Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace
He frowned, moved some chilli sauce out of the way, and took the photo from me.
‘This girl?’ he said. ‘Missing?’
‘Missing? No, she’s … I’m just trying to find her. We’ve lost touch.’
Now didn’t seem the right time to explain the camera.
‘Wife?’
‘No. A friend.’
‘Why you lose touch?’
‘Just, you know.’
‘You fight?’
‘Nope. So, does she come in here?’
‘No,’ he said, still looking at it. And then: ‘You can put in window.’
‘Eh?’
‘Yes. Make copy, put in window. Maybe she come past. Why do you think she come here? She like kebab?’
He laughed for quite a long time.
‘Well, the photo was taken just over there, and—’
‘Make copy. Come, look.’
‘No, it’s okay. It’s probably a bit—’
‘Yes, make copy! Come!’
‘It’s fine!’
But he was hanging on to the photo. And then he was shouting. Shouting for someone upstairs to come downstairs. A young lad – seventeen, maybe, and in an ancient LA Lakers T-shirt – poked his head through a side door and the man, who was now talking to him in the way only a dad could, barked some instructions. The lad took the photo and closed the door, looking at it.
‘He make copy. Canon. Printer does copy. Canon.’
He nodded, and I made an impressed face, and said, ‘Canon.’
I wasn’t sure of the etiquette here. This man was doing me a favour of sorts. Helping me find my old friend who I’d lost touch with by sticking a photo of her in his kebab shop window. I suppose that meant I should buy a kebab.
‘Um … while I’m here, I’d like a kebab, please.’
‘Chilli sauce?’ he said, delighted.
Minutes later the door opened again and out came the lad, holding a sheet of A4 paper with a bad printout of the photo. He’d left space above and below for a message, and he’d brought a selection of colourful pens.
‘Go,’ said the man. ‘Write!’
‘Oh … okay,’ I said.
This was awkward. I’d told the man we’d been friends. Who’d lost touch. How was I going to word this without it making me look mental?
I grabbed a green pen, and then remembered hearing something once about only psychopaths writing in green pen, so I picked up a red one instead.
Are You This Girl? I wrote, the man watching me the whole time, as he shook a fryer full of chips. If so, get in touch!
I looked at it. I decided it needed more exclamation marks. So I added a couple in. Then changed pens and added more. And then I realised psychopaths probably did that, too.
The man seemed pleased with my efforts, and so I put my number at the bottom, and handed it to him.
‘Good luck!’ he said, sliding my kebab across the counter. ‘Hope she call.’
I nodded, and popped a quid in his Poppy Appeal tin.
Outside, on a dark street, I stood for a moment and watched the man and his son argue for a second, all lit up, like a private soap opera. The picture hung in the window, smudged and already ignored by a couple, huddled together and heads down, like a team against the night.
I looked at my watch. I was late.
The Kicks were playing in a small venue nearby – Camberwell’s bright green Crown & Anchor on the corner of Rodney Place, next to the windscreen repair centre, just opposite the estate.
They must have felt like they’d made it.
I did, though. Genuinely. Already, I felt like a proper music reviewer, representing my paper. My name would be on the door, I’d been told, saving me the £3 entry and making me feel important.
‘Hi. My name’s Jason Priestley,’ I said, and the girl on the door laughed.
I was used to this.
‘Wow, you smell like kebab,’ she said. ‘Sorry to laugh.’
‘Oh, yes. I just … ate a kebab. I thought you were laughing at my name.’
‘Why would I laugh at your name?’
She quarter-smiled at me.
‘Anyway, I’m from London Now,’ I explained.
‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘I thought it was one of those made-up names. You know, when a paper writes bad reviews of things then makes up a name so they don’t get all the hassle. I’ve seen your reviews. You’re not a happy man, are you?’
She was pretty, this girl, and smiling. Maybe early twenties. Straight black fringe. She was wearing what looked like a homemade T-shirt and neon-blue leggings. She was cool. I suddenly felt fifty.
‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘I’ve just got … specific tastes.’
‘Well, go easy,’ she said, and then she reached out and gently took my hand in hers.
I didn’t know what to say.
And then she stamped it.
The Kicks were good. They were really good. I mean, as I’ve explained, I’m no expert, but I’m paid to look like one, so I’m telling you, with my best expert face on, they were good. Plus, they had fans. Maybe only a dozen or so, but they’d all travelled down from Brighton to watch the band they’d usually watch in Brighton, so you can’t knock their enthusiasm.
The guys – five of them – were all about nineteen, but they stomped about, and rocked out, and made casual, easy-going, mock world-weary jokes between songs. I recognised one or two tracks from the album, and made a few notes from the back of the room on a piece of tissue I found.
I never know how to act at gigs. I feel self-conscious and odd. I can’t let myself go, and I don’t trust my sense of rhythm, so I sort of half-frown and bob my head, and I feel it makes me look like I’m somewhere else, on a higher plain, observing it as a piece of art on a level far beyond everyone else. Holding a piece of paper empowers me, too. It means I don’t have to commit. I’m not there as a fan, nor by accident. I’m there to Do Something, and For a Reason. I sometimes wish I could just hold a piece of paper throughout life in general.
