It had been one of those days where every minute had been taken up with something, the sort of day where the till actually had a queue and it seemed there was a never-ending stream of people pulling up into the car park with boot-loads of things to donate. Some people had more than a boot load, one guy turned up in a transit van full of boxes and bags.
"House clearance," he said.
Amanda gave him a cheerful smile and tried not to sigh in dismay at the rapidly growing stack of boxes inside the charity shop. If the area manager was to come down, he would not be happy. It didn't look professional, having the place cluttered up with donations like that. But today there were only two of them in the building. One volunteer had rung in sick and the other was away on holiday. So Danny was on the till and she was doing everything else. She grabbed the nearest box and walked through to the back of the shop where the sorting took place. As she passed the till Danny smiled apologetically. It wasn't his fault, even if he wasn't serving customers, he was in his late sixties and quite frail. He shouldn't be lifting boxes anyway.
She's been working in the charity shop for three years now. It had started as something to occupy her time once the children went to school. She supposed she could have looked for paid work, but James had been funny about that. She had no experience or qualifications, could only have gotten low skilled and low paid work. James had argued that it was demeaning. They had no need of a second wage in the house, she had no need to work at all. He said it looked bad if she was working at something so low-brow. Charity work didn't count as low-brow, apparently.
James had a lot of funny ideas. When they had first met, he was a newly qualified solicitor and she was on work experience. They had kept their relationship secret for months, she had thought her father would be angry at her dating a man ten years her senior. She was right. When the cat was finally let out of the bag, her father went ballistic and demanded she stop seeing him. She hadn't. Instead she'd married him.
Over the years, the relationship between Amanda and her father declined. By the time her mother died, she and her father were barely speaking. Her father called James "that snobby bastard", and James refered to her father as "that old goat". Caught between the two of them, Amanda chose James, she'd never got on particularly well with her father, he was ex military and spent most of her childhood abroad, she figured it was too late now to make up for all those lost years, all that time gone.
Once she'd brought all the boxes in, she opened the first one and began to sort through its contents. Books mainly. Almost exclusively history tomes and historic thrillers. She had no idea people still read them. Three of the boxes contained nothing but books. Another couple of boxes held housewares. Nothing fancy, it seemed who-ever had died, had been a very plain living man. And it must be a man, because all the clothes in the black bags were men’s. The older looking clothes bigger sizes than the new.
The last of the bags held a surprise. She opened it expecting more men’s clothes but instead pulled out a wedding dress. It was old, the lace yellowing a little. Something about the dress seemed familar. She put it on a hanger, hung up on the back of the sorting room door and stared at it. She felt she’d seen it before.
Just a couple more boxes to look through. Trinkets and ornaments in these. She lifted out a wooden carving, an elephant with its trunk held high. A memory came to her. Of when she was small, crouching by the old fireplace and playing with an elephant like this. Her father had a whole menagerie of wooden creatures on the mantelpiece. He'd caught her once, elephant in one hand and giraffe in the other, playing in the still warm ashes. He'd tanned her hide for that little game.
She put the elephant to one side and reached into the box. There was a giraffe. A rhino. An elegant heron. All of these she remembered so well. She looked up at the wedding dress. Her mother's.
Then she put her hands over her face and began to cry.
Friday 17 January 2014
Friday 10 January 2014
The Book
You picked the book up because it looked interesting. Not the book itself, it was rather a plain thing, just a plain green book. You assumed it was old and you assumed it had once been covered with a dust-jacket. You were right on one count but wrong on the other. It never had a dust-jacket.
So it wasn't the cover that made it interesting. Was it the title? Or lack of one rather. There had been a title there at one point, but the lettering had all been rubbed off, just a few imprints of lines and curves remaining. Not enough to truly decipher.
No, it wasn't the book itself, but where you found it. If it had been on a shelf somewhere, in a neglected section of the library, or a seldom dusted shelf in a pub alcove, you wouldn't have looked twice; such books blend into the background, become scenery. And if it had been in a box of secondhand books at a car boot sale, you again wouldn't have looked at it twice, your attention diverted by flashy covers of newer books.
But no, this book was in none of those places. This book had been on the roof of your car.
You can't remember where you had been, and that's not even important now. You do remember stopping a few feet away, your car keys in your hand, and just staring. Such an odd thing to find. You remember how the olive green of the book stood out, clashed against the cherry red of the car. You remember thinking of apples and strawberries, of some bad pun about leaves.
You picked it up and glanced down the street. There was no-one about. It could not have fallen there, it must have been carefully placed, and you can think of no good reason why.
Eventually you stopped wondering why, and simply flipped the book open. Perhaps you were looking for a name on the inside. This book belongs to ... whoever. Perhaps you were curious to see how bad a book has to be before a person loses enough interest in it and abandons it mid-journey. It probably occured to you that maybe one person had dropped it and another presumed it was yours and placed it on the roof. None of that matters now.
