ORIG FIC: "Dear Tuesday"
Oct. 24th, 2003 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321Happy birthday, dearest ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badgermonkey. Here is an origfic, the first I’ve ever posted. It’s a present just for you and spurred on by your fandom-unlust and your perseverance in the indomitable face of orig.
And maybe others will enjoy it, too. :-)
Dear Tuesday
An original story by Lobelia.
Written for Demelza on her birthday.
---
Up until noon, the day was quite uneventful. Like any other Tuesday, really.
Tuesdays were the quietest. Mondays were busy, what with everyone rushing in and getting used to the shock of the weekend being over. Wednesdays were early days for many of the businesses around here; people got off work in the early afternoon and liked to wander by their local pastry shop for an iced bun or a cinnamon danish. Thursdays were gearing up for Fridays, and Fridays were a frenzy of sales: the door chimes clanging almost non-stop, the till pinging away, Ruth’s hair escaping from underneath her paper hat in frazzles, Jeremy getting sweaty out the back, and she herself rushed off her feet from eight to five-thirty.
Not Tuesdays, though. On Tuesdays, she could put her feet up on the top rung of the high bar stool behind the counter, hum a tune and count the flies committing suicide against the insect-o-bar.
There was another reason for humming. Tuesdays were Mrs Barelli-days.
Mrs Barelli came in only on Tuesdays but she was regular as clockwork. Ten o’clock on the dot, and her flame-red car would drive up -- “Alfa Romeo!” Jeremy always said, his voice cracking with awe --, park illegally half on the kerb, half off, double yellow lines smudging under the fat, racing-car tyres, and in she would sweep. “Cherize!” she would say, in that honey-warm voice of hers, like ten damson dougnuts rolled into one. “How’ve you been, hon?”
Nobody ever called Cherize ‘hon’. And nobody ever pulled her aside quite in the way that Mrs Barelli pulled her aside, both of Cherize’s plump white hands between her slim gloved fingers. And nobody ever greeted her as Mrs Barelli greeted her, with two wet kisses on either cheek, and Cherize never sure whether she was expected to kiss Mrs Barelli back or not and getting flustered but also dimply in the confusion. As it was, she never did kiss Mrs Barelli back. The very notion seemed outlandish: her, Cherize’s, chapped pale lips against Mrs Barelli’s porcelain smooth cheeks! Impossible.
Then Mrs Barelli would draw her to the table in the window and order two teas from Jeremy – imagine being served by Jeremy!! And there they would sit for five, maybe ten minutes together, sip their Lipton’s and chat about womanly things!
Nobody ever chatted to Cherize about womanly things. Cherize was not really a womanly type of person. “But hon,” Mrs Barelli would say, “you should buy yourself one of those new tops that are so fashionable now, they would bring out your figure to great advantage! And you know that new colour lipstick that’s out? That would suit you ever so well. Don’t you think?”
Cherize only ever nodded in response. She had never worn lipstick more than twice or thrice in her life, and she certainly didn’t think of herself as having a ‘figure’ of any sort whatsoever. The mail-order brochures her mum got in categorised Cherize’s dress size under the heading ‘the fuller figure’, her mum called her ‘ample’, and Cherize herself only ever shopped at Woolworth’s for clothes – floral patterns, sweatshirts with tiger babies on the front, floppy T-shirts in discounted pastels. Mrs Barelli’s ‘tops’ seemed as remote from Cherize’s horizon as did Mrs Barelli’s camel-coloured overcoats, her shiny beige stilettoes and her double strings of pearls. “You can tell they’re real because they’re not even. See how each one has a different shape? Don’t be shy, hon, just bend your head closer to have a look. Jeremy, more milk!”
And Jeremy scuttled.
Jeremy normally hardly ever entered the shop. He worked out the back, between the ovens and the cake racks. Every morning, he opened the roll door of the delivery entrance and hauled in the crateloads of ready-rolled dough. Mr Patani brought those crates, and sometimes other crates as well, crates that were kept locked and stacked under an old tarpaulin next to the freezer-fridge. Cherize didn’t know what was in those locked crates but the open ones were full of blonde snails of pastry, little humps of scones, sausage-shaped buns, flat pancakey ones that Jeremy would have to roll up into cones, round ones, square ones, half-moon ones, and ones with open mouths waiting to be stuffed with cream from the giant cream syphon in the fridge.
