5. Secondhand Prose

What it says, really. A piece from years ago that I've rewritten to fit with something new.

Next morning, I sat down with a pot of coffee and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. I figured I'd use that rather than the laptop. Back to something more basic. No internet to distract me. Over the course of two hours, I pecked in some ideas, but nothing that really fired me up.

Husband and wife each have sex changes to save their marriage.

Stage play set in traffic jam on M25 (environmental theme).

Couple go on holiday somewhere. Both disappear without trace.

Man gets on a bus to go to work.

Town where nothing happens. Something happens?

Forty-six words in two hours. At that rate, I might finish a novel in, say, ten years? If my liver lasted that long.

I pulled the sheet out, balled it up and threw it away. I needed some fresh air. A walk, I thought, might get the cogs turning again. Up through the town, maybe.

The town where nothing happens.

Perhaps I do it a disservice. Things do happen here. Just not very often. And they're not usually very exciting when they do. It's a funny town in many ways. Too shabby to be a favoured holiday destination (except for people as skint as I am). But it holds some faint charm if you don't look too closely. Like many towns, the High Street has been hollowed out by the internet. To serve the forty-thousand or so inhabitants there are twenty-three hairdressers, eleven nail bars, thirty take-aways, seven tanning salons, nine tattoo parlours, twelve estate agencies, fourteen charity shops, four gyms, seven churches, thirty-eight retirement homes, three bait shops, a dozen amusement arcades, two angling clubs, two sailing clubs, one greengrocer, a few hundred CCTV cameras and a broken pier. There are nineteen pubs (including micros), only one of which I frequent. There are NO bookshops. None selling new books, anyway. Even the library has less book space now that the Birth and Death Registry is based there. The seafront car park is a regular skid-pan for the local boy (and girl) racers, and the boating lake often gets used as a park for trolleys from the nearby supermarket. In summer, jet-skiers invade like a lunkhead Luftwaffe. In winter, it's as cold, wet and empty as a lost glove.

It's about what you'd expect for a small town on the 'little England' coast.

But lest I paint too bleak a picture... it has its good side, too. Its characters. Its places of interest. Its curious side-alleys and corner-ways, where you can often find something worthwhile. These people and places are part of what keeps me interested - and, I suppose (financial imperatives aside), part of what keeps me living here.

Next to The North Pole, the other little oasis of sanity is The Bean Bag - the 'world food' shop next to Mole's motor yard. It's run by a Rastafarian called Tam and his Welsh partner, Fee. They used to be travellers - pitching up here and there, doing some work, saving some money, moving on. Then one day they drove their ancient converted pantechnicon into Dunhaven Bay, liked it for some reason, saw the shop up for let, and decided to stop. In there, you can get - as the hand-painted sign outside says

'Everything From A Bag Of Spice To A Sack Of Rice.'

Oat and soya milks, every type and colour of lentil, star anise, asafoetida, ghee. Organic cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil in gallon cans. Raisins the size of teabags. Coriander fresh from the earth. Stoneground spelt flour, taramasalata, biodynamic wine, feta cheese, fair-trade Columbian coffee, Imzir figs, dried cepes and chanterelles... and a smell, like eastern souks and rain-washed gardens, that sharpens the air and makes your taste buds throb. By the doorway, there are shelves and racks of books, magazines, flyers and cards covering everything from trans-fats and compost toilets to monkeywrenching, rebirthing and chakra-balancing. Tam and Fee have a bagging room at the back of the shop where they'll weigh things up as you want them. They run a Mindfulness group once a week in their upstairs flat, and Fee does Reiki massage. Tam - gentle-natured and unassuming almost to the point of diffidence - is the third-dan Sensei at Yoyo's Bujinkai dojo. He's one of the few people, actually, that Yoyo's wary of.

"You have to watch those quiet types," he told me. "He swings a roundhouse kick like a fuckin' helicopter rotor. It could take down a tree."

There's a courtyard at the back of the shop with a few tables, and during the summer it's nice to sit out there and nurse your hangover with a sun-dried tomato and houmous bap and a cup of turmeric tea, and think some thoughts - the only sounds being the distant tinkling of spanners from Mole's yard, interspersed with coughs or a cry of "Cunt!" at some recalcitrant nut or bolt.

Then there are the charity shops. Everything covered from cats to cancer. Most of my kit comes from these. It's about much more than simply being skint a lot. They have some excellent stuff. Good books, too, if you take the time to sort through the boxes. In amongst the Sophie Kinsellas and the Lee Childs, you can often find a Dickens, a Steinbeck, a Kafka or a Balzac. I've even found Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson sometimes. Not a clue in town who might have handed them over. Me, possibly.

B-Side the Seaside does you for everything vinyl, video and disc. Every label, every band, every genre. Frank Sinatra and Frank Zappa. Johnny Cash, 50 Cent, Dire Straits. Epidemic and The Cure. Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Green Day, Barry White, Deacon Blue, Cream, Indigo Girls, Simply Red. He doesn't discriminate.

"Taste is taste," he told me. "However bad."

And then, the secondhand shops. Plenty of those, too. Some conventional ("Objets d'art, if you don't mind!"), some off-the-wall entirely. In Belshazzar's, for example, you can get a Victorian prophylactic (long past 'use by'), a stuffed skunk, a prayer mat with a compass, a glass eye and a set of dog's dentures. Sell-Fridges does what it says on the sign, as long as you don't want an ice box newer than about 2010.

