and tea sets. She would be very pleased but worried that I had spent so much money. She would put them on the dresser, where they would stay until the day when we would all come and clear the house and take them away to arrange on our dressers or put into boxes with labels like ‘from Mum’s’ or ‘bric-a-brac’ or ‘for Oxfam shop’.
But today her death was about thirty years away.
Today it was summer, and it was Wimbledon, and she is in the garden waiting for the women’s final to start
As I walked past the Radio Rentals shop, the game was on causing me to stop and check who was playing. I had eyes for only one player, and she was not on screen.
I would have eyes for one passenger who waited in the station when I waited. I keep my distance, about ten passengers; I calculate far enough that she wouldn’t see me staring but near enough to be near. I never say anything, and I never hear her speak. Why would she speak to a stranger? We’re all strangers, us passengers – commuters I suppose, but commuting to a suburb is not really commuting; it’s just going to work.
Our paths would cross but never meet for at least a year. I once saw her sit on a station bench. I considered sitting next to her but didn’t. I regret that now. It just seems a stupid thing not to have done. Not that I would have said or done anything. She was probably Japanese. She had black hair that was long and flat and immaculate. That’s about all I remember. Did I ever see her face? She was unlike any of the girls I had ever known at school, not just because she was foreign but also because she was immaculate, seeming to be disconnected from the grubby station platform, the smelly commuters, and all the stuff that made the day so ordinary.
Past Radio Rentals is a baker. There is always a small queue as they serve cups of instant coffee or tea in the morning, which you can take onto the bus to sip carefully during the forty-minute journey I would one day take to a different branch of the same record shop in a different town, just down the road from a different railway station. Bigger but scruffier, both shop and station; opposite another record shop, a competitor vying for the same set of customers in the thrall of the Jam, the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers. And another small perfection. Short brown hair and short and clever. Much cleverer than me. Younger – still at school, doing A-Levels – I had left two years earlier. A Saturday girl with a crush on me. A few months later, the new Television album came out and she was dead. Car accident. I was
upset, but not enough. I think the news was kept back from us; she just stopped turning up for
work, as though she had found a better job. We had to make our own coffee, big mugs of the stuff.
Opposite the baker’s is Habitat. All orange and white. It’s in a block that nobody bothers with. The road is too busy and there is no crossing. The shops either side are things like key cutters with signs in the windows for ‘Shoe Repairs’ and ‘Staff Wanted’, but no customers. It’s windy because of the concrete plaza that sits behind, similarly neglected; a place for no-hopers, but even they stay away. Habitat is big but empty. The windows are full of bright items that appear incongruous against the dim desolation. One day, I will buy two glasses, the most expensive glasses I have ever owned, from this shop; but on this Wimbledon day, Habitat is out of reach and irrelevant.
Another day, and I should be studying for some exam or other, and I am enraptured by Berlioz. It the same day another year, and Wimbledon is on the TV, and my mother is guiltily watching it. It was the first moments of The Damnation of Faust that fixated me. I found the record further up the hill, beyond Habitat, quite near Smiths (that on another day provided me with a sale purchase of Wernher von Braun’s book on astronautics). I savoured the book, not for its content, which was too difficult and required commitment and dedication I didn’t possess, but for its feel. It was heavy; the pages had a sheen, not glossy but weighty. It felt like a book that could contribute to the design of the Saturn V rocket. It made me feel strong enough to contemplate being clever and being a man, not a boy. I covered it in tracing paper so you could still read the title through, and carried around at school like a trophy, opening it and pretending to read it when I needed to make myself more present, more powerful, more like the rocket that would carry Armstrong to the moon.
February 25, 2022