The second chance store, p.17
The Second Chance Store, page 17
So, they walked.
Clock
Janet hadn’t meant to give it away. She hadn’t meant to wrap it carefully in a cardigan and place it at the bottom of a sturdy shopping bag, then fill the rest of the bag with socks and undershirts and the soft old slacks that her soft old husband had left behind when he’d abandoned her for the great beyond. She hadn’t meant to carry it around to the charity shop, leave it with the nice tattooed girl in the back room, assuring her it was mostly junk and probably not worth their time, and walk home again, stopping to buy mince and yogurt and bleach and tea bags and a lottery ticket on the way.
She hadn’t meant to let a day and a half slip by before she looked up from the television and noticed the bright patch in the middle of the faded wallpaper; felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as she processed the violation. Burgled! Stop, thieves! If Henry had been here instead of selfishly dead, he might have . . . well, he’d have been useless. But he’d have screamed with her.
Janet had meant to run to the window to shout for help from the neighbors—not police, never the police—but then, as she fiddled with the knob on the sash window, something in her mind dislodged and half a memory emerged, glinting through a trickle of sand.
She could see it now, the clock, being wrapped up and stashed at the back of the old wardrobe so that the heavies at the door would never find it. Her mother bleating at her to be careful, it was valuable, but also to be quick, quick quick quick. Her mother would be furious that Janet had let them take it after all. But she hadn’t meant to let them. Hadn’t she done her best? Hadn’t she wrapped it up so carefully, in her best cardigan?
When times were bad, she didn’t need a clock to tell her. Soft old Janet.
25
Up ahead, a man was passed out on the pavement. His legs were splayed at improbable angles, his face red and waxen from the sun. There was a can of Black Ace next to him, standing perfectly upright like a prop in an advert.
As they approached, a woman appeared from the nearest shop and crouched over him for several seconds. “He’s fine! He’s breathing,” she announced to the world at large, sounding almost disappointed. A few people in the vicinity nodded at her, as though to suggest they’d been on the brink of launching into CPR. Gwen and Connie walked on.
As they rounded the corner into Gwen’s street, they saw the family from the ground floor assembled in their garden, a scrubby but neatly kept patch of lawn next to the bin shed. They were having a barbecue. A folding trestle table of food was set up against the wall of the building, next to a small inflatable paddling pool filled with ice and drinks. Toots and the Maytals played tinnily from a small Bluetooth speaker. It was the kind of scene Gwen had always romanticized, one of the things on her mental list of Reasons to Love London, along with coffee shops on canal boats and children’s birthday parties held under trees. The list was, admittedly, becoming more academic and less applied with each passing year.
“A party, excellent! Who are they?” Connie asked, and for a second Gwen wondered if Connie had somehow set this up herself.
“I’m not actually sure,” admitted Gwen. She felt like a politician who doesn’t know the price of milk. “I’ve never quite managed to get chatting. I mean, always wanted to! But you know . . . after the first year it started to seem awkward.”
“Everybody needs good neighbors,” Connie said. “I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere.” And before Gwen could stop her, she had walked over and started talking to them.
She was pointing at her now, and vigorously beckoning her over. “That’s Gwen.” By the time Gwen reached them, Connie was brandishing a chicken drumstick. “Gwen has lived in this building for five years!” It was almost four. “And she claims she doesn’t know any of her neighbors, and I thought that was ridiculous. Don’t you think that’s ridiculous?”
The adults in the family smiled, albeit warily. The children—about eleven and nine, she’d guess—just stared.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry to interrupt! I’m Gwen, I live on the third floor.” She did a little flourishy hand gesture to illustrate the concept of “upstairs.” They nodded. “But you already know that,” she added, lamely. They nodded again.
Then the man wiped his hand on his shorts and stuck it out in her direction. “Darrell,” he said. “Nice to meet you properly, Gwen. This is Jackson, and Summer,”—the kids waved shyly—“and my wife Heather, and her sister Rochelle, and Rochelle’s husband Nathan.” He’d adopted the cadence of a team captain on Family Fortunes. Rochelle, who was reclining on a floral sun lounger, gave her a little salute with a gin tin.
