I heard the monotone drone of Barry’s voice getting louder as he explained to a new volunteer that they were not permitted to take their headset home to use while playing Call of Duty.
The volunteer, a girl in her early twenties, with poker-straight hair that turned from blonde at the root to fading teal at the ends, smiled at me when she noticed me standing by the kettle.
Barry opened up a cabinet, from which spilled years of useless crap that had been shoved in there over the years, each time with that quick slam of the door that stops whatever you’ve just put in from coming straight back out.
‘All of this needs sorting,’ Barry droned. ‘If you think it’ll be useful put it back in, if not, chuck it.’
The volunteer got down on her hands and knees as a pot of century-old Berol markers tumbled out and spilled across the floor.
‘I’ll get you a bin bag,’ Barry said, shuffling off.
‘You new?’ I asked, even though I knew full well that she was. You don’t spend five years working in a place without spotting fresh meat in a heartbeat.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, turning and smiling. ‘Makayla.’ We shook hands as the bubbles inside the kettle built to a crescendo and it clicked off.
‘Nell,’ I replied. ‘He seems dull and humourless,’ I said nodding in the direction of Barry as he waddled back, barely lifting each foot from the ground as he walked, bin bag in hand. ‘But he’s a sweetheart really.’
‘If you say so.’ She pulled out a small cardboard box.
I turned back around and went to the kettle, dousing the mound of coffee granules and watching them disintegrate as the water turned them liquid. I poured in the milk, using the teaspoon to crush the few defiant granules against the side of the mug.
‘What do you want doing with these?’ Makayla asked Barry as he tossed the bin bag down beside her.
‘Let me see,’ he said. I turned around to return to my cubicle, taking a mild interest in what she’d found in the depths of the cupboard. ‘Oh, these old things.’ In his hand he held a spool of stickers for the charity. ‘We got these as a sample from a start-up company. We only used them once though because they spelled one of the words wrong.’
I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to Barry.
‘Let me see,’ I said, placing my coffee down on Dennis’s desk and ignoring his snide comment about me invading his personal space. I took the roll from Barry’s hands and unfurled a few inches. I let out a disbelieving laugh. There they were, hundreds of the sticker that Charlie had seen on the clock tower, the sticker that had saved his life, twice. There at the bottom was the same misspelled slogan ‘caring for your mental heath’. The only difference was that this one didn’t have a movie quote written in Sharpie around the edge.
‘Do you want them?’ Barry asked.
‘Erm, yeah,’ I replied. ‘You said we only used them once?’
‘Yeah.’ He chortled. ‘How is someone meant to trust us with their mental health when it looks like we can’t even spell it?’ He looked at Makayla and seemed peeved when he saw she wasn’t chuckling along.
‘I’ve seen one of these out in town. Do you remember who put it there?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, stopping there as if that was enough information on the subject.
‘Well?’ I prompted, growing impatient.
‘Someone came to us a few years back and wanted to volunteer, but we had no spaces and so I offered her the job of putting those stickers around town.’
‘Her?’ I asked. ‘Do you know who she was?’
‘I don’t recall the name,’ he said with an almost pained expression as he tried to regurgitate the memory. ‘But I remember she was pretty, real pretty. Redhead. Irish.’
I left work in a sort of trance. Ned hadn’t believed it either when I’d told him that Abi had been the one to place the sticker at the top of the tower. Her actions years before her death, saving Charlie’s life when he couldn’t bear to grieve for her any longer. Charlie had asked me once if I believed in fate and I hadn’t been sure at the time, but right now, it seemed pretty real to me.
I know we’d agreed to focus on ourselves, for Charlie to distance himself from me and concentrate on himself for a while, but no matter how hard I’d tried, I’d still been the first to break the pact. I’d sent Charlie a text asking him to call me when he got a moment, but I hadn’t heard anything from him as of yet.
I walked towards Cool Beans, my instant caffeine fix not really doing much for me at this point in the day. I entered through the glass door and nodded my usual greeting to the tattooed supervisor before joining the queue.
The first few times I’d visited the café after Charlie had left had been an emotional roller coaster. When I’d walked through the door, my childlike hope would spike at the thought that I might just see him there, sitting at our communal table, ready for me to throw my lunch at him and force him into awkward conversation. Obviously, this hadn’t happened, of course, and even though I tried really hard not to let anything to do with Charlie affect how I felt about this place, it did seem somewhat tainted with heartache.
‘Any hot drinks?’ the supervisor at the till called and I approached with that awkward smile that always comes when you know someone by sight and then speak to them.
‘Americano please,’ I said and added a brownie to that for good measure. He frowned at me for a moment, which made me wonder what I’d done. He shook the frown away and smiled, gesturing for me to tap my card against the reader. It pinged and I uttered
