clearly not yours. While I would never judge your fashion sense . . .”
I snorted.
“. . . trendy red and black trainers several sizes too big for you are hardly what I would expect. Nair said, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Why would that interest him so much? Why would he make you the Midnight Mayor?”
So, I told him.
First Interlude: The Sorcerer’s Shoes
In which the story of a pair of trainers is recounted over dinner.
I said: “The shoes aren’t mine. They belong to a kid. His name is Mo. Actually, his name is Michael Patrick Hall, but you can’t be cool and be called Michael unless you’ve been to prison. So everyone calls him Mo. I’ve never met him. But that’s really the point.”
It happened without bothering to explain itself.
I was in Hoxton, the street market. I can’t remember why. It can be hard, coming back. There are things, rituals, routines, that I had taken for granted. Not any more.
Anyway. Hoxton. The word is “trendy”, but I don’t know if it can be rightly applied. It’s a mishmash. Great rows of terraced houses with new paint, next to boarded-up windows. Council estates rotting from the inside out, mould and crumbling dust dripping with water from broken pipes down the walls. New apartment blocks, all bright paint, fresh brick and steel; art galleries tucked in behind the local boozer, yoga centres nestling in between the old rip-off robbed-radio garages. Tandoori and chippy, Chinese takeaway and halal kebabs, kosher bakeries and low squatting greengrocers selling strange growths that might be vegetables. Clubs hidden away underground, the door just a door by day, a purple-lit cavern at night, guarded by big men in black. Social clubs where no one cares about the smoking laws, snooker tables underneath low neon lights; leisure centres, where every shoe squeaks on old varnished floors. Hoxton is a bit of everything, all at once, a low old grandpa squinting at the scuttling kids. There’s magic in Hoxton, if you know where to look for it; enough to start a fire, although you’ll never quite know what will catch.
There was a chippy in the street market. I went there one night, for no good reason. Because we smelt vinegar on the air and cannot resist fish and chips. It was late, maybe elevenish, the shops shut up, the usual left-over debris of the market billowing in the street. Broken splattered fruits, empty cardboard boxes, torn-up plastic bags. The guy serving up the chips was called Kishan, an Indian name, though he was as white and freckled as dirty snow. He had dreadlocks and dyed black hair, and an earring that wasn’t just a piercing - it was a great round gaping hole, the size of a ten-pence piece, pushed out of his lobe by a plastic hoop. We were fascinated and appalled by it. I did my best not to stare.
I had plaice and chips and sat at a table in the window. Everything about the place was plastic, and just two squeaks short of sterile.
I had been there about half an hour when Kishan said, “Closing up, now.”
I shrugged, and ate up faster.
“Hey, mate, you getting back OK?” he asked.
This is not something I usually get asked. Men don’t ask other men if they’re getting home OK, they just assume that beneath the frail, weak exterior lurks a muscle-building kung fu master fearless of ever being mugged. I said, “I’m fine, thanks.”
He was uneasy, we realised. His eyes kept dancing from us to the window and back again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sure.”
I followed his gaze out of the window, but saw nothing but the slow rumpling billow of the litter in the streets. We finished the last chips, wiped our hands on the edge of the greasy paper, stood up.
“Hey, are you sure everything’s OK?” I asked.
He looked at me sideways and said, “Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Just fine.”
These things don’t take much translating.
“Well, OK,” I said. “’Night.”
And we walked out of the chippy.
There’s a phrase - curiosity killed the cat.
We are very curious. The world, this living world is so full of incident, strangeness, experience, event, happening so busy and so fast, that it’s a wonder you mortals don’t go mad. But you learn how to shut it out, to perceive only that which is relevant to you. You say things like - curiosity killed the cat. So very sensible. Such an unforgivable waste.
We are curious and, like I said, I didn’t have much better to do.