The second chance store, p.21
The Second Chance Store, page 21
Before that, it had been curing his own salmon—the fumes from his improvised smokehouse in the utility room might not have been to everyone’s taste, but she’d enjoyed the results and couldn’t pretend she hadn’t—and before that, building a wood-fired pizza oven out of reclaimed bricks. Before that, homebrew. Before that, latte art. Before that, ketamine. Before that, rolling his own sushi with a little bamboo mat.
But now, pickles. He had started with the entry-level stuff: cucumber, onion, beetroot, the withered old carrots that knocked around his crisper drawer. But quickly he began to branch out, pickling cauliflower florets, watermelon rind, grapes, even herbs. He started to see the world as a series of would-be, could-be pickles, eyeing the produce in his local corner shop as if through a pair of vinegar goggles. Could he pickle tomatoes? Bananas? Cheese? Was there any food that wasn’t enhanced by a little time and a lot of tang?
The whole thing was reminiscent of the time his family had bought their first toaster, and ten-year-old Tim had eaten nothing but toast-based meals—beans on toast, tuna on toast, shepherd’s pie on toast, Mars Bar on toast—for a solid month. Eventually, severe constipation (a very solid month) had forced his mother to take him to the GP, and the toast had been rationed to breakfast time only. But Tim still liked to commit to a project wholeheartedly. It was the main reason the breakup had bothered him so much.
Now the top two shelves of his fridge were entirely given over to pickle jars of varying size and vintage, and the act of making food to accompany his pickles was interesting him less and less compared to the pickling process itself. He was going through a packet of antacids every few days, and his fingers smelled perpetually of vinegar and cloves—something his last Hinge date had actually remarked upon. At the time he had hoped she might not have meant it in a negative way, but now three days had passed without a message so he was forced to conclude she must have.
Still, at least this was one aspect he could work on. Because now, he didn’t just have pickles. He had pickle forks.
32
A chat was how Connie’s friend had phrased it in the email. Let’s meet for a chat! ok? Fab.
Like many superiors Gwen had worked with over the years, Saskia seemed to communicate as though niceties and punctuation were a sign of weakness and excess spare time. She messaged in brusque staccato sentences that rarely contained all the necessary info, leaping between platforms and channels at random. HI Gwyn still on for tmrw, an anonymous text asked at 11 p.m. last night. Running late b there in 10 announced an unknown number in her WhatsApp. She was mildly surprised to see Saskia walk into the café at all.
The woman who walked in was elegantly rumpled in the same way as Connie but about ten years younger, with an expensive-looking ash-blond blow-dry streaked with purposeful gray. She was wearing flared jeans, white cowboy boots and a Motörhead T-shirt with a tiny, embellished waistcoat and an oversized blazer on top. Gwen tugged at her dress, feeling painfully provincial.
“Saskia? Gwen. Lovely to meet you.”
She stuck her hand out to shake, but Saskia seized her by the shoulders and pulled her in for a double-cheek kiss. Gwen’s hand ended up briefly inside Saskia’s blazer, where it met with a warm, silken lining. It felt nice to be Saskia. She retracted it quickly.
“Hi hiii, so glad we could do this,” Saskia continued to look at her phone as she settled herself in her chair and removed her jacket, then placed it facedown on the table and flipped her gaze up to Gwen as though a meter had started. “Connie’s told me amazing things.”
Amazing things.
“Some of them true, I hope!” replied Gwen, and Saskia gave a husky laugh.
“Connie only speaks the truth. Shall we get coffee? Or . . . wine?” She was looking around her now, seeming to expect a waiter to appear in what was clearly a chain coffee shop. Behind the counter, a blue-haired barista was watching videos on their phone.
“Coffee is fine for me, thanks,” said Gwen, in case this was a test. Though wine could as easily be the pass as the fail.
“Fab. And cake? Let’s get cake, shall we? Yes.”
Gwen’s lower intestine had performed its usual nervous pyrotechnics in the café toilet about fifteen minutes earlier, but she sensed that refusing cake would be a foolish move. Not just for the job, but possibly for feminism. She chose carrot and pistachio loaf, feeling this to be the most businesslike option on offer. Saskia looked mildly disdainful and asked for a brownie.