So it was strange to be sitting at the table near the window with Jeremy coming in, his hands and face all white with flour, and with his thick glasses fogged because of the different temperatures in the oven room and the shop, and with his hands clasped round the tea tray.
“Thank you, Jeremy. Put them down here.”
Sometimes Jeremy would spill a bit of tea down the side of one of the paper cups, and once he’d forgotten to take the tea bags out before bringing in the drinks, and Mrs Barelli had had to chide him. Jeremy had looked foolish and barely managed to stutter an apology but later, when Mrs Barelli had gone, he’d got mildly annoyed. “I’m not the one supposed to be doing the teas,” he’d grumbled, “you’re supposed to be doin’ that, Cherize. That’s your job, that is. Not mine.” But it was only a mild annoyance. Cherize had never seen Jeremy get really annoyed. Jeremy was permanently mild. He didn’t even get very excited, not even over that episode in Eastenders where that girl had got shot. The only time Jeremy ever got the tiniest bit worked up was when he was planning a Dungeons & Dragons night with his mates and didn’t know whether to lay out a Level 10 adventure or to go for Level 8 because someone’s little brother was coming along and he’d never played and could Drobbo be the Dungeon Master, please, except that was a stupid idea because Drobbo was hopeless and only wanted to do it to impress Charlie who was the one with the little brother… And by this stage of Jeremy’s ramblings, Cherize had generally switched off her attention and was silently counting the hundreds and thousands on top of the teddy-bear cookies.
“Thank you, young man,” Mrs Barelli would sometimes say to Jeremy when he’d finished putting the tea cups down. And that was strange, too, hearing Jeremy called ‘young man’. Cherize never thought of Jeremy as a man, young or old. Jeremy was just Jeremy, the lad out back, with the thick-rimmed glasses and the watery eyes and the tufts of black curls twisting their way into his earholes because he never went to the barber’s but had his mother trim his hair every fortnight or so.
Until noon, that is. Everything changed at noon. On that particular Tuesday.
It started out normally enough. There was the normal flurry of customers at breakfast time, crowding in for their buns and rolls. Then there was the elderly couple from down the road. They came every morning at half past eight to have a cup of tea and a vanilla Danish at the table near the window. They had been having their half-past-eight cups of tea ever since the table was first introduced to the shop. Mr Elderly Man would sit to the left, near the doorway, and Mrs Elderly Lady would sit to the right, in the corner, and they sipped their teas and ate their pastries, being careful to catch all the crumbs on the white paper napkins that they’d spread out to full size as substitute plates. Once, Cherize saw Mrs Elderly Lady dunk her Danish but that never happened again. Mr and Mrs Elderly spoke to each other about once every minute, saying slow frail things like, “That tea’s not too hot, is it?” or “The Danishs are nice today.” “Yes, that they are.”
Cherize wondered whether her own mum would ever sit like that with her dad when they were older but that thought was too weird to dwell on so she didn’t. For one, Cherize’s mum was about five times the size of Mrs Elderly Lady, and she didn’t have pastry for breakfast, she had eggs and bacon and baked beans, and she never talked to Cherize’s dad in anything lower than a foreman’s holler.
The very table in the window had been Mrs Barelli’s idea. The others had been dead against it. “We’re a shop, not a cafeteria,” Ruth had mumbled. And Jeremy hadn’t liked having to shift the old boxes and rolled-up awnings that had been collecting dust in that corner. But Mrs Barelli had oozed perfume and elegance, and she’d carried in one of the fold-up chairs herself, and she’d said, “It adds a bit of class to the place, and it will bring in extra customers.”
Secretly, Cherize thought that Mrs Barelli had introduced the table because she herself liked to sit at it when she checked up on the shop. She didn’t like just to stand around in the middle of the floor or squashed up between the cake racks out back. Sometimes she’d sit there for an hour or two, all told, after having finished her tea with Cherize, filing her nails and speaking very softly into her mobile telephone.
