Put yourself in their (crocodile) shoes

It's My birthday. Happy Birthday to Me. For my birthday I got some yellow silk socks and a pair of crocodile shoes. The man from Lobb verified them: real crocodile, beautiful skins, very well-made, should last me my lifetime, don't use metal trees and polish them with linseed oil. They are a size too small but il faut souffrir pour etre beaux.

I bought them myself, in memory of a terrible old roue I used to know. Dead now, like too many people who used to brighten the place up. Not an Edwardian roue, you understand; more Georgian, flagrant and unabashed in the floridity of his sin. A prowler. It's my birthday; Mister Infarct on the stairway, Mister Gaga in the hall, looking at their wristwatches, biding their time; what can you do?

Yellow silk socks and crocodile shoes is what you can do.

I took them out dancing and they seemed happy, at home in the smoky nightclub, sexy ladies, loud music, cigarette smoke and Kid Creole at the table, dapper in his scarlet suit and pencil moustache. Beautiful ladies with breath like honey sat on my lap. I drank like a fish, was last to leave, and now the long slide into the grave continues; but not without elegance; not without a fight.

The crocodile shoes came from Bennett's in the Hammersmith Road, a repository of dashed hopes and changed minds, where you can buy other people's memories and mistakes and make them your own.

Two parallel texts hang from Bennett's rails to be read. The living men's mistakes promote fiction; dead men's suits are biography. Here is a polycotton seersucker in a sadistic Prince of Wales check. A living man bought this. Why? Easy: he was a vulgar person of loud taste and no discretion; a bounder, who in earlier times would have had a Vauxhall, two-tone with whitewall tyres and reclining seats, yellow dogskin gloves in the glove-box and a bottle of Madeira on the mantelpiece in his little Dolphin Square pied-a-terre because the popsies like something sweet, bless their little hearts: give them something sweet and soothe their fears, listen to your Uncle Ronnie and you won't go far wrong, old man.

But why did he sell it again? Did the money run out? Did the divorcee rumble him and withdraw her support; chucked out of the little Tite Street love-nest, did he fetch up in a Peabody Trust building somewhere off the Edgware Road, melancholy among the clari- net students and twitchy Lebanese transients, moving from chip shop to newsagent in a world of skips and tide-wrack and other people's mattresses, buying his fags in tens and eat- ing tinned spaghetti on toast? Did the mo- ment come when he needed something in sombre grey to wear to an interview for ... for what? A job as a trainee timeshare salesman, a bookie's runner, the front man for a telephone-sex joint?

He should have bought the crocodile shoes, that's what: bought the crocodile shoes and gone back to Tite Street after a suitable lapse of time, when the divorcee had had a few nasty experiences with toyboys, become a little frayed, a little less fruitily plump, said a little too much to the hairdresser, spent a little too long in bed among her pillows and her collection of china dolls. "Ooh look at you. Crocodile shoes! My, you have landed on your feet. You'd better come in ... "

And then the vodka-and-tonic ("I didn't want so much tonic." "I haven't put the tonic in yet, dear.") and the chat and the reconciliation and the bed.

Purest fiction; and the sadistic suit probably belonged to a harmless man who realised it was a mistake, bought it in Atlanta, Georgia, but somehow it didn't travel; all that worry about not declaring it at Heathrow, the stories made up in the 747 lavatory ("Actually I bought it on my last trip and I think if you look up your records you'll find I paid duty then"), and all for nothing, because under grey London skies it just looked ... well, looked like a white man trying to look like a black man.

Purest fiction. But the dead men's clothes are more factual. Here's something from Douglas Hayward, made for Lord Someone, the Someone carefully blacked- out on the label. Lord Someone isn't like you or me. Lord Someone is made of finer stuff. Not for Lord Someone the broad shoulders, the hardworking legs, the deep proletarian chest, with their low centre of gravity. Lord Someone is improbably long, impossibly thin, with arms like an ape, designed by a benevolent God to drape himself over a pigsty wall, or lounge bonelessly in a neo- classical drawing-room. And here are his suits, his tweeds, his greatcoat and his hunting pink. Lord Someone never knew the problems of Uncle Ronnie. If there were Tite Street divorcees - which there were in their dozens - Lord Someone parted with them on the best of terms ("A little something to see you right, my dear") and outlived the rest. But it's all gone now; Lord Someone's in his grave, and his heirs have sold the old place to a sharky commission's agent with a blazer and a four-wheel drive, and Sharky's wife Boofles (podgy arms, scent by Giorgio, ex make-up salesgirl, blow- job queen of the North-West, now on her fourth husband but by no means her last) is already filling the place with chintz, flounc- ing around in turquoise chiffon, queening it like buggery and making herself utterly loathed by the locals who talk about her behind her back, common as muck.

So it goes. Fiction, biography, and the crocodile shoes? Oh ... metempsychosis, I expect. Presently the leather will re-form to the idiosyncrasies of my own feet, but the shoes have their own soul and it has entered into mine as it entered into the previous owner's. We are become chancers, smoothies, men with an eye for a pretty girl, smelling of brandy and cigar smoke, happiest after dark, not to be trusted. Lock up your daughters but don't blame me, blame my dead man's birthday crocodile shoes. !