Notes from July

I stepped out of the Tesco and polished my Pink Lady apple on my shirt. As I stepped in to Whitechapel High Street, a man called me over and asked me for change. “Just for cup of tea,” he said, and I shook my head “no.” He had clear powder blue eyes and a green checkered shirt, and he shook as he spoke. “I’m going to kill myself,” he told me. “I’m going to kill myself tonight,” he called, as I walked away.

At the crosswalk to the Bell Foundry I thought about what I’d done. Back home, none of this situation would happen. For one, I wouldn’t be eating an apple, a simple orchard fruit. Back home, I wasn’t poor, and I wouldn’t buy basic ingredients and eat them as a meal. Back home, I would have a soy latte and biscotti for sustenance, a soy misto to maintain.

Back home I wouldn’t have to answer no for a request for change. I seldom offer money to the panhandlers that litter the streets, but I heartlessly, and naively, thought that they didn’t need it. Here, it’s clear that the people asking for money are completely penniless, but I know now that their requests for tube fare or coffee money are just covers for their fix. And here, I can’t afford to share my change, because I need it for the same. That 70p might not get me on the train but it might tomorrow, when I find another pound under my bed in an accidental cleaning blitz. The loose dimes and nickels might translate into a paper cup of filter coffee at a later date.

Earlier today I walked through Ladbroke Grove, up a street I don’t usually take on my way to work. I ran into my coworker, the stock boy who struts in a sort of cartoon sitting motion as his jeans fall lower off his hips. He didn’t see me right away, with his ball cap and shaggy black hair covering his face, Pendulum and Incubus pulsating in his headphones.

At 10am he brought me a coconut coffee from the fair trade organic where I spend my nickels and dimes on special or miserable occasions. When we talk, it’s usually about work or girls or our weekends… nothing in particular, now that I think hard about it. But he’s still one of my favourites, soft spoken and funny, unassuming in the way that he spends his nights getting high in his friends’ living rooms playing video games, or in Farringdon to see his Thai “girl.”

He never tells us her name and I know nothing about her, but I hear she’s quite a looker “if you’re into that sort of thing.” When he goes out, it’s to Fabric, or Sports Bar for pound-ninety-nine drinks, or to the pub after football. He has the best style out of anyone I work with but his clothes never quite fit.

In the morning I worked the tills, chatting with customers, finding out how they spend their time in Notting Hill. A stylist, a publishing agent, a couple taking a break from their family in North London for a day browsing the market… An attractive forty-year-old came forward with a stack of sweatpants and I suppressed the urge to josh him on his choice of casual wear. Turns out it’s not appropriate to make fun of people’s purchases.

I asked what he was up to this afternoon, a little sooner than I intended, but I couldn’t back out now. “Spending the day at the recording studio, actually” which perked my ears up. “What do you do? Are you a producer?” I asked. Everyone in Notting Hill is a writer or producer or production assistant or something that finances celebrity-based entertainment. “It’s mine,” he answered. “I’m in a band.”

Not wanting to pry, and not wanting to pry to discover that it was nothing worth prying apart, I asked “what type of music?” “Pop,” he said, so I knew I should probably ask more. You don’t make pop music if you don’t want to be known, so I went ahead. “What’s your band called? Do you have a good name?”

“Have you heard of Take That?” he said. I blushed really red, which I never do, and suddenly felt a bit star-stuck, a mix of self-conscious and ambitious, curious, and wry. “I should know who you are,” I mumbled, “I’ve heard of you guys but I don’t know what British pop stars look like, coming from Canada.”

“I guess we weren’t very big in North America,” he said. “No, you weren’t,” was my immediately-regretted reply.

He took his sweats and headed into Portobello, off to lay new tracks with Gary Barlow and the rest. The first British pop star that I’d spoken to casually and who had once graced my walls from a poster out of Bunty made off into the street.