Provisions secured—Saskia had sent Gwen to the counter with her debit card, giving things a distinct “treat day with Auntie” air that didn’t exactly help matters—they embarked on small talk. Saskia was effusive, scatty, and lavishly indiscreet. Gwen was tense, on the lookout for the moment at which “chat” might suddenly give way to interview. It felt a little like riding a log flume, bracing herself for the drop.
But after nearly an hour of cruising in the shallows, Saskia was displaying no signs of suddenly asking her to rustle up a presentation deck. They’d talked about where each of them was from (“Us Home Counties evacuees have to stick together!” said Saskia, with no apparent trace of irony); places they had lived (“I thought about moving to Bristol, once,” said Gwen. “But I didn’t.”); how each of them knew Connie, wasn’t Connie great, didn’t you want to be Connie when you grew up; Saskia’s husband’s book group (“It’s an all-male group but they only read female authors”); the perils of running a Southwold Airbnb remotely; and everything that was wrong with vegan cheese. “Like Blu-tack dipped in Wotsit dust,” said Gwen, at which Saskia snorted approval.
Just as Gwen was wondering if Connie had set her up on an interview not for a job but for a high-end swingers’ community, Saskia said: “So. Let me tell you about Fred.”
“Is Fred your partner?” Gwen asked. “Or . . . pet?”
Saskia squinted at her. “Fred is the company,” she replied. Then she began hooting with laughter. “So yes, in a way!”
“I’m so sorry!” blustered Gwen. “Connie never actually said. Is it an acronym?”
“No, no no,” said Saskia. “Just Fred. But it’s all lowercase.”
“Ah,” Gwen said, as though this explained it. “Lovely.”
“So Gwen, what you’ll be doing,” said Saskia—hang on, was that it? was she hired?—“is providing a kind of semi-creative, semi-logistical, semi . . . managerial lead support role. We’re at a really exciting point, about to start our first round of investment, and so I need someone really on it in the office while I’m running around fluttering my lashes at the money men. Someone who can take charge and bring their own vision to the mix. Who doesn’t need to be babysat, you know?”
“Sure, absolutely,” said Gwen, wishing she had paid for her own coffee.
“But I know you must have your fingers in a hundred pies! So I was thinking we could keep it really flexible at first,” Saskia went on. “See how much you want to pick up, let you fit it in around other projects.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Gwen, nodding as though she might have other projects.
“I’d set you up in our office space, of course,” Saskia said. “I think it really helps in those early days to be in the same place, don’t you think? Throw ideas around, see what sticks. We’re looking at expanding to bigger premises soon, but of course that all hinges on the funds!”
“Of course,” echoed Gwen. “So where is Fred”—was it possible to pronounce things in lowercase?—“based right now?”
“Gospel Oak,” said Saskia. “That wouldn’t be too much of a trek, would it?”
No, she insisted, it wouldn’t. Saskia continued, but Gwen wasn’t listening, because images of a very different kind of working life were forming in her mind. A life where she would gad about the rarefied perimeters of Zone Two like a graceful swan, never having to venture into the murk of the city proper. She would flit between the well-preserved older women of Hampstead, with their taut cheekbones and dewy, pickled appearance. She could walk up to the Heath on her lunch hour, maybe swim in the ladies’ pond before work. That was a thing people did, wasn’t it? Ponds.
Gwen pictured herself taking meetings at pavement cafés, with reeds in her hair and a baguette sticking out of her handbag. Perhaps this was the reward she deserved, after seven years of strip lights and carpet tiles and festering doughnut platters, of “chemistry sessions” with men who walked around the office in their socks. This could be the pivotal meeting she looked back on a decade down the line, as the point at which she gathered up the straggling ends of her life and started to weave a beautiful new future.
“I’ll send you the decks over,” Saskia was saying now. “What would be really great is if you could work up a few ideas by Thursday so that I have something to show Giles”—who was Giles?—“and come into the office on Friday to chat them through. Then we can get you going on the other digital properties next week.”
