The Wrong Life
by Ian Barker

Monday morning, eight o’clock. We don’t open the shop ’till half past, but I like to get in early. I relish that small oasis of calm between home and work. Besides, it’s easier to get a parking space when you’re early; that’s the excuse I give to my wife anyhow.

The truth is I like being on my own, although I seem to have more than enough time to enjoy my own company lately. I sometimes feel as if I’ve begun living the wrong life.

I lean on the counter, sipping my first caffeine fix of the day, and stare at the unopened boxes of new stock on the floor. There’ll be the usual selection in there: the latest release of some plastic pop star from a reality-TV show; greatest hits collections from ageing rockers; and some middle of the road crap that’ll have a shelf-life of about six weeks before it ends up in the £3.99 bargain bin.

When did I get this cynical? I used to love this job; used to love telling people at parties that I worked in the music business. Parties, huh! Those were the days. The only time I go to parties now is to collect my teenage daughter, and then I’m not allowed to get out of the car since I’m apparently too embarrassing to be seen with.

The back door creaks open and I hear tippy-tap footsteps down the passage, past the stockroom and the toilet. They pause outside the kitchen, as she hangs up her jacket, then continue. She’ll be at the doorway. . . now.

“Morning.” Marie, my assistant, doesn’t so much speak as trill. She has all the annoying-yet-catchy bounciness of a Eurovision song contest entry. “It’s going to be a warm day again.”

“Morning,” I mumble, not granting her weather forecast the benefit of a reply.

“Working in the dark, as usual?”

I haven’t turned on the lights, the shop is in gloom, there’s just the daylight filtering weakly through the shutters at the front, and the evil-eye green glow from the cash register.

“Sorry, I couldn’t be bothered with the lights.”

“That’s no way to start the week is it?” she chirps. “Something on your mind?”

“No,” I lie. What’s on my mind this Monday, like every other Monday, is that I’m forty-four. Okay, okay, forty-five, and I’m running a branch of a cut-price music store in a crummy shopping precinct. People I was at school with are accountants, or doctors, or detective inspectors. I know this, not because I’ve kept in touch, but because I’ve seen the reports in the local press: of their children getting married, or their new surgeries, or their murder cases.

Marie bustles around, switching on lights and picking up the post which I’d left lying on the doormat. “Do you want me to make a start on this stock?” she asks, with a nod at the boxes.

“No, let Adam do it. He’s supposed to be a management trainee, he should be able to manage pricing up CDs and putting them on shelves in alphabetical order.”

“If he gets here on time.” Marie frowns at her watch.

“I’ll speak to him about his timekeeping,” I say, knowing that I won’t. The confrontation would be too much hassle. He’d probably storm off and never come back, and then I’d have to go through the process of getting a replacement. The thought of trawling application forms and interviewing a parade of terminal acne victims is enough to make me turn a blind-eye to Adam’s Monday mornings. Mornings when he arrives late, pale, baggy-eyed, and looking like the unmade bed he’s recently vacated.

“Donna’s never late,” Marie sniffs. She seldom misses a chance to sing Donna’s praises. Donna, the Saturday girl who wants to be permanent. She’s Marie’s niece, or removed cousin, or something. And she’s another reason I can’t risk losing Adam. Donna would be top of any shortlist for his replacement, and I couldn’t work with her five days a week. Five days of glimpsed navel ring when she reaches for the top shelf; five days of braless nipples under her staff-uniform polo shirt. No, five days of Donna would be far too distracting.

With Donna around there’s little wonder that on Saturdays the shop is full of monosyllabic teenage boys with lolling tongues; their hands plunged deep in the pockets of their oversized trousers. Still, she’s cut the shoplifting problem. The attraction of handing over cash in the presence of Donna’s anatomy seems to outweigh the buzz to be had from petty theft.

“I’ll open up.” I snap from my reverie, pick up my keys and head for the front of the shop.

I reach up to turn the key-switch and watch as the electric shutter clanks slowly upwards. Flourescent shop-light is boosted by bright sunlight. Cyril, at the bookshop opposite, is opening his shutter. We look at each other and flap our free hands in salute, both slaves to the machinery of twenty-first century retail security. Unbolting the door I open it and wedge it back. Standing for a moment in the sunshine, I think it would be nice to work in the open air. I turn back into the shop; there isn’t much call for alfresco music store managers.

Adam rolls in at about five past nine, through the front door. He is his usual unkempt self, but the snooker-hall pallor has been replaced by bright pink sunburn. With his tapering chin, spots and spiky dyed-green hair he looks like an under-ripe strawberry. He throws his backpack under the counter and throws me a wolfish grin, “What a Sunday!” The ring in his eyebrow glitters.

