The second chance store, p.15
The Second Chance Store, page 15
No, she’d like to cut it out as a mere practicality. A simple workaround. Not many things left in the world could make her hate her body, but clothes were one of them.
She had bought the dress in a panic, which was how she bought most of her clothes. Notions of shopping as “retail therapy” had always baffled her, because to Bronagh it felt more like administering an emergency drug.
She shopped on her lunch hour, when whatever she’d left the house wearing that morning felt wrong—socially wrong, aesthetically wrong, morally wrong, but also physically wrong, digging and slipping and riding up as though the clothes were trying to crawl off her body and escape. She shopped after work too, grabbing things she was too exhausted to try on and knew she’d be too lazy to return. She shopped at night, bathed in the blue light of her phone screen as her boyfriend slept beside her. She shopped alone, always, and couldn’t remember the last time it had been fun.
This dress was a midi in a vivid floral print that had looked playful and stylish on the mannequin but somehow both clownish and dowdy on her, like a toddler dressed as a pensioner for a play. She’d bought it anyway. It had joined the legion of dresses in her wardrobe that were worn resentfully, and which only looked good in the mornings.
This morning, “good” was too high a bar but she was willing to settle for fine. “You look fine” was how her sister answered the phone when Bronagh called to say she wasn’t going to the party. Actually she said, “You look fiiiiiiiiiiiinnne,” stretching the vowel out until the word collapsed into an exasperated grunt. Not “fine” as in beautiful. Fine as in adequate. Fine as in, nobody is looking at you anyway.
“I can’t fully breathe,” she had said.
“How fully is not fully?” Siobhan had replied.
“Maybe fifty percent lung capacity?”
“Any pain under your ribs?”
“Not yet.”
“Good girl. Pop a Brufen.”
Bronagh clenched a fistful of fabric. “Shiv, I’m not coming.”
“You are though.”
“I’m not.”
“Except you are.”
“Nobody will care.”
“I care. You’re coming for me.”
“Do it for me” was the sibling trump card they agreed could be played once a year each, no more. In their teens Siobhan had even kept a tally in the back of an exercise book to ensure neither exceeded their quota.
Back then, their duties mostly involved lying for each other to their parents, accompanying each other on trips to R-rated films and taking it in turns to stand guard as they got off with the same boy round the back of the big Safeway. Being so close in age meant the sisters tended to swap and share everything indiscriminately—clothes, razors, lovers—until either felt the slightest tug of competition from the other, at which point they’d mark out their territory with sudden ferocity and snarls.
Two decades later, their obligations were more complicated. They had involved, over the years, lawyers, landlords, removal vans, hospital waiting rooms, the invention of fake email addresses and the destruction of incriminating property. Sometimes when her phone pinged and it was her sister, resurfacing after months of silence with the words “Do me a favor?,” her palms would sweat and she would curse the day her parents came home with the new baby and condemned her to a life of familial servitude. Sometimes, though she’d never admit it, she was thrilled.
Today, Bronagh was defeated. “Fine” was all she said, and hung up the phone.
Then she unzipped the dress to her waist, inhaled greedily, and put an old cardigan on top. She turned back to the mirror. Fine. Fiiiine.
21
When it came to sex, Gwen usually struggled to focus on the job in hand.
This had been especially true with Ryan after years of the same set menu, but it had happened with her few casual flings in the years since, too. Her mind wandered. Pragmatically, through pieces of life admin—whether she’d hung that washing out, had she canceled the Sky Cinema trial—but also surreally, to snapshots of places long since forgotten during her upright hours. The kitchen of a childhood friend, the cool atrium of a ceramics shop she’d once visited in Mallorca, the thickly carpeted foyer of her local bank branch. Faces of former teachers and colleagues, long-dead relatives and daytime TV hosts would loom up out of nowhere. She would find herself running through lists of trivia or trying to retrace her footsteps around a local TK Maxx, only stopping when some shift would occur in proceedings that jolted her back into her body.