Nobody ever came to tow her car away. “It’s Alfas, that’s what,” Jeremy said, “even the cops is afraid of them cars.”
After Mr and Mrs Elderly had left, silence descended on the shop. The flies buzzed suicidally. The chimes clanged forlornly but only because the hot air wafting in from out back made them jingle. Outside, cars rolled by; people hurried to work or to school or wherever they hurried to; someone’s dog peed against the post box. Cherize smoothed back her hair, every inch as black and shiny as Jeremy’s curls, unpinned her cap and pinned it back again, wiggled her bottom on the stool, hummed a song from last night’s Top of the Pops, kicked her shoes (flat, unpolished, with a dishevelled bow on the front), yawned without covering her mouth, looked at the clock (Ruth not due for another two hours), counted the charms on her charms bracelet – nine in all, including the little silver-plated puppy her sister had given her for her birthday and the four-leaf clover she’d won at the fair and her favourite, the little fairy with real emerald wings – well, not real emeralds but if she held her up against the light, she could imagine that they were real, they glittered so brightly.
The door chimed and in came Mrs Barelli.
Cherize dropped her hands and jumped off the stool.
Mrs Barelli’s coat flapped open. Her hair was as shiny as ever, blonde and piled up and stiff with spray. Her cheeks were as smooth as ever, and her nails as lacquered but there was something about her, something not quite right. Cherize craned her neck: the flame-red car was not there. Cherize looked back at Mrs Barelli: her necklace was askew, and one of her front teeth had a stain of red lipstick on it.
“Hello, hon,” Mrs Barelli said, and her treacle-sweet voice sounded breathless.
“Hello, Mrs Barelli.”
Mrs Barelli did not take Cherize’s hands in hers. She did not kiss Cherize, nor did she invite her to sit at table with her. She swept past, coat tails swishing against Cherize’s shellsuited leg, and disappeared into the back room.
“Jeremy!” Her voice was harsh over the hum of the ovens and the fridge. “Jeremy, help me shift these crates, would you, dear?”
Dear? Mrs Barelli had never called Jeremy ‘dear’ before.
The chimes jingled. A man came in. He was wearing a roller-neck jumper and carried a thermos. He stood staring at the doughnuts.
Mrs Barelli appeared in the door, opened her mouth, looked at the man, looked at Cherize, said, “Honey, don’t let anyone into the back, will you? We’ve got business to attend to.” Then the door to the back room closed and clicked. A key – a key! -- turned in the lock. There was a muffled crash from the other side.
“What’s the jam in these?” the man with the thermos asked. “Is it raspberry or strawberry?”
“It’s…” Cherize glanced at the door. She had not even known that this door had a key. In all her time at the shop, that door had never been locked. It had not even been shut. There was another crash and the sound of the back door rolling open.
“Or is it apricot?”
“Oh,” said Cherize and wiped the hair from out of her eyes. “It’s… it’s damson jam.”
“Oh. What’s that when it’s at home?”
Cherize didn’t know what to answer but the man was laughing now.
“Just kidding,” he said. “Look, luv, just give me five of them plain ones, then. With icing sugar.”
Cherize bagged the doughnuts, folded the paper lip over at the top, keyed in the amount, pressed 5, took the ten-pound-note, counted out the change, and all the time her ears were trained on the back room and on the noises coming from behind the back door.
There was another bang, and then a melodic tinny tune which Cherize recognised as Mrs Barelli’s ring tone, and then Mrs Barelli’s voice, speaking very rapidly. Speaking in a language that was not English. Cherize had never heard Mrs Barelli speak in this voice.
The man with the thermos left. The shop was quiet. Except for the thumping of Cherize’s heart. She didn’t know why it was thumping. She thought of those locked crates under the tarpaulin. She thought of Mr Patani’s whippet face. She thought of how red Mrs Barelli’s nails looked, and how red her lipstick looked against her mouth.
Then everything went still out back.
It was worse than the noise.
The Tuesday-lull continued to hold so Cherize crouched down next to the door, one eye always on the door, and pressed her ear to the keyhole.
Nothing.
She turned around and pressed her eye to the keyhole.