“Yeah?” I try to sound disinterested. I know he’s going to tell me the story anyway which makes my reaction largely irrelevant.

“Yeah, went out in the country with me girlfriend. She said she wanted to do it outdoors.” The lupine grin again, this time with a lecherous nudge.

I think back to a time when my girlfriend, now my wife, wanted to do it outdoors. That must be twenty-six years ago. How time flies, now she’s so busy going to evening classes and being a pillar of the community, she doesn’t even want to do it in the bedroom. “You look like you were outdoors a bit too long,” I say.

“This is nothing,” he laughs, pointing to his face. “You want to see the state of me arse. I won’t be sitting down on the job today.”

I summon a grin, and quickly dismiss it again as Marie comes in from the back. “Well, let that be a lesson to you,” I say in a mock-stern voice. Adam winks at me knowing Marie can’t see. “Put the kettle on, Adam, then get started on this stock.”

He picks up the boxes and goes off into the back of the shop. “It’s about time you told him,” says Marie when he’s out of earshot.

I nod, with what I hope is a suitably firm set of my jaw.

The day grinds slowly forward. On Mondays we’re lucky if we get six customers in the morning, there’ll be a bit of a flurry at lunchtime, a quiet afternoon, a handful of sales when the schools turn out and then it’ll be time to shut. Roll on.

About eleven-thirty I go through to the back to see how Adam’s getting on with pricing the stock. The storeroom is stuffy and airless and he’s taken his shirt off; he is squatting by an open box and has his glowing red back to me as I walk in. “Isn’t that sunburn painful?” I ask.

“A bit,” he replies, “but it was worth it.” He grins at me over his shoulder, a tattoo of tangled thorns encircles his left upper arm. “I thought she was good enough in bed, but get her in a field and she goes like a train.”

“You should go to the chemist’s at lunchtime and get some cream,” I say as I turn to leave. My days of carefree sunburn are gone, I worry about skin cancer. And I envy Adam so much it hurts.

At lunchtime I exercise my managerial prerogative and take my break first. I get a salad roll from the bakery and I join Cyril from the bookshop, on a bench by the fountain. In a routine honed over years of practice we talk to each other for half an hour without actually holding a lucid conversation. I tell him my dreams, he tells me his, and we neither of us really take in what the other is saying. Cyril is due to retire in nine months and is counting off the days. I envy him a bit too.

I’m back behind the counter when Adam returns from the chemist’s, with a wide smile and an economy size bottle of after-sun. “Be careful with that,” I say, “I don’t want greasy fingermarks on the goods.”

“It’s cool.” The smile broadens into the wolf-boy grin. “Claire in the chemist’s took me into her stockroom and rubbed some on for me.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “All over.” He winks – this twenty-two-year-old sex-maniac punk, who’ll most likely be running a store of his own in a couple of years – then he disappears into the back. I think how I’d like to take Donna into a storeroom and rub after-sun all over her; and I watch with my mind’s eye as another segment of my own life recedes a little further into the distance.

By the time we’ve sold our last CD of the day, and I’m rolling down the shutter, and watching Cyril do the same across the way, I’ve made a decision. The rest of my life starts here.

I’m going to go home, have breathless, earth-moving sex with my wife – preferably on the kitchen table – then I’m going to tell her I’m making a fresh start. I’ll phone the area manager and tell him where he can stick his poxy shop. Then we’ll head off to who-knows-where, to a new life of freedom, no strings, no responsibility. I’ll be a beach bum, or an itinerant labourer, or a poet. Or all three: an itinerant, beach-bum poet’s labourer. Yes, I’m going to do it, today’s the day. I lock the back door one last time and head for the car park with a purposeful stride.

I don’t do any of it of course. By the time I’ve driven home I’ve thought about the kids, and the mortgage, and my company pension. When I get there the wife is out improving her mind, the kids are at their friend’s, and my dinner’s lurking in the microwave. The kitchen table has a wonky leg that I’ve never got around to fixing, it probably wouldn’t have stood up to my planned sexual gymnastics anyhow. My dream goes back on the top shelf, placed there by Donna with a seductive glint of navel ring. Tuesday at 8 a.m., I’m back in the shop.

And next Monday I’ll follow the same thought process and make the same decision. But I won’t go through with it next Monday either, or the one after that. I’ll do it one day though, oh yes, I’ll do it. Because if I don’t do something then I’ll end up turning into Cyril and spending the rest of my career in the wrong life, counting off the days.