If the man who’d spoken those words weren’t long dead, he’d have had no trouble finding the shop in question: it hadn’t moved, hadn’t redecorated, had barely changed at all. It was still the same stamp-sized floorspace, with a counter on which sat a till, still fondly referred to as ‘electric’; it was still shelved floor to ceiling on all sides, and each shelf still bore the same bewildering array of vendibles: the same cigars with green and yellow bands; the same chocolate frogs in the same foil wrapping. The same calendar, still celebrating 1993, still hung above the door to the stairs, and the same biscuit-tin lid, its bright motif still a twinkly-eyed Stalin, was still propped on a head-height shelf, and still saw service as a percussive device when Conference was in swing, ‘Conference’ being the designation Old Miles bestowed on any upstairs gathering numbering more than three – any fewer, he was wont to grumble, and there was no call to count cadence, a rhythm he still observed by beating Joe Stalin in the face with a tiny hammer.
Old Miles wasn’t his actual name, but it was generally held that old miles were what he walked, and nothing about the way he clung to established habits gave the lie to this.
But one reason for adhering to tradition is an awareness of impending change, and the little shop’s apparent obduracy concealed a minor shift that required major rearrangement, in that what once had been a going concern was now simply a concern. Business rates were ever on the rise, and the customer base ever dwindling, reduced by mortality and age and decreasing mobility. The shop had once been part of a local network of grocers and tradesmen of every description, where the competent shopper could provision a family for a siege. But those days were gone, and Old Miles’s tobacconist-cum-smuggler’s cave was now marooned in a hipsters’ playground. Which was the least of its worries. London altered by the day, and if the city had never been as kind nor as welcoming to strangers as it liked to pretend, it had at least thrived on the variety that strangers introduced. The political fog of the times had changed that, and political fog, as history has illustrated, is best dispelled by the waving of flags and banners, which usually foreshadows the use of truncheons and sticks. Variety was no longer a draw, and the gatherings of so-called Yellow Vests on the streets of central London were a testament to the shrinking of mental horizons that accompanies the raising of a drawbridge. Milosz Jerzinsky – Old Miles – hadn’t spent his early years fighting communists from a distance only to be sandbagged by fascists on his doorstep in old age. Besides, the leasehold on his shop had precisely as many years to run as those by which he had surpassed retirement age, and the neat mirror image these spans presented was as good as a sign from the heavens. So he had taken, he admitted to his remaining customers, the land-grabber’s shilling; he was folding his tent; he was making his departure. His shop would remain unchanged until its final day, but that arrived on the stroke of midnight, to mark time until which one last Conference was being held in the upstairs room; a gathering of stalwarts and irregulars alike, who would count the hours down glass by glass, and simply by their presence prove the remainder of that long-dead customer’s encomium on Old Miles’s place:
But the given moments, thought the man himself, were fast wearing out their welcome.
He had just sold the last three packs of his Russian cigarettes – a life-destroying brand that only a suicide could embrace – to a fat man in a dirty overcoat who looked like he worked in a betting shop, either behind the cashier’s grille or on a stool beneath the TV, watching his pay packet break a leg in the 3:15 at Doncaster. Still, there was a grim focus in his eyes as he waited for his change, as if he were committing the little shop’s interior to memory. Maybe he’d lost more than the odd pay packet in his time. Maybe there was a whole archive of failure shelved in that ugly head, which was perhaps the reason Old Miles spoke to him as he counted coins into his waiting hand. ‘We’re closing,’ he said.
‘So I heard.’
‘There’s no future in it.’
The man grunted. ‘It looks like there’s barely a present.’
‘You’ve not been here before?’
The man didn’t answer. He was staring at the coins, as if Old Miles had shortchanged him, or slipped an unacceptable currency into his palm. But at length he shovelled them into his trouser pocket and looked Old Miles in the eye. ‘Heard about it. Never set foot inside.’
‘You can’t have bought that brand anywhere else in these parts.’
‘Maybe there’s the reason you’re having to close,’ the man said. ‘Maybe you’re too nosey to survive.’
