The Fullfillmet*Centre 3

Anything else to say, to get in quickly as I walk along the hall, trying to make out through the frosted glass who that shape behind it might be? Perhaps I thought it was someone canvassing and I was ready to share a few comradely words or have an argument of some kind.

My dad had been a great arguer in doorways, a great arguer in general: sacrificial Tories or better still, religious types, God-botherers rolling up to be berated from the comfort of his own hallway. He had died a few years before and I was sorry he hadn’t got to see some of the changes that were taking place, the return of a Labour party and of a politics he recognised and still believed in.

Perhaps I anticipated some nice, middle-class, Blackheath moderates out to urge me to do my civic duty. I was unprepared, perhaps that’s why it hit me so hard.

At first I couldn’t make out whether they were a boy or girl, they were young certainly but prematurely aged and lined, preternaturally weary, standing there holding their box of overpriced kitchen utensils, tea-towels, chamois clothes, shoe polish kits.

This was Jay, though I didn’t know their name at that point. Chestnut brown hair in a bowl cut swept to one side above their eyes, the eyes, big, blue and pained, already had crow’s feet at the side from a short lifetime’s-worth of wincing out at the world. The lips thin and pressed tight, cold sore at both corners of the mouth and a small dry patch of impetigo below the bottom lip. The jaw pushed out, freckles across the cheeks a snub nose.

The expression was one of a person already bafflingly sick of life. The thin frame inside a cheap, shapeless tracksuit already seemed sclerotic, bad diet from birth, mother an alcoholic maybe, bad genes poisoned through generations of life at the bottom. Centuries of suffering condensed and compressed into someone still not much more than a kid.

Jay looked at me in full anticipation of rejection, of not being able to get a word out before being busily told no thank you; clipped politeness, angry smile, the door closed and for a second we stood their wordlessly.