By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
27) Shopping
On and off, clothes are a burden. Standing on Fore Street's bricks Paul is aware of every wrinkle and crease of his jeans, has his shirt undone. Alice is flopped wide-armed and wide-legged in the pushchair. Even Julie occasionally, and unconsciously, wafts her cotton top to send some new air up around her breasts. Michael alone, in his long grey school trousers, white shirt and school tie, looks cool. Every other Fore Street shopper oozes sweat and discomfort.
At the top of pedestrian Fore Street, the grey road looping around it, Cornhill stands like a pillared cake. Within Cornhill's shade is a cement-floored market smelling of raw meat and melted butter. Thin old women come out from among the wooden stalls with scowls of doubt and disapproval. Below the pillars, down narrow steps, are subterranean lavatories. It will be cool down there.
Michael is in need of a new jacket. Price is the prime consideration. They have had to buy hardly any new clothes for Alice she gets Polly's hand-me-downs. Fastidious Michael, worse luck, has to come and choose. Today, as a prospective treat, they are also pricing up cycling shorts.
Further down Fore Street a small round man waits outside another shop. Instead of a pushchair, he waits with a two-wheeled shopping trolley. Paul worked with him once. His wife is a big round woman. The man has a squeaky voice. Giggling, he told Paul that he wanted to be a male chauvinist but his wife wouldn't let him.
Paul looks aside before the man can make eye contact.
A tall old woman, curved over her folded arms, stands in the curved shadow before Cornhill.
Impatience governs Paul's own clothes shopping. He will set out from home with every intention of finding the best buy. But soon he is seeing the same article at about the same price in all the shops and is aware of shop assistants all poised to serve him. So in the next shop, different labels same clothes, he will grab the nearest thing approximately his size, part with his worried-over money, and go home dissatisfied.
Michael and Julie, though, look, try on, look, and look again; often they go home satisfied without having bought a single thing. Now they stand side by side before a window of immaculate dummies, and they look.
Michael is already almost as tall as Julie. Both are neat people. Julie has on a cotton top with thin straps, a short dark skirt and flat blue shoes. Both stand with their backs straight and their knees together.
Paul and Alice are used to waiting for them. It is a family division. Paul looks to the other shoppers and wonders what they find to buy, and why.
Paul's view of these other shoppers is larded with contempt. Not that he thinks himself, by comparison, superior. The contempt is apart from him, is not related to him, is for them and their gawping selves alone.
Giving in to the human craving for novelty, these people travel miles simply to go shopping. Skimming along on a totally artificial environment of motorway and shopping precinct, they have no roots to their being. Pensioner couples in pressed clothes, made-up women packaged atop high heels they haven't delved into themselves to see how they work. All are content with the superficialities of existence. Media fodder.
Paul exempts Julie and Michael from this gullible shopping mass. Their income means that they have to seek out the best buy. Otherwise Paul despises consumerism. Its dupes come to look at the world and its antics solely through the lens of consumerism am I being shortchanged? Thus, rather than appear to have been cheated, do such people become critical where it cannot matter of scenery for instance where they are not being sold anything, where there is no transaction other than human intercourse, where there is the exchange of ideas and opinions, not of cash and goods.
Here, by shops, on an overbearing hot day such as this, Paul knows that he could so easily become a misogynist. Most shoppers are women. These shops, these prettified precincts, are not designed to attract men. Most shops, even the men's, are designed to attract women. And women, women who like to shop, do not see the whole. They do not accept that their way of life, no matter what they can't afford, is paid for in starvation elsewhere. The price of a nice cup of tea or coffee is poverty.
A big pink man stops, sweating, beside Michael and Julie.
He has short curly gingerish hairs on the back of his solid neck. Looking into the window he moves slowly around Julie and Michael like an amicable and inquisitive bullock. Michael and Julie don't move.
Turning away Paul looks to the statue of Admiral Blake. Looking up makes his right eye throb.
Two different policemen have passed him here in the precinct. One's eyes noted Paul's bruised face. Neither passed any remark. If last night's assailant did find a corner to die in, no-one has found him yet; and the further away the death the further away any connections with Paul.
Fitting, Paul thinks today, that Bridgwater's one statue should be of a fighting man. And he wonders again why they have placed the statue of a nautical man with his outflung arm pointing inland....
commentary.... The world has become acceptably cynical. The clean-cut heroes have all been found to have weaknesses. To fight, to take up arms, once sounded so simple and noble, brave and clean. War, we have found out, is usually very muddled and messy.
The past is a fiction. Remember, in every nostalgic past, there was always some out-of-sorts bugger like yourself.
The present makes the past. Who, for instance, would Bridgwater have to celebrate if it wasn't for Admiral Blake? He is the present's invention, fulfilling the present's need.
