The second chance store, p.14
The Second Chance Store, page 14
“She’s supposed to be twenty bloody seven!” Connie had raged, brandishing a pricing gun. “Twenty-seven!”
And “The main chap has all the charisma of a breeze block!”—yelled from up a stepladder.
And “And we’re supposed to believe Carmen Whatsit, Diaz, is going to drop out of college to open his beers?”—while helping a customer wrestle a pair of cargo pants off an armless mannequin.
“I know,” Gwen said each time, in a soothing tone. “You’re very right.” Although they both agreed the musical lunch scene was perfect.
A little later, Connie talked Gwen into buying a pair of shoes. They were white with vertiginous stiletto heels, pointed toes and slim, buckled straps that crisscrossed over her arches. Shoes of a kind Gwen had never worn, not even at Peak Clubbing or, a decade later, Peak Wedding. She was stroking them absentmindedly, more as a piece of art than a wearable prospect, when Connie pounced and forced her to try them on.
“They’re ridiculous,” she told Connie, as they both looked at her reflection, one hip jutting out in a parody of music video sex appeal.
“They’re fabulous,” Connie insisted, although Connie wasn’t the kind of person who said “fabulous.” “Not my taste of course, but you look tremendous in them. And look! Look at your face, you clearly love them.”
Did she? She really didn’t think she did.
“Honestly, Gwen,” Connie went on, “buy all the heels! Wear all the heels. Fuck your feet up until they are gnarled little trotters, life is short.” She said this with the breezy conviction of a woman in £300 loafers. Connie would never wear shoes like this, Gwen was sure.
“Really, Connie, I do not lead a killer heels life. I barely lead a clogs life.”
“Well that’s because you don’t have the shoes.” She was grabbing skirts and dresses from the rails now, holding them up in front of Gwen for consideration. Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” was playing over the shop speakers and suddenly the effect was so acutely that of a rom-com makeover montage that it felt rude to ruin the moment.
“They’re not me,” she tried again.
“Then don’t be you! Be someone else for a night. Run riot.”
“I can barely hobble riot.”
Connie laughed her signature laugh, which was a loud, monosyllabic bark. But she was in full flow now, boxing the shoes up, ringing them through the till and writing them down for her in the volunteers’ purchase log.
“You want them, I can see it in your eyes. Now drop the sexless self-denial bit and give yourself permission.” It seemed easier to give in before Connie tried to make her recite any affirmations. Obediently, Gwen tapped her card.
The jury was out on the sexless self-denial bit, because she had agreed to see Nicholas tomorrow night. Somehow, after the ick factor of the dinner party had faded, the morbid curiosity remained. “Okay,” she’d said quietly, walking up behind him as he shook warm rain from his trench coat at the start of their Tuesday shift. “One drink. But please know if there is a single Ian Fleming reference, I will leave.”
Nicholas had laughed, and promised, and spent the rest of the afternoon whistling “Nobody Does It Better” while he baby-wiped a pile of Mills & Boon romances. Gwen had spent the rest of the afternoon pretending he wasn’t there.
Only when he’d said “See you Saturday, Gwen,” in front of Lise at the end of the day, and Lise had dropped her usual cool demeanor to yelp “I am sorry, what?,” and Gwen had stammered something unconvincing about him sounding her out for work consultation on his retro-tat business, and Lise had told Brian, who had told Brenda, who had told Connie, who had greeted her arrival for the Wednesday afternoon shift with a cheerful “Here she is, Mrs. Robinson!,” had she admitted that the drink was a thing that was happening. She admitted it more fully the next evening as she gave herself an at-home bikini wax.
It itched, now, the whole region did, and she performed a series of discreet lunges behind the counter to try to deal with the problem. It didn’t work. By closing time she felt like one giant, walking crotch.
“Go, have fun! Make his year! Tell me all the sordid details please,” Connie said, winking, giving her a little push out of the door. “Wear the shoes.”
Handbag
It was the first thing Asha bought when her first month’s salary came through. Before lunch, even, or a new pair of tights to replace the ones that had laddered halfway up her thigh on the escalator at Turnpike Lane that morning. A bag. The right kind of bag.
