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Dad rang to say he'd been labelled again. Wrong thing in wrong wheelie-bin. It's three strikes and you're out, name and shame, and three irremovable labels for the villagers to gawp at. Including taking glass to the tip yourself (he's eighty four), that makes four bins and a rolling sequence of collection dates. Fair enough, they did send a handy chart, but the dog bit it. The dog hates post. Father's OK on the dates he can read, but not the one's with teeth marks through.
I only mention this because we both write and were having a discussion the other day about getting published and what help, if any, the dog might be. We thought, for example, of selling up, moving in beside a suitable publisher, and sending the dog next door with the manuscript (she's a Labrador) one page at a time. That, surely, would get it noticed, and maybe read. Starting with page one, mine would take three hundred and twenty-eight trips, so she'd likely get fed up or lost and spend the day wandering the streets alone carrying her most recent page. Always willing to accept new challenges, do her very best and stay positive, it's unfortunate she's a dog and not a literary agent.
Actually, since there would be no removal costs, property transactions or stamp duty, it might be more sensible to re-write the manuscript in accordance with the publisher's requirements. Father had a novel accepted once, lunch in London and all that, then refused to accept their changes. With that in mind a recent rejection set me thinking - crunch on gravel, letter-box click, thumping heart and a DL envelope flat on the mat. What turmoil hides within that slip of a thing, 'Literate and original,' wow... but, wait, there's more, 'common mistakes,' here we go, 'too much tell, lack of dialogue, repeatedly questioning the reader.' Damn and blast, three strikes! I'll ring Dad. He'll pop round. He'll put me right.
"You remember in nineteen seventy-something," he began (dialogue - d'you know, I think this is working already), "when the coinage went decimal?"
"Yes..."
"Well, an old lady was asked in a street interview what she thought of the new system," he sipped tea from a cup he'd used since I was a young man.
"And?" (I think it's time I checked his tablets.)
"'Oh, it'll never last,' she said," he said. (That's not right, is it?)
"What's that got to do with anything?" I asked.
"We're out of step with the times, that's all." He gave a little cough to reassure himself. "Look back at the great writers. Did they pepper us with rules and trends?" Some of them did, I thought. Never mind, I'll hear him out. "Did they never tell us anything," he continued, "where's their obsession with style and structure, hooks and strands?"
"Hooks and strands?"
"Just pay attention!" He's my oldest friend, but inclined to get tetchy.
"You mean, it's not a question of what's right or wrong, it's simply a question of fashion?"
"I just explained that. Maybe you should try some of my tablets."
"OK, Dad." He'd made a point. Confidence was good, obsolescence not. It was for standing her ground we admired the old lady, but where is she now? "You're saying that aspiring writers, like any students, must get ahead of the game to complete their trade - what use is a half-trained acrobat?"
"Yes..." he said, warming to his own counsel.
"...To be fully professional, they must keep up to date and develop a style that takes account of publisher's trends - no one wants a balloonist flying an Airbus, do they?"
"Ah, that's another thing," he added, "directing questions at the reader."
"But," I pleaded, "they're directed at me, the narrator."
"So you can be sure of an agreeable answer, I suppose, one that won't shock or annoy you."
It's tiresome other people being right. But, how did he come up with all these revelations - a clandestine writer's course, an informative rejection slip, a self-help book? I looked to the dog for support. She looked away.
"What are you going to accuse me of next?" I asked. "Pontification? Excessive use of adverbs and adjectives? Waffle?" He was beginning to sound like a publisher.
"I don't think 'pontification' is in the dictionary." My God, I was right.
"So, what about our clever schemes?" I reminded him.
"Won't work."
"...the dog?"
"No, no, none of that. It's the writer who should do the work, no one else." The dog sighed and went back to sleep. "Why should the reader answer questions, absorb info-dumps, imagine dialogue, create scenes...?"
"They shouldn't, I suppose," even to my own ear, I sounded contrite.
"Exactly."
"...because they buy the book," I admitted, "through the publisher, they pay the writer."
"Correct!" he shouted. "It's about what they want, and it's about now," with my eyes shut, I could mistake him for a movie advocate, "and not what happens to suit us," he fingered a riff on his empty cup suggesting it was what he had always believed, rather than regret about his novel, "...like slipping behind the times," he said, bonding with the middle-distance, "and being awkward and self-indulgent."
Just then there was a rumble of wheelie-bins and thud of machinery in the road outside. The dog stirred, yawned, and threw me an inquisitive look.
"Oh bugger," I said, reaching for my manuscript, "it's dustbin day, isn't it?"
(Tovell PWA. 'Not a Dog's Chance', May 2009, words 900)
"Dusty today," I said, hoping not to sound critical.
Standing behind the counter poised for a sale Sid, like everything in the shop, had been lightly sprinkled with grit. Sid... how can I describe him? Not 'fat' exactly... more wide than tall, as though dropped into his trousers like a beach ball into a bag, just two arms and a smile proud of the waistband.
"Can't see us holding out much longer," he replied, his eyes both weary and defiant.
"Heard back yet?" I asked.
Beth, Sid's wife, she was wide too. She would have been wider even than Sid but for the breathless grip of her corsets that forced her upward like a wrung-out cloth.