Paul could not think of that statue, nor of any other indicator of civic pride in Bridgwater, without a sneer. Because, in Bridgwater, despite the thin steeple beyond Cornhill's low white dome, despite the admirable admiral, despite the intense brick college at the back of Sydenham, all was commerce. It was the shopkeepers, the factory owners, the local men of business who made their money and their names in Bridgwater, who had taken their profits and their importance from the town. Everyone else had just been customers, or hired hands; the most they could ever hope for was the foreman's top hat. While the men of commerce continued to put up plaques to each other; and to this day they still when pillars are only kitsch-decorous call themselves pillars of society. And still, to make themselves rich, they rob their workers of wages, cheat their customers of pennies, then give a few of those pennies to a charity and make believe they are doing some good. What good, Paul wondered, had they ever done the likes of him?
Those sly men of commerce had to have one hero to give themselves respectability. The erectors of Blake's statue, though, had not themselves been heroic people. Nor had they had much choice. Blake was Bridgwater's one success. Bridgwater otherwise had been the home of pompous causes whom history had overtaken. Here Colonel Wyndham surrendered his stout castle; here the Duke of Monmouth declared himself King, before being trounced at Sedgemoor.
And now there can be no heroes. Their pedestals are flawed before ever they climb on them. We've seen it all before. Soldiers and politicians, laughing stocks who end up killing people, for which they want the world and its dog to think well of them.
Should Bridgwater have celebrated in stone one of its more prosaic citizens? A giant marble figure, say, of some farmer come to market, sat formally with his large red hands on his outspread knees, while he waits to be cheated? Or, more typically, a wobbly statue of a drunk, legs bent sideways?
Paul knew, however, that statuary does not exist to foster truth. It is part of an illusion, of a town that, individually and collectively, practises deceptions upon itself. Koi carp, each fish worth thousands of pounds, are kept in a manor house pool in the very middle of the stinkmaking cellophane factory. While the admirable admiral continues to point into a window above a shop that keeps changing hands...
The world does not now want heroes. Heroes demand allegiance and are therefore dangerous. Now we have instead destroyers and creators, contributors and consumers. And while potential heroes strike poses the world goes shopping, ignores the statues, ignores the other people in the precincts, and steps aside from danger. The heroes are all elsewhere.
Paul, though, did then have a hero.
In Bridgwater, in 1986, a pavement artist lived in a rubbish shack, built and decorated by himself. The council evicted him from the piece of spare ground. He made no protest. But, curiously, some of the local residents did.
Paul had more respect for that pavement artist than for any of the local dignitaries who bought and sold and thought no more on the big issues. Because, when it comes down to it, it's only the big issues that count. Not the little snitchy ones like money, but the meaning of life. That kind of thing. What we're doing here on the planet Earth. Not how much we're earning. Not how much we make in a week. But what we make of our lives. That's what counts.
How can money, how can the owning of things, help us to achieve wisdom? Money, the making of and spending, simply fills time, provides distractions. The things that money can buy will not help you think. And what is money but a system of barter, a result of trade? And trade is a fiction that has grown upon the necessity of provision. A self-sufficient people do not need to trade. Needs can be artificially created through advertising, but real trade must always require a deficit on one side and a surplus on the other.
Paul had not once spoken to the man, but the pavement artist, by his way of life and demeanour, had obviously given life some thought. Not, maybe, that he could have expressed those thoughts he was not that good a pavement artist, and Paul had only heard him grunt an acknowledgement of the change thrown in his tin. Through the mode of his existence he continued to be, nevertheless, Paul's one hero.
The man tried, albeit ineffectually, to leave behind beauty. His rubbish shack collected curiosity and comments. The weather quickly washed away his paintings. But he did try. And in this life there are those who try to leave beauty for those who come after, and there are those who thoughtlessly fuck this world up.
Here and now most of us are property speculators. Like rats on this dump of a planet we seek to turn temporarily abandoned bits and pieces into a passing comfortable niche. Until it all slips away from under us. The painter's way of life knew this.
The greater the possessions the less the humanity. Materialism is inherently dissatisfying, ownership always a disappointment. The search for profit knows no scruples, and the people who declare that everyone has their price are the first to be bought. In a society that believes everything can be bought everyone is for sale. In this society the thief and procurer are tacitly respectable because their motivation is personal gain. The heretic here is he who goes and does for free. In a society that makes whores and hustlers of its artists, the pavement artist remained unbought and unsullied.
Paul's own ambition was to be conscience-clean contented. No more, no less. (Only sad or disappointed men strive for the good of all mankind: the happy and the fulfilled strive only to maintain their status quo.) Failing the success of his family, it had become Paul's fantasy ambition to be that pavement artist. To be free, unowned and unowning, moving on, moving out of people's troubled static lives, walking about inside his own stink.
How's that for an honest man's hero?
A high red car comes creeping around Cornhill. In the high red car are four upright fat people with tight expressionless faces.
The less proper shoppers open their new clothes in the hope of air. Alice uncomfortably stirs. Paul moves her bright blond head around a black bollard and into the shade.
