The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 13
The Lock Up

I felt quite choked when I heard about Stan. He’ll be greatly missed. I suppose the good news, if there is any, is that he went quietly. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. He never approved of fuss.

We first came across our friend Stan when we took the bold step of investing in a lock up. While that may sound grand, our lock up was effectively a garage the owner was prepared to rent out for a small sum. These garages generally were ones too far from the owner’s property. And times being what they were people preferred to keep their cherished cars on their doorsteps. Which left the distant garages free for the likes of us. And it was effectively for many a moon our HQ. We stored our supplies there, and it was somewhere to go rather than hang around home, the library or the caff. Stan had the lock up next door to us but one. We never actually worked out who had the one in-between us, but that’s neither here nor there. Stan, at that time, was recently retired. He’d been forced to sell up his small shop, his pride and joy. One of those strange old places where they sell everything and nothing. A bit of hardware, some gardening stuff, tools of all descriptions, and string with anything. A vanishing breed.

Then the newly retired Stan was told in no uncertain terms by his Mrs Stan that under no circumstances was she going to have him hanging round the house, cluttering up the place and getting under her feet. So Stan was banished to his lock-up. And he whiled away his days pottering about with his impressive accumulation of completely useless junk. Well, it wasn’t junk to him. It was his pride and joy. He was a man who could elicit extraordinary pleasure from a good carborundum stone, and he had many similar passions.

I know that when we first turned up he viewed us with considerable concern. Quite clearly we were up to no good. Until one day Stan’s curiosity got the better of him. I was squatting down in the sun, the Kinks playing in the background, tinkering with an old reel-to-reel tape machine I’d picked up for next to nothing. Blimey, said Stan, not seen one of those for years. Is it working? And before I knew it Stan squatted down next to me, and became delightfully absorbed in my old tapedeck. I can’t recall whether he actually got it working, but we agreed it was a beautiful old thing, and the ice was broken. Over a period of time Stan became a staunch comrade and member of our extended family.

He was one of those old guys, who were outwardly respectable, having served the public for so many years. But scratch the surface, and there’s an old romantic with a truly anarchic soul. And he came to kind of respect us for wasting our lives away. After all it was what he was happily doing now. There was plenty of time to settle down, he mused. A bit of a philosopher was our friend Stan. A man with all sorts of strange passions too. An inveterate collector. Football paraphernalia particularly. You never saw a man more delighted than Stan when I handed over an old attaché case full of unloved football programmes from the early ‘70s which had been gathering dust under my bed. He loved football full stop, particularly the local team, but for sentimental reasons he followed Leyton Orient when he could.

One Saturday he drove a few of us up to Darlington or Doncaster. One of those places. It was grim. I mean it. Some of the locals were giving one of the young black Orient lads some abuse. Swinging from the bars, and making monkey noises. Very grown-up. Stan simply sauntered over, adjusted his glasses and asked the tykes just who the idiot was here? Is it the young lad out there earning a thousand pound a week, he asked, or you paying to act like a monkey? With that, he ambled back to us, poker faced. And it has to be said we were trying desperately to act as nonchalant as he was. Trying being the operative word. Thankfully there were no afters. I think everyone concerned was a little surprised shall we say?

That was Stan at his best. Wounded indignation he could carry off very well. Mostly he liked tinkering with old things though. And he came in very handy. Like getting The Quiet One’s Lambretta up and running, and fixing old record players we had acquired. He also had a very useful old boys’ network, literally. Old contemptibles in comfy cardigans and cords. Jacks of all trades. The electrician, the carpenter, the printer, and the teacher turned ardent amateur photographer. Handy people to have around for some of our odder jobs. They were our salvation seldom times.

Stan was quite a philosopher on the side too. The best part of forty years behind a shop counter I suppose gives you a keen insight into people’s souls. And it turned out he had a subtle routine for wreaking revenge on time wasters. He would have been fantastic on one of those old quiz shows, like Call My Bluff. He looked dour and dependable, but he could send people up something rotten. He had a sideline in seeds, and if someone came on overly pretentious he would send them packing with some sort of bird seed packaged as some exotic specimen of flora. I don’t think anyone actually called his bluff on any of that.

He was a good man. He was good to us. And I feel guilty for not keeping in touch so much over recent years. I’ll have to dig out a copy of the photo that’s buried somewhere of Stan seated astride The Quiet One’s old Lambretta, with arm raised in a clenched fist salute, and drink a toast to the old rascal.