The book's pages were yellowed and faded. For the first time you realised your initial estimate of 'old' was being kind. The book was ancient. And not even in English. It looked like Latin, but you weren't sure. Then you began to wonder if such a book may be worth something.
You made a few phonecalls, perhaps called into a couple of bookshops. Your enquiries were vague, because greed had gotten to you a little bit and you were then almost convinced it was worth money, perhaps a lot of money.
And then you had the idea to use google translate and see what it was all about.
You decided not to start at the beginning, but chose a block of text under a badly drawn illustration . It took you half an hour to type the paragraphs into the tiny text box, checking the spelling of the unfamilar words every minute or so. You wanted to get a decent chunk of it in there, enough to get a proper grasp of what it was. As you typed, you tried to read it aloud, slowly and probably with terrible pronunciation.
Then you clicked 'translate' and waited. You didn't have to wait very long. Google could not translate it.
Some people would have given up at that point, but you didn't. You took to reading large portions of the book to yourself. It became almost a form of poetry, perhaps you found the nonsense words soothing, a mantra to clear your mind. Maybe your initial curiousity had bloomed into a raging thirst to know, to comprehend.
You began to dream of the book. Especially the large, intricately drawn first letters of each chapter.
You found yourself doodling the lettering.
And then finally you found an answer. You had no idea what the main text read, but those lovely little illustrated capitals spelt out a message.
It said if you kept the book, you would die. Unless you gave it to someone else, and they read it.
You tried to sell the book on ebay, but took it down after thinking that selling was not giving. You walked into a charity shop with the express intention of donating it, but you knew that the book would go unchosen, upstaged by the flashy new books already on the shelf.
You got the feeling time was running out.
You considered leaving it on the roof of someone else's car, but it was such a gamble. They may just throw it away. They may flick through it and see it was not in English and give up. If you just had to give it away, that would be easy, no, the hard part was getting the person to read it.
Then you thought about the young woman in the bookshop, the one who'd laughingly told you, as she looked up from a book almost as old, that she never gave up on a book, that she had a special interest in the arcane. And you were tempted to give it to her. So ridiculously tempted.
But you decided you couldn't do that.
And so now you sit, like you have so many nights lately, with the book in your hands, reciting the words, waiting for death. You're almost certain it's coming soon. You've stopped going out, stopped getting dressed. In the last week you've barely eaten.
And as you read the book for perhaps the final time, you run your fingers down the spine and your wasted fingers spell out the title. You think it may have been called 'Self Fulfilling Prophecy'.
So it wasn't the cover that made it interesting. Was it the title? Or lack of one rather. There had been a title there at one point, but the lettering had all been rubbed off, just a few imprints of lines and curves remaining. Not enough to truly decipher.
No, it wasn't the book itself, but where you found it. If it had been on a shelf somewhere, in a neglected section of the library, or a seldom dusted shelf in a pub alcove, you wouldn't have looked twice; such books blend into the background, become scenery. And if it had been in a box of secondhand books at a car boot sale, you again wouldn't have looked at it twice, your attention diverted by flashy covers of newer books.
But no, this book was in none of those places. This book had been on the roof of your car.
You can't remember where you had been, and that's not even important now. You do remember stopping a few feet away, your car keys in your hand, and just staring. Such an odd thing to find. You remember how the olive green of the book stood out, clashed against the cherry red of the car. You remember thinking of apples and strawberries, of some bad pun about leaves.
You picked it up and glanced down the street. There was no-one about. It could not have fallen there, it must have been carefully placed, and you can think of no good reason why.
Eventually you stopped wondering why, and simply flipped the book open. Perhaps you were looking for a name on the inside. This book belongs to ... whoever. Perhaps you were curious to see how bad a book has to be before a person loses enough interest in it and abandons it mid-journey. It probably occured to you that maybe one person had dropped it and another presumed it was yours and placed it on the roof. None of that matters now.
The book's pages were yellowed and faded. For the first time you realised your initial estimate of 'old' was being kind. The book was ancient. And not even in English. It looked like Latin, but you weren't sure. Then you began to wonder if such a book may be worth something.
You made a few phonecalls, perhaps called into a couple of bookshops. Your enquiries were vague, because greed had gotten to you a little bit and you were then almost convinced it was worth money, perhaps a lot of money.
And then you had the idea to use google translate and see what it was all about.
You decided not to start at the beginning, but chose a block of text under a badly drawn illustration . It took you half an hour to type the paragraphs into the tiny text box, checking the spelling of the unfamilar words every minute or so. You wanted to get a decent chunk of it in there, enough to get a proper grasp of what it was. As you typed, you tried to read it aloud, slowly and probably with terrible pronunciation.
Then you clicked 'translate' and waited. You didn't have to wait very long. Google could not translate it.