Digital properties. She had digital properties now. And an office. And a Giles. Gwen nodded, made affirmative noises, gathered up a few stray cake crumbs with the pad of a finger.
“Does that work with your other commitments?” asked Saskia.
She thought about her other commitments. She pictured Brenda and Harvey wearing Bluetooth headsets, wiping down piles of old James Pattersons around a long, glass conference table. Asha tapping out an impatient email to ask for her take on the latest conspiracy theory about a fake celebrity baby. Customers in suits and bowler hats, leaving crisp packets in the shoe display, and mystery smears on the changing room mirror.
“Sure,” she said. “That should be fine.”
Saskia smiled broadly, bearing a glamorous gap in her two front teeth. “Great, great. Wonderful.”
It was only afterward, as Gwen watched Saskia leave and then walked back to the counter to buy a brownie of her own, that she realized she had no idea what the company did. Or made. Or was.
In an act of blithe optimism, she typed “fred” into Google. It didn’t help.
Disposable Camera
Finn was an artist. Finn was an artist in the same way all his friends were artists, which is to say that he believed he had something vital and urgent to communicate with the world but hadn’t figured out what it was yet.
He had dabbled in various mediums—clay, tapestry, tie-dye, TikTok—but was yet to settle on the form that expressed his truest self, and would also fit into the room in a Clapton houseshare that he unofficially sublet from an Aussie drag queen. Barbie Q Prawn was rarely there at night but had strong feelings about vegetable dyes near her lace-front wigs.
Finn had no qualms about monetizing his work in progress, because everyone knew the idea that art should be given away for free was a neoliberal scam. As a result, his friends bought a lot of his work and he was obliged to buy quite a lot of theirs back. This meant that he had begun to lose track of which things he’d actually created and which had been merely acquired.
“It’s an interesting thought though, isn’t it?” he’d said to Li recently. “By recognizing the value of a work and giving it a platform, am I not in some ways its true creator?”
“No,” she’d replied. “It’s my painting because I painted it. Look,” she said, nudging the canvas with the tip of her clog, triggering a small shower of glitter. “It has my name on it, next to the fallopian tubes.”
When Finn found the disposable camera, he was thrilled at it as an object in its own right. Look at it, all plasticky and gray! A relic from a time when photography was only for special occasions—an optional add-on, rather than the metric by which the ups and downs of everyday life were measured.
Although Brenda pointed out that you could still buy disposable cameras—they sold them in the chemist, next to the insect repellent and travel sickness bands—Finn bought this one for its authenticity. For the faded Fujifilm logo and the small warning label on the side that read “Keep cool.”
At first he intended to take it to parties and capture his friends through a medium most befitting their cycling shorts and bucket hats. But he was even more delighted when he discovered that the film inside was already full. Or rather, when Brenda showed him the little window with the number—“27,” so weirdly arbitrary and yet maybe somehow symbolic?—in the same way she had taught him about chip and pin on his very first shift, when he had asked a confused older customer to “just tap when you’re ready, please.” Finn and Brenda were good friends.
The idea of this little plastic box having contained someone else’s memories for the past twenty years was thrillingly romantic to Finn, who had a fatalistic streak that had been cultivated by a recent fling with an amateur shaman, and a voyeuristic streak that had been cultivated by a single father who dated widely and didn’t believe in locked doors. Maybe this would be his art?
“Reminds me, I once gave my camera to a bloke on holiday who looked exactly like Steven Seagal” said Brenda, as she rung it through the till for him. “And when we got the photos back, instead of Roy and I at the Parthenon, they were entirely of his— Hello, love, the gray sweatshirt was it? On my way.”
By the time Finn took the camera to the chemist, he had hyped up its contents to an unhelpful degree. He imagined scandal, murder, impossibly beautiful people doing dastardly deeds—or else quietly romantic scenes of nothing, the kind that made it into galleries and centerfolds in the Guardian. Gas stations in remote locales that could just as easily be the US or the USSR. Boxy old cars speeding down sepia-tinged highways and glass-eyed children clutching teddy bears on dirt-track roads.
