Fiction
A striking story of concealed love
A Room Above a Shop
by Anthony Shapland
A Room Above a Shop opens in south Wales in the late 1980s, where a young man, B, is feeling excited, about to make a big decision. It will take him away from the sense of provisionality that’s embodied by his council house with its “doors with weightless cardboard interiors and hollow aluminium handles”. He’s going to meet an older man, M, to view the sun from a hill on New Year’s Eve.
But he’s not really going for the sun. “He’ll go to hell for what he wants, but still he climbs.” M and B edge closer to each other, certain and uncertain at the same time, heading towards an intimacy they can’t speak aloud. “The hunger for another body, for a person to know, to see what he knows, to share.” Over time, M, who owns the local hardware shop, gives B a job there and invites him to stay in the room above the shop.
Thus, mutely expressed, begins an affecting love story that picks up force as it progresses. The challenge is to find a language that expresses B and M’s inability to articulate their own feelings. Shapland does this with brevity, and a style intimate and impersonal at the same time. There’s a shaking of syntax to reflect the men’s head-spun emotions but also to slow the reader down and make the descriptions sink deeper. “Tense, the flex and judder, and seaweed smells of semen and spit and blood and food all capsize as they slump and sink sleep-deep.”
The atmosphere conjured by the language means that when the plot’s payoff comes, it hits hard, sending the reader reeling. A Room Above a Shop is a sticky book: memorable, striking, dark, beautiful and one of the best debuts I’ve read in years.
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