Charlotte Street (2 page)

I was staring at Dev in what I like to imagine was quite a blank manner. It didn’t matter. In all the years I’ve known him I doubt he’s seen many looks from me, other than my blank one. He probably thinks I’ve looked like this since university.

‘Now, it conjures up not only mysticism, of course, but also
intrigue
, meshing as it does both Roman culture
and
Greek mythology.’

I turned and looked at Pawel, who seemed mildly traumatised.

‘Now, the interesting thing about the sound effects—’ said Dev, and he pressed a button on his keyring and out came a tinny, distorted noise that sounded as if it
might
be trying to say,
‘Wise Fwom Your Gwaaave!’
.

I put my hand up.

‘Yes, Jase, you’ve got a question?’

‘Why’ve you got that noise on your keyring?’

Dev sighed, and made quite a show of it. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Jason, but I’m
trying
to tell Pawel here about the early development of Sega Mega Drive games in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I’m sorry we’re not covering your personal passion of the work of American musical duo Hall & Oates, but that’s not why Pawel is here, is it?’

Pawel just smiled.

Pawel does a lot of smiling when he visits the shop. It’s usually to collect money Dev owes him for his lunchtime snacks. I sometimes watch his face as he wanders around the floor, taking in ancient, faded posters of
Sonic 2
or
Out Run
, picking up chipped carts or battered copies of old magazines, flicking through the reviews of long-dead platformers or shoot-em-ups that look like they were drawn by toddlers now. Dev let him borrow a Master System and a copy of
Shinobi
the other day. Turns out you didn’t really get many Master Systems in mid-80s Eastern Europe, and even less ninjas. We’re not going to let him borrow the Xbox, because Dev says his eyes might explode.

‘Anyway,’ said Dev. ‘The name of this very shop – Power Up! – owes its existence to—’

And I start to realise what Dev’s doing. He’s trying to
bore
Pawel out of here. Dominate the conversation. Bully him into leaving, the way men with useless knowledge often do. Throw in phrases like, ‘Oh, didn’t you
know
that?’, or, ‘Of course, you’ll
already
be aware …’ in order to patronise and thwart and win.

He can’t have enough cash on him for lunch.

‘How much does he owe you, Pawel?’ I asked, fishing for a fiver in my pocket.

Dev shot me a smile.

I love London.

I love everything about it. I love its palaces and its museums and its galleries, sure. But also, I love its filth, and damp, and stink. Okay, well, I don’t mean
love
, exactly. But I don’t mind it. Not any more. Not now I’m used to it. You don’t mind anything once you’re used to it. Not the graffiti you find on your door the week after you painted over it, or the chicken bones and cider cans you have to move before you can sit down for your damp and muddy picnic. Not the everchanging fast food joints – AbraKebabra to Pizza the Action to Really Fried Chicken – and all on a high street that despite its three new names a week never seems to look any different. Its tawdriness can be comforting, its wilfulness inspiring. It’s the London I see every day. I mean, tourists: they see the Dorchester. They see Harrods, and they see men in bearskins and Carnaby Street. They very rarely see the Happy Shopper on the Mile End Road, or a drab Peckham disco. They head for Buckingham Palace, and see waving above it the red, white and blue, while the rest of us order dansak from the Tandoori Palace, and see Simply Red, White Lightning, and Duncan from Blue.

But we should be proud of that, too.

Or, at least, get used to it.

You could find a little bit of Poland on one end of the Caledonian Road these days, the way you could find Portugal in Stockwell, or Turkey all through Haringey. Since the shops came, Dev has used his lunchtimes to explore an entirely new culture. He was like that at university when he met a Bolivian girl at Leicester’s number one nightclub, Boomboom. I was studying English, and for a month or so, Dev was studying Bolivian. Each night he’d dial-up Internet and wait ten minutes for a single page to load, before printing it off and committing
stock Spanish phrases to memory, hoping once again to bump into her, but never, ever managing it.

‘Fate!’ he’d say. ‘Ah, fate.’

