Copper reflects sunlight in a way people don't yet understand

He was a philanderer and a sycophant and I was too young to really know what either of those words meant. Once, when I wasn’t looking, he took my notebook out of my Eastpak rucksack and read some of my awful, teenage poetry. I think he chanced upon a rhyming story told from the perspective of a disconsolate foetus. I pretended to be annoyed, but was secretly elated that anyone would even bother, and I was naïve enough to believe him when he told me he was moved.

He wore white, hessian shirts with only half the buttons done up- he said he’d stolen them from a tablecloth factory in the Holy Land and would one day take them back. I wanted to go with him but I never had the courage to ask. He talked about Jesus a lot, and I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never read the bible, but when I finally did he just laughed and exclaimed “That’s not how you learn about God!” but he never told me how you did.

He worked in a record shop and called everyone ‘cats’ and said he was planning to build a temple out of all the pennies and coppers they got back in change and place it in the foyer of Victoria Centre shopping centre, a soulless vacuum in the middle of the midlands, a non-space which, affecting the persona of a preacher, he described as a Capitalist Godless Cathedral. He said that it was third on Bin Laden’s hit list and that he’d be glad to see it go. By my third double vodka and grapefruit I couldn’t have agreed more.

The whole time I knew him he never once seemed to sleep and when some maudlin drunk perched up at a bar asked us how we’d best like to die, he put his face right up to his and looked around with faux-concern and replied “Aren’t we already dead?” When this failed to elicit a response he started gyrating and yelled “Alright you bastard, I’d like to die having sex, like everyone else,” and then he punched him in the arm and bought him a Guinness and said “now cheer the fuck up.”

“Copper reflects sunlight in a way people don’t yet understand.”
“It won’t ever see sunlight, stuck inside like that,” I said.
“It will be a roaming temple. It will go on tour.”

And still I believed him.

He admitted, to my ceaseless amazement, that he wanted to pick me up and run away with me every time he saw me.
“What would you do with me?” I was desperate to know.
“I’d just carry you around. Over my shoulder”
“I’m heavy.”
“Then I’d tie you up.”
“Oh. Right”
“So you couldn’t escape.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
“She won’t be there.”
"But-"
"Shh!"
"But-"

He spoke with a slight American drawl even though he grew up in Derby. He was always at least half an hour late and would always be the last to leave. He had an old Citroen 2VC with no tax disc and no windscreen wipers; once when we were driving down a country lane in Leicestershire the rain started crashing down in sheets and we had to pull over into a lay-by. I was glad because we just sat there, brambles and hedges scratching against the window, and I tried not to look at him too much as we listened to Ryan Adam’s Heartbreaker on repeat and even though we never even kissed there was so much 'potentialness' there that it’s as if, in my memory, we did. I told him that I loved these songs and he wrote out the tracklisting on the back of an old Benson and Hedges packet and handed me the tape there and then. He had handwriting like a medieval scribe- elegant and ornate and barely legible. That tape travelled the whole west coast of India with me. It lulled me to sleep when I should have been listening to real sounds instead.

Before I left on my trip he whispered in my ear “I wish you were my girl” and then walked off into the night, and I spent the whole six months I was away wondering if I’d heard him right.

When I got back there was no sign of that temple.

As far as I know Victoria Centre is still going strong.