She didn’t love it, but that didn’t seem relevant. Asha wasn’t sure what it meant to love a bag, or how she would know if it happened to her. She loved people, music, intense conversations, and mediocre Thai food. Loved finding the perfect question to pry a case, or a person, wide open. The other junior associates knew how to love bags. They knew how to identify each model (make? Flavor?) by its proper name or number, and appreciate the tiny design evolutions that could add three hundred pounds to a price tag. They knew how to talk about gold “hardware” and pocket capacity and exclusivity—mainly the last thing—while stroking each other’s buttery-soft full-grain leather, cooing over new acquisitions as though they were lapdogs with straps.
Some of them had been toting expensive bags since they were undergrads, or school kids. She could tell. It came easily to them. They carried them casually, tossing them onto sticky pub floors and swinging them from the crooks of their elbows as though they weighed nothing at all.
Some hadn’t, and she could tell that too. They carried theirs a little too carefully, held them a little too tightly in the Itsu queue. She could see the glimmer of awe and defiance in their eyes, reflecting the gold embossed label that proved it definitely wasn’t a knockoff from the market. Asha held her bag like it was someone else’s newborn baby, or a bomb that could go off at any second (though honestly, weren’t they the same thing?). She couldn’t not hear her mother’s voice, squawking that there were thieves everywhere, that pride was sinful, and the world was queueing up to knock her off her perch.
Truth was, she barely even liked the bag she chose. But that seemed the best strategy—playing against all her natural inclinations, going too far the other way. She hoped she could use the bag as a corrective device, against which she would grow in the right direction. It might help counteract her accent, her shoes, the nails that clicked against her keyboard as she typed and which somehow sounded different in their timbre and pitch to everyone else’s nails clicking against their keyboards as they typed.
She had swelled with pride as she left the shop with her bag (inside another bag, inside a box, inside yet another bag because that was how this lunacy worked). Pride, not so much for having earned it herself, but more for having successfully overridden her own instincts. And while buying an overpriced bag she barely liked might be small fry compared to the other modifications on her Be Less Asha checklist—talk less, talk more quietly, ask fewer questions, learn to ski—it felt like as good a place as any to start.
Within a couple of weeks she had filled the bag as she had filled every bag before it: with tissues; lip gloss and loose, fuzzy lozenges; wadded-up receipts with gum spat into them; wrapperless tampons roaming free like escaped mice; and a quantity of that mysterious gritty sand that will line every handbag until the end of time. Her plastic lunch box had leaked oil into one corner of the monogrammed lining. She would scrub furiously at this stain several years later, knowing it meant that there was no point trying a fancy resale site, that it was consigned to the charity bin liner instead. She would see the handbag as a symbol of everything she’d tried so hard to carry, and everything she’d let fall. For now, she shrugged.
The bag was soon scuffed around its edges in a way that she’d hoped, as she hurled it cheerfully into the backs of taxis and onto the toilet floor when she had her customary 4 p.m. cry, might give her a little of the same easy nonchalance as the others.
But it didn’t. And it wouldn’t. It wasn’t the right kind of scuffed, somehow.
Maybe it wasn’t the right kind of bag.
20
Gwen wore the shoes.
She felt absurd, teetering on their spikes along Seven Sisters Road, feeling every bump and swell in the pavement through the tender balls of her feet. It had been a while. She’d almost forgotten about heels. Forgotten the way they made you feel fragile, but somehow brave in your fragility. The same way red lipstick made you self-conscious about your mouth, and that was supposedly its power.
She’d forgotten the way each street and staircase you click-clacked down without falling over felt like a victory, and so maybe that was the secret: to spend a day in heels was to cheat death over and over again. Who wouldn’t feel strong after that?
In the Tube station, a busker was playing a maudlin acoustic version of “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz and Gwen pictured herself falling down the Tube escalator. She did this a lot, even when she was wearing trainers. She pictured the way she would fall, imagining each thud and crunch as her limbs hit the stairs. The way her body would fold and flail like a defective Slinky. She would replay it over and over in her mind, zooming in on different details—the wobbly ankle that started it, the faces of people around her changing in slow motion as she made her descent—and imagining all the variables of pain and injury, from small grazes and bruises to instant death. The more she imagined it, somehow, the safer she felt.
