In Cardigan Market

I sat on a long, wooden bench on the first floor of Cardigan indoor
market, a paper bag on my knees. It was Summer; we were staying in a
caravan with friends. I had just bought a CD. I could see down to the
ground floor. There was a bookstall made out of paste tables, stacked
with row after row of faded, dog-eared hardbacks. Next to it was a
record stall, lots of cardboard boxes stuffed with LPs. I could see my
Dad, buying a copy of Jefferson Airplane's Red Octopus, a big red heart
with eight tentacles coiling out of it on a yellow background. I'm sure
I couldn't have made all that out from where I was, but he showed it me
excitedly later, and two years later one of his friends from work
bought it him for Christmas. I'd never listened to Jefferson Airplane
before and assumed they were some ultra-bohemian sixties thing until I
listened to White Rabbit and decided they were just a bit fucked.

Across from me, past an expanse of stone flagging, was the fish market,
a counter stretching from wall to wall, heaped with ice and laden with
orange crabs and red lobsters, silver trout and pink salmon, cod,
mackerel, halibut, skate and those little yellow ones I don't know the
name for. Above the counter and almost as long was a big frieze painted
on wooden boards, showing the ocean and Neptune with his trident and
flowing beard, and seahorses and ships. In places the paint was rubbed
away to brown, grainy wood, though why those places and how I couldn't
say.

I was fifteen at the time, I think. Maybe sixteen. I remember, some
days later, walking down a long road lined with conifers, and looking
at the blue sky and the sun-baked tarmac and feeling kind of happy for
no reason. When we got home, our house had been burgled. My room was
dusted for fingerprints. The money box I got when I was seven was
smudged with grey prints.