And then I caught her eye.
The girl from the door was looking at me and smiling. She seemed to love this tune, and did a little ironic devil horn’s gesture at me, and I nodded and smiled back, and tried and do the devil’s horn thing, but it looked more like I was hailing a cab. She turned back to the band, and so I did my important face again, and made a few more notes, most of which were just random words, like, ‘music’ and ‘singing’.
I checked again to see if she was looking at me, but no.
And then the gig was over.
I decided to hang around, finish my pint. I watched the girl hugging the band as they came off their tiny stage. They were sweaty, and already holding cans of Red Stripe, and I felt self-conscious, so I drained the rest of my pint and folded out a small tube map to help me work out how to get home.
But then she was there.
‘Drink?’ she said.
It was 1.38 in the morning and we were in the Phoenix on Charing Cross Road.
Abbey – because that’s her name – me, The Kicks, and their fans were slurring now, but it was a nice kind of slur. A comfortable slur. I’d found out a lot already. Abbey was single, for a start, and she’d taken on the role of a kind of head promoter and booker for the boys. She was a student at Brighton University, doing performance and visual arts, which she wasn’t as into as she’d hoped, but really I can’t tell you much else, because, like I say, she’d already told me she was single and that was pretty much all I could focus on.
‘So you thought they were good, yeah?’ she said, a little closer to me than I was used to. I think she had glitter on her cheeks.
‘I did,’ I said. ‘I really did. Here – look at my notes.’
I found the crumpled piece of tissue and began to read.
‘Music. Singing. Speakers. Guitars.’
She giggled and tried to snatch it from me, but I managed to keep hold.
‘Different songs and lyrics,’ I said. ‘Good us
‘They’re Brighton’s brightest,’ she said, and it stuck with me.
We were on the benches to the side, and The Kicks seemed to fit in. Leather jackets and messy hair and T-shirts with rock and roll references. The usual clientele here were theatre people. Good-looking men and women fresh from that night’s show, some still in make-up, some you’d swear hadn’t changed from the stage. The Kicks brought a harder, younger edge with them. And I looked like their rock and roll accountant.
I’d talked to Mikey for a while – he’d seemed to think it was some kind of interview, and so I’d had to play along, asking serious questions and trying to look like I was taking it all in – and he’d told me where they got their name (a nod to Feargal Sharkey, which I didn’t really get but pretended I did) and what they hoped to do next. And then I found myself giving them advice. Sage advice from a man with literally no experience of their world whatsoever. But they took it well, and toasted me, and I felt like I was part of a cool new gang.
Outside, we high-fived our goodbyes, which they took to be ironic, and I found myself using the word ‘man’ more than usual.
‘Good to see you, man. Good luck with it!’
‘So when will the review go in?’ asked Abbey, suddenly there.
I hailed a black cab, unsteadily. The boys all clambered into theirs.
‘Next few days,’ I said.
And she looked at me.
‘Tell me something about yourself,’ she said.
It was out of the blue. What do you say to something like that? She already knew I lived in North London (but not next to a shop everyone thought was a brothel but wasn’t), that I was the Reviews Editor for London Now (but not that I’d been doing it for two days and only because someone else was sick), and that my name was Jason Priestley (her big sister had had posters of Brandon Walsh on her walls for years, she said). But what else?
Make it cool, I thought. You’re an older man. You have experience. You are urbane. You wear proper shoes. You carry a wallet. You only need one more stamp before you get a free latte at Costa.
But instead, I said, ‘My girlfriend left me and now she’s engaged and pregnant.’
A pause.
‘Also, I found a camera recently.’
There was a horrible moment of silence.
She stared at me for a second.
And then:
‘What kind of camera?’
I laughed. Mikey stuck his head out of the window.
‘Come on, Ab!’
She started to back away, and then said, ‘I’m back in a couple of weeks. We could have a kebab if you like?’
I gave her the devil’s horns.
Properly, this time.
ELEVEN
Or ‘Lazyman’
When I got up, Dev was making breakfast.
I say ‘making breakfast’; he’d boiled the kettle.
‘Make me one, too, will you?’ he shouted from the living room, and I could hear the sweet early morning sounds of Modern Warfare 3 flutter my way.
I handed him his tea and slumped onto the sofa.
‘Dobranoc?’ he asked, not taking his eyes off the screen.
‘I. Had. A. Great. Night.’
‘Did you? What happened?’
‘Rock and roll, my friend,’ I said. ‘Rock and roll happened. I saw this band and then we went to the pub.’
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You don’t get much more rock and roll than that. A pub! How am I going to live up to that? You are certainly living the high life now.’
‘The Kicks, Dev. I met these guys, and they were supercool, and we just got on, you know? And there was a girl called Abbey who seemed to take a shine to me.’
‘Their promoter, yeah?’
I balked. Dev saw me balk. I don’t know what I look like when I balk, but Dev seems to. Maybe I’m always balking.
‘Wanted a good review, yeah?’