This wasn’t the same as imagining leaping in front of a train as it pulled into the platform, or hurling somebody else’s baby across the room like a rugby ball, or the urge to kiss the back of a stranger’s neck, tenderly, while she stood behind them on the Tube. The more she thought about those things, the more she worried she would do them. But because the falling would be involuntary, the act of a sadistic god, it felt like the best way to protect herself against it happening was to mentally practice, again and again, until she almost started to wish it would happen, just to get it over with. And then it wouldn’t. This all made sense in her head.
The bar turned out to be one of Nicholas’s clients, which meant she had to endure the painful ordeal of watching him greet the barman like an old friend, then asking after “Tom” once it was clear the barman didn’t remember him, then discovering the barman was Tom, then carefully explaining who he was by saying “I sourced your musket” several times.
“The muscat?” asked Tom, helpfully.
No, insisted Nicholas, and pointed to the wall above the pool table, where a long replica gun was mounted alongside framed sepia photos of Wild West pioneers. “The musket.”
Once that was settled, he steered her toward a cozy corner booth—the hand on her lower back was welcome for once, as ballast—and the two of them sat in silence for a moment, sipping their martinis and making “ah” noises. She was determined not to crack first.
“So Gwen, how’s the career break going?” he asked, finally.
“Still broken!” she joked.
“But are you feeling, like, creatively refueled?”
She studied his face for signs that he was joking, and found none.
“Not entirely, ah, refueled yet, no . . . but certainly in the process of . . . um . . .” She stalled. “It’s nice to have more, y’know, headspace? I’ve got a much better idea of what I don’t want to do, at least.”
“Which is?” Nicholas asked.
“So far, everything.”
He shook his head and wagged his finger. “That’s a defeatist attitude, Gwen. I thought you were more driven than that.”
“Nope, sorry. Really not.”
“Your friend Susan said that at school you were voted Girl Most Likely to Be Prime Minister.”
“That’s because I used to take a newspaper with me to house parties.”
Nicholas didn’t seem to know what to say to this, so he launched into a long story about a debate tournament in which he’d once beaten Richard Branson’s nephew. Gwen fished the olives out of her drink and ate them, suddenly starving. She willed the numbing warmth of the vodka down toward her throbbing toes.
She was almost glad he’d used the martini gimmick, because it made the whole thing feel more like elaborate roleplay than actual dating. So long as he kept up his schtick with the galleries and cocktails and trench coats and antique armory, Gwen could pretend she wasn’t going out with him so much as taking part in a murder mystery weekend, or an amateur dramatic Noël Coward. And for as long as she was unemployed, this odd diversion seemed to fit the bill.
For as long as she was fraternizing with Nicholas and failing to get herself hired as Special Client Envoy for a dynamic design agency who did the blackboards outside coffee shops (“curbside straight-to-consumer marketing, must have GSOH and proven chalk skills”), she could write this whole time off as an aberration. Post-redundancy decision-making disorder. It could also explain why she’d started watching old reruns of Watercolour Challenge on YouTube at 3 a.m. And when she had mortifying sex with him later, which she was already fairly sure she was going to do, it would explain that too.
Nicholas finished his story. But just as he shuffled closer to her on the banquette in what had all the overtures of A Move, a voice cut through the buzz.
“Oh hey! Gwen!”
It was one of the Gemmas from her office. A lesser-known Gemma—possibly a Jemma, or even a Jenna?—dangling off the arm of a man who was wearing two shirts, one on top of the other.
“Hi! Hey! How are you?” Gwen attempted to match her enthusiasm without necessitating introductions.
“How are you? Funny, I was saying to Claire H. the other day, we needed to catch up with you and find out how things were going.” G/Jemma tilted her head sympathetically to one side. “Honestly it was so unfair what happened to you, we were all fuming after you left. After all those years you’d been there and everything. A few people even thought about seriously kicking off to the directors.”
