Posted by Anonymous on 2021/01/25 under Life After the Post Office, the greengrocer. Not a white face to be seen in But the man only ever said, 'Yes, mate? Pand fifty. Anyfink else?' And Not necessarily, no. Should the shop even be here with its warm reek of foreign holidays? Of course. Of course it should. Of course he should. It was 1936 or '37. That was fine. After the shop, the last thing before the boundary of the main road Only white men in there, obviously. First pints of the morning. No white men out on the street apart from Winkler. And no brown men in the pub. Some of the white men (you could Over from the pub was what decent people call a corner shop. For This one never has much in it: a fridge full of Sunny Delight and Though why the fat old goats want to eat that crap is beyond Winkler. Now, after the corner shop, is a gap in the buildings where the road Nobody cares if these people die coughing and screaming and weeping for their faraway mothers. They waste no money here on posters about cancer, heart-disease or birth defects. Just as long as they pay ^4.90 a The black poster made Winkler's eyes water, it looked so hot. The full The extras scuttle in the shadows to keep cool. More lizards. Or spiders Then there's some other s***-dirty pointless shop with f*** all in it It's a sturdy little thing dressed all in black. But, all. Head to foot. With 'Ooh, stone me to death for adultery, I saw her nasty little toes.'
there. Not ever. Winkler used to go in occasionally to see what would
happen, pick up a funny-looking vegetable and stand there with it at the
counter, anticipating suspicion, waiting to not understand whatever the
Asian man behind the till said to him and to mumble 'Sorry' and run out
of the shop and all the way to work.
so that was no fun. The shop smelt of cumin, fenugreek, soft old fruit,
armpits and boxes. It brought flashing back with frightening efficiency
shops he had been in in Cairo, Nairobi, Goa, Zanzibar, Hammamet, always
ducking very briefly off the package-tour crocodile to slip through a
beaded doorway. Then, those shops had made him feel adventurous, selfreliant,
competent, happy and free. This shop, despite the authenticity of
its smell (which was helped very much by the heat), made him feel none
of those things. Should it?
Outside the shop today a short fat man stood, talking on a mobile
phone in a language he may, for all Winkler knew, have been making up
II he went along. He was fat, but not overhanging. Not fat like a … It
was George Orwell, in Burmese Days, who wrote the thing about Orientals
growing fat not like Europeans, but swelling roundly, like fruit ripening.
Should he have written that? Really, should he?
was the pub, green outside with frosted glass and three silhouettes of
Victorian drinkers: two men and a woman, all laughing, all wearing hats,
all madly overdressed for going to the pub, even then. The front door was
open because of the heat.
see the corner of the bar and two tables beneath a wall-mounted television
from the street) were bare-chested. They had nylon football shirts
rolled up and hung over the edge of their jeans, wedged in by the hip,
next to the mobile phone holster and the tattoo of something not at all
poetic or sensitive syringed into dumb fat.
years Winkler called them Paki shops. 'It's a term of affection,' he said,
when friends upbraided him. 'If I thought it was offensive I wouldn't say
it.' Now he calls them corner shops.
hundreds of packets of crisps. Packets of crisps that the scrawny teenager
with the bum-fluff moustache doesn't even bother taking out of the delivery
boxes. Just leaves them on the floor for old white women whose husbands
may well have fought to keep us free and English-speaking (or just for the
fun of killing) to bend over and rummage in for their cheese and onion.
slips off towards the grey housing estate (full of bright washing on lines)
which Winkler always cuts through to get to work, the one with the
smells that make him want to eat curry at eleven o'clock in the morning.
On the corner, a giant poster pasted up by the government (the Home
Secretary in the dead of night with a brush and ladder) warns against the
evils of cigarette smuggling and tells you what will be done to you if you
are caught. And you will be caught. The poster changes every few months
but the message is always the same:
don't smuggle pags!
pack for the pleasure and don't get them for two quid a pop round the
back of the market.
sun blazed on it, and hot warps bubbled under its black skin. He looked
away to cool his eyes, looking at the pub, the fish shop and the bridge's
pale-blue iron side, the chromy metal of cleanish wheel hubs, bicycles and
the struts of push chairs flashing in the whiteness. The edges of everything
surreally crisp and sharp. The sky very blue in the gaps between
buildings. The walls cartoon clean. Every brick spotless in the brightness.
The floor dirty with stubs and wrappers and tickets and leaves and polythene,
ash, oil, s***, hair, splintered wood and plastic, rotted food, papers,
piss, the puddle … as if the director of this ghetto-in-the-morning scene
were going hard for urban realism on a set created by a gay set designer
who likes everything to look nice.
even. Little and black and unimaginable.
that stays open all night and then . . . wait, what's this?
a little black cowl and a little black mask. It could be Batman for all
Winkler knows. Apart from being barely able to walk, it's so fat. Let alone
fly. Mind you, Batman couldn't fly either. Nor did he show his toes. Oh
no, you want to know about modesty, you look at Batman. Batman is a
Muslim woman who knows her place. Not like this one, whoring her fat
little toes to all and sundry. Look, look, Winkler can see her toes.
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What the f*** is this s***? I feel like a few minutes of my life have been wasted thanks to reading this. If I could only wash this from my brain.