This is the first third of work-in-progress. Inspired by my own foreign-ness

The reason I went there that night was to get some tobacco. I had two packets of rizlas, fourteen filters and no bleeding tobacco. As far as I knew, Jim’s Offie was open all day. Whenever I needed something, it was open, as though wholly for my benefit. There was no list of times, no ten-to-four on Sundays, not even one of those open-close signs other shops usually have tacked to the inside of the door.

If you didn’t know better – if you were maybe, a weekender down from London and got a bit peckish and popped into Jim’s, you would be unfortunate enough to delve into the dark side of chocolate gone white around the edges, stale Extra gum. Were you hungry enough, you’d go over to the biscuit shelf and find that when you picked up a packet of Hobnobs, the dust made you sneeze.
But the wine and the tobacco were always fresh, and Jimmy kept a keen eye on the whereabouts of his favourite newspaper stand that used to go walkies when the crowds of boys would fall out of The Albert Inn at 2am.
As long as it was back and ready for the Sunday’s, Jimmy never told them off.

I think Jimmy kept his offie open all hours because he enjoyed the company and diluted banter of drunken students over that of his wife, who, it seemed to me, always smelt of deep-fat frying and damp dishcloths.
She was all right, I guess. She would always say hello, smile, and dig a finger between her gold tooth and the gum, poking away at an omni-present piece of food.
“You know why he puts up with me Sam?” she mused at me one night,
“Because when his bluddy sister’s little Shamira came to stay for all that winter and complained the bluddy room was cold, and the Tarkha Dahl was cold, and this and that, I put up with him and her bluddy chickpeas all that winter. Now he puts up with me.”
I remember asking her, “Chickpeas, Mrs Moody?”
“Yes Samuel, she had bluddy chickpea fever, always bluddy chickpea soup, chickpea salad, all this and that.”
Nobody thought that Jimmy and Mrs Moody loved each other very much, or, at least, that perhaps Jimmy loved her a bit more than she did him, because whenever she went off on one of these anecdotes, she would always end by saying, “You see Jimmy, even Sam looks like he knows why I help you.”
And Jimmy would smile, really wide as if she had just made him his favourite curry and presented it wearing his favourite Sari. I'd never seen Mrs Moody wearing a Sari, only overalls or aprons.
Jimmy had really light skin, not like some of the Indian kids I went to school with, he looked more like a Spaniard than an Indian to me. He didn’t even have an accent any more.
Mrs Moody was the only reminder of my distant, cramped knowledge of the world beyond my island.

So yeah, that night I went to get some tobacco, and Jim’s was open as always. He said hi, and I asked how Mrs Moody was.
“Fine Sam, fine.” he smiled.
“Have you seen Julie tonight at all?” I asked him.
Julie was one of my housemates, she was never home, but I knew she always came into Jim’s about eleven thirty to get another bottle of wine before moving on to her next venue.
“No Sam, she’s not been in this evening.” he replied, and handed me my change-from-a-fiver.
I checked my Swatch. Eleven forty-five.
“Okay, well, cheers Jimmy, have a good night.” I said.
“You too Sam, and a good morning I guess, by the time you get home.” Jimmy said monotonally as I waved from the door.

Julie was a really pretty girl.

She had been living in the house since January, and I remember when she moved in it must have been the coldest day of winter so far. She had this old car, a Nova ’93, and said it took her three trips to and from her old house to get all her stuff moved in.
She didn’t even want any help moving her big suitcase up the two flights of stairs, even though I offered.
She would say something like “I’d have to be able to do it on my own if you weren’t here, Sam”, whenever I offered to help her with stuff.
I guess by “you” she meant “any man”.
That was the thing about Julie – really damn pretty with a pretty little antipodeans accent, and this really unfeminine way of being a woman.

It had gone midnight; as Jimmy had predicted, it was another late night.
Our little terraced house was about a five minute walk from Trafalgar Street. That is to say, Jim’s was in Trafalgar Street, on the corner of the road I used to live on before the landlord decided to sell it last summer – there was no left sympathy for me and the other two guys I used to live with; we had been renting it for next to nothing, compared to what some of my other mates were paying at the time. Now I lived in the opposite direction, minus two housemates and with just enough money each month for beer and baccie and Bamboogy on a Wednesday night. Steve dropped out in the second year. He confused me, and when people confuse me I tend to kind of ignore their idiosyncrasies. I guess I couldn’t be damned with having the patience for it.
On the last day I saw Steve, we were alone at home playing sordid, violently terrific video games.
We only took short breaks so one of us could fetch a fresh pair of Grolsch’s from the kitchen.
“Sam, mate, Sam…” he was calling from the kitchen.
“Yeah Steve-O?”
“Mate, the paints comin’ down, it’s well colourful, he’s painting again!”
When I got into the kitchen he was staring outside through the frosted glass.
“Steve, there’s nobody outside mate, that’s our garden and Dave’s not even home.” I tried, perhaps convincingly because his smile left his face like a bird being startled away by a cat while he was enjoying the last breadcrumb he had picked up off the pavement.
Steve left the next day.
Dave moved into a pink house with two girls from Wolverhampton. That's where I was heading to, because I wanted a beer, because I knew I wouldn't get to sleep now anyway. Because I could.
The house was pink in the day, but tonight it looked luminous, bright peach, a wierd glow was coming off the edges of the bay window, above the empty recycling bin, still turned upside down from last weeks collection and caked in dirt made wet and clumpy from the rain in the afternoon.
I rapped the shiny brass knocker.
I thought about our knocker, the etched gold-like lump on our door that resembled an elephant.
Probably from the colonial days, I would think whenever I saw it, and remember the night when Mrs Moody told me, over the counter, all about curries - about how Tikka Marsala was an English dish dressed up with a fancy name, and that saffron was grossly and widely misused.

Dave answered the door and my mind returned to me.

“Mate!” He pulled me in by the hem of my sleeve. “I’ve got something weird to tell you!”