"Still at the Appeal," Sid and Beth replied in unison. It was a question they'd been asked before.
Given the restriction of their padded geometry, neither torso was capable of movement. But for a speaking lower jaw, the only motion available to them were the mincing steps by which they walked - as though on castors.
"What's it been... almost a year now?"
The shop, a run-down general store, with late licence, had a drowsy out-dated atmosphere about it - much like the cat that snoozed on the counter gathering dust.
"Reckon so... all of that," said Sid, and it was obvious his year had been longer than mine.
Occupying the last remaining slice of a once-grand Georgian terrace, the building stood alone amidst a beau monde reduced to rubble and patted flat by angry yellow machines.
"Any chance, d'you think?" I ventured. Unable to resist, our eyes like voyeurs in their sockets were drawn toward the shop window... lured there by the horror of the devastation. Standing at his counter, holding the fort, Sid must have had to watch it happen. I felt ashamed to have asked such a stupid, thoughtless question.
Sid's jaw dropped down. His eyes shrank back. His head hadn't shaken for many a year. Eventually, with a twitch side to side, he managed, "Don't seem right to me," almost in a whisper and then, letting in another customer, the shop bell dinged and Sid resumed his smile.
Statuesque, proud, cut edges raw and exposed to the light, theirs was the final splinter in the planner's dream. One run-down general store, with late licence... and it didn't seem much. A few loose ends for the legal team, and that would be that.
"We'll have nowhere - with you gone," I said, stuck for what to say.
Steadfast, timeless, last man standing, the beat of their hearts was the last of the old community. To finish it quickly might have been kinder...
"They say it'll be better," he offered, without conviction.
Where the customers came from wasn't clear. Over the top like wounded soldiers, they picked their way across no-mans-land in search of their Valhalla. Always open, always good for news and wit and idle chat, always there, it was their place to be welcomed by, to look forward to... to embrace.
"...for some, maybe," I said, indignantly.
Surely their constancy, their thread of continuity promoted Sid and Beth's beyond the trifle of progress? Endorsed by time, they had become a refuge. That was their stock in trade, their product - security and comfort. They traded in consolation.
"Aye, right enough," he replied.
Yes, purveyors to the senses, carnival yet calm, warm, resonant, harmonious, and sticky to the touch... that smell of shop, of cardboard, apples and very stale spice. In essence, what did that offer? Serenity, solace, safety... pain? There was pain there too, pain that they must join that grocer's in the sky, with late licence, and leave us all to our mendicity.
"Not 'right' at all," I said, wanting to help - hoping my sympathy wasn't out of place.
The building, of course, was older than the shop. Annexed by the troops of social change it had, like the home of a hermit crab, once belonged to someone else. The intent and context had been born of another age - a Regency residence for the well-to-do maybe, a city slicker from the maritime days...
"Aye... an improvement, they say."
Built to the smooth perfection of wedding cakes, in decline that elegance became a grocery store, with late licence, and blossomed in its ruination, like any architecture worth its salt. And now its time was up. No longer leant on by its neighbours, savagely scarred to either side, brutalised and vulnerable, it stood on dignity alone. Brave like a stag, it faced the barrel's bead. Abandoned by history, colours in tatters, it became itself the last redoubt.
As I left, I waved 'goodbye'. No words came, I couldn't speak.
In their final hour, I'm happy to report, they merged. Unlikely comrades bonded by injustice, Sid, Beth, the store, the cat, the stock, the architecture, the ding, the failed Appeal, the smiles, the dust, the Age of Elegance, the late licence - against a common enemy they became one.
"Goodbye," they said, standing on the doorstep side by side, framed by all they owned. "And, thank you..." they added, giving me a little wave, "...for your custom."
As I walked away I turned to see them one last time, cast out, un-moving, like taken pieces in a game of chess. Without ado they trundled back inside their shop, the bell dinged, and their dying radiance - a single tungsten bulb yellowed with age and draped in a buzz of flies - went out.
#
Stop at the barrier, take your ticket, park and pay on leaving. Do not leave your ticket in the car.'
I did all that.
I spiralled into the multi- super- hyper-mart, the brand new mall so rudely planted in that soil where Sid and Beth's once stood.
'You have parked in Car Park 'D'. Have a nice day.'
Nice day? How was that possible?
I was an intruder, a party to a desecration.
Sure, the progress had progressed, the newness gleamed, the brightness shone... but, where was the radiance, the soul, the patination? Where was the inconvenience, the sounding-board for gossip, the snoozing cat, the silverfish that hid beneath the tins - where would there be for them to scurry now? Where could I buy red wine that had stood so long it was brown, or eggs one at a time?
I never saw Sid and Beth again, though it would be hard to imagine them without their shop.
Impossible as it may be to recreate perfection, to gather back each fragile strand not essential in itself but a component of the whole, but - Sid, Beth, the store, the cat, the stock, the architecture, the ding, the failed Appeal, the smiles, the dust, the Age of Elegance, the late licence... we are the sum of our experiences.
My memory is what I am.
In me they live on... they will not die until I die and now, since you have read this, until you die too.
(Tovell PWA. 'Demolition', Sid & Beth's General Store, Bristol, Words 1160 )
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