Chris Markou stepped smartly out of the Shepherd’s Hill Wine Centre and had to wait while a silver-painted Belgian truck the size of a railway carriage passed majestically across his front between the rows of parked cars and vans, moving like a liner among supply boats for the moment but destined for a fearful traffic-blocking struggle when it tried to turn in front of the footbridge. The sort of thing that was ruining the area, thought Chris as he bounded up the couple of steps to the post office.
It was the slack time before the lunch-hour rush. A young mother in bright squalid clothes dragged and shoved her two children towards the door, cursing in a preoccupied way, and Chris had the elder Asian brother’s undivided attention from behind the counter. The glass top of this bore a pile of magazines offering the true facts behind a Royal pregnancy and another of copies of a pornographic short-story collection by a local feminist writer, signed by her on the title-page too.
‘Well, squire, what can I do you for?’
‘Could you be a real sport and slip me a couple of hundred quid?’
‘Now you just tell me why I want to go and do a stupid thing like that.’
‘It’ll only be for a couple of ticks till I’ve sold a few bottles of hooch. Old Caldecote just came in to cash a cheque. Seems to think he can use me like his bloody bank, you know, and he’s the local lord or something. I suppose I should be flattered, should I, is that his idea? With the pub his next port of call and loaded with currency and only too willing to oblige.’
The younger brother was rearranging the video stand to give the horror and crime greater prominence. ‘Are you saying old man Caldecote cashed a cheque with you for two hundred?’
‘Well, I was low on cash to start with and then he came along and bloody near cleaned me out.’
After a pause and a sort of sideways shrug of the head the elder caused his till to glide open. ‘I’ve always had this silly, trusting, gullible nature, right from a small child.’ The tens and twenties crossed over at top speed. ‘Count them, count them. And take care of them. Don’t get mugged while you’re crossing the street. There’s some nasty foreign types have moved into the district lately. Be warned, now. Oh, two-thirty will do, okay?’
‘Thanks very much, Howard.’
The name was not a jest, on Chris’s side at any rate. None of their customers had once heard the brothers’ original names to their knowledge. Even between themselves they used them only in exasperation or to pass off a racial slur. Except at such moments, and sometimes when their wives were present, they likewise spoke English to each other, though neither had ever read a book in the language. Quite a few column-inches of newspaper, though, and a great deal of various pamphlets.
The younger, called Charles, said when they were alone, ‘Mutts indeed.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Thank you very mutts. A dead give-away. None of them can pronounce words like that properly.’
‘By them I presume you mean gentlemen from Cyprus.’
‘I mean Greeks. Are we supposed to believe old man Caldecote took anything like two hundred pounds off him this morning? Fifty it might be, at the outside.’
‘What are you getting at, Charles? I don’t care for the look of that nasty gleam in your eye.’
‘Tell me, think, why does he want all that cash suddenly? To pay for something, not to put on a horse. And what’s an office manager paying for that only cash will do? And the answer’s not cocktail-sticks.’
‘Your trouble, one of your troubles is you think everybody is as bad as you.’
‘A short-notice delivery of what shall we say, three cases, four cases? Going for a song to clear in a hurry, before the Old Bill come round.’
‘I think you’ve got a horrible mind. I’m surprised at you.’
‘By Gad, sir, nobly spoken, I do declare.’
‘Now Charles, don’t you fool around, you’re the one who’s going all British. You’re even starting to look British, you know that? Soon your eyes will be turning blue and your ears sticking out.’
‘I know you mean it kindly, Howard, but I don’t appreciate your saying British like that. Chris is British. Hardly the same thing.’
‘All right, English, and where would you prefer to have come from, my lord? Kent? East Anglia?’
‘They do nothing but manufacture turkeys in East Anglia. Preferably the West of England. Devon, perhaps. Cornwall. Somewhere I can get the tang of the sea in my nostrils. This way, please,’ Charles called to a new arrival, a bushy-faced old gent with a literary look who was asking about typewriter ribbons at the counter. ‘Do you know what group? All black or black and red?’
The shop was beginning to fill up. Quite soon Howard and Charles were hard at work behind the counter, moving like dancers or boxers as they dealt with two or three ranks of shoppers at once, thrusting articles into paper bags – white for eatables, brown for general goods – cashing up, scribbling in the ledger, clicking with the credit-card imprinter, darting round the front every other minute to put their hand on a particular pot-holing journal or crock of honey. A short queue formed in the post-office section proper, where a middle-aged woman who really had come from a place like Kent reduced the tempo of activity to something nearer the authentic British (or English) level. Howard’s wife strolled out of the room at the back of the shop, where it was Charles’s wife’s turn to stay with the two younger children, and lent a hand with fetching some of the easier items off the shelves. This addition to the team speeded things up hardly at all, because male customers up to quite an advanced age tended to linger in sight of her flawless creamy skin and great dark eyes. But the brothers were well satisfied with her overall contribution to trade.
In a momentary lull Howard murmured to Charles, ‘You see that one just going out now? – yes, there, in the blue.’
‘Took the Tatler. What about her?’
‘Fine pair of bristols, didn’t you think? Small but, you know, solid.’
‘I suppose so, I hardly noticed. You’re vulgar, it’s the only word for you. Anyway she’s forty-five if she’s a day.’
‘You know who it is? That’s old man Caldecote’s bit of stuff. Not bad, eh?’
Charles said nothing to that. His attention had been caught by something outside over the road. ‘Do you see what I see?’
They hesitated briefly before, calling ‘Bear with us a second, would you?’ and ‘Don’t go away now’ to the two or three within range of the counter, they moved along to the broad pavement window beside the door and, as if rehearsed, started fiddling with an elaborate display structure intended to attract people to performances of an anti-nuclear drama at a small suburban theatre near by. Meanwhile they peered across to the Shepherd’s Hill Wine Centre. Parked next to it, in the little side-road that ran down to the branch library, stood a square grey van without markings, its rear doors standing open. As they watched, a tee-shirted youth picked up an equally unidentified cardboard carton from the inside and carried it with unnatural speed towards the shop entrance.
Howard and Charles looked at each other, nodded slowly in unison and burst into loud laughter. As always, this last bothered slightly some of those within hearing who wondered whether the brothers might be enjoying a typical Asian joke at some of the stupid Brits they served and made a good living out of. But this was rare.