“And I’m Connie,” announced Connie. “I don’t live here, I’m just a facilitator.” The facilitator helped herself to coleslaw.
Darrell and Heather were gracious about having their barbecue gatecrashed, especially after Gwen declined to eat the last remaining burger. They chatted about how long they’d lived in the building, and in the area, and whether they’d tried the new pizza place up the road yet and how brazen the foxes were getting these days, and had they heard the guy who rode his motorbike around the block at 4 a.m. every Tuesday, and did she also think the ceiling fan showroom up the street was a front for a crack den? Benign, neighborly fare.
It might have been nicer were Connie not watching from behind her varifocals, nodding at Gwen like a pushy gymnastics coach and leaping in to make supportive comments. “It’s true!” “She does, you know.” When Darrell mentioned a community group chat and asked if Gwen would like to join (she wouldn’t, but pretended she would), Connie looked as though she might cheer and applaud. She wondered if Darrell and Heather might think Connie was some kind of support worker. Perhaps it would be better if they did.
The whole endeavor was painful, and yet she couldn’t say she wasn’t grateful it had happened. As the sky cracked overhead and the first fat pellets of warm summer rain started to fall, Gwen found she was equal parts relieved and disappointed to say goodbye.
“I told you it was easy,” said Connie, putting up her umbrella and slipping a wedge of Rochelle’s coconut cake into her Longchamp tote. “All you have to do is ask.”
Back inside, Gwen lay on the sofa and stared at the wall for a while. She was groggy from the daytime drinking and the social exertion; tired in the kind of way one only ever is after being out in warm weather, energy evaporating along with the sweat and a cool blanket of lethargy settling on her instead like fallen snow.
She knew she ought to use the evening to apply for jobs, and yet currently even taking off her left sandal felt beyond her. So she lay perfectly still, one arm draped across her forehead like a classical statue, breathing in the heady, mineral scent of wet tarmac, burnt charcoal, and stewed garbage that was drifting in through the open window. If she died right here, how long would it take for anyone to find her? Maybe it would be better to go outside and lie down in front of a shop.
When she finally reached for her phone a little while later, her heart leaped pathetically to see a LinkedIn notification. She opened it. Nicholas had endorsed her for “interpersonal skills.”
Jeans
They weren’t really jeans. Jean-like, from a distance. Jean-adjacent, at a stretch. And stretch was the operative word, because what they lacked in authenticity and Bruce Springsteen associations, they made up for in Lycra. They sagged, apologetically, at the knees.
She had bought them online, or she assumed she must have done. Although when the deliveryman arrived, winking at her as he always did, as though he were a cheerful co-conspirator in her crime, she had only the faintest memory of hitting add-to-basket and wondered if she’d been shopping in her sleep again.
She had sat in the bath to shrink them perfectly to her body, the way her mum used to in the seventies. But indigo dye had leached out of the fabric and left a grubby tide mark around the enamel, and the jeans still sagged. Her mum never told her you weren’t supposed to use bubble bath.
26
Gwen’s days had begun to blur into one, in a way that was not unpleasant.
Volunteering at weekends meant that the conventional rhythm of her week had been upended, those once-echoing Saturday afternoons now carved up neatly between customers and tasks. A ten-minute tea break. A forty-minute conversation with Gloria about the best way to ball socks. An hour of steaming, an hour of tagging, an hour of sorting donations under Michael’s critical eye. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir. Home again via Sainsbury’s, eleven minutes for al dente pasta, and three, four, five episodes of something before bed.
But on the days she wasn’t at the shop—and Head Office policy insisted there be some—time was mercurial. Whole afternoons could pass just trying to get her dodgy hip to click. Hours were shorter than minutes, and it was always too long until lunch.