Some people would have given up at that point, but you didn't. You took to reading large portions of the book to yourself. It became almost a form of poetry, perhaps you found the nonsense words soothing, a mantra to clear your mind. Maybe your initial curiousity had bloomed into a raging thirst to know, to comprehend.
You began to dream of the book. Especially the large, intricately drawn first letters of each chapter.
You found yourself doodling the lettering.
And then finally you found an answer. You had no idea what the main text read, but those lovely little illustrated capitals spelt out a message.
It said if you kept the book, you would die. Unless you gave it to someone else, and they read it.
You tried to sell the book on ebay, but took it down after thinking that selling was not giving. You walked into a charity shop with the express intention of donating it, but you knew that the book would go unchosen, upstaged by the flashy new books already on the shelf.
You got the feeling time was running out.
You considered leaving it on the roof of someone else's car, but it was such a gamble. They may just throw it away. They may flick through it and see it was not in English and give up. If you just had to give it away, that would be easy, no, the hard part was getting the person to read it.
Then you thought about the young woman in the bookshop, the one who'd laughingly told you, as she looked up from a book almost as old, that she never gave up on a book, that she had a special interest in the arcane. And you were tempted to give it to her. So ridiculously tempted.
But you decided you couldn't do that.
And so now you sit, like you have so many nights lately, with the book in your hands, reciting the words, waiting for death. You're almost certain it's coming soon. You've stopped going out, stopped getting dressed. In the last week you've barely eaten.
And as you read the book for perhaps the final time, you run your fingers down the spine and your wasted fingers spell out the title. You think it may have been called 'Self Fulfilling Prophecy'.
Friday 3 January 2014
Birthday Wishes
Be careful what you wish for. It’s one of those phrases that people like to say to you when they’ve asked you what you desire and you’ve made the stupid mistake of telling them. They also usually add “it won’t come true now you’ve said it.”
This was a conversation I had many times. At each birthday I would pull my hair away from my face and blow out the candles. The year I had a caterpillar cake and four candles, I wished for a puppy. That one didn’t come true. The year I had ten pink candles on a ghastly princess cake, I wished for a pony. That one didn’t come true either.
There was neither candles nor cake for my eleventh birthday. Just a fiver in a card that read ‘love Dad xx’. My birthday cards perched alongside those that read ‘condolences’ and ‘in deepest sympathy’. That was the first year I wished for something impossible. I wished for my mother back.
Over the years this was the theme for my birthday wishes. I mean it changed, sometimes I added ‘I wish no-one had to die’, or the morbid ‘may I die before my children, but not before I’m old’. Sometimes I threw in ‘and peace on earth’. And then there was that year when I was seventeen and hated the world. My wish that year wasn’t for peace on earth or immortality, but a desire for everything to end, a raging apocalypse to mirror my own emotions. But aside from that year...
I never spoke these wishes aloud. So they had a shot at coming true.
And they did.
The world is calmer now. There’s no war anymore. Not after that last one. It lasted a couple of years but we won eventually. There’s no fighting, neighbour rarely raises a hand against neighbour. We spend our days peacefully roaming the earth; my children and my parents beside me. They will never die, they are already dead.
Be careful what you wish for.
This was a conversation I had many times. At each birthday I would pull my hair away from my face and blow out the candles. The year I had a caterpillar cake and four candles, I wished for a puppy. That one didn’t come true. The year I had ten pink candles on a ghastly princess cake, I wished for a pony. That one didn’t come true either.
There was neither candles nor cake for my eleventh birthday. Just a fiver in a card that read ‘love Dad xx’. My birthday cards perched alongside those that read ‘condolences’ and ‘in deepest sympathy’. That was the first year I wished for something impossible. I wished for my mother back.
Over the years this was the theme for my birthday wishes. I mean it changed, sometimes I added ‘I wish no-one had to die’, or the morbid ‘may I die before my children, but not before I’m old’. Sometimes I threw in ‘and peace on earth’. And then there was that year when I was seventeen and hated the world. My wish that year wasn’t for peace on earth or immortality, but a desire for everything to end, a raging apocalypse to mirror my own emotions. But aside from that year...
I never spoke these wishes aloud. So they had a shot at coming true.
And they did.
The world is calmer now. There’s no war anymore. Not after that last one. It lasted a couple of years but we won eventually. There’s no fighting, neighbour rarely raises a hand against neighbour. We spend our days peacefully roaming the earth; my children and my parents beside me. They will never die, they are already dead.
Be careful what you wish for.
Thursday 2 January 2014
New year, new posts
I am surprised I can actually still get into this blog. Poor neglected thing it is. I slid off the radar last year but this year I promise to do better. No serials, but I've promised my dad I will do #FridayFlash, so at least one post a week. Maybe I'll even get back into 750 words...
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