Blind Needle by Trevor Hoyle

the noise and the dirt and the smoke – but then that was industry for you. Where there’s muck there’s brass.
    This was the final bitter conundrum: there was plenty of muck all right – floating in the air, lying in the gutters – but where was the brass?
    The streetlights came on. The display lights in the shops flickered into life, laying bare for scrutiny their paltry contents: cheap shoes, reconditioned washers and fridges, second-hand clothes, a dusty jumble of broken television sets, heaps of yellowing paperbacks and warped LPs, a row of coloured plastic toilet seats. These were the few traders that were still in business; the rest were silent behind rusty iron grillework or battened over with raw timber covered in fly-posters shiny with glue … St Thomas’s Jumble Sale, Admission 10p … New Orleans Trad Jazz Night … Be Born Again – Join the Eternal Flame! … AIDS Helpline at Your Service … We Do House Clearances – Best Prices Paid …
    I turned a corner into a narrower, gloomier street. There was a row of flyblown shops, most of them empty and ransacked, one with colour photographs from magazines taped to the window which might have been a gent’s hairdressers. Halfway down the street, above a window blurred with condensation, a sign said: E GA FOO S ORE.
    There was a ‘Room to Let’ card in the window, propped amongst the haricot beans, chickpeas, sacks of roots and jars of chutney.
    A bell jangled but no one came. The air was dense with the smell of spices and the mingled odours of an Asian bazaar. Motheaten fans of dried leaves hung from the ceiling, masking the single flourescent tube. Vibrant green vegetable shoots, fastened with rubber bands like bunches of daffodils, and dark purple fruits, shiny as bowling balls, lay in splintered boxes, peeped out through shredded tissue paper.
    I could supply the missing ‘D’ and ‘T’ to make ‘FOO S ORE into ‘FOOD STORE’ but I couldn’t work out the ‘E GA’ part of it. A man appeared with heavy, sad, sleepy eyes and a thick white stubble extending into the open neck of a collarless cotton garment.
    I nodded to the card in the window. ‘Is it still free, the room? Available to rent?’
    He blinked slowly, heavy eyelids coming down and going up again like wrinkled blinds. ‘You would like this room?’ His expression didn’t alter, though he sounded faintly incredulous.
    â€˜How much?’
    He rubbed the white stubble; his fingernails were long and curved and rimmed with dirt. ‘Twenty pounds. One week,’ he said abruptly. He pointed above his head. ‘Up there.’
    I shook my head. ‘I don’t have that much.’ He frowned at me, the blinds closed and slowly opened. ‘It’s too much money,’ I said. ‘I don’t have enough.’
    â€˜Fifteen pounds.’
    â€˜I can give you twelve.’
    â€˜Twelve pounds,’ he said, and he nodded. ‘In front.’
    He motioned me to come forward. ‘Come through please.’
    He came out from behind the boxes and sacks and squirmed sideways to get through a half-open door. The passage was crammed with produce which was why the door couldn’t be fully opened. We mounted some dark stairs. The Indian was labouring, his chest wheezing: the smell of garlic enveloped me like a pungent gas. He wore loose slippers over thick white socks, flap-flapping ahead of me across the landing and into a room directly above the shop.
    He switched on the light and beckoned me inside.
    There was an iron bedstead and a bare flock mattress with broad blue stripes, a bolster without a cover, a few grey blankets on a chair. On the marble top of the washstand, as if to justify that this genuinelywas a ‘Room To Let’, some thoughtful soul had placed an enamel bowl inside which was a plastic jug of the type that garages give