Do the pensioners inside know the sort of danger they inhabit daily? Is their irksomeness excused by that knowledge of the threat of sudden, arbitrary demolishment?
Charlotte lives at the end of the row and she has nothing to complain about. Her bungalow is nowhere near the main road and her garden is smashing, nothing like the poky bits of concrete we’ve all got. You get all the perks if you’re old. They put you on the phone for nothing. She had lovely flowers out all the year round, it seemed. She used to get a man in to do that, but now her garden arrangements have changed. Her garden is, if anything, even more sumptuous.
We always reckoned she must have quite a bit stashed away. Her husband had been someone, they said, and she still had an accent. Not posh but a bit southern, which marked her out. She played hell when the bairns went near her windows.
Think of a tortoise with white, flaccid skin and its shell crowbarred off. Charlotte to a T. You’d see her silhouetted in her french window of a night in her orthopaedic chair that swivelled round and we used to say that was her shell and she’d put herself back in for the night. She had one of those dowager’s humps and we’d think it was wet and adhesive beneath her cardigan, fresh from the shell, lobster pink.
She never had tortoise hands—those are like elephants’, aren’t they? Though her fingers were oddly short, as if she’d worn them to the bone, working. Old, she still worked, in the Spastics Society shop down the precinct. Those short fingers had crossed my palm with copper once, when I was about ten—Hallowe’en 1980. We were running from door to door, wearing bin bags and asking for money. Charlotte made a big show of looking for her purse in all her kitchen drawers and asking me about my family. She seemed genuinely concerned about them, making me worry whether I wasn’t concerned enough. Her questions placed them in peril, I felt. She hoped, she said, that my mummy and daddy would sort out their problems soon and that it wouldn’t affect me too deeply.
Back home, later, I counted up my carrier of coppers and told my mam this in an offhand manner. She went up in a blue light. My dad and she were living in different places—he at one end of the estate and she, with us, at the other—on a social fiddle. The council had given him a single person’s flat by the shop and the Chinky. We went over to hoover and dust every Saturday morning. His shared front door faced the grass at the back of the Chinky and I found heaps of discarded pink shrimps. For a while I thought they’d been rained, the way they said things got rained in The Unexplained, that magazine.
Mam said Charlotte was a nosy bitch.
Charlotte has worked down the Spastics shop for years. In there it always smells of washing powder and sweat. They arrange second-hand clothes on chrome stands in order of colour. In spring everything to the front of the shop is yellow. They fill the window with chickens made out of woolly pompoms. These are made by Charlotte, all winter long. Sits in her orthopaedic shell through the devastating cold days, when she lets the younger volunteer lasses do the earlier shifts, and she runs up furry lemon chickens. I bet it’s a lonely thing being old on our estate. Even if they do put your phone line in free.
They’re all pensioners who work in the Spastics shop down our town. Is this because they have more hours to fill in? When you are old, life has shrunk horribly to nothing and its warp and weft can’t be pulled back to a decent size, no matter how much you tug. Surely in those circumstances you want to wring the best you can out of what’s left? How can giving it all to charity constitute the best? An overflow, if anything, a by-product of pleasure: you can give leftovers to charity, but the main action?
I’d ask Charlotte if she was as selfless as this. Why does she put on that red nylon pinny in the morning to stand behind her counter doling out bargains, oddments, junk, other people’s discarded crap?
Would she admit ‘I get first dibs on the decent stuff’?
My goodness, the bargains!
The things people do away with!
They don’t know when they’re well off!
I tend to be in there quite often. I like to look at the books because they get quite a good, eclectic selection. There’s always somebody literary dying in Aycliffe and their goodies wash up here. I became addicted to checking out the Spastics shop after finding Anna Karenina for fifty pence. But on every stiffened yellow page, can I inhale someone else’s last gasp? It’s a wonder if I can’t. Intellectuals always smoke and these books are preserved with a laminate of nicotine. I think, Was this the book dropped from a dying grasp? This, the last sentence read? Look: I’ve read on further!
I’m educating myself to leave.
You really have to poke about, between Cartlands and Macleans, to find the good stuff. But it’s there. Jane Eyre thirty pence.
I heard Charlotte speak quite sensitively to Ashley, a seven-foot-tall transsexual who models her hair on Liz Taylor in Cleopatra. She’d been hanging on to some special heels for her. They were a kind of present for after Ashley’s op. I was in the day Charlotte produced them from under the counter; but they