In this respect it wasn’t that the sex she had was bad, only that it functioned less as sex and more as an exercise in meditation: allowing the weird flotsam and jetsam thoughts that were usually held back all day behind makeshift mental barriers to surge forward and flood her brain. She always slept soundly afterward.
But this time was different. For the first few minutes, her embarrassment acted like a shot of adrenaline. Every noise seemed amplified, every awkward maneuver and logistical shuffle and oop-my-hair-is-caught was magnified times ten. She felt electrified by the strangeness of the situation. Lit up by a thousand fluorescent bulbs, naked in the middle of a soundstage. Burning with the fear that after twenty-odd years, you might still be doing sex wrong.
Then she forced herself to look at Nicholas, who was pinker-cheeked than she had ever seen him, grinning like a kid at a funfair, and something brilliant happened.
Something awful happened first—his growling “You love that, don’t you,” while kneading at her tits like bread dough, which she absolutely didn’t love—but suddenly, Gwen didn’t care what he thought, and that was energizing in a different way altogether. She didn’t care about inhaling as she arched her back to unclasp the bra he was struggling to remove; didn’t care about the stretch marks that laced across the tops of her thighs, or the minimal depilatory efforts that drew a firm landing strip, as far as she’d heard, between her generation and his. With a confidence Gwen had never had in bed before—not with Ryan, who tended to take sexual stage directions as a personal insult—she told him what she wanted, and what she didn’t, and where and when and how and nope, not that, stop it, stay still, yes, no, yes, yes yes. For once she made no effort to rush things along; didn’t feel obliged to start the encouraging fanfare too early, to make things sound more imminent than they really were. The coital equivalent of texting “there in five!” when you’re still upside down with a hairdryer. No. Let him wait.
Nicholas didn’t seem to have a problem with this. In fact, he seemed to prefer it.
Afterward, Gwen sat on the toilet, praying he would leave of his own accord. Her mouth felt swollen again, and alien. She pulled at her lower lip, maneuvering it until it covered her top lip completely, enjoying the warm, wet flump of it against her skin. Gwen often did things like this in private. It was a kind of sensuality that didn’t exist in porn or perfume adverts.
She sat for another minute, or maybe three, not caring if her absence started to look suspect. Two short, dark hairs lay on the side of the bath, she noticed, curled one within the other like quotation marks. She left them there. In the mirror, she wiped away the mascara gunk that had collected under her eyes. Then she took out her lenses, pulled her hair into a topknot and proceeded to remove what was left of her makeup, slowly and methodically, until all she could see in the mirror was a round, pink balloon with ears.
Eventually, Nicholas’s voice punctured the silence. Not from the next room but from right up against the other side of the bathroom door. It felt presumptuously intimate, in spite of everything they’d just done.
“Uh, hi, Gwen? I was thinking, I’m going to order a pizza,” it said. Then, “What would you like on yours?”
Clock
By the time Janet was eight years old, she was well known to the counter staff at the pawnshop.
Her father was in the habit of taking the smallest and most adorable of his six children along with him on each visit, as a kind of insurance. Cross words might still be spoken, veiled threats might still be exchanged, but while Janet stood there in her gymslip and best school socks, smiling her gap-toothed smile like her sister Linda before her, and her brother Ralph before her, and Rita and Bernie and Phyllis before him, he knew that no punches would be thrown and the curses would be kept to a minimum. Reggie preferred it that way because he was, as he was fond of telling everyone at the dog track as yet another prayer was lost in the dust, a deeply pious man.
Besides, Reggie McAffery was good for business and it didn’t do to let them forget that. Grimes & Son, meanwhile, made money off the downturn of other people’s fortunes. Underneath all the niceties and yessirs and shiny cufflinks and biscuits at Christmas they were nothing but a pair of jackals feasting on other people’s bad luck, and if Reggie shook their hands and took the biscuits, well that was only because it paid to keep them on side. Also, he loved the pink wafers.
