11 The Teashop on the Corner (25 page)

‘Why get up so early if the betting shop didn’t open until eleven?’ Did he think she was an idiot?

‘I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d go out and catch the bus into town. I hardly thought it appropriate that I woke you early and asked you to drive me to a betting shop,
knowing how much you always disapproved of my habit of gambling,’ said Harvey, going into the kitchen to put on the kettle. ‘Tea?’

He was infuriatingly chipper. Well Molly decided that she was going to bring him down a peg or two. Ill or not ill, he couldn’t go around stealing from her when he was a guest in her
house.

Without answering him she marched upstairs into her bedroom and grabbed her jewellery box. Once downstairs, she slammed it on the kitchen table making the cups and saucers he had just put out
give a short shocked dance.

‘I had six rings in this box,’ she began with a very tight expression. ‘Do you want to guess how many I have now?’

Harvey’s eyebrows dipped in confusion. ‘Erm . . . six?’

‘Let’s count them, shall we?’ Molly opened it and took out a ring. ‘One . . .’

She found another. ‘Two . . .’ and moved her necklace out of the way to retrieve the third with the opal. ‘Three.’ Strangely that opal ring was one of the missing ones
she hadn’t been able to find. She gulped. There were three more rings in the box. A cold wash of shame drenched her.

‘And three plus three makes six?’ said Harvey. ‘Is this some sort of dementia test to make sure my heart hasn’t affected my brain?’

Molly was only glad she hadn’t come out and made a point-blank accusation. He must have realised where this conversation was going. Worry nudged the embarrassment away. She had been sure
there were only three rings in there, just as she was sure that Royal Doulton figure was on a shelf and her pen and compact were in her handbag. She’d had another ‘episode’, it
seemed, and now was the time to go and see a doctor and have a test done for Alzheimer’s.

‘You’ve got too much on your mind,’ said Harvey, pulling out the chair for her. ‘Sit down and stop nattering. I merely fancied a little outing by myself and some thinking
space. Now, have we got any chocolate biscuits left?’

That was it, said Molly, sinking onto the seat. She had too much on her mind, that was all. But she was so sure there had only been three rings. So sure.

‘Shaun, Shaun!’

Shaun’s attention was diverted from choosing between the mixer tap he was holding in his hand and another. He looked up the aisle and saw her, waving, making an awkward bouncy run towards
him and then he felt her arms around his neck and her lips press deep into his cheek.

‘Well, how are you?’ She held him at arm’s length and beamed at him. Rosie, his ex-wife.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I see you are pretty fine too.’

Rosie patted her solidly rotund stomach. ‘Two months to go. A girl.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ said Shaun, wondering how he could be struggling for something to say to a woman he had been married to for two years.

Apart from the change in her usually trim figure, Rosie looked exactly the same: swinging blonde ponytail, big blue eyes, and a trademark perma-smile. Pretty, bubbly, warmth oozing out of her.
Once upon a time he thought that’s what he wanted, thought she would be good for him.

‘So what are you doing in Plumber’s World?’ It seemed an obvious question.

‘I’m here with the builder to choose a bath for our en-suite,’ she replied, still smiling, eyes sparkling as they took him in. She rubbed his arm. ‘Oh it is good to see
you. You look great. Is a lady putting that twinkle in your eye?’

She was fishing, thought Shaun. There was no twinkle in his eye, they both knew it.

‘No,’ he said. He noticed she was wearing a wedding band. He was glad she had found someone to love her and give her a child. He knew he had broken her heart and from the way she was
looking at him, he also knew she would let him break it all over again. She had told him over and over that she would never love anyone as much as she loved him – he was her soul-mate, her
everything.

‘Well, you look happy anyway, Shaun. Plenty of work?’

‘Too much.’

‘That’s good, that’s really good. Especially in this climate. How many builders can say that?’

Her hand had slipped to his wrist and her fingers were circling it, not quite daring to hold his hand. He knew she was waiting for something – any sign of affection that implied they still
had some connection. She had adored him to the point of obsession and he guessed that he still lingered in her heart. But he couldn’t give her anything back. She was a stranger to him now.
Really she always was.

