Our Thomas says it all began when we closed the shop early because of the Beast from the East. He says after I left he went out for a cigarette and there was Tomas sitting there begging and the snow was falling on him the way that that snow was – with so much air in it like polystyrene flecks and just piling, settling thickly on top of him. Thomas says he offered Tomas tea, then, and then a cigarette, and it began.
Tomas begs on one side of the street and his wife Jo begs on the other side. She is beautiful, he is not. They are young. Twentysomething – it is difficult to tell these days. I am getting older but all that really means is that everybody else looks younger – impossibly, peachily, cleanly young. But when Tomas opens his mouth you can see his teeth are rotten and all over the place and he is so open and every time he opens his mouth it’s an argument. When he comes in to pick up sittingcardboard in the morning he doesn’t open his mouth any more. He opens his rotten mouth in the evening when he comes in to change the beggingcoins into useful notes. He meows the numbers at me in Romanian, correcting my English, brusque, sharp, annoyed or not annoyed, annoyed or playing annoyance, just disconnected enough to play annoyed/not annoyed.
On the street they are solemn and solid and unmoving, playing the part of beggars, still and sad and stuck. When they change the beggingcoins into notes they are loud and joking and she laughs and is all throat and she has no English. Inigo says Tomas speaks four languages, Tomas says it’s five. His face is that wide emoticon of distress. Every day the back of his neck gets browner and browner. The beggingcoins smell of half smoked cigarettes, flecks of burnt tobacco on them, stink of earth and decay and late nights but then so does Carla and Carla is a popstar. Andy doesn’t like them, because he is a snob and doesn’t want to encourage them like I encouraged the King of the Tramps who ended up shouting FUCK YOU I WAS ONLY DOING IT TO PLEASE YOU ANYWAY in the shop when he was too drunk to serve.
One day he had grippe he told me, Tomas. ‘What is wrong with you,’ I asked, ‘you look awful’. ‘Grippe,’ his eyes glossy and his skin a weirder colour than usual, his skin waxy, textbook waxy grey. They stayed out though, even though they were sick. I thought maybe they were coming off drugs or were on them or they’d taken something bad or something, I’d never even heard of grippe but it’s a funny word and the French root is to snatch whilst the German is flu.
Tommy who plays the guitar out at the front of the Subway – who used to play guitar out at the front of the Co-op – says that they’re bad, Tomas and his wife. He came in to tell me, conspiratorially, at the edge of the shop, ‘can I have a word, Fee?’ that they were Bad People, that he’d seen them at the clinic, that they were heroin addicts, that they weren’t to be trusted. But also I think Tommy is a bit racist and territorial – I remember him sitting right next to – right next to – the Romanian Ladies when they were bussed in and out every morning and there being a begging standoff one day. Then that toad Sandro moved the bin over the road in the middle of the night and outside was quiet for a while.
Tommy is very brown and thin and weathered and wiry and handsome, white-blue eyes, and has recently started wearing a thick, white, knitted fisherman’s jumper from the overpriced vintage shop. He twangs away at his guitar, an amped up, brassy twang, it’s loud and he’s good. He’s good at a couple of songs and he plays the songs on repeat, Charles reminded me last week – he used to play the same four songs at the Co-op door and drove Charles mad.
Last week he didn’t have his guitar and I asked where his guitar was and he said he had forgotten to charge the amp and now he was worried that his kids would draw up in their cars and see him begging, not busking but begging, and he didn’t want them to see him begging again and he kept seeing them in his peripheral vision and he would be ashamed if they saw him. He was twitchy and left early. I have not seen him for a while.
I get used to not seeing people for a while. In the wine shop people pause because they’ve realised they drink too much or they’re spending too much or they’ve told me too much and then I see them months later and they look healthy and are distant because they remember I’m a pusher and a pervasive pusher and I’ve heard too much.
I see people not walk past the shop anymore, walk on the other side of the street and not look in – Cliff, Graham, Nice smelling Andrew, Joy.
And there’s people who always look in, Hobbit John, George, the Florists.
And there’s the people I don’t know who look at themselves in the window, check themselves out, pout and look seriously at their reflection, making sure everything fits together and they look like themselves.