“It’s never really their money,” he would tell Janet, or Ellen or Bernie, with emphasis. “But it’s never really ours, neither.”
And so the family lived in a state of eternal seesaw, like so many on their street, using the life raft of their possessions to keep their heads above water on a weekly or monthly basis. During the leanest months, Reggie would pawn his best Sunday suit on a Monday before buying it back with his Saturday pay packet. On the few occasions the money wouldn’t stretch to get it back in time, he would wear his overalls and boots to the churchyard and sing along from the end of the path, his gruff, tuneless baritone still managing to drown out most of the indoor congregation.
But the clock was the real barometer for the family’s fortunes. Janet had still been a baby when Reggie had been given it as part payment for a plastering job at the smarter end of the Roman Road, where a young French couple had vacated the property in a hurry and the landlord didn’t want to cough up the full amount for their extensive—and somewhat mysterious—damage. It was a hulking great thing in gilded wood; a brass-ringed face buried in an ornate sunburst design, layers of rays in deep relief, intricately carved to look like so many golden feathers. The back was stamped with the name: Japy Frères. Improbably, given the scene of wanton destruction around it, the clock kept perfect time.
“I took a shine to it,” he’d told his wife when he brought it home that night. “Jappy Freers knows his stuff.” She’d wrinkled her nose at its gaudiness and old-fashioned heft, at a time when everyone wanted Bakelite. And when Reg’s cousin, who sold antiques on Camden Passage, had told him it dated back to the late Belle Époque and might be worth a serious bob or two, she had tried to insist he sell it outright. But Reggie dug his heels in. He was an aesthete when he could afford to be, and he wanted the sunburst on his wall where all the neighbors could see it glinting through the net curtains. He was, as he was fond of telling the curate when he called with his cautionary pamphlets, a deeply modern man.
“It’ll brighten our gray days, Vi,” he’d said, whistling a few bars of “You Are My Sunshine” and dancing her around the kitchen. She called him a big daft beggar, but she let the clock stay.
Of course, it ended up at Grimes & Son. In fact, the sunburst went in and out with such regularity over the years that it started to mimic the East End sky. “When times are good, the clock hangs on the wall,” Reg liked to say. “When times are bad, we don’t need a clock to tell us.”
He was proud of this poetic bent. He fancied himself a latter-day Alfred P. Doolittle without the loose morals.
Then one day Reggie’s wrist turned on a tricky ceiling job, and his little bit of luck went with it. Away went the sun for a longer stretch, and then a longer one still, and by the time Janet was eight and her eldest siblings were out at work themselves, money was so tight she could feel it—in the shoes that pinched, the skirt that cut into her waist, and the gristle that caught in her throat. It was the mid-sixties and elsewhere the city was starting to swing, but within their four walls life had almost ground to a halt.
Until she found the cash. A slim bundle of notes tied up with a piece of butcher’s string, hidden inside an old Huntley & Palmer’s tin right at the back of the wardrobe. Janet liked to climb in there periodically, to escape her siblings, crunch cola cubes and contemplate life. Her friend Nancy sometimes lent her a Bunty comic when she was finished with it. Last week, one of the stories had featured a gang of gung-ho schoolgirls coming across a hidden stash of money in a smuggler’s cave during a pony trek (or was it in a circus wagon during a thunderstorm?), so when she opened the tin and saw it there, she simply thought: treasure, of course.
Wary of getting herself caught up in criminal activity that might not end as well for Janet as it did for the girls in straw boaters, she had felt it sensible to dispense of the loot quickly and in the most noble way she could think of. So she’d taken the money in secret, gone along to the pawnshop, flashed that gummy grin and asked very nicely if she could buy the clock back, please. It was her dad’s favorite and it would make him so happy to have it on the wall for his birthday.
