Part Seven – The Quiet Life of Bobby Shaw

Here is the latest instalment of my serial: Stookey Hill.

Part Seven – The Quiet Life of Bobby Shaw

There was less of a need for a tailor these days. This was Bobby’s daily observation as he opened his shop – the action of which was getting later and later. Back in the day, he had opened at seven sharp otherwise he would: a) miss his early clients who came by before work, and: b) never get anything finished.

But the work had, over the years, near enough petered out to a standstill.

“Fast fashion!” he would remark with a huff whenever anyone asked how business was these days, “I cant compete with cut-price throw-away clothes that folk buy in four different sizes and keep going until something fits!”

Most of his remaining clientele didn’t know what fast fashion even was, but his granddaughter, a sympathetic soul who had grown up with a first hand witness to the steady demise of Grandpa Bobby’s business, had written an essay on it for school. She had got full marks. Her teacher said that was because she had done primary research. Bobby himself was the said research and had spent a good few hours bemoaning the abundance of cheap fabrics and expendable clothing that was so readily available with the ascendance of global distribution.

Of course, Bobby had also benefited from this, but he said less about the fact that he too had a few cheap international suppliers. He was pretty sure no one would go digging to determine where he had got his reels of cotton and replacement machine needles from.

Bobby, with ever-increasing reluctance, turned the Closed sign on his shop door to Open and unlocked the snib. He pulled up the far blind and sighed as he realised there was a splash of something across the window. Youths. They’d been throwing things round again. There was always some sort of ruckus with a bottle of Coke or a pint of milk. The worst was eggs. They were near enough impossible to get off.

With a series of heavy, heaving sighs, he went to the back of his shop and filled a bucket with warm, soapy water, swirling it round and watching it foam.

This was his life. He thought it was pitiful. Opening a shop barely anyone used anymore on a busy street – made so only by the fact that they sold cut-price alcohol and vapes. He thought the bakery did well enough. There was always a hearty queue there. Bread, it seemed, would never go out of fashion.

Dragging the plastic bucket from under the sink, Bobby sunk a sponge into it and went out front to clean off his windows.

“Didn’t you do that yesterday?”

Bobby resented the council’s decision to put a bus stop outside his shop. Not only did the bright green shelter obscure his view of the road (and the houses and shops opposite), but it attracted all kinds who liked to gossip, commentate and pass judgement. He was fairly confident that some folk gathered there not for the cheap public transport but for the opportunity to pass on all manner of news – invented or otherwise.

“Not yesterday, Pamela,” he said, without looking up. Pamela was one such gossip. He had never seen her board or alight from a bus in his life but there she was, regular as clockwork. Once upon a time he had felt sorry for her. She was, it seemed, a lonely only soul who needed human contact. That’s what he thought, anyway. Until she spread that vicious rumour about him and his dog. Then Bobby knew. She was an actress. And a pretty good one.

“I thought it was yesterday,” that was another thing. She was persistent. In her inventiveness, she had decided that if she said the same thing enough times it became true.

“Indeed it was not,” Bobby knew fine well how this was going to go. Back and forth until somehow he admitted to cleaning his windows yesterday, either by silence or omission.

A bus pulled up, hissing to a stop. Pamela was watching Bobby intently. He had his back to her, but he could see her in the glass, arms crossed over her chest, her head slightly tilted.

“Aren’t you getting on that?” he turned and looked at her squarely, pointing at the bus. She wasn’t flustered.

“Not this one,” she said.

“Not any one,” he muttered, dipping the sponge which was now a shade of brown into the bucket of water.

“What was that?” she asked, leaning forward.

“Nothing,” Bobby squeezed the sponge and waved it in her direction. He should have known, after all these years, to check who was at the bus stop before committing to cleaning his windows. He just couldn’t bear them being dirty.

The bus driver, who had been waved on by Pamela, pulled away leaving a hot trail of exhaust. Bobby coughed a little.

“That doesn’t sound good!” Pamela remarked, a strange joy in her voice as she calculated how she could tell some folk that Bobby might be carrying a communicable illness.

Bobby, relieved that the brown splashes that had dried on his window were easy to remove, shuffled back inside his shop, closing the door behind him. For a moment, he considered turning the sign back to Closed. That would give Pamela, who was now straining her neck to see in after him, something to talk about.

He didn’t, however. He had to stick with the vain hope and possibility that someone might come in requiring some trousers turned up or sleeves shortened.

He was just about to tip the murky liquid from the bucket into the sink when he heard voices. The back door to his shop was ever so slightly ajar. He wasn’t one to leave that open and so laid the bucket down and went to click it closed. It bothered him a little that he hadn’t realised it wasn’t shut. How long had it been open?

Bobby lived upstairs and could get to the shop without going outside. The flat had an external entrance, at the back down a precarious black metal staircase, but his cousin Ned had put in a staircase so that as he aged, Bobby didn’t have to go outside. A small door just next to the sink, led up to his one bedroom flat. And this is where his consternation came from. He couldn’t remember when he last used that door. He didn’t think it had been for a few days.

This bothered Bobby considerably. He had found these past few years that there were details that escaped him. Not necessarily significant details. He knew who folk were, and he had a good long-term memory…but there were other things…where was his wallet? Where were his keys? Had he sent that invoice yet? Had he even printed it off?

He could reconcile with those small details – but leaving the back door to his shop open when he had no recollection of being out there at all…for days…

But just as Bobby went to close it, there were voices. And this was not unusual. The back alley of Stookey Hill ran across the rear of the shops, interrupted occasionally by a garden on drying green for the flats. Some businesses used their back entrances frequently. Some less so. Bobby: never. But voices in of themselves shouldn’t have stopped him.

It was mostly muffled noise to be honest. But as he sat, minutes later and shaking, Bobby noted down the words he had heard:

Primrose.

Threat.

A combination of factors.

Secret.

Chess.

Although he wasn’t sure of the last one. The others were all along a theme – a semantic field if you will. He couldn’t decide if it was ‘chess’ or ‘Jess’. Either way, the muffled nature of what he had heard, the fact that it was clearly a private conversation, his back door being open…

And try as he might to convince himself he shouldn’t binge watch ‘Bosch’ because it was doing nothing for his nerves, he still felt there was something afoot more sinister than the machinations of his own American-cop-lead imagination…