She would force herself out for long walks like a convalescent, tramping the same familiar route around the same few streets, watching everyone else meeting friends for a dog walk like it was the easiest thing in the world. On those endless in-between days, Gwen worried she was losing the power of speech. She found it easier to swerve around someone on the pavement, stepping right out into the road, than to cough up the words: “excuse me.”
When she wanted to feel productive and vital, she took her laptop to coffee shops, read essays on American news sites for as long as she could focus, and occasionally typed the word “jobs” into Google. Inevitably the coffee shops would be filled with parents and babies, great swarms of them multiplying across the morning, their steady stream of nonsense babble and nursery rhymes only serving, somehow, to make her own endeavors seem childish and ridiculous.
Twice now, Suze had messaged—Gwen’s heart leaping at the sight of her name on the screen before plummeting again once she saw that it said: How’s the job hunt going?x
These felt like emotional tick-boxes of texts. Suze doing her due diligence by checking the only quantifiable fact she could think of. Perhaps in another few years they’d log all vital statistics in a public database to save people the bother of asking. Engaged yet? Pregnant? New house? New job? Divorce? Cancer? Dead?
She had nothing to tell her. Besides a preliminary telephone interview for a role as Shoulder of Content Strategy at a comms consultancy (“We don’t believe in heads of department, too hierarchical,” the HR Sternum had explained), none of her efforts so far had been fruitful and so the efforts had ground to a halt. Several places had told her she was overqualified. Gwen tried to hold the word “overqualified” in her mind each time she made a mess of wrapping a teapot in newspaper, mangling the sellotape around her fingers while an unimpressed customer looked on.
It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say that the shop had become her main source of excitement, given how much of her time there was spent rifling through a box of small plastic cubes marked S, M, L, and XL—but there were moments of levity and drama that sustained her for days. Shoplifters were surprisingly common, and although the crime itself often went unnoticed by the staff, it was usually accompanied by a good forty-five minutes of speculation and gossip. There were conspiracies and intrigue. Petty feuds and small-town politics.
Last week, Gwen had arrived for her shift to find treachery in the air. Treachery and a new vanilla reed diffuser, which was making the shop smell like a fudge pantry. Lise was holding a muttered conversation with St. Michael, who was pummeling a stress ball shaped like a Minion.
“What’s going on?” she had asked Brian.
“Yasmeen’s defected,” Brian whispered. “Gone behind enemy lines.”
“Not to . . . ?”
“The Niceness Hive, yes indeed.”
“Kindfulness Hub,” Asha corrected him, joining the huddle. “Said it aligned more with her personal value system.”
“Yikes,” said Gwen.
“So Michael blanked her in the corner shop.”
“Wow. Shit.”
“I know.”
Two days later, a local Turkish restaurant had come by and donated their unsold mezze to the volunteers. “For all the good that you do!” the beaming teenage waiter had said, pushing a vat of taramasalata into Gwen’s hands. “Eat, please, before midnight.”
The Kindfulness Hub, Finn had heard via an unconfirmed source, received weekly deliveries of vegan pastries and cold brew from a benevolent sponsor. But as he, Gwen, Lise, and Jeremy sat on the brown carpet after closing time and toasted each other with fistfuls of stuffed vine leaves, all agreed that they could never go over to the dark side.
Then there were moments like today, when Gwen plunged her hand into an unassuming bag of T-shirts and pulled out, Excalibur-style, a huge purple dildo.
For a second she looked at it, wondering if it were perhaps a bike pump or a particularly sculptural pepper grinder. Then the truth dawned and she screamed and flung it across the back room, where it rolled gaily across the carpet and came to a halt next to the printer.
St. Michael stuck his head around the door and surveyed the scene. Gwen braced herself for a telling-off, but instead he looked from her to the dildo and back, then said, “Congratulations! Is it your first time?”
Before Gwen could reply, Lise had popped up behind him, followed by Brenda on tiptoes.
“Gwen found a golden ticket,” Michael told them. Lise giggled and took her phone out to capture the moment.