Now it was all about Poland. He gorges himself on
Z szynka
cheese, proclaiming it to be the finest cheese he’s ever tasted, ignoring the fact it’s processed and in little plastic packets and tastes
exactly
like Dairylea. He buys
Krokiety
and
Krupnik
and more cheese, with bright pink synthetic ham pebbledashed across each bland jaundiced slab. Once he bought a beetroot, but he didn’t eat it. Plus, if it’s the end of the day he’ll make sure whatever customer happens to still be there sees him with a couple of
Paczki
and a goblet of
Jezynowka
. And once he’s made it obvious enough and they’ve asked what he on
earth
he’s got in his hands, he’ll say, ‘Oh, they’re brilliant. Haven’t you ever
had Paczki
?’, and then look all international and pleased with himself for a bit.

But he’s not doing it to show off. Not really. He’s got a good heart, and I think he thinks he’s being welcoming and informative. It’s still the laziest form of tourism there is, though. No one else I know simply sits there, playing videogames, and waiting for the countries to come to him, with each new wave of what he likes to call the ‘Newbies’. He wants to see the world, he’ll tell you – but he prefers to see it all from the window of his shop.

Men come from everywhere to shop here. Men trying to recapture their youth, or complete a collection, or find that one game they used to be brilliant at. There’s new stuff, sure – but that’s just to survive. That’s not why people come. And when they do, sometimes they get the Power Up! reference. After that, it’s only a matter of moments before Dev mentions Makoto Uchida, and that’s usually enough to establish his superiority and scare them off, maybe having bought a £2 copy of
Decap Attack
or
Mr Nutz
, but probably not.

Dev sells next to nothing, but next to nothing seems to be just enough. His dad owns a few restaurants on Brick Lane and keeps the basics paid, and what little extra there is keeps Dev in ham-flecked
Szazinska
, at any rate. Plus he’s been good to me, so I shouldn’t judge him. I lost a girlfriend and a flat but gained a flatmate and virtually no rent in return for a few afternoon shifts and a weekly supply of
Krokiety
.

Talking of which …

‘Right, we’ve got
Żubr
or
Żywiec –
take your pick!’ said Dev, holding up the bottles. I wasn’t sure I could pronounce either of them so pointed at the one with the least letters.

‘Or I think I’ve got some
Lech
somewhere,’ he said, pronouncing it ‘Letch’ and then giggling. Dev knows it’s pronounced ‘Leck’, because he asked Pawel, but he prefers saying ‘Letch’ because it means he can giggle afterwards.

‘
Żubr
is fine,’ I said – something I’d never said before – and he flipped the lid and passed it over.

I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind him.

I looked tired.

Sometimes I look at myself and think, Is this it?, and then I think, Yes, it is. This is literally the best you will ever look. Tomorrow, you will look just a little bit worse, and this is how it will go, for ever. You should definitely buy some Berocca.

I have the haircut of the mid-thirties man. Until recently, I wore cool, ironic T-shirts, until I realised the real irony was they made me look less cool.

I’m too old to experiment with my hair, see, but too young to have found the style I’ll take to the grave. You know the one I mean – the one we’re all headed for, if we’re lucky enough to have any left by then. Flat and dulled and sitting on every man in an oversized shirt at an all-inclusive holiday resort
breakfast buffet, surrounded by unpleasant children and a passive aggressive wife who have worked together in single-minded unity to quash his ambitions the way they have quashed his hairstyle.

I say that like I’m any better, or that my ambitions are heroic and worthy. I am a man between styles, is all, and there are millions of me. I’m at that awkward stage between the man of his twenties and the man of his forties. A stage I have come to call ‘the man in his thirties’.

I sometimes wonder what the caption at the bottom of my
Vanity Fair
shoot would say, the day I wrote the cover story and they decided to make a big deal of me:

But I’m not that bad. A Spanish model I met at a Spanish bar on Hanway Street and once even had a passable date with said I looked ‘very English’, which I took to mean like Errol Flynn, even though later I found out he was Australian.