“Did they?” Gwen replied. “That’s . . . sweet.”
J/Gemma nodded emphatically. “They really did.”
“I’m fine though, honestly!” Gwen hurried on, lifting her martini in a Gatsbyish pose while praying Nicholas would keep quiet. “I’m actually doing a bit of, ah, volunteering. Taking some time off while I figure out what I want to do next.”
Somehow it sounded less convincing than when she’d said it to Nicholas. It sounded like a disgraced politician doing photo ops at a soup kitchen.
“Wow, good for you!” replied Jemma, because that’s what people have to say. “So selfless! Is it, like, a mentoring thing?”
“No, it’s . . . it’s a cha—” Her lips were forming the word when Nicholas jumped in.
“It’s more a kind of retail consultancy, isn’t it. Gwen?” he said. “Social enterprise combined with strategic post-consumer waste management solutions. Fuelling the circular economy while parlaying the profits into a range of vital community causes. As a small business owner myself I’ve really found her support invaluable.”
Jenna blinked. “Amazing! Wow. So cool. I really must give something back, I’m always saying that, aren’t I, Felix?” Felix dutifully nodded. “I love the sound of the one where you take old people out to tea.”
She turned back to Gwen. “Really glad you’re okay though, Gwen. Honestly it’s their loss. And you didn’t hear this from me, but . . .” She leaned in, after casting a quick glance over each shoulder. “We lost the New Roots account after you let slip about the rates. They went to find an agency that wasn’t stiffing them. Chris was raging. It was fucking brilliant. So there’s another legacy for you.”
Then after the requisite chorus of byebyebyeeees and hollow pledges to go for coffee soon, Maybe-Gemma turned and weaved her way out through the crowd with Felix Two-Shirts in tow. Gwen slowly drained the rest of her drink, watching them through the glass. When she finished, she put it down and found Nicholas staring at her.
“So what—” he began.
“Can we not talk about it, please?”
“Obviously, yeah, of course,” he replied, then proceeded to talk about it. “But did y—”
“Really, I’d rather not.”
“But I just w—’’
“Seriously.”
“Okay, fine, whatever,” he said, affecting a sulky pout. “But you’re going to have to suggest something else for us to do instead, Gwen. I think you owe me for that lie, which was pretty fucking good, if I do say so myself. Did I tell you I used to do improv?”
Gwen looked at him. His hair was rumpled, his cheeks flushed. He was smirking at her teasingly, but also hopefully, and she had the sensation of being an old cad come to corrupt the petal-lipped ingénue. She couldn’t bring herself to deliver the obvious dialogue—“I have a few ideas . . .” or something to that effect—but she leaned in and kissed him anyway, cutting him off right in the middle of a sentence about the St. Andrews university sketch group.
There was an inevitability to the situation that was oddly comforting. Because she’d tortured herself by imagining how it might happen, so many times now that she’d almost started to wish that it would.
Dress
The dress was too tight across her chest. Not so tight that she couldn’t get the zip done up, just tight enough that Bronagh was compelled to take her bra off and manipulate her breasts into place, one then the other. Were they better in the middle, nipples tweaked to point purposefully forward rather than down? Or—she inched a hand beneath the neckline, rummaged around again—tucked away to the sides so they sat almost beneath her armpits? Mix and match? No.
She took a deep, experimental breath, felt the stitches tauten and dig into her flesh as her ribs expanded against their fabric casing. Was she light-headed, or was that psychosomatic? Would she be forced to escape to the toilet every thirty minutes, to sit and unzip and inhale?
Not for the first time, Bronagh entertained a fantasy about cutting into her skin and scooping out a few extraneous fat cells. Not as an act of self-loathing, because she loved her breasts perfectly well most of the time; loved to see them bouncing and assertive in a bikini top or emerging from the bathwater in glossy white mounds like two triumphant, family-sized panna cotte. She’d come a long way since her teens, when she would fill the great, hungry chasms of her waking hours googling “are there calories in phlegm” and wondering which food group silica gel fell into.