Ryan says he saw Big Tam the other day and his face was all messed up, but Ryan is an exaggerator and once had a hernia of the imagination. I saw big Tam passing the shop on one of the rainy evenings and he looked fine to me, he loped, shuffled and looked fat and shouted, Hiya Darlin, through the door to me and I smiled with all my face.
Big Tam is my favourite. He really is big and I’m not sure where he sits, or how he sits really, he is quite fat. I don’t know how he would work it because he is so big and where would his legs go? I can’t see how the Tam I know would translate into begging but I know he does because he brings in coins to change, different coins from Tomas and wife, smaller denominations – coppers, five pences, twenty pences.
His voice is huge and grinding and frightening, I guess. Sometimes the customers look around alarmed when they hear him. He sounds like he’s drunk, like the back of his tongue is swollen, slow and amused, like he’s smoked and shouted himself hoarse, Arite Darlin, ye Big Darlin, ye arite Darlin aye? The boys say he calls them pal and Carla’s Wee Yin but I’m always Darlin.
From his pockets comes the smash but other things, too, presented on the counter with his great yellow fingers, a green heart shaped button, short lengths of blue bound wire, flat pebbles, a corner of a playing card. One day he pulled out a small, enamelled, hollow golden egg with a stand and blousy pink flowers stretching across it. ‘I collect these, darlin’ (long pause and soft long look) ‘this one’s from the charity shop up that way’ (not a pause full of meaning but a soft full pause) ‘I get them and sometimes I sell them to the jewellers next door’ (ha ha ha ha) ‘I’ve got somethin for you Darlin ah’ll bring it in’ but he doesn’t.
Tomas asks if he can leave his computer behind the counter and then he does, a CPU nestling among the cardboard. We worry that there are drugs in it or it’s stolen but really I just think he is leaving his computer with us for a couple of hours. He and his wife are camping in the churchyard at St Mary’s. He’s taken to sneaking up on me in the shop and he’s good at it and Carla never lets on.
He brings me an empty tube for a 30 year old tawny Port. He found a bag on the street with a sporran in it. A sporran and a superhero onesie, a cape, a mask and a glass ship in a bottle.
Grey Skinny Thomas used to be outside the shop every day until he wasn’t. Skinny Thomas’ face is very rectangular and all of his features are exaggerated but round, his brow, his chin, his nose all growing towards his mouth. He hated the junkies and took 6 sugars in his tea and I could almost make him smile even though he wore this hard scrunched face and didn’t say anything to anyone, hardly even acknowledged the cup in his hands let alone the addition of coins into it. He wasn’t embarrassed, he just wasn’t really there. He was friends with Half a Head and Half a Head freaked me out, he was unpredictable, loose limbed, drunk.
And then one day he wasn’t there any more, Skinny Thomas.
Months later I was struggling getting plates and glasses and boxes of bottles out of a car and he shouted over at me from the busstop across the street, ‘Fee! Fee! Fee! Fee!’ so pleased not to be sitting and everything growing together but to be stretched up face to the sky, tall, long. What are you doing, I shouted and he shouted, I’m waiting for a bus and we both just smiled at each other from across the road. I shouted, that’s great Thomas that’s really great and he shouted, I’ll see you then. We stood not shouting, stretching, smiling. The sun was setting at the top of the Great Western Road and he got on his bus.
Tomas says self-proclaimed Guru George is Bad People and I asked him why and he just pulled his sad necky face and said he’s Bad and nods at the space he left. He says Ryan was a Good Boy and I know that to be incorrect, so I’m not sure that he is a great judge of character. One day after Tomas charges his phone he shows me a photo of his wife and a small boy, his son. He says his son is in care and they want to go back to Romania but they can’t get their son back and so they sit collecting money for him. He angrily asks me for a job and I say he doesn’t know anything about wine and he says his family has a vineyard and it’s all just fermented grapes and there’s nothing to know anyway. I say that all the bottles are different and he looks incredulous and says no, how can they all be different?
It is hot and Tomas has a new pair of fluorescent pink trainers that he has taken off and placed neatly beside him. He tells me I shouldn’t be riding a bike, and that Coca Cola tastes like sugar and caramel. I tell him he has a way to go with his tasting notes.
Phoebe Weller grew up in Fife. She studied English and Anthropology at Glasgow and stayed. She sells wine and talks about cheese.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. IV]