‘No, it’s … I happened to be there after the gig, and—’
‘You seeing them again?’
‘Maybe in a couple of weeks.’
‘After the review’s out?’
‘There are no firm plans right now, but—’
‘Yeah. Not happening. Forget about Abbey. It’s not about Abbey.’
And then Dev threw his controller down.
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘I forgot to say! It was genius!’
‘What?’
‘I saw your message! For the girl!’
I blinked. What?
‘I saw it!’ he said, again.
‘The kebab thing?’
‘What? No. What kebab thing? I mean in London Now. Very funny. Very saucy.’
‘I didn’t write anything funny. Or saucy. I kept it completely above board. Almost like a business transaction. Very straightforward.’
Dev smiled at me like I was a cheeky so-and-so, and then threw a copy of London Now at my chest.
I found the right page and read it.
I saw you. Charlotte Street. You were climbing into a cab. Think I still have something of yours. Get in touch if you want me to give it back to you.
‘I couldn’t believe it!’ said Dev. ‘You didn’t say you were going to do that. But it was resourceful of you. Use what you have around you. Go for it! I thought it was funny!’
But it wasn’t supposed to be funny. It’s hard to be funny in thirty words. Twenty-eight, actually. The words ‘I Saw You’ are ‘complimentary’, and I’d made sure mine was twenty-eight words long exactly, showing a skill for concise communication and demonstrating my sensible side. Also, it brought with it deniability. If the man with the chunky watch was also, as I suspected he might be, highly-trained as an instructor in various martial arts, I could quite plausibly say I never meant this romantically. But twenty-eight words … is that enough?
I started to count them up, mindlessly, as Dev blethered on, wondering whether there was even the remotest chance she might have seen it too. Whether right now she also had a flatmate annoying her about it over breakfast. Perhaps right now thousands of flatmates across London were mocking those they live with over these ads. And maybe, in a very few cases, they were eliciting excitement in living rooms, or on buses, tubes or trains, as people recognised themselves, and maybe realised the moment they thought was theirs alone was actually one they were sharing, and …
Hang on.
I recounted. And counted again.
Twenty-seven.
‘I mean,’ said Dev, ‘I thought it was forward, but sometimes that’s what women like, isn’t it? Bit of risk-taking.’ Twenty-seven? And then it hit me.
Clem had been on his way back into the office, because he’d forgotten his lighter, and that must have been when I’d spun round, and finished my message with a flourish, because I remember as he walked in, I was already several feet away from his desk, but I didn’t check what I’d written, because why would I need to, and now here in front of me a day later I could see it.
There was a word missing.
A word which changed my sensible message into the kind of message I was really rather hoping to avoid. I’d been reading what I thought I’d written, because I’d agonised over it.
What had been published, though, ended in a different way. What had been published ended in:
Get in touch if you want me to give it to you.
I closed my eyes, and then opened them and read it again.
Give it to you? No! Give it back to you! Get in touch if you want me to give it back to you!
Not give it to you! That was rude! It was bawdy!
This was the kind of message Dev and I had mocked. Witless. Graceless. The kind of last-ditch effort a drunk and sunburnt man with inappropriate tattoos makes to a smart and sober lady trying to ignore him at closing time. Laced with goodwill, but all the while carrying with it something less honourable entirely.
That was not me.
And now I was sure – absolutely sure – that she would see it. She would see this message,
Well done, Jason Priestley! You took a hopeless situation and just gave it your own unique spin to make it worse.
I closed the paper quietly. Then Dev remembered something.
‘What kebab thing?’
The fourth call that morning happened as I stepped off the bus outside the office. The conversations thus far usually went like this:
Me: Hello?
Teenage boy: Yes, it is me, the girl of your dreams you are looking for.
Me: You’re a teenage boy.
Teenage boy: No, I am the lady from the kebab shop poster.
Me: I’m pretty sure you’re the teenage boy who’s been calling me all morning.
Teenage boy: Why are you putting up posters for teenage boys then?
Me: Look, I’ve got your number now.
Teenage boy: So now you’re taking the phone numbers of teenage boys?
Me: Goodbye.
(muffled laughter, high fives, someone in the background saying ‘call him again, call him again!’)
And so the search, such as it was, could have been going better.
I crept into the office, slightly sheepishly, holding a tray of coffees and a tub of chocolate Mini Bites for Clem. Clem loves Mini Bites. These are the kind of details you pick up in an office.
‘These are not just Mini Bites!’ he said, gratefully and with raised, comedy eyebrows. ‘These are M&S Mini Bites!’
‘Ha ha!’ I said, though I should have tried harder. ‘Well, I know you like them. And I’m very sorry about yesterday.’
‘No biggie!’ he said. ‘We all have our moments.’
‘You were just being funny,’ I said.
‘I suppose I was being funny, wasn’t I?’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘You just suffered what is technically known as an SOHF. Sense of Humour Failure!’
‘Ha ha!’ I said, again, as if I had no idea how he made these things up and they were brilliant.
‘You know Clem’s signed up to do some stand-up next week?’ said Zoe, staring at her screen, not wanting to make eye contact.