Nothing. Well, nothing visible but there was a sound now. A strange, new kind of sound. It wasn’t a sound Cherize had ever heard. But no, it was… It reminded her of something. Of some movies she’d seen, and of once, when it was summer and all the windows were open and her mum and dad hadn’t realised she’d come home early… But that was years ago. That was when she was still at school. Now it came rushing back, that sound, the memory of that sound, and Cherize’s ears heated up, and suddenly, suddenly all at once and with the full force of something she seemed always to have known but just not to have admitted to— Suddenly, she remembered that yes, Jeremy was indeed a young man.
He had never, never ever, made that sound before in the back room, however.
Cherize stuffed her fingers into her mouth, all ten of them, and bit hard. She tasted ginger and sugar and hundreds and thousands. She tasted the sour tang of used bills and the gritty stickiness of glazed sultanas. She shouldn’t be tasting all these things, she should be wearing her plastic surgical gloves at all times. She should keep her hair covered and her hands in the gloves, and Jeremy should, too, and the wares must be kept neat and tidy, that was for the sake of hygiene, and where was Ruth, why was Ruth late?
There was another sound, a quite helpless one. It reminded Cherize of the puppies that her cousin’s dog had had last Christmas. Poor little lambs, they’d all had to be given away to the animal shelter, and one of them had died on New Year’s Day. Such a tiny, weak thing he’d been. Cherize had cried all morning, and she was crying now, although she didn’t know why.
Then the door burst open so fast that the chimes snapped off their hinge and clattered to the ground.
Cherize sniffed and blinked. Two men stood in the shop. They were impossibly big. They seemed to fill out the entire space with their peaked caps and their big, pale blue chests and their crests and their shiny shoes and their holsters at their sides.
And outside, on the pavement, where by rights Mrs Barelli’s Alfa Romeo should be parked, there hulked a sleek white car with a rotating light on top, and two more uniformed men stationed themselves next to the door, and another one was running towards the corner.
One of the men, she didn’t know which, they were too difficult to tell apart— One of them flashed a card at her of some sort and said in a deep, pickle-barrel voice, “Good morning, ma’am. We’re looking for Lola Cardelli Smith. Is she here, by any chance?”
Cherize had never been called ‘ma’am’. And she had never heard of a Lola Cardelli Smith. The ‘ma’am’ made her mute, and the ‘Lola Cardelli Smith’ made her shake her head, and the way the two men were now shouldering past her to the locked door made her shake more than just her head; it made her shake all over.
“There’s only…” she said, but her sentence was cut off by a splintering crash. One of the men had kicked the door in.
She had seen this done on television. In fact, the whole situation was turning into something out of television. The men pulled guns from their holsters. They charged into the back room. They yelled something, but Cherize couldn’t tell what. The phone on the counter rang. Ruth appeared and banged her hands on the window. Ruth! But the policemen outside grabbed her arms and wouldn’t let her come inside. Cherize shrank against the display case. One of the guys outside motioned to her. Did he want her to come outside? She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t leave the till. “Never leave the till,” Mrs Barelli always said. “Never leave the till.”
And she didn’t. She hadn’t ever. No matter how long Mrs Barelli talked on the phone or rummaged round in the back.
There was a shout but it wasn’t Mrs Barelli’s voice. It was Jeremy’s. They were leading him out, with his hands held behind his back, just like on television, just like on that episode of Inspector Morse, and they were saying, “So you won’t tell us where Lola Cardelli Smith is?”
“No, no,” said Jeremy. He looked shocked. His T-shirt was hanging out of his trousers at the front. His cheeks were red.
“There is no Lola whatever here!” shouted Cherize. “There’s only us! We don’t know any Lola!”
“Yeah, sure, and my name’s Grumpy and I’ve never heard of a laundering operation,” said one of the cop men and guffawed. “Sorry, ma’am, but we’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”
“I didn’t do nothin’!” Cherize shouted and started to cry again. She was still shaking. She was shaking so much that clouds of flour puffed up from the cherry bun shelf against which she was leaning.
