“You came to us from the RSPB,” she said.
“Guilty,” I said. “Shoot me.”
“How could you work in the charity shop of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds of all things if you’re-”
“I couldn’t!” I squeaked. “Not in the shop. My God. I was in the office. Totally separate building.”
“But even so… ” Dot said.
“Yeah, even so,” I agreed. “I lasted a year, though.”
“Why?” she asked me. “Why did you put yourself through it?”
Her face was puckered up with concern. Well, she’s sixty-three, so her face was puckered anyway, but the way she was looking at me, almost like she would cry in a minute? It floored me. Shouldn’t have, really. Dot rakes through manky clothes fifteen hours a week for no pay and deals with our lippy clients too. Dot organised five separate jumble sales for JM Barrie House and didn’t even swear when it went tits up in the end. She’s got to have a caring streak a mile wide running through her.
“Atonement,” I said. First time I’d said anything like it to anyone.
“Atonement?”
I’d floored her back. Was I really going to tell her the rest of it? How something doesn’t need to be true for you to be sorry it happened? How you can know from a thousand hours of therapy that you didn’t do something, and still it’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
“It’s not the birds’ fault, you know,” I went for in the end.
“You were atoning to the birds?” she said, and the middle of her face unpuckered as the edges creased up. “You’re a funny wee bunny, Jessie, you know that?” She shook her head, laughed a soft laugh, and then squeezed past me to fill the kettle for our tea. “Quite entertaining, mind you,” she called over the sound of the tap. I just kept stuffing in my load of dark mixed-fibre easy-care.
So my point is basically this. The day I met Gus, the day she died, the day I grew a family like I’d planted magic beans, was the day I told Dot at work about my pteronophobia and told her quite a lot really, when you get right down to it, about where it came from too. It was the very same day.
Maybe I ended up where I ended up, did what I did, because I was already down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. Maybe it’s not totally my fault that I tripped and went over the rainbow.
Two
So Dot struck out for the top of the town to catch the Thornhill bus back to Drew and the bungalow and the corgi, and I peeled off at the bottom of the High Street for the five items or less queue in Marks and Sparks food hall.
“Morry’s is actually closer,” Dot said, like she always did. “Never mind cheaper.”
“It’s not my road home,” I said, like I always did too.
“You youngsters,” said Dot. “My mother fed a family of eight on a foreman’s wages and saved enough for skiing every winter and a second home in Tuscany, I know.”
She made as if to cuff me, then looked at her watch and started walking again. “Be good,” she called over her shoulder. “See you Friday.”
So Steve was on tomorrow. Okay. Dot’s a bit dittery, which means a lot of extra work voiding the forms she mucks up, but she brings scones from Gregg’s and apples from her garden, whereas Steve makes his own deodorant from baking soda and-I’m sure of this-nicks the stock if he sees something he fancies. He says he’s an anarchist, but the Project isn’t exactly a multinational. And the worst of it is that he’s about five foot five, and we’ve never got enough stuff for short men. We get loads of donations from tall people, but it’s a hundred percent Hobbits that come in the front door. Break your heart to think, in this day and age, rich people are still bigger than the rest of us, like in Dickens’s time or Henry the Eighth or something, but there it is. The war, Dot said once when I asked her, and then smoking and then microwaves. Triple whammy.
And I swear to God, it was right then, halfway up the soft drinks and groceries aisle, when I was thinking about work and how all our clients are basically Borrowers, that I saw him, pushing his daughter along in the trolley, like neither one of them had a care in this world.
It wasn’t the first time I’d clapped eyes on him. It was actually the fourth. When I recognised him, my throat got a sudden lump in it, like the thing people call their heart leaping. It’s hard to say why. I mean, he’s tall and broad, but he’s got that kind of sandpapery skin that sometimes goes with red hair. Except not as bad as that sounds, really. I smiled. He looked straight at me and then away, and the smile died without me having to kill it. I never remember, never bloody learn, even though the only reason I shop in Marky’s, spending a fortune, is so I don’t run into them all every day. It’s the worst thing about my job, to be honest-apart from the obvious, which goes without saying. I hate seeing people’s faces fall when they spot me, seeing them whip their heads away and pretend I don’t exist. Must be the same for prostitutes, only they get better money.
Kids are different. Sometimes they dance right up to you and twirl, show off their outfits. They don’t know the Project isn’t a shop like any other one. Father Tommy’s dead right there.
“Children are too easy, Jessica,” he says. “Show me a pretty little girl in a wheelchair and I’ll show you ten people who want to run marathons to get her a better one. Show me a smelly alcoholic in his seventies, cursing at the top of his lungs and throwing his fists about, and I’ll show you someone St. Vincent’s will get all to itself.”
Which is why he took such a lot of persuading to get involved in that Barrie House project, because a children’s respite home with a magical garden attached is definitely at the pretty-kid-in-a-wheelchair end of things.
“Practical Christianity is my game, Jessie,” he told me. “Not fairies and wishing wells.”
But Father Tommy’s favourites are easy too. Proper tramps that just want a warm coat and thick boots. They’re a dying breed, with their long beards and purple faces and their country accents. Irish tinkers, Dot calls them, no matter how many times Steve asks her not to. And then she spreads her hands and lifts her eyebrows and asks how it can be racist if it’s true.
Mostly our clients aren’t pretty little girls or quaint old Irish tinkers. They’re either reeling from some disaster or worn out from years of them. Either way they’re pissed off, and there’s no one but me, Dot, and Steve for them to nark at. Especially the parents, like this guy. And of course, here he was again. I’d pass him on every aisle in the place unless I did a Uey.
Strictly speaking, mind you, he wasn’t a client at all. And it wasn’t the Project I knew him from, not really. And anyway, he’d decided to pretend I was invisible. He was bending over the wee girl standing up in the belly of the trolley, blowing raspberries on her neck, making her giggle. I sneaked a good look as they passed me. I’d have remembered that dress and sandals coming in: bright coral corduroy pinafore, the nap still velvety, sandals with not a single scuff on them.
On the other hand, it was even worse than usual, because there was a time I thought we might be pals. Or-be honest, Jessie-there was a time when he was a wee tiny bit friendly to me like anyone might be, and I thought we might be… Anyway, I was wrong. Turns out it was wishful thinking.
Now eggs, cakes, and baking. He was on his phone, she was sitting down, fat legs braced under her, tugging open a bag of figs. Figs! Not many of our clients give their kids M &S figs for a snack. Not in a world with Pringles. Except that made me sound like Dot, saying they were poor managers, was all. “They’re not poor managers,” I tell her. “They’re just plain poor.” And then Steve (who’s taken every social science course the Open University ever invented) says that expression’s inappropriate. Inappropriate is Steve’s second favourite word, after unprofessional. Everything he doesn’t like is one or the other. Never cruel or rotten or clueless or mean. We’ve had run-ins about it, proper set-tos, because I reckon it’s better to try to be funny and kind and make mistakes than to be a sodding appropriate professional robot all the time.