Casio, 1984 Jayne Marshall (bio) We hadn't known each other for very long, so the watch shops served as a proxy, a third person to dampen the intensity of a full day spent together. We wandered from shop to shop, searching for bargains and looking ahead, talking only when we felt like it. The summer sun was a shock to us too, as—until now—in the couple of months we had known one other, we had only ever met at nighttime. He would show up at my place once he finished work, usually around midnight. We drank tea and smoked, then made love. By the time the sun rose, I was already on the way to work, having left him sleeping in my bed, the cat curled up in the crook of his long legs. He didn't drink, but he did smoke. Though of his addictions, or dependencies, buying old watches was probably the most imperative. He spent money he didn't have, projecting onto his purchases dreams of huge future profits via specialist reselling websites, dreams that seemed to me to be very slow in materialising. But it made him happy, the joy of a rare find illuminating his day and, by extension, our excursions. He knew Madrid like no one else I knew in the city, having been born there, and never having left. He didn't ever tell me where we were headed, but I was happy to follow him around, down streets I hadn't seen before, and some that I had but now saw with new eyes. The watch shops themselves were rare finds. Like most capital cities, the small businesses were being ousted by chains as well as by time and technology. As he questioned and haggled with the shopkeepers, it was pleasant to imagine customers coming and going, asking for watch batteries to be changed, wasted straps to be replaced. An act of imagination was necessary, as the shops were always empty. Hopeful, handwritten signs announcing new and unmissable offers yellowed, unread, in the windows. My favourite watch shop was called Dimar. A contraction of both the owners' surnames, although only 'Mar' remained now. Dimar was hidden [End Page 124] away in an arcade between two busy streets. Only two other premises were left open, one sold cameras and another was a signwriter's workshop—making the whole place otherworldly and a little eerie. Inside Dimar everything was pristine. Watch parts were organised by maker and by year, in four great walls of drawers. He asked for a new strap for a Casio 1984, which was located and fitted in a matter of minutes. Waiting, he scratched his thigh, which I knew to be red and raw under his jeans. He had told me it got worse with stress. Above the counter was a screen with space for double figures, imploring customers to take a ticket and wait their turn. It was switched off. Each of these trips was also a trip through his past, embedded as it was in the city itself. He showed me the streets where he had played as a kid, where Madrid's first Chinese restaurant had opened its doors, where he rented his first apartment with his first girlfriend. One day we came upon a building that had been almost completely demolished; only the façade remained, held up at the back with scaffold poles. He stopped in his tracks and took a photo with his phone. He told me his sister had worked there as a teenager, when it had been a large and cavernous bookshop. I was marking time too. Looking for signs; quietly taking notes and measuring them against experience. In my last relationship, had I already started to feel lonely after four months? Was I miserable by our six-month anniversary? I counted eight months before I had been told: 'I love you, but . . .' Now, with him, it was different. Calm. Metronomic. Yet I worried that without the intensity—traumatic, corrosive as it had been, but binding all the same—we would grow bored with one another. What should come after 'I love you' if not a storm of emotions...