The sign on the door still reads MARLOWE TV AND RADIO SERVICE in a typeface that dates it to roughly 1974. Underneath, on a sheet of A4 gone yellow at the corners: WE DO NOT FIX LAPTOPS. Underneath that, on a sheet that is still white: WE REALLY DO NOT FIX LAPTOPS. Koji Marlowe says the third sheet is coming and it will be ruder.
Sixteen stairs, turning left, no handrail. The smell arrives about halfway down and it is the reason people come here: hot solder, dust cooking off a transformer, and under both of those the faintly sweet smell of a valve amplifier that has been switched on for two hours and is thinking about it. The basement runs the full footprint of the shop and then some, because at some point in the eighties somebody knocked through into the cellar next door and never mentioned it to the council.
Forty-one amplifiers sit on steel shelving down the long wall, each with a brown luggage tag looped through the handle: owner, fault, date in. The oldest tag is from 2019 and has faded to the point of uselessness. Marlowe is standing over an open chassis with an iron in one hand and a small torch in his teeth, and he does not look up when we come down. He takes the torch out of his mouth and says: careful where you put your bag, that one is live and it bites. Then he asks if we want tea, and puts the iron back in its stand without turning it off, because it is never off.
