Eighty Years
The kettle in the back had furred up again. Brian stood listening to it labour towards a boil. Patiently, and without much hope.
Through the serving hatch he had the whole floor. Two ridge tents pitched and guyed on the display carpet, an awning wound out over nobody, a carousel of walking poles turning slow in the draught off the door. The place smelled as it had always smelled, of proofed canvas and rubber groundsheets and the cold that lived in the concrete under the carpet and never quite left, a stockroom smell, a smell of things folded and waiting. All of it squared away and dressed since half eight. It had gone eleven now, and the only soul through that door in the hours between had been a courier after a signature and directions to a unit that had not been Barstow’s since before the courier was born.
Brian poured the water before it had properly caught. A weak brew you could drink beat a strong one you stood waiting on. He had done enough waiting. He carried the two mugs out onto the floor, where the strip lights hummed over the quiet and the big room held its cold, nobody having troubled to warm a space that nobody was in.
Colin was at the counter with his phone up in front of his face, filming himself or the ceiling, it was hard to say which. Brian set a mug down by his elbow and got no thanks for it.
“Owt?” he said.
“Feller rang about a porch awning,” Colin said, not lowering the phone. “Wanted to know would we match the internet price.”
“And?”
“Told him we weren’t the internet.”
Brian drank his tea. Weak and drinkable, as forecast. Off behind him the Skegness lad had the young cricketer backed against the sleeping bags, running some patter at him. Roll up roll up, three seasons in one bag. The pair of them were laughing at something on a screen Brian could not see and would not have followed if he could, their voices thin and bright against the hum of the lights and the wind worrying the door.
He had been on this floor thirty-one years. He had sold tents to men who were now dead and to their sons who now flew to Spain, and he could still, on the rare occasion one wandered in, read a customer the way a farmer reads weather. The shift of the feet. The hand that goes to the wallet pocket and stops. He had lost none of the knowing of it. There was simply nobody left to know.
The bell over the door went, and the cold came in with it. Both Brian and Colin looked up at once. A man came in out of it in a good coat, fifties, with the look of somebody who had decided a thing in the car and come in to have it confirmed. He went straight to the bigger of the two ridge tents and stood stroking the flysheet between finger and thumb.
Brian left it a ten-count and went over. Not too quick. Quick was for the ones who wanted quick.
“That’s the four-season,” he said. “You’ll not have it flap on you, whatever the top of a fell throws down. Feel the weight of that pole.” He put it into the man’s hand himself, because a thing in the hand sells and a thing on a shelf does not, and watched the man take the heft of it and like it. They talked pitching. They talked porches and groundsheets and the year the man’s father had taken them all to Filey in the rain. Brian did what he had always done. He stopped selling a tent and started standing in a wet field with a man he had known four minutes. It worked, right up until the man got his phone out.
“Do you know,” the man said, warm, apologetic, already half gone, “I’ll just have a think. Cracking, that. What did you say the model was?”
He photographed the label on the pole bag, thumbs quick, and thanked Brian twice on the way out, and meant both. The door let the cold back in behind him. Brian watched him through the window get into the good car and sit there with his face lit blue by the screen, finding it cheaper, finding it by dinnertime on a doorstep forty miles off.
“Sale?” said Colin, who had not looked up again.
“Aye,” said Brian. “Somebody’s.”
He stood there a moment, mug going cold in his hand.
“Amazon. Got us all by the bollocks and still charging delivery.”
Above the door, gold on a green ground gone the colour of old moss, it still said Barstow & Sons, Camping and Outdoor Supplies, established 1947. Stan’s father had put that up when Holbeck still made things, when the mills ran three shifts and the foundries lit the underside of the clouds and a man who sold you a groundsheet was a man you saw at chapel. Now there were cranes over the far end of Water Lane and glass going up where the Tower Works had stood empty half of Brian’s life, and the young ones who worked in the glass came past the window at dinnertime without once turning their heads. The name meant nothing to them. It did not ping, was how Colin had explained it, more than once, pleased with himself. It did not clip into anything. You could not stumble on it, because no one was looking, and no one was looking because in eighty years it had never once occurred to Barstow’s to make itself easy to find.
