The thing about ice-skating is not only do skaters desire to break their own records as well as matching themselves against the competition, but also they long to surpass what is accepted as possible in their field. Occasionally they strain at the barriers of what is humanly possible. When they jump, they’re hoping for a triple salchow, or axel or lutz. Quadruples are rare. I once saw a quadruple toe loop, by a French woman in the Winter Olympics. I remember her face as she landed: it was ecstatic, but there was a look in her eye of something close to madness.
Watching ice-skating always reminded me of my favourite track by my favourite band, ‘Watching You Dance’ by the Passage, a group that emerged from Manchester’s soot and shadows just before I left for London in the early 80s: Dick Witts’ whispered vocal about an unnamed dancer shooting through the air, escaping the earth.
I dragged myself to the fridge to get a cold Sapporo, then collapsed in front of the skating. When a skater goes into a triple lutz she throws everything into it. The judges might not require her to jump a quadruple, but that’s what she’s straining for. She wants to stay up there a little bit longer; like a ballet dancer, she wants to fly, escape the earth. Only it’s not possible. It’s not supposed to be possible. But it doesn’t stop her wanting it. And it doesn’t stop me wanting it for her. I watch ice-skating and I’m emotionally drained; my body aches in sympathy.
They jumped and span. They landed; one or two stumbled. One guy skated into the barrier and fell over, hurting his knee, but carried on to do a triple toe loop and a double axel. The crowd loved him. He was crying as he bowed. Me too. Christ, I was bawling my eyes out. I suddenly realised I was thinking about Annie Risk and the evening we’d had together; the kiss. Fuck it. I’d got her number, why not use it? I reached behind the sofa for the phone. It was on the floor, strangled by its own curly flex. I fished the scrap of paper out of my jeans and punched in the digits. As I waited for the connection I had second, third and fourth thoughts. It was late. I was being too keen. Spur-of-the-moment decisions invariably land me in the shit. I returned the handset to the cradle. It seemed more sensible just to go to bed.
A that moment the phone rang, startling me. I was still holding it in my lap so I grabbed the receiver. ‘Hello? Hello?’
There was no answer.
‘Annie,’ I tried, thinking that somehow she had known it was me ringing a moment before. No reply. I said hello a couple more times only to hear those strange metallic grating and echoing sounds you hear on these occasions. No one there. I replaced the receiver and sat staring at the phone for a while before deciding to go to bed.
The alarm woke me at eight in the morning. Taking a cigarette from the pack next to the bed I lit up and lay back against the pillows. Breakfast. I thought about the day ahead as I looked around the bedroom. The walls held posters of Siouxsie, John Lee Hooker and Lenin, and the covers of the first two Passage LPs, Pindrop and For All and None. There was also a faded picture of the 1971 Manchester City squad and a clipframed photograph of me and Jaz freewheeling down Ludgate Hill. He’d set the camera up on a tripod and we’d got it just right first time.
Cigarette finished, I visited the bathroom, then pulled on my tight black jeans and a red sweatshirt and lit another cigarette while I made coffee. I had a loaf of bread somewhere and boxes of cereal. I don’t know why because I never had more than black coffee and cigarettes for breakfast. I took my coffee into the living room and sat back on the huge low-slung sofa. There was a big glass ashtray overflowing on the coffee table between piles of videos and record sleeves and books. All around the room, and out into the hallway, the walls were shelved to take my collection of records and CDs. I didn’t know how many there were. Thousands. Books, there weren’t so many. My tastes were quite narrow. Cult fiction, anything published by John Calder or Peter Owen or Marion Boyars; compilations of Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles; road atlases, map books, A — Zs.
I parked the car a couple of streets away from the shop. There was no good reason why I did that. I’d done it once and it became a habit. There had been space in front of the shop but I’d chosen not to use it. Maybe I just wanted a short walk before the day began.
I paused briefly to light up. There was that sense of anticipation you get at the beginning of a fine summer’s day; a slight breeze turned drink cartons and leaflets for carpet warehouses over in my path. I took a drag on my cigarette and it must have been too deep because my head started to swim. I stopped walking to let it clear. It did, but for a moment my senses seemed strangely heightened. Everything around me had become more vivid. A bright post box, a tree in bloom, which I passed every morning but noticed now for the first time, was an explosion of colour, a gleaming black Mini that drove past with a single occupant whose black hair shone like Siouxsie Sioux’s or Andy Wilson’s from the Passage — or my mother’s.
The breeze whistled past my ears and carried a slight tang that I failed to identify. I could hear individual scraps of paper grate against the pavement.
I thought to myself that I should consider switching to Camel Lights or those yellow Silk Cut that had so little tar in them they arguably didn’t exist.
The sensation lasted only a couple of seconds and as it passed and I rubbed my eyes and shook my head I saw the map at my feet. It appeared to be a page photocopied from an A — Z. In black and white, printed only on one side, frayed at the edges and scored with deep folds, it looked as if it had been blowing about for a while. I picked it up and had a proper look. Mildly interesting, I thought, assuming it to represent part of North London, and I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans with Annie Risk’s phone number.
When I reached the shop there were two or three kids hanging around waiting for it to open. I greeted them and they grunted back. My customers kept me in Camels and takeaways from the Hong Kong Garden, the Chinese place two floors beneath my flat. It wasn’t really called that. The real name didn’t roll off the tongue as easily and wasn’t a Siouxsie and the Banshees song title.
One of the kids who’d been waiting wanted Toy Planet’s first LP on Spoon Records which was so rare even I didn’t have a copy. Not in the shop anyway. I had a copy at home but that was mine, bought from a little place in Brighton some years before. He wasn’t having that. I occasionally took home records I bought from punters in the shop, but only rarely did I sell anything from my own collection.
I recommended Can. He looked doubtful. ‘It’s the same guy,’ I said and he brightened up, leaving with a copy of Tago Mago for not much more than I’d paid for it.
There was a quiet period during which I looked over the latest addition to the shop — the single shelf of second-hand books I’d mentioned to Jaz. I’d gone for a limited range of titles that both reflected my taste and projected a particular image. So there were some Penguin Modern Classics, a few Picadors — Knut Hamsun, William Burroughs, The Existential Imagination, The Naked I — and anything I could find by Anna Kavan, Alan Burns, Boris Vian and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It probably didn’t fit with the whole cowboy boots and leather jacket look I affected, but I was a sucker for the nouveau roman. The only trouble was my extremely limited French, which was where John Calder’s translated editions came in.