‘Well, I better get on and leave you to picking out your bath,’ he said, pulling his hand away to scratch at an imaginary itch on his head. A sigh of disappointment snagged on her
smile that he didn’t want to chat any more, that she might as well have been stood behind a firewall. She reached up and kissed his cheek again, forcing him close. Her perfume was the same,
heavy and spicy and cloying.

‘Goodbye, Rosie. Good luck with the baby.’

‘I hope you find someone, Shaun. Someone you can love.’

He saw tears blooming in her eyes as he walked away and he hated himself for being so cold. But there was no chance to ever be warm with Rosie – there was only frost or stifling heat.

He had met her in a pub in town. One of Shaun’s workers had been getting married and he had agreed to join them for a drink. The plan was that he would show his face, drink a pint with the
groom and then go home. Then he met Rosie.

She said she had fallen in love with him at first sight, spotting him across a crowded room. She spoke in lots of clichés. She latched on to him as he was ordering a round, batted her
eyelashes at him and persistently talked to him as he waited to be served until he had given her some attention.

She looked good. She was all blonde hair, big blue eyes and pouty pink mouth and was wearing a dress that made the best of her slim figure. The only other person who had ever shown Shaun any
real kindness was also called Rose; it seemed like an omen. Shaun had had relationships before, all short-lasting, all usually ended in a flurry of frustrated accusations about his inability to
commit and his emotional detachment. Ironically all he wanted to do was settle down and have a home; yet as soon as he was in a relationship, he found himself looking for an out.

He thought that maybe it was time to try harder, give it his best shot – and who better than with a pretty, kind, warm woman who idolised him. Rosie put him on a pedestal and he forced
himself to open up to her, told her about his loveless upbringing, how every time he began to settle in a foster home he was taken from it and placed somewhere else, eventually ending up in a home
for boys which was little better than a holding pen. Opening up to Rosie had been the beginning of the end.

Rosie embarked on a quest to fix him, heal him, change him. He felt smothered by her constant attempts at therapy. If he never saw another fecking candle scented with destressing oil in his
lifetime it would be too soon. Books lined the shelves:
Letting People In. Men Who Cannot Love. The Injured Inner Child.
He became her life project. Even when he told her that enough was
enough, she went underground: her attempts became less obvious but she didn’t stop.

He
did
want to love her, she was the perfect wife, but he couldn’t. Then he discovered that she had stopped taking the pill and he panicked. A child would be good for them, she
said. It would help him focus outwards instead of inwards. He started to wake up feeling as if someone were pressing a pillow over his face. She was giving, giving, giving, but why did it feel as
if she were taking, taking, taking from him, leeching from his history, making him her project, her life’s work? He didn’t want a child. He couldn’t stay with Rosie, not even for
the sake of a child: she was suffocating him with her giant caring heart. What if he couldn’t love the child when it arrived? What if something happened to Rosie and him and the child ended
up in foster care and the whole cycle happened again? He knew he had to get out soon. He stopped sleeping with Rosie; she got more frustrated and hurt because of his emotional withdrawal. He
didn’t want to smash her heart by breaking up and tried to do it by degrees, but he was killing her with his coldness as much as she was stifling him with sunshine. They split up.

Seeing her again brought it all back, those horrible fears that she might get pregnant deliberately. She had no interests outside him, nothing to talk about but therapies and theories –
she was even planning to conceive a child as a form of treatment. He often dreamt that his child had been born and was unhappy, suffering and would grow up unable to love, to connect. Just like its
father.

He paid for the tap and walked out of the shop. There was a pink Volkswagen Beetle painted with yellow roses in the car park with plastic eyelashes on the headlights. He knew that it must be
Rosie’s car.

He got in his van and took a deep breath before starting the engine. He was damaged beyond repair, he knew that. He would have been better off staying with his
durty whore
of a mother,
not being fed, not being washed, not being looked after properly, for then at least he would have had connections with people, a sense of home and a heart that worked. Shaun McCarthy was adrift
with no anchor. It was more of a curse than a life.