Winston came through from the stockroom with a box of gas canisters held against his chest, set it down, straightened, and looked about the empty floor.
“Quiet,” Winston said.
“It’s Tuesday,” Brian said.
The lad nodded and took the comfort, and went back for the rest. Birmingham, that one, the boss’s sister’s boy, set down up here with an accent nobody on the floor could place and a fear of putting a foot wrong that came off him whenever anybody looked at him twice. Brian had a soft spot for him he had not yet decided whether to own to.
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Upstairs, Stan Barstow sat with the accounts open in front of him and his father looking down from the wall, and tried for the third time that morning to make the two of them agree.
The office was warmer than the floor, the little electric heater ticking away by his feet, and it smelled of that and of the paper and of the tin of good biscuits Suzanne kept for people who never came. The photograph was 1961, black gone brown in the frame, his father in shirtsleeves outside the Water Lane door with one hand flat on a stack of ex-army bell tents and the other on the shoulder of a man whose name Stan had never learned. His father was not smiling. You did not smile for a camera in 1961 unless you meant it, and his father had meant very little in front of a lens and a very great deal everywhere else.
The accounts were not smiling either.
Stan had done them himself, which was the first of the economies and the one that shamed him least, and he had done them slowly, the way you work at a tooth you already know is going. The showroom took less across a week now than it had taken across a good Saturday when he was a boy sweeping this same floor for his pocket money. The wage bill had not shrunk to meet it. He had six people down there, seven with Suzanne, and not one of them he could see a clean way to lose without it being the beginning of the end rather than a means of holding the end off.
That was the part he could tell no one. Brian would have listened. Brian of anyone would have understood it to the penny, the two of them having come up through the same school and the same streets and knowing between them where every last body was buried. But Brian was down there keeping the floor breathing on nothing but pride and thirty years of habit, and a man does not go to his oldest friend to say the thing they have both spent two years not saying. So Stan sat with it on his own. You got the name over the door and the last word and the parking space, and in exchange you carried the one thing nobody else was let see you carry.
There was a knock, and Suzanne came in with the post and a fresh tea, set both down, took the cold mug away, and stopped at the door she had stopped at for forty years, and for his father before him.
“You’ll think of something,” she said. “You always do.”
“That’s the trouble.” Stan did not look up. “I always do.”
She very nearly smiled, and went out, and left him with the post, which he did not open, and the tea, which he did not drink, and the accounts, which had not moved.
Through the office window, if he leaned, he could see two doors down and across the front of the little place that had opened last spring in one of the done-up units. Tate’s, it said over the door, in lettering so plain it had plainly cost a fortune. A woman he had watched build a thriving thing out of nothing on the same eighty feet of Holbeck pavement that was quietly finishing his family off. She sold, so far as Stan could make out, very dear versions of ordinary things to people who drove in on purpose. She sold them face to face, one at a time, looking each of them in the eye, and they came back, and they told their friends. Stan had stood at this window more than one dinnertime and watched her do it.
He had her card. He had lifted it months back from a saucer by her till, on an errand he had invented for himself so as to go in and have a look, and he had kept it in the desk drawer under the elastic bands ever since.
Stan looked at his father. His father looked back and did not help. He remembered being twelve, standing behind the counter with a new line of ex-army rucksacks his dad had told him to shift. Every time a customer came in, Stan had tried. Every time they left without buying, his father had said nothing. Just watched. Same look he had now.
He got the card out, and squared it on the blotter, and picked up the phone, and dialled before the sensible half of him could get its case together. It rang twice.
“Good morning,” said a voice that had never once in its life let a room down. “Tate’s.”
“Aye,” said Stan. “Hello. You’ll not know me. Stan Barstow. Barstow’s, the camping place, couple of doors up.” He kept his eyes on his father while he said it. “I wondered if. That is.”
He stopped.
“I’ve a sales team down here that couldn’t persuade a camper to upgrade from a bivouac to a proper two-man tent,” he said, “and I’m told you’re the woman who teaches folk how to talk. So.”