He was disappointed, then, when the photos revealed a series of normal-eyed children, clutching Slush Puppies in a water park.
There were individual portraits (one child turning his eyelids inside out while bearing his lower teeth at the camera) and group shots (the same child, clawing at a small girl’s hair while she screamed). There were still lifes, too: a portion of chips with ketchup and mayonnaise; a yellow Teletubby toy, half-buried in sand; and a pair of feet, striped brown and white with tan lines, waving aloft against a background of cloudy gray sky. The feet were almost interesting, Finn decided, imagining the caption he could spin along the lines of “conceptions of selfhood in a pre-smartphone era.”
Then he flipped to the penultimate photo and was confronted by a blurry image of what seemed to be a naked arse, half-obscured by bushes, its owner entangled with a woman holding a Bacardi Breezer at arm’s length like a grenade. It was beautiful, exquisite in its grubbiness.
Finn took in the period detail—the hair gel, the chainmail halter top, the cargo trousers in a heap around a pair of Reebok Classics—and decided to put this one in a frame. Barbie Q would love it. Possibly Brenda would too.
33
Gwen was stressed. After some extensive digital potholing, she had managed to locate Saskia on Facebook, LinkedIn, and as an active member of an interior design message board called “Farrow & Ballers NW3.” But clarity on fred (fredd? frhed?) was not forthcoming.
If the job required special technical knowledge that Gwen didn’t have, surely it would have come up by now. Saskia had seen her CV. She knew that Gwen’s career path was a gentle meander from temp receptionist work, slowly up through the ranks at a media monitoring agency and then on to a consultancy that specialized in public awareness campaigns for local councils (“She tells people when to put their bins out,” Marjorie had explained to a neighbor) before getting her job at Invigorate. Which meant she could probably rule out any need for a working knowledge of the endocrine system or, say, an HGV licence.
But even assuming fred was just another breed of ambiguous content marketing enterprise—which it might not be!—Gwen wasn’t sure if that was a job she wanted to do anymore. If she ever had. For Saskia to assume Gwen would simply hop aboard without so much as a cursory waft of a mission statement was, in hindsight, rude.
Ruder still was the fact that no deck had materialized, twenty-four hours later, and she was about to write the whole thing off as a caffeinated mirage when an email arrived at midnight.
Deets 4 you! xS it said. Gwen had always admired people cool enough to put the kiss before their initial.
Attached to the email were several documents—a set of branding guidelines featuring Pantone references for various shades of putty and taupe; a Tone of Voice document which took pains to explain that fred was “witty but warm, friendly but authoritative, colloquial but not over-casual,” and a one-pager headed “who is fred?” Gwen sent up a silent prayer as she opened it.
fred is a brand-new experience, it read. fred is not one-size-fits-all. fred is for all the people you are. fred is for your yesterday, your today, and your tomorrow.
“Fucksake,” breathed Gwen.
fred is storytelling for people who don’t have time for stories. fred is a new type of family. fred is the friend you wish you’d made, and the lover you should never have let get away.
Gwen dug her fingernails into her thigh.
fred is rooted in nature, but optimized by science. fred is committed to radical transparency. fred is not afraid to cause a stir.
Gwen bit down hard on her knuckle.
fred is an app
An app! Of course it was an app!
. . . . but not as you know it.
Just as she was on the verge of hurling her laptop at the wall, she noticed a URL at the bottom of the page. This led her to a holding page—sit tight, fred is coming—which was linked to an Instagram account—six taupe-toned tiles, each containing a fragment of the word “fred”—and a Twitter page, consisting of identical tweets to TV presenters and podcast hosts reading Hi @name, we’d love to tell you more about fred.
“Tell ME more about fred,” Gwen begged the universe. She stared at a blank document until gray shapes started to dance before her eyes. She wrote three generic paragraphs about achieving cut-through in an oversaturated digital landscape, then put them in size-14 font. She read a long article about a woman in Wisconsin who had become a millionaire by selling her used cleansing wipes to men on the internet. She went to bed.