Within this shop/office window a thin man with clipped hair leans back from his desk with a flat white phone to his ear. It is a customary posture. He is one of a new breed of people who spend their lives with an ear plugged into a phone talking to voices not present.
Paul sighs, bored with being here, doesn't want to be seen by anyone he knows. His bruises will only attract comment, and confirm him in the character that Bridgwater has given him.
commentary.... The heroes are all dead. The world is too cynical now. Politicians have seen to that. Shallow ambitious people every single one, hyping themselves up to a sublime saintliness which they do not expect to be believed. The public domain is full of such fictions. The quiet clean-cut heroes have all gone.
Standards now are set by the single amoral eye of television. That those standards are nothing more than images is beyond contention. All images, however, are examples for us to follow, models for us to copy. Workers leaving a factory gate, combat soldiers in single file, crowds waiting glumly for a train.... all are situations with their own modes of behaviour. With the new we are at our most uncomfortable: but if we can see ourselves via an existing image then we have one concern less. Television provides us with those images, with those millionfold norms.
Theatre has always been propaganda, if only on behalf of the status quo stereotypes keeping to their station in life and the ruling elite to theirs. Now, though, we have so much theatre, television, that it has no overall single message. All is image. And the viewers know that those images, especially with regard to adverts, are being used to manipulate them. People may think that they themselves are sophisticated because the images being used to manipulate them are sophisticated. These, though, are exactly the same minds that were once moved to patriotic indignation by a propagandist's clumsy puppet show. Those minds question now only the efficiency of the image if it can make them do what they think the propagandist wishes.
Television swamps us with images. Every single one of those images has its own set of values. So when the psychopath horror movies are shown, or the explicit porno sex, or the slushy romances, or the bank robberies, or the car chases and muggings, television is setting a precedent. Certain minds will not question their own actions in such situations, they will simply act out the scene according to television's precedent, according to that situation's set of rules. Singing, dancing, and murdering in the rain....
Television's images are usually those of destruction bombs, car crashes, ordered demolitions even. In a society of instant images destruction is instantaneously effective. Was there, now isn't. Creation takes longer, is not so immediately noticeable.
Violence also makes better drama. But violent heroes now are not those who, sacrificing themselves for their fellows, recklessly charge at machine gun posts. Instead it is the saboteur who, hidden safely from his enemy, blows them up and, mission accomplished, sneaks off into the night. This makes better TV. Viewers all assassin and spectator we are uninvolved. So do all in these times pursue the image and not the ideal.
Television is the agent of amorality. When the plot's hero is a saboteur it makes of sabotage a glamorous thing. So children place concrete blocks on railway lines and, like the TV saboteurs, hide and watch the results with glee. Killing at a remove, anonymous killing.
The saboteurs on the screen pay no heed to unknown human lives. If the train so dramatically destroyed contained human beings, then the plot pays little attention to their passing. The message is that only the lives of people known to us are important. Strangers are of no account. And these days we are most of us strangers looking out from our cars at strangers, locking ourselves in our houses away from strangers.
In a world of strangers we are all anonymous and of no account, live lives barely touching. Acts of sudden random violence can therefore make others aware of us. Respect us. You will never take us for granted. None of you scum. Hear that? the boy wrote on the listening wall.
There are too many people breathing now on this small globe. Too many of us rubbing against each other and having to ignore most everyone, like the world's become one big city.
True Stories
In September 1965 McPheat, a machine operator of Main Road, West Huntspill, was seen sitting on the kerb in St Mary Street, Bridgwater. 23 year old McPheat was apparently crying. A police officer offered to call a taxi. Mcpheat started shouting, "Leave me alone. Leave me in peace." McPheat became so agitated that it eventually took four policemen to restrain him. McPheat was later fined £50 for being Drunk and Disorderly.
On the afternoon of March 15th 1989 self-employed Agricultural Contractor Roger Douglas Sparks, of Haines Hill, Taunton, went in to the Cornhill gents, Bridgwater. PC Douglas Shaw saw 30 year old Roger Douglas Sparks go into a cubicle and soon came to suspect that an indecent act was taking place with the person in the adjoining cubicle. PC Douglas Shaw fetched PC Andrew Owen, who had been waiting outside the lavatory. PC Andrew Owen looked over the top of the door and challenged the two men. Roger Douglas Sparks said afterwards that he was very ashamed.
By Wednesday 15th November 1989 ambulancemen had collected 32,927 signatures from Bridgwater people in support of their pay claim. Steve Jones, of Colley Lane, volunteered to take the bundles to Banstead in Surrey.
"I am more than happy to help the ambulancemen," he said, "As I am in the haulage business it seemed a good thing to do."
In July 1990 Anthony Leslie Finka, of Fairfax Road, Bridgwater, dragged his 17 year old girlfriend out of their house by the hair. They had been arguing and she had broken some fragile ornaments. Having dragged her out of the house, 19 year old Anthony Leslie Finka forced her back inside and made her paint the living room door.
