Forty-Fives, by Carlton Myers

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Lenny Marsh opened Spin City in a damp basement off Gallowtree Gate in the spring of 1967, with three hundred records he had bought from a sailor and a loan from his uncle that he never paid back. He was only twenty-two, but he wore a tweed jacket with leather elbows, as though he were a professor of something. He kept the soul and ska singles in a locked cabinet behind the counter, because they were the ones that walked out of the shop in people’s coats. Anyone who asked for the latest number one was sent up the road to Woolworths with a polite smile. The listening booth was a converted coal cellar with an old sofa inside, and Lenny allowed only one person in it at a time, timing them on a kitchen clock. On Saturday afternoons the queue went right up the steps to the pavement. He knew every regular by the records they bought rather than by name, so that a quiet boy from the grammar school was known all over town as Otis.

List five things you learn about Lenny Marsh in this extract.