‘What. A. Day,’ said Dev, sighing a little too heavily for a man who can’t really have had that much of a day. ‘You? Yours?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You know, not bad,’ by which I meant the opposite.

It had been bad from the moment I’d got up this morning. The milk had been off, but how’s that different from normal, and the postman had slammed and clattered our letterbox, but the real kicker was when, with a grim tightening of my stomach, I’d flicked my laptop on, and headed for Facebook, and even though I
knew
something like this would eventually happen, I saw those words, the words I
knew
would come.

… is having the time of her life
.

Seven words.

A status update.

And next to it, Sarah’s name, so easily clickable.

And so I’d clicked it. And there she was. Having the time of her life.

Stop, I’d thought. Enough now. Get up, have a shower.

So I’d clicked on her photos.

She was in Andorra. With Gary. Having the time of her fucking life.

I’d snapped the laptop shut.

Didn’t she care that I’d see this? Didn’t she realise that this would go straight to my screen, straight to my stomach? These photos … these snapshots … taken from the point of view and angle
I
used to see her from. But now it’s not
me
behind the camera. It’s not
me
capturing the moment. These memories aren’t
mine
. So I don’t want them. I don’t
want
to see her, tanned and happy and sleeveless. I don’t
want
to see her across a table with a cocktail and a look of joy and love and laughter on her face. I don’t
want
to search for and take in the tiny, pointless, hurtful details – they’d shared a Margherita, the curls of her hair had lightened in the sun, she’d stopped wearing the necklace I gave her – I didn’t want
any
of it. But I’d opened up the laptop again and I’d looked again anyway, pored over them,
took in
everything
. I hadn’t been able to help it. Sarah was having the time of her life, and I was … well. What?

I’d looked to see what
my
last update had been.

Jason Priestley is …
eating some soup
.

Jesus. What a catch. Hey, Sarah, I know you’re off having the time of your life and all, but let’s not forget that only last Wednesday I was eating some soup.

Why didn’t I just delete her? Take her out of the equation? Make the Internet safe again? Same reason there was still a picture of her in my wallet. The one of her on her first day at work – all big blue eyes and Louis Vuitton. I’d not been strong enough to rip it up or bin it. It seemed so … final. Like giving up, or something. But here’s the thing: deep down, I knew one day
she’d
delete
me
. And then that really would be it, and it wouldn’t be my decision, and then I’d be screwed. Part of me hoped that she wouldn’t – that somewhere, in that bag of hers, the one full of make-up and
Grazia
and Kleenex, somewhere in that bag would be a photo of
me
…

And yeah, there’s that hope again.

But then one day it’ll be cruelly and casually crushed and I’ll be forgotten, probably just before she decides that her and Gary should move in together, or her and Gary should get hitched, or her and Gary should make another, tiny Gary, which they’ll call Gary, and who’ll look exactly like bloody Gary.

I’ll probably be sitting there, on my own, when she finally deletes me. In a grey room with a Paddington duvet above a videogame shop next to that place that everyone
thought
was a brothel but wasn’t. A momentary afterthought, if that. Staring at a screen that informs me I can no longer obsess over her life. That I’m no longer deemed worthy of seeing her photos, seeing who her friends are, finding out when she’s hungover, or sleepy, or late for work. That
she’s
no longer interested in finding out when
I’m
eating soup.

My life.

Deleted.

Misery.

Still. Could be worse.

We could have run out of
Żubr
.

An hour later, and we’d run out of
Żubr
.

Dev had suggested the Den – a tiny Irish pub next to the tool hire shop, halfway down to King’s Cross – and I’d said yeah, why not. You never know. I might have the time of my life.

‘Ah, listen,’ said Dev, waving one hand in the air. ‘Who wants to go to Andorra anyway? What’s so good about Andorra?’

The Pogues were on and we were now a little drunk.

‘The scenery. The tax free shopping. The fact that it has two heads of State, those being the King of France and a Spanish bishop.’