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weight-lifter; he looked down and easily lifted the chromed bar from
the woman’s throat just as she was heading towards the white light and the
welcoming outstretched arms of her mother.

 
     
     
    3
     
     
    Three years before, on her
second day of property ownership, still settling into the shop and the flat
above it, slowly sorting through boxes of books and wondering where to hang
pictures and just about deciding to set fire to the whole lot and start again,
Harriet had noticed through the big shop window a smartly dressed man of about
thirty-five standing at the bus stop a little way along the parade talking
animatedly into a mobile phone. As she got to work on her very first job,
repairing several knife slashes in the ballgown of a transsexual, she saw a
number of the little red buses that served the stop race up and rock to a halt,
she saw their doors hiss open and the man shake his head, refusing to board;
the driver would shout some insult or exhortation then, getting no response, would
drive off in a fury, the bus often becoming airborne as it crested a nearby
speed hump. Throughout all this the man continued to talk rapidly into his
phone.
    At
lunchtime, guiltily skipping next door to console herself with a large shawarma
and chips at what had then been a place called Shashlik Happens and was now Mon
Fromagerie, Harriet passed near to the man and heard him describing somebody to
whoever it was he was speaking to on the other end of the phone. ‘Yeah, he
looks like one of those big Irish farmers,’ the man said, ‘that never marries
then fails to commit suicide with a shotgun in the mouth, huge hands, probably
a repressed homosexual …‘ Following the man’s electric gaze up the road she
saw that the big repressed homosexual, failed suicide Irish farmer person he
was referring to was Toby lolloping towards her along the pavement, making the
first of his many visits to the shop and now beginning to wave a cheery hello
at her with his huge hands. In turn the businessman shifted his gaze to see who
Toby was greeting, moving his head in a stiff arc like one of those
silver-painted street performers she’d seen that terrible time she went to Barcelona for the weekend on her own, who
made money by impersonating robots. The man with the phone stared directly,
disturbingly, into her eyes. Unable to take the intensity of his gaze, she
looked away slightly and saw that what she had taken to be the smart
metal-effect mobile phone which he had been holding to the side of his face was
in fact an unopened tin of sardines.
    ‘Gotta
go …‘ the man said, before slipping his tin can phone into an inside pocket
of his jacket, then, crossing the road with stiff movements, walked straight
into the park where he was soon swallowed up by the moist grey-green vegetation.
     
    Now three years later the
Tin Can Man was still at the bus stop most days or walking up and down the
parade or striding along the perimeter roads of the park; though his smart
business suit was now filthy and torn, he still clutched his sardine can to his
mouth and would still generally be describing those around him. ‘Big, enormous,
porky girl, can hardly breathe she’s so fat, greasy black hair, gigantic gig
lamps, obviously not been fucked for years …‘ was what Harriet heard him say
about her one afternoon, forcing her to laugh out loud when he said it, since
there was really nothing she could find to argue about in this portrait.
    Though
she was inclined on occasion to get extremely upset with those she thought had
insulted her, much to her own surprise Harriet never felt any fury towards the
Tin Ca-n Man. When thinking of
him she recalled the look briefly observed in his eyes on that first day when
she had seen his ‘phone’. A look of sadness and panic as if the words were
saying him rather than the other way around.
    Also
sometimes, usually if returning to her flat late at night, when she heard him
talking he appeared to be involved in a