But the biggest and best by far is El's Emporium, down in the High Street. The proprietor (and Yoyo's sometime employer) Eric is mostly known by the diminutive. The only people it confuses are Spanish tourists. "El... ¿quién?" they always want to know. "El Pastor," is the correct answer. Plain old Eric Shepherd. You then have to try to explain why he doesn't have any sheep.

"El vendedor de muebles antiguos?"

"Sí. Creo que lo entiendo."

El's is housed in what was once the town's old music hall theatre. It's one of the oldest buildings in town, and one of the most striking - rising from a drab row of tacked-on take-aways like a temple in a council terrace: a merchant's mausoleum in a broken-tooth churchyard. The architect must have been jointly inspired by the Pharos of Alexandria and too many mushrooms. Above the entrance arch, stone fauns frolic in a pillared apse, from the dome of which El flies his flag of trade. Further up, the facade bulges outwards and is dotted with tiny windows, like a lighthouse. On the very top, where the lantern should be, sits a cupola, like a vast upturned cooking pot that was stewing seagull guano.

The archway and foyer are El's front stall, where he keeps some of his better bargains - book-ended by a couple of gold-painted grinning Buddha statues. Sofa beds, granny rockers, tall-boys, ornamental fountains - plus a life-sized fairground Cossack mannequin that waves its arms and booms with sinister laughter as you pass. Moving in past the the old Ticket Booth (now El's office) the place opens up like a cathedral. The nave is stacked with double layers of bureaus and suites, while the two side aisles house bookcases, wardrobes, cabinets, dressers, upright pianos, tables, recliners and desks. Lacking the floorspace, he hooks dining chairs in ranks high up on the walls - like they're set up for a rock-climbers AGM, or for when Mary Poppins drops in for tea.

A clerestory of windows runs down to the stage, and on a bright day the dust motes rising off the old furniture swirl in the light like miniature universes. The stage is where El keeps his special stuff: older, heavier, pricier. Here, you might find a Second Republic French closet wardrobe - big as a bedsit bathroom - bulking up next to a Georgian bureau-desk and a '50s walnut cocktail cabinet. There's an old Bechstein grand - possibly the theatre's original, and allegedly once played by a holidaying Horowitz - and a full-size slate-bed snooker table which still gets plenty of use (though the balls tend to collect in certain areas). It looks like how the set of a Chekhov play might have looked - translated by Harold Pinter, with a score by Wagner. You won't find much veneer here. No chipboard or plastic. Nothing out of a flat-pack. This stuff's solid as a forest, and so heavy it might even be rooted like one.

A staircase to the side of the foyer takes you up to the old Circle, which houses the more exotic items. El’s laid it out like a sultan’s den. Fine Turkish rugs cover the floor and the walls. Satin drapes plunge and loop around plush chaise-longues. Tall, baroque hall-stands rise in the corners, topped with vases of fluted crystal and slender porcelain figurines. A glass-topped coffee table, broad as a rowing-boat, holds a chess set in green and white marble. Flashes of rose-light and bronze catch against surfaces and in mirrors, giving the place a museum glow. A Chinese screen, depicting the four seasons in delicate strokes, folds its way across an alcove. There’s even a garment draped over it – though not the one you’d expect. It’s El’s old demin jacket.

You could almost believe someone lives there. Which is interesting, because someone does.  Fold back the screen and you’ll find a very cosy domestic arrangement: sofa bed, table and chair, TV, turntable, wardrobe, bookcase, drinks cabinet, heater.  Along inside the alcove, a small electric cooker, a sink and a fridge. It’s been El’s home for five years, since he got divorced and sold his house. Since he became ex-El, you might say.

“There’s something about the place, Harry,” he told me one night over a beer and a game of lop-sided snooker. He spoke very softly, almost reverentially. “It’s the history or something. You can feel it in the air. It gets into you... like right in the blood. And it suits me. Being alone with it. I wouldn’t want to live any other way now.”

I watched him chalk his cue – eyes darting about at the different groupings of balls. He’s a striking figure of a fellah. About fifty, wiry as a pipe-cleaner, hair in a thinning grey ponytail, big silver earring, scuffed cow-poke boots, jeans as faded and thin as blotting paper. He looks like Neil Young did before he became Neil Old. He took his shot and watched as the balls scattered off and regrouped. A red dropped into a pocket. 

“My great-gran on my mother’s side, bless ‘er… she used to sing here, you know… way back. Played the piano, too. Taught herself. So there’s that connection I’ve got. Family. They say that when someone’s been part of a place, their spirit gets into the wood and the stone... so they’re always there, in a way. I’m happy to go along with that. It's the same with the furniture, too. A lot of it comes from house clearances after people have died. And it's like part of their personality, you know? They're still there in it. I can feel it.”

He took a swig from his can, then put a line on the black.

“It’s funny, but some nights… when I’m sitting up there, quiet like…”

He arched his eyes towards the Circle, louring up in the dark like a mouth beyond our pool of light. He was just about to play his shot when he glanced at me a moment. Then he chuckled and put his eye to the ball again.

“Well… you know. Full of sounds, these old places. Probably just the wind in the rafters.”

The balls cracked together and the black disappeared like a bat down a well.

“Eight,” he said, grinning.

I wouldn’t mind living in a place like that – spooks or not. Plenty of space. Pick of the furniture. Quiet-ish. Bit of a sod to dust, I suppose, but you can’t have everything. So I envy El in a way. A friendly way, of course. Work he likes in a place he likes with an atmosphere that keeps him rooted in his own past. A lucky fellah.

You couldn't odds it, could you?

I know I couldn't.