He can’t do this! I need my job. Trying to quell the rising panic, I replay Lloyd’s consolatory words to me last night: Tell him to stick his job up his arse. We’ll have your other income stream pretty soon. Foot porn, he meant. It’s not porn, babe. It’s just feet!
I take a deep, slow breath and briefly consider fetching my posh china cup from the cupboard. But instead, I study Rupert for a moment, captain of that vast mahogany desk, and I turn and walk out of the shop.
11
SHANE
Shane and Fletch have to be jacks-of-all trades in order to keep things afloat. While Shane is adept at drum and guitar repairs, his friend and business partner (not a term either of them would ever use) takes care of woodwind and brass. When Fletch disassembles a saxophone and lovingly pieces it back together again, it’s as astounding to Shane as if he’d operated successfully on a human heart. Yet there are aspects which Fletch is, frankly, crap at – like managing their extensive online string business and the colossal amounts of admin involved in running a specialist shop.
Shane regards all of this with the same bleary acceptance of scrubbing out the charred remains left by Elaine in his frying pans. However, he is also rather good at it. That, and actually making sales as, for some unfathomable reason, takings are up whenever Shane mans the shop. He suspects that Fletch might be a tad overzealous, which can come across as pressurising. Shane is certainly more patient with people who wander in and proceed to ‘try out’ every guitar in the shop – it’s all ‘Nice action, man! Yeah, I’ll think about it’ – with no intention of buying.
One of these people is Boris: a permanently denim-clad man in his sixties, his mop of grizzly grey curls poking out from a faded baseball cap. Shane hands him a coffee and they catch up on each other’s news. ‘It was all right, you know?’ he says when his friend enquires about the Yorkshire trip. ‘Sad, of course.’
‘Yeah, tragic, mate.’ Boris scratches at his beard. ‘Those things are hard.’
Yet not completely, Shane muses – because it had got him back in touch with Josie. Thank God he’d gone down to the hotel bar because that had made things feel less awkward between them. He’d looked for her again at breakfast and assumed she’d decided to skip it. As he’d chewed gamely on an anaemic sausage, he couldn’t say he blamed her.
He doesn’t know if he’ll ever see her again, but at least things were cordial – to the point where he’d messaged her last night to check she’d got home safely, and she’d replied that she had.
Coffee finished, Boris wanders over to a Fender Telecaster and caresses it reverentially. He likes it to be known that he’s played guitar ‘for everyone’ (although he is vague about actual names). Apparently, he even recorded a solo instrumental album, although Shane has never found any evidence of this. In all the years Boris has been coming in, their friendship has never progressed beyond music talk, and tales of his travels. As a longtime singleton, Boris undertakes these campervan trips alone, apparently content in his solitude.
‘I’ve told you,’ he announces now, ‘you can borrow Doris any time you like. ’Cause you look knackered, mate,’ he adds, not unkindly. ‘Take some time off from this place! Have a holiday!’ Frankly, Shane’s idea of a holiday is somewhere sunny and hot, with his kids, even though it’s been a couple of years since they’ve gone away together. He’s asked them, of course, but they have busy schedules, and in the two years that Tony’s been in their lives, they’ve all gone to Florida, Mexico and skiing in the Alps. On top of that, there are so many weekend breaks – Copenhagen being the latest – that Shane feels lucky if he is able to see his kids at all.
As the day goes on, the image of Boris’s van buzzes away in Shane’s brain. He’s picturing a classic VW camper, lovingly restored – chrome fittings gleaming, a pot of tea on the stove, bacon sizzling in a pan. Admittedly, it’s appealing. Boris was right in that he’s spending an awful lot of time in the shop these days.
It’s become his habit to stay on a bit later, long after the shop has closed, to give the place a thorough clean. By the time he’s finished tonight, the floor is almost as shiny and gleaming as the trumpets and French horns. Even Fletch has commented on his efforts: ‘Place is looking good, mate! Are we getting inspected or something?’ In fact, the reason for Shane’s recent vigour on the housekeeping front is to delay the business of going home.
His place isn’t particularly smart. It’s a post-war flat in a three-storey block, bordered by patches of straggly undergrowth and accessed by means of a rickety walkway. But it was a place of his own, which he was grateful to find after he and Paula broke up six years ago. He’d always felt comfortable there – until Elaine moved in. For a small woman, she takes up an awful lot of space.
Shane lets himself into his fuggy-smelling hallway. ‘Hiya!’ Elaine appears, beaming, in the kitchen doorway.
‘Hi, Elaine.’
‘Good day?’
‘Not bad, yeah. How’re you?’
‘Good!’ She plants her hands on her hips and does a little shimmy. ‘What d’you think?’
Shane realises he is expected to comment on her outfit. The tiny porridge-coloured dress, in some kind of stretchy, bobbly material, brings to mind sofa upholstery. Usually, her crinkly reddish hair is pulled back and secured with a glittery scrunchie. But today it appears to have been flattened somehow. Ironed, presumably.
‘You look great!’ he manages.
‘Thanks!’ She grins.
‘Going out?’ he asks, unnecessarily.
‘Yeah.’ She continues to hover, clearly waiting for him to ask about her plans. All Shane is concerned with is opening every window to dissipate the sealed-canister atmosphere in here. She has been frying again – when is she not frying? – and the place has the fuggy air of a greasy spoon café. Yet even when he does this, the odour still hangs. It must be heavier than air, he thinks, as she follows him around. ‘Got a date. We’ve been chatting. Don’t want to get my hopes up but he sounds lovely…’
‘Oh, that’s good.’ Briefly, he eyeballs the dirty frying pan still sitting on the hob, and the plastic utensil which she seems to have melted beyond all recognition. It’s only a spatula, he tells himself. And she’ll be gone soon. This is not his life forever. His second urge – stronger than the window-opening one – is to send another message to Josie. She’s been on his mind all day. Her beautiful, finely boned face filled his mind as he politely turned down the chance to buy a wheezy old accordion from a man emitting cast-iron confidence and whisky fumes. He thought of her while a teenage boy tried out seven different trumpets, assaulting his eardrums with a series of tuneless blasts. ‘Not sure they’re what we’re looking for,’ his mother trilled, and they left.
‘Anyway, you’ll meet him!’ Elaine announces as he looks for a beer in the fridge.
‘Meet who?’ The beers have gone. Elaine must have had them.
‘My man! Valter!’ Hang on, is he her man already?
‘Valter?’ he repeats.
