Windfall

The archive of pornography stands on the corner of Dean Street and Bateman Street in the Georgian heart of Soho. Its quaint awning and curtained window would be more suited to a Parisian bistro than an adult book store. Lacking the inviting neon lights of other such establishments, it had also been mistaken for a newsagent by several late night revellers in search of cigarettes and crisps.

The selling of the former was now a side business whilst my health conscious employer had expressly forbidden the latter. Occasionally, I would eat a packet of salt and vinegar in an act of open rebellion only to feely oddly disappointed when I wasn’t reprimanded.

The content of the archive was largely antique pornographic prints and object d ’arts from around the world. The people who sought this material were obscurely academic and of the bearded, hatted intellectual kind. For these aficionados, two climate controlled rooms of material awaited in the back. The front of the shop offered books on every kind of pornography, copies taken of Eastern erotic paintings and coital sculptures in wood and bronze. There was even a painstaking sandalwood recreation of the carvings of the Sun Temple in Khajuraho. Beautiful but a bitch to dust.

An old Victorian fireplace had been gutted out to make a small office room. Next to the room, stood stacks of old wooden shelving which housed bric-a-brac and items with assorted origin. These formed part of the rotating group of objects used in the display which no one came to see. It also housed several distinguished bottles of Scotch and two Turkish style coffee cups used interchangeably for tea and scotch.

Aside from caring for these relics, my job consisted of providing latex gloves to the patrons, locating relevant material for their research and minding them as they reverently pored over it to ensure that no theft or fingerprints took place. Also, I needed to take utmost care to ensure that Bertrand would not urinate on these precious artefacts which I did quite successfully with the aid of a feather duster. Bertrand was a morbidly obese ragdoll cat with whom I shared the shop and my living quarters.

My employee, a Mr Josiah, visited fortnightly to collect the scant takings from the till and pretend to inspect receipts. His drop ins were mostly to fuss over Bertrand. This over zealous attention was wholly unnecessary as there were few visitors and amongst them, almost no buyers.

How the business had come into his ownership was mystifying. Josiah was a middle aged Indian man with the moustache of a Bollywood villain and the beautiful accent of an Eton graduate. He had vaguely mentioned an inheritance of some kind but hadn’t elaborated and I hadn’t asked. Equally perplexing was the business's ability to stay afloat (even during a recession) with such nascent foot traffic.

Still I asked no questions. For just over a thousand pounds a month paid in crisp fifty pound notes and a cramped studio flat above the shop for which I paid my gratitude in silence.

The shop and London had been my home for eighteen years. Around it, bars had opened, closed and re-opened in the time that I had lived here. Pop-up restaurants (true to their name), sprouted like mushrooms in busy Soho until the celebrity chef in question moved on to a permanent abode in a five star hotel. I had witnessed people have sex on the single plated glass window more times than I would care to count. Outside buzzed with activity and the dull thud of music and life and inside was as austere as a tomb, the smell of incense and paper woven into the dust.

It was on a Friday night of the drizzly kind which London is famed for, when a man walked in setting of the antiquated door alarm and surprising me as I wiped down the bookcases at the front of the shop. He bought in the scent of cigarettes.

He reviewed the display of Tokugawa era erotic prints honing in on one of a moon face Japanese girl in ecstasy as her nether regions were being devoured by an octopus. Looking from me to it, he smiled awkwardly as I waited for him to request an escort (male/female/both/neither), cocaine or cigarettes. When he hadn’t, I expected him to ask me if I had a relationship with my saviour. Lately, a group of beautiful, identical Mormons had chosen Soho’s many sex shops as the site of their war against Satan. This one would have been the shortest and ugliest of that group. He wore a mackintosh which was several sizes too large.

“Can I help you?”

His watery blue eyes were set in a freckled, snub nose faced which belonged to a boy. As they sized me up, I get the sensation of insects crawling on me. An entirely ordinary man. The absolute depiction of every serial killer.

My fingers tapped out a nervous Morse code, rapid burst on non-shatter proof glass.

I imagined that this was another of Mr Josiah's business associates. Their visits were almost always crepuscular and in the manner of cats, they dragged in battered, leather bound books offerings for his inspection. He would haggle and complain that the price they were asking was extortionate. After some souk-like bartering, they would agree on a sum respectable to both which would be paid in cash. Whatever artefact exchanged hands would stay on display for a few days and then mysteriously vanish. If these visitors dropped by whilst Mr Josiah was not in-situ, I was to give them a receipt detailing the item and any wear and tear so that he could pay them at a later date.

'You are shorter than he said you would be! Arthur, isn't it?" It wasn't.

"Archie. I'm afraid he isn't in today..."

Unceremoniously, the man waves away my voice and puts down a paper bag out of which he fishes a small, black book. It is a smooth and leather bound with gilt edged pages. I know if it real leather as the scent hits my nose like an expensive cologne. He places it on the glass bookcase which separates us.

"Please give this on to him when he next passes by."

'Of course.'

I had turned to locate the receipt book but I heard the door jingle a second time. The man had disappeared leaving only a faint unease and ashy ether in his wake. I considered running after him but the rain had begun to come down in great sheets.

The rest of the evening expectedly passed without another visitor or the stranger returning.

Somewhere in the midst of that autumnal deluge, the idea of a hot toddy and bath sang out like a siren and I made the executive decision to close the shop early.

I had almost forgotten the book when Bertrand wandered into the store in search of dinner. He gracelessly jumped onto the glass counter with a resounding thud upsetting the little black book. It landed on the ground facedown and with unnatural symmetry its pages parting in the middle perfectly.

On picking it up, I could see that the notebook's pages were thicker than they ought to be. They were completely blank but for a fifty pound note perfectly folded in half and pasted into the middle. My mind quickly surmised that it would be about fifteen thousand pounds give or take.

There are moments in your life where you look back and know that they shaped your destiny in some way. Usually, these moments are fortuitous and you will tell your story to whoever will listen because you feel lucky. This is a story I'll never tell. I'll never tell how I locked the shop and walked out to hail a taxi. I'll never tell how I travelled far away. I will never tell of my strange inheritance except in this little black book from whence it came.