After the first hour in her new temping job, Carla was bored rigid. On the second day she wanted to grab her handbag, walk out and find refuge in Leni’s teashop, with the
others. What theme had Leni decided for today? she wondered. Would today be Tolstoy Tuesday? Or maybe a tribute to D. H. Lawrence? But instead Carla sighed, treated herself to a compensatory coffee
from the machine and carried on pumping numbers into her PC. After five days she was ready to hang herself from the fluorescent light on the ceiling. She found herself making tally cards of how
many quarter hours were left until home-time. When the clock nudged its big hand on five o’clock on the last day, Carla didn’t wait another second to down tools. She made as dignified
an exit as she could, even though she wanted to turn the sort of cartwheels that would have had Olga Korbut ringing her for tips. Never had she felt a Friday feeling like it.

There was a little corner shop on the way to the train station. She called in, picked up a bottle of over-priced red wine and contemplated buying herself a bunch of flowers. But the offerings
were pathetically skinny – they couldn’t have cheered anyone up.

Carla missed floristry so much. She had loved her last job working in Marlene’s Bloomers where Marlene Watson, the owner, was quite happy sitting in the back room smoking her fags and
reading
Hello
and
OK!
for the last few years of her working life. She left the running of the shop totally down to Carla, knowing that her business was in safe hands. Even though
she was quite shy by nature, Carla was perfectly capable of dealing with customers in the shop. She loved delivering the buttonholes and bouquets to excited soon-to-be newly-weds, some young and
some not so young. She was brilliant at putting together a quick bouquet for someone who wanted to buy an impulse present. She loved the smells and colours and shapes of the flowers, the packed
velvet heads of roses, the phallic anthuriums, the pungent stargazer lilies with their oriental perfume, the jaunty birds of paradise, the giant-headed sunflowers. There wasn’t a flower that
Carla couldn’t recognise or wasn’t able to put together with others for best effect.

Despite her misgivings, she bought one of the scraggy flower sprays. She’d make it her mission tonight to fashion something presentable out of them.

The train was cancelled and when it eventually arrived it was full to the brim with commuters so Carla not only had to stand, but she had to endure being crushed against the bulk of a large man
who kept coughing on her without covering up his mouth. The train dumped her at Barnsley station at quarter to seven and she was drenched by the time she reached the car, thanks to a flash summer
storm of heavyweight proportions.

The lights were on in Dundealin when she pulled up in the drive. For a few moments she sat in the car with the wipers on and marvelled at it. The odd-looking house had become a cosy haven that
she couldn’t wait to get in to. She switched off the engine and dashed to the front door, getting even wetter than before.

Will was in the kitchen snapping the ring-pull off a can of coke.

‘Bloody hell, is it raining?’ he laughed, watching her drip all over the floor.

‘It’s terrible,’ said Carla. ‘It was at full pelt when I crossed from the train station to the car park and I thought that was as bad as it could get, but apparently
not.’ She eased off her coat to find the rain had soaked through her blouse. She made a quick check that she wasn’t treating Will to a Miss Wet T-shirt private show before hanging it
up, but it was mainly her sleeves that were soggy. She should change, but first she pulled the wine out of the carrier bag and Will instinctively reached behind him to get her a glass out of the
cupboard.

‘You look as if you need a big one.’ Then he added, ‘glass of wine, that is.’

‘I need a massive one. Wine, that is,’ smiled Carla, screwing off the top and pouring out the liquid. ‘Would you . . . ?’

‘Nah thanks. Just opened this. I think your flowers might be a bit water-drunk.’

The bunch looked even more sorry now it had been saturated.

Carla tipped her head back and took a long, long sip of wine. It was a little on the cool side, but it was dark and fruity and still hit the spot. She felt it spread around her system and up to
her brain where it zapped away all images of numbers out of her head.

‘What do you do for a living, Carla?’ asked Will. He had been curious and now was an ideal time to ask.

‘Well,’ began Carla after another glug, ‘I’m doing some temping at the moment. Office stuff. I’ve spent five days in a bank inputting data.’ She shuddered.
‘By trade I’m a florist though.’