She collected handbags for one daft old wife, Sonja, who always wore a wig, though hers was for cancer, a beehive for ever on a tilt. Sonja said, ‘It’s forty-seven now! Forty-eight with this one, ta very much, Charlotte! And every one a different colour. I’d have a different bag to go with every outfit I could ever have!’ Daft Sonja looked up at Charlotte again and Charlotte blinked those steady, judgemental eyes. ‘Thank you, Charlotte. Would you keep a watch out for one in baby pink?’
Charlotte nodded tersely, regal arbiter of justice for castoffs.
Expert, she sat each morning in the back room of the shop with her pot of tea and barrel of digestives (in the shape of Dougall, the dog from The Magic Roundabout) and for an hour or more she would go through the bags newly hauled in for redistribution. In the dusky half-light she would gut the plastic bin bags. They’d spill and strew like a trawler’s nets. Turning stuff over in her hands, she’d inspect it, unfold and refold garments, giving them a good, careful sniffing. She counted the pieces in jigsaws and, in case one or two were missing, kept a spare, useless one to the side of her to make up the numbers. It all went with her job and her perk was first refusal and the chance to set a price on whatever she didn’t care to offer the public.
She found an earthenware pot of gold coins. At first it looked like somebody’s urn of ashes. Somebody, perhaps, whose treasured books were stacked in boxes close by. But the pot jangled inside and she heaved and grunted at the stuck lid until it popped free and the gold poured out on her lap.
‘How much is here?’ Charlotte cried, although she wasn’t a greedy woman. She was careful and always had been. Her widow’s pension went on the extravagant food she had delivered from Marks and Spencer of a weekend. Their white and green van pulled up beside her bungalow on Saturday mornings and Charlotte laid out a banquet for no one but herself. Seen in silhouette by the rest of our street. All of it would be out, uneaten, in the bottom of her wheely bin by Sunday morning. Sometimes we’d sneak a look: check. Miss Havisham. (Great Expectations forty-five pence.)
Her needs were met. They weren’t always outrageous. But a whole pot of gold! Who’d turn their nose up at that?
‘But what is it worth?’ asked Charlotte of the bags and boxes of detritus, the heaps of semi soiled clothing, the single stuffed rocking donkey. ‘What’s the going rate for gold?’ And she saw, sitting astride the donkey, a human skeleton, bracing its frail weight on the felt saddle, gazing at her with terrible blank sockets. Its skull was disproportionately large. This was a baby’s remains, rocking steadily on the donkey.
‘I don’t know what they give for gold,’ said the child. ‘These days.’ Charlotte blinked, for now it was a fully fleshed child, chubby and brown, its head full of tangled curls. ‘But think, Charlotte: if you bought this pot and took it home, wouldn’t you lie awake and worry?’
She never worried. It was a point of honour with her. Her face clouded. ‘Worry about what?’
‘Even though your garden is wonderful, your bungalow is still ever so delicate. How easy for somebody to huff and puff and blow it in! How easy to take away your crock of gold! They leave rainbows behind, you know, for thieves to follow.’
Lips pursed, Charlotte was writing out a tiny label for the pot, ‘20p’, and sticking it to the lid, which she had replaced. Really, it was an ugly thing. Ethnic-looking. No pattern on it or anything, no flowers. She shrugged, not to be put off.
‘I’m not one of these silly old women who keep money and valuables vulnerable in the home and get murdered in their beds for it. My mattress isn’t stuffed with fivers. I’d get these gold coins down to the bank at the first opportunity.’
The child had small wings flapping, but these were featherless and thin: dead sycamore leaves. ‘You might lose the gold coins on your way to the bank.’ The child smiled. ‘Wouldn’t you fret that the gold shone through your pocket or your bag and everyone would know what you were carrying? Would you feel exposed?’
Charlotte was quick. She’d been a junior-school teacher once. She knew something about answering children back. ‘Then I’d carry my gold in the urn. You can’t see it shine through the urn, can you?’
She held up the nondescript pot in the meagre light of the room’s flyblown lamp. The child squinted. ‘I can,’ he said. ‘And what if the bank tricks you, gives you only half the gold’s worth?’
‘I can check the exchange rate,’ said the old woman vaguely.
‘Did you look at the coins? Aren’t they strange and old? Perhaps, for all they may look like gold, they are useless here and now? Mightn’t they excite suspicion and cause the bank people to point their fingers at you and jab at their alarm buttons?’
Charlotte had heard enough. She left the storeroom clutching her new pot and paid for it down in the shop, wrapping it and putting it away in her bag before anyone could inspect it.
But that night she walked home nervously across the Burn. She imagined that every stranger she passed could see through her shopping bag and knew about her treasure.
The next day was Saturday; there was no going to the bank. She had her usual banquet and the only person she saw all day was the cheery delivery boy from Marksies in his green and white van. He came up the garden path with her usual