“I’m sorry, a what?”
“It’s a rite of passage,” he crowed. Michael had never paid her this much attention before. For a worrying moment she thought he might hug her.
Brenda nodded solemnly in agreement. “You never forget your first dildo.”
Gwen fashioned a protective hand mitt from a length of paper towel, and tried to sound stoical. “Well if this is as bad as it gets, then I’m glad I’ve passed the test.”
“Oh bless your heart! This isn’t as bad as it gets,” said Brenda, cheerily. Then they all started chipping in with their most memorable donations, both intentional and accidental.
“Sets of dentures, lockets with human hair in them,” began Michael.
“Used brushes for the toilet,” said Lise, miming in horror. “Nipple rings.”
“A mummified hamster,” said Michael, “several inhalers, a rucksack containing a bag of dog poo—”
“Still warm,” added Lise.
“A full set of adult lederhosen, a box of diabetic needles,” continued Michael. “A VHS tape containing every Granada weather forecast from 1989 to 1993—”
“Someone’s dead nan, in a jar,” said Brenda.
“—multiple pregnancy tests in multiple handbag pockets—”
“We only realized because it said ‘nan’ on the side.”
“—a copy of 50 Shades with all the sex redacted in marker pen.”
“—and a bag of broken biscuits,” finished Brenda. “Three years past the sell-by.”
“What do we do with them all?” asked Gwen.
“Well,” Brenda paused, thinking for a moment. “The biscuits we ate.”
Jumper
Derek hadn’t known what to do with the jumper.
He had grabbed it before he ran out of the house, because it was early evening and the weather had been unseasonably cold for late August, and there was nothing Derek hated more than being chilly. He had cursed the jumper ever since, for those lost seconds. Precious seconds he had wasted rifling through the hooks in the hallway (they needed to clear out those hooks, he’d been saying it for years), seconds which could instead have been spent cradling his son to his chest before the paramedics arrived. Before Derek was jostled out of the way and relegated to the role of “useless bystander, clutching jumper.”
He could pretend that he’d grabbed it for his son, in a moment of foresight. To keep him warm as he lay there on the pavement, the chalky pallor of his skin already making him look like a crude imitation of a person. But that wasn’t true. He had definitely grabbed it for himself. It tormented Derek to know that he was the kind of man who could hear the words “your son, he’s collapsed, come quick” and think “better take layers.”
He hadn’t known what to do with it at the hospital either; had been ashamed to be holding it when his wife arrived, in case she noticed and knew immediately about those stupid, wasted seconds. His wife wouldn’t have stopped to find a jumper. Or perhaps she would have?
In the end she hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t been able to see anything at all, it seemed, as she stumbled across the room toward him, arms outstretched as though groping through darkness. But he was aware of it as he held her, as they both shook with the sobs that seemed to come not from her but from elsewhere; from deep within the ground below them, as though their orange plastic chairs were sat atop a fault line. His arm had been at an awkward angle, he remembered, as he held her. It had gone completely dead but he had been too scared to move it. As though the tiniest shift would shatter everything anew.
When his daughter had arrived some time later, gasping for breath, with her boyfriend hovering mutely behind, she had looked down at his jumper in the empty chair and sat, confusedly, next to it. The gap it left in the family lineup felt at once both macabre and appropriate. I’m sorry, that seat is saved.
Later still, as he began shivering—it was cold, after all, in the hospital, Derek had been right—he didn’t put the jumper on. Because what use was warmth to him now? But even as shock coursed like ice through his veins, he was turning to see if Luke was cold and if Luke wanted his jumper. Despite knowing that Luke would undoubtedly consider himself too cool to wear his dad’s jumper. Despite also knowing, in the very same heartbeat, that Luke wasn’t there.
Derek saw someone else in the hospital wearing flip-flops and another in pajama trousers and a tank top, and felt another rush of shame. What if he’d been in the shower when the doorbell rang? Would a good father have run outside in only a towel?
