~~~
At Foyles a middle-aged man, greying stubble, balding head, faded light jeans and a leather jacket..." I am looking for a love story"
[Well, who isn't, my friend?]
No Englishman would be seen dead asking that to a woman half his age. Not the done thing, old bean. You hang around the corner to pick up the rest of the conversation since you can't afford any books...
"This is really, really popular. I mean, really, really popular. Er..girls really love it".
Is he buying the book for his daughter, or his wife? Bizarre!
~~~
You have a great desire to find some new road today. It's easy, so you spontaneously side-step the sleep-walkers into some different path and a new world of gleaming lanes and forgotten pathways suddenly opens up before you. Down Newman Passage (see pic. above) and Percy Passage onto more familiar terrain: Charlotte Street, your old haunt. It would be interesting if at each juncture some love had been lost. Now, that would have been a story [he says in his best Jewish accent].
You stumble across a bookshop you've never seen before. Occult books, Jewish mysticism (no Islamic mysticism, I note..well, who can blame them?), a fake Red Indian feather head dress and tarot cards laid out on a table in front of you.Death or love, I want to ask the woman. She's slightly desperate, as if she's ready to fall in love (or maybe they just haven't had any sales today). You buy a book on Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry for a pound for the dougal. Inside is a thin sheet of lined paper: a list of names for some literature class conducted by Elaine Ross (1977). The 'E' is signed with a wonderful old-world flourish that one very rarely sees nowadays.
She takes the pound coin in one hand and then-remarkably-kisses the bookmark she places in the book. For good luck? A spell? She says, "Can I tempt you [steady on!] with some Iain Sinclair (I shouldn't have asked for that blasted book on Blake when I walked in..trying to appear clever you always fall flat on your face).
Er..maybe next time?
~~~
At Judd's you wish Sandy, the tight-lipped Scottish bastard, a happy new year. He is genuinely surprised-and perhaps even touched- by my gesture. Pick up Dewey's wonderful Common Faith for under a fiver. Harrower can't be found anywhere.
~~~
Waterstones will collapse someday soon, you can feel it in your bones. How much is a Kindle again? Och, I canna give in.
~~
You note that quite a few of the second-hand books are the same ones that make it to the land of the pure. This makes me think that only time separates people, things. It is only a matter of time-centuries, perhaps-before all the books in London make their way to me.
You have no money and no time. Drink a latte as you walk past a spiny, evil-looking woman trying to palm off a Hare Krishna book onto you. If it had been soup I might have stopped. Jesus, I'm wahabi, don't you know!
You feel three-quarters dead in the cold as no words are spoken, no glances exchanged. You feel alive, perhaps the only one so. There are no camps, the ashes in the wind now, former warmth a distant memory, just like all the other Bedouins. Walser is found at the Italian brothers' place for four pounds. You will probably never read the book so you count the money you've saved instead.
You look for a Brooklyn poet, for some Denise. Build a wall around yourself, become even more invisible. Our faces don't lie in the the bright winter sun. Being Mortal looks interesting.
~~~
Past Soho books, selling knickers that in former days only high-class prostitutes would wear (er..or so you imagine). At he park you sit on a bench and devour your fish sarnie (wrapped in silver foil, for old time's sake). On the bench next to you sit two lesbians, wearing the same black woolen gloves, looking at each other dreamily. They sit awkwardly, straining their necks, so that they can look at each other's faces full on. To the East a single red brick tower of a now disappeared (?) Church, the high light fragile; at the base the shadows extend themselves in one large square block at a time. By 2.30 the sun will be gone. The old days come around again, with no false note in your heart.
~~
Down Shaftesbury Avenue-this being the only square of land I know- you overhear a mother say to her daughter, with great precision and equanimity:" The matter of the fact is...". The words trail off and this single sentence is all you have to go by; what happened before, what led up to this declaration, and what followed it, God only knows.
Later, near Russell square, the old red cafe, Valencia, where old Naim-now deceased-used to go. Died of heart failure but also from heartache for much longer, much before the final act. "What's your story?" he asked me the first time I met him. "Haven't got one, mate. Work in progress".
~~
A poet, so fiercely independent that she had to either break or find some kind of inner revelation. She ends up disappearing for forty years, burns her books, destroys the pagan gods her aunt had given her, and any notion of the east is disbanded, even though it had held her still before, and lives out her life on the coast, watching the sea, year after year.
I will write my name in the sand, she says. The desert is here, right now. The territory of the bed, the street, the heart, half-lit.
1 comment:
a bewitching flânerie ...
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