The other David Beckham

A good few years older than his namesake, and painfully shy. The other David Beckham was approached once at a school disco by a girl who asked him to dance. He had silently worshipped her for years. With all he'd dreamed of from ages eight through to twelve there in front of him he’d panicked and run to find his mum, who was chaperoning that night, told her he'd been sick and asked to go home. he spilled a cherry Panda Pop on his shirt to prove it. He’s never forgotten the moment and it’s coloured the rest of his life. Even now, forty-three years later, he finds it close to impossible to approach women, and he fixates upon that moment, willing himself into the past, willing his past self to say yes.

He worked for a time in the Civil Service, as a job centre adviser. In his work he was confident and precise, brisk even. Crisply dealing with the weekly searches of job-seekers, ensuring that they’d applied for the requisite number of positions and helping them find more. His efficiency meant that he was perpetually near the top of the office league table for success in shifting people from benefits into work, but he suffered a crisis of confidence after the suicide of someone who he’d placed in a job at a local supermarket. There were rumours of a bullying culture, and an investigation that was inconclusive. After that he found himself second-guessing every decision and slipped slowly, inexorably down the league, his supervisor stopped smiling at him and he was forgotten when the tea run was made. He left the job centre and drifted into an itinerant career, working variously as a bar man, a sales supervisor at a gift card shop, in the canteen of a shoe manufacturer and, latterly, as a customer service clerk at a bookmakers, where his shyness is matched by the diffidence of the daytime punters, the old men who don’t have smartphones and who still stare at the form pages of the newspapers which are pinned to the walls, muttering to themselves as they do so.

His most cherished memory is of a holiday to Croatia, taken when he was fifteen. A girl approached him as he sat on a wall next to the sea, kicking his legs against the arid concrete. She had green eyes face and honey coloured hair, and to his amazement she cradled his face in her hands and kissed him without a word. His first kiss, and one of only a handful he’s had so far, though he lives in quiet hope (there is a woman who volunteers at the church soup kitchen on Tuesdays who he thinks might like him). She smiled, turned and walked away. He didn’t go after her.