To his credit, Reggie only screamed and raged and kicked the bins along the alleyway later, after Janet had gone to bed. In front of his youngest daughter he simply clasped his hands together and said, “Well now. How about that. What a lovely thing you’ve done, old girl.”
The clock never left the wall again after that. He was, as he was fond of telling them down the Dover Castle at chucking out time, a deeply sentimental man.
22
Nicholas was staring into her fridge, of all places.
“Why do you have so many types of vinegar?”
Gwen often stared into her fridge herself, imagining how it would look were she to be interviewed for a tabloid newspaper’s “What’s in your fridge?” feature.
What would a celebrity nutritionist make of the two whole shelves of pickles and gherkins and Christmas present jams and chutneys and chili oils and continental mustards with precisely one spoonful missing from each? The old yogurt pot suspended in ice like a dead explorer, or the clouded Tupperware of mystery leftovers so forbidding that she now thought of it only as “The Box”? What story could be gleaned from the graveyard of half-eaten apples, packets of parched coriander, stumps of carrot shriveled like witch’s fingers, and fossilized quarters of lemon?
Optimism, she liked to think. Only an optimist buys a whole pot of buttermilk when the recipe calls for two tablespoons. An optimist believes they will genuinely use the rest.
Of course, the imaginary readers wouldn’t know that the fridge also had an indeterminate smell, the source of which Gwen never managed to find. Every so often she’d turf out a mold-capped jar of pesto or a slimy spring onion and think she’d beheaded the beast, but the smell would return. They wouldn’t know that when hungover or sad, she liked to crush up a family-sized bag of Doritos and eat them with a spoon, like cornflakes.
Every couple of months Gwen would take herself to the organic minimarket in the next postcode over and spend a pleasant hour breathing in the scent of burlap and botanical hand cream, squeezing bags of ancient grains, and looking at exotic fruits as though they were gallery installations. She never picked up a basket—a basket was too big a statement of intent—and so instead would gather a pile of things in her arms as she walked around, holding them in place with her chin.
At the counter, she would dump them all down and try to look like a person who knew exactly what she was going to do with a bag of blue maize flour, pickled plums, and a spirulina Bounce ball. While the cashier rang up her purchases she would do a frantic appraisal of the chocolate bars, the way she did in every shop, scanning the rows with urgency, as though it might be her last ever chance to buy chocolate. Occasionally she would grab one in the final seconds before the cashier announced the total, and then she would regret it when the chocolate cost £4.79 and tasted of soap. More often she wouldn’t, and she’d regret that too.
Gwen would take her spoils home and line them up on the kitchen counter, hoping Nigel Slater might manifest and offer instructions in a soothing voice. She would nibble a cautious corner of something, open a packet of something else, dunk a Hobnob into a jar of apple butter and discover sadly that it wasn’t butter at all, but a kind of sweet, viscous tar. Then she would bundle everything into the back of the cupboards and take the pasta saucepan out again.
All of which explained, but only just, how Nicholas came to be standing in her kitchen, asking why she had so many types of vinegar.
“Obviously don’t get me wrong, love a bit of bal-sal,” he was saying. “But Gwen, I didn’t have you down as such a gourmand.”
“I’m not,” she told him. “I use it for . . . limescale.”
They had finished their pizzas twenty minutes ago—eaten not in bed, but stood awkwardly at the kitchen counter like a pair of Italian businessmen—and though he was showing no sign of trying to settle in for a sleepover, he wasn’t showing any sign of leaving either.
Having finally finished the fridge inspection, he was now walking around her flat, identifying items out loud to nobody in particular—“Curtains . . . nice . . . oh, a spider plant . . . HG Mould Remover Spray . . . cool . . .”—while Gwen yawned and tugged at the hem of her pajama shorts and agreed that yes, he was correct, that was a heated drying rack.
There should be music playing, she realized. It was strange, wasn’t it, that neither of them had put music on? Didn’t that say something, about something? She could put some music on now, but it was too late for that and might look like she was vying for an encore.
