Coptic Street Sunset

by David Redd

conclusion

The customer said, “I have nothing but this one denarius.”

The coin in his hand was about the size of an old halfpenny, of dull silvery metal, bearing some foreign design. I whispered to Akani, “No three wishes, and no commission either!”

Fortunately the man in the white robe did not hear me, because he had noticed another object nearby.

“I see,” he said, “that you have priced this one. The ankh.”

His nod indicated a silver-coloured cross with a loop as its top, very small indeed, seemingly a lucky charm of the type seen on bracelets. Some previous owner had attached a label with a pencilled price: “1d.”

“One penny,” I read out. “Or you could say, one denarius.”

The customer looked from the ankh to the lamp. “How strange that both of these face me here! I may accept from you one thing, one thing only, and use its power to such purpose as I see fit. The lamp for giving true understanding, or the ankh for the secret of life. Which must I choose?”

“Think carefully,” said Akani.

“It doesn’t matter to us,” I said. No commission would come our way, whichever one he took.

Our visitor frowned at me. He did appear to think carefully. Finally, he took up the tiny ankh in his hand, hardly disturbing the dust beneath it. He left a coin where it had lain.

“Thank you,” he said to me, and repeated “Thank you” to Akani.

“You’re welcome,” I said. In truth, the two of us were poor salesmen, more concerned with exploring words than with selling them, and too tolerant of callers who earned us nothing. Still, the denarius went “chink!” into our till, in the rear compartment where foreign coins accumulated.

When I looked up, the customer was gone.

I saw only the impression of swirling motion by the door, a phantom reflection of his departure. The lamp, of course, remained.

In my surprise at his sudden leaving I dashed out and looked for him along the crowded pavement. Various pedestrians trotted or ambled by, but nobody wore white. I hurried to the nearest corner, where Coptic Street met Streatham Street, and in the west a magnificent sight caught my eye: the sun an orange-red ball dazzling me as it beckoned amid flame-tinted cloudscapes sailing beyond the buildings. Could I perceive a last glint of golden wings, fading into that glorious sunset? Perhaps I saw what I wanted to see. It was forty years ago.

Imagination, I told myself. I went back inside the shop.

“If you ask me,” said Akani, “our visitor should have taken the lamp.”

“I’m not asking, thanks.” I felt disoriented by the experience, with bright after-images of the sun still flashing at me. Besides, my typewriter was waiting.

“Forget it,” I said. “No post-mortem.”

Determinedly I retreated back to the new epic I was typing; having sold two stories to Mike Moorcock at New Worlds I was anxious to produce more. Shop business could wait. So, with the swift-moving mind of youth I dismissed the whole incident from my thoughts and resumed writing. Akani shrugged, but stayed silent. No other visitors disturbed us.

I did not quite complete the story before Uncle Albert emerged to close up the premises, so that evening I wrote the final paragraphs of “Sundown” by hand, in a launderette north of the Mile End Road. It was a good first draft, I thought. Eventually the agency in Great Russell Street sold the finished story to an American magazine — my first foreign sale — so for years I felt pleased with that day’s work.

Time passed.

As for the lamp, the ankh and the customer in white, I did not think about them again.

Around me the world began to change.

Before long I returned to Wales and to proper paid work. I lost touch with Akani as his homeland slid into civil war. The next year was the hippie Summer of Love, which ended too soon. A year later, the students rioted in Paris. The year after that, Neil Armstrong stepped out on the Moon, while I got as far as Finland.

At Number Seven, meanwhile, Uncle Albert had extended his usual generosity into taking in more human flotsam, an anarchist newly released from a Spanish gaol, and somehow our Old Curiosity Shop seemed no longer magical, only old and cluttered and stale. Even the stuffed owl had gone. After my last visit, I took nothing with me except good wishes from Uncle Albert... and a small earthenware lamp, which now felt like an ordinary lamp, old and dead.

More years passed.

In 1972 I attended a writers’ conference and encountered an author called John Phillifent. Suddenly, memory overwhelmed me. John’s face was the face of the customer in Coptic Street.

I must have stared rather rudely before managing a few words. “We’ve met before.”

John said pleasantly, “I don’t recall it.” He laid down his copy of African Genesis — he had been reading on the hotel lawn when I arrived — and he inquired, “Where do you believe we met?”

“In London. Number Seven, Coptic Street.”

He denied ever having been there. When I described the events further, he gave a gentle smile — John was an amiable man, good-natured, who still liked to discover the strangeness of the world — and he said that he had dreamed of making just such a purchase in a shop like that, years ago. Writers often dream of bookshops. This dream of his had been exceptionally vivid, but he thought it had occurred in the late Fifties, long before my time in London.

John said, “I can remember picking up the ankh, in my dream.”

I said, “I swear I saw you do it in the shop.”

“Perhaps you were dreaming, too.”

His suggestion was soft-spoken and meant kindly, but it disconcerted me; I could only apologise and leave him to his reading. I did not trouble him about the incident again.

Later, I could never quite decide whether this story of John’s dream was a coincidence or not: imagination, or something bubbling up towards reality? What it all indicated, I thought, was that our visitor had been someone important. He had talked of lighting the lamp to release tongues of fire, but instead he had chosen the ankh. Those words meant little to me, but they could be researched...

I find now that in ancient Egypt the ankh was a symbol of life, and such symbols have always had great power.

I find also that the tongues of fire were described as historical fact by the Apostle Luke. He wrote of a supernatural brightness which descended upon a great meeting of people from many different countries, and permitted everyone to understand all they heard whatever their language. No divisions, no need for translation. But why had this gift of perfect understanding vanished afterwards? Might the gift have been hidden away deliberately? I sense an ancient fall from grace, or echoes of an ancient conflict.

And I had said the choice didn’t matter!

I recall Uncle Albert earnestly campaigning to change the world, and me writing about possible futures, and Akani pleading sympathy for strangers, but we lacked the gift of tongues. We were not understood, and our words changed nothing. Around me still turns a world uncomprehending as it drowns in Hamlet’s sea of troubles, a world of war and tragedy and disaster. Why are our warnings never heard? Who decided that people should never understand each other?

Was it God who decided?

The visitor?

Me?

On my shelf is the old earthenware lamp, its value perhaps no more than one denarius.

I remember the sight of wings, flashing golden in the Coptic Street sunset. There is so much still to tell the world; I put oil and wick into the lamp, and light it. I wait.

One day, surely, the gift of tongues will return.

[Author’s note: Bernard Earp and Deirdre Counihan have both given permission for their words to be used in the story; Albert Meltzer died some years ago but had told me in Number Seven that I could write a piece about the shop. (Thank you to all.) I met the late John Phillifent in the exact circumstances described, but our dialogue is invented, as is all dialogue in the story. The lamp which sits on the shelf above my computer was fictional when the story was written but became fact when Deirdre sent it to me in 2005.]