William Shaw - She's leaving home

Four hours later he woke, unable to return to sleep. He switched on the light by the table, and lay awake for a few minutes, then he got up and shaved.

Outside it was dark. He walked down Kingsland High Street, deserted at two in the morning but for the occasional car, pavements silver with rain. The late summer was slipping into winter with little in the way of autumn in between.

He passed shops with their wooden shutters down, barrows chained to trees, piles of rubbish and dogs that growled from behind locked gates. Below the pavement, water trickled noisily through drains.

At Dalston Junction he arrived at Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop. It never closed, serving tea and coffee to lorry drivers delivering at Ridley Road market and to the taxi drivers waiting for the early shift to begin. The front of the cafe was painted bright red. In the window was a handwritten sign that read 7 days without a bagel makes one weak .

Joe, leaning on the counter reading a novel, looked up as he came in. “Hello, my friend,” he said, and spooned coffee into a mug without asking. Joe only served instant. When Breen had told him he should buy one of the machines like the coffee shops in the West End and start serving real coffee, he had said, “And maybe get a skiffle band to play for my customers too.”

“Teacakes are half price,” said Joe as he filled the mug with hot water from an urn. Breen never ate here, but Joe always offered something.

“What’s the news?” asked Breen.

“My daughter is about to make me a grandfather,” said Joe. “What’s happening with you?”

“I’m in the shit.”

Joe said, “Don’t tell me your problems. I have enough of my own,” and went back to reading his novel. Breen added a spoonful of sugar to his coffee, stirred, then stood at the counter slowly sipping it. The bell went and a young greaser couple in black leathers came in, ordered egg and chips and sat down on opposite sides of a small table, staring at each other while they waited for Joe to cook their food. The guy had long hair and huge sideburns, like some reincarnated Viking warrior. He stubbed out a cigarette and leaned over and started to kiss the young woman on the mouth. Older men gaped enviously over cooling tea. In all their lives they had never had the chance to be as young as this, to wear leather and to fondle beautiful women so brazenly in public. As if to tease them further, under the table, the man forced his right hand between the black leather of the young woman’s thighs. She slapped it away and broke the kiss, laughing loudly.

The doorbell rang again. This time it was a young man in a tweed cap that looked too small for him, brim pointing upwards. He approached the counter and asked for a cup of tea.

“Cor, look at them two.” He nodded at the pair of greasers who were kissing again. “I bet she fucks him,” he said quietly. “What you think? I bet she likes it too. I bet she fucks anyone. I’d fuck her.”

Joe said nothing. While he served the tea, the young man said in a quiet voice. “Hey, I got something good for you. Do you want to buy any watches? Gold watches going cheap.”

Joe replaced the large teapot on the table and said, “What do I need to tell the time for? This bloody place never bloody closes.” He turned back to the chip basket, lifting it from the hot fat.

The young man blinked a couple of times. It could have been a nervous tic. “I thought you Yids liked a bit of tom.”

“A bit of tom? God save us. Talk English, schmuck. You watch too much television.”

“Tom. Tomfoolery,” the guy whispered. “You know, jewelry.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake go home,” said Joe quietly. The chips were still too pale. He dropped them back into the bubbling oil.

Next the young man turned to Breen. When he’d come in, Breen had thought he was only about twenty. Now he looked closer he could see fine lines around his eyes, and veins breaking in the skin. “What about you, mate? Nice stuff.”

Joe said, over his shoulder, “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, my friend. I told you, if you know what’s best for yourself, get lost.”

The young man was offended. “I’m just trying to earn a living like the rest of you,” he said.

Joe snorted. He cracked first one egg, then a second, onto the hotplate and wiped his brow with his forearm.

“Shockproof,” said the man to Breen, picking up his mug of tea. “Gold straps. Roman numerals. Guaranteed to five yards underwater.”

Breen put down his coffee and reached inside his jacket pocket. For a second the man’s face lit up, thinking he was about to make a sale, until Breen pulled out his wallet and opened it. “Do as he says. Get lost.”

The man slapped his cup back down, spilling brown tea over Joe’s Formica counter, and was gone into the night in half a second.

“You could have waited till he paid,” muttered Joe.

“Keep your hair on,” said Breen, putting his warrant card back into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get it.”

Joe wiped down the surface with a gray dishcloth. “Flash that flipping thing around in here anymore and I won’t have any customers at all.” He put two plates onto the counter and tipped the chips onto them, then slid two eggs from the hotplate. “Egg and chips twice,” he called.

The greaser couple broke from their kiss and the man stood to fetch the plates. Breen pulled out his notebook and flicked through the pages he had written. His notes were densely scribbled and unmethodical. It was as if he had forgotten how he used to arrive at a scene and patiently record first the time of day, then the position of the corpse, and so on. Across the bottom of a page he had written “River Tiber.” He borrowed a pencil from Joe and turned to a clean page and started sketching what he remembered of the scene behind the flats. He had added diagrams to police notebooks before, but never drawings, even though he had a talent for it. Art had been one of the few subjects he had done well in at school. His father had never been able to hide his disappointment at the mediocrity of his son’s academic results, but the day before the funeral, Breen had discovered a small roll of the drawings he had done at school carefully tied in red ribbon, tucked in a box his father had brought with him to the flat.

He drew the downward curve of her back and the pure roundness of her behind, her arms folded awkwardly. “What you drawing?” said Joe.

Breen closed the notebook rapidly and put it back into his pocket.

It was quiet now. In an hour or so the morning shift would start arriving on their way to work. Joe went to his LP collection and spent a while looking through it, pulling out a record, replacing it, eventually picking out another. There was a record player just to the right of the counter. Joe took the black disc out of its sleeve and laid it on the turntable, then lifted the needle and dropped it carefully.

There was a moment of crackle, then a piano began to play slow descending notes. A cello joined in for a short phrase, then the rest of the string quartet, until they all gave way to the cello exchanging conversational phrases with the piano.

The woman looked up. “What in hell’s that?”

“Leave it,” said her boyfriend, pausing from his chips.

Joe came out front and sat down on a plastic chair and took out a cigarette and tapped it quietly on the table in front of him, then lit it and smoked as the music played. No one spoke. The only other noise was the clatter of cutlery on plate and the sigh of one of the old insomniacs who gathered at Joe’s in the smaller hours. It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself. Making a shape out of such sadness seemed to offer a safety from it. Breen sat and listened as his coffee cooled. The moment lasted for two or three whole minutes before the bell rang and a bobby on his beat came in, the door’s bell ringing dissonantly against the music.