“We know that,” the cop man said, and then another man came in, quite an old-looking man; in fact, it was Mr Elderly Man, goodness, what was he doing here? And wearing that smart suit too, with creases down the trouser legs.
“Don’t worry, miss,” Mr Elderly Man said to Cherize in a voice that was almost kindly. He touched her on the arm. “We just want to ask you some questions. Then you can go home.”
“I didn’t do nothin’, either!” Jeremy looked desperate.
“Well, son,” said Mr Elderly Man, and suddenly he didn’t sound quite so kindly any longer. “We’ll see about that. I do believe you were consorting with the feisty Ms Smith whom, I believe, you know under the name of ‘Barelli’ and who seems to have let you into her little secrets and into her skirts, too, by the look of it, so that you may better aid and abet her in her felonious ways.”
Cherize wasn’t sure she understood all of that but one thing she did understand. “Jeremy ain’t been consorting!” she cried. “He ain’t… he ain’t been! Truly!”
Mr Elderly Man just cocked his eyebrow at her. That was also something he had never used to do. He appeared to be a different man altogether. Everything was different. Mrs Barelli was, it appeared, a felon, and Mr Patani, oh dear, who knew what he would turn out to be?, and Jeremy… Jeremy was…
“He ain’t been consorting; he’s my boyfriend!” Cherize shouted.
Jeremy’s head swivelled round.
“Well, miss, I’m sorry to have to tell you that even the love of a lovely lady like yourself is not always enough to prevent a young man from philandering…” said Mr Elderly Man smoothly but Cherize barely registered his voice now. All she registered was the look on Jeremy’s face, behind his glasses, and all she could attend to was the way he walked out of the shop, quite meekly, and the creak of the car door as it opened, and the warmth of his thigh against her own as they sat, squashed up together in the back of the patrol car.
“I didn’t really do anythin’, you know,” Jeremy said to her.
“I wonder where Mrs Barelli is now,” Cherize said, “and if I’ll ever see her again.”
She started to cry again, and Jeremy looked at her strangely. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt, and Cherize sniffed, and the car sped away down the street, with the neighbours and the business people and Ruth and the man with the thermos all crowding round and looking on.
--
THE END
Lobelia40@yahoo.com
24 October 2003
This story is copyright to Lobelia.
badgermonkey. Here is an origfic, the first I’ve ever posted. It’s a present just for you and spurred on by your fandom-unlust and your perseverance in the indomitable face of orig.And maybe others will enjoy it, too. :-)
Dear Tuesday
An original story by Lobelia.
Written for Demelza on her birthday.
---
Up until noon, the day was quite uneventful. Like any other Tuesday, really.
Tuesdays were the quietest. Mondays were busy, what with everyone rushing in and getting used to the shock of the weekend being over. Wednesdays were early days for many of the businesses around here; people got off work in the early afternoon and liked to wander by their local pastry shop for an iced bun or a cinnamon danish. Thursdays were gearing up for Fridays, and Fridays were a frenzy of sales: the door chimes clanging almost non-stop, the till pinging away, Ruth’s hair escaping from underneath her paper hat in frazzles, Jeremy getting sweaty out the back, and she herself rushed off her feet from eight to five-thirty.
Not Tuesdays, though. On Tuesdays, she could put her feet up on the top rung of the high bar stool behind the counter, hum a tune and count the flies committing suicide against the insect-o-bar.
There was another reason for humming. Tuesdays were Mrs Barelli-days.
Mrs Barelli came in only on Tuesdays but she was regular as clockwork. Ten o’clock on the dot, and her flame-red car would drive up -- “Alfa Romeo!” Jeremy always said, his voice cracking with awe --, park illegally half on the kerb, half off, double yellow lines smudging under the fat, racing-car tyres, and in she would sweep. “Cherize!” she would say, in that honey-warm voice of hers, like ten damson dougnuts rolled into one. “How’ve you been, hon?”
Nobody ever called Cherize ‘hon’. And nobody ever pulled her aside quite in the way that Mrs Barelli pulled her aside, both of Cherize’s plump white hands between her slim gloved fingers. And nobody ever greeted her as Mrs Barelli greeted her, with two wet kisses on either cheek, and Cherize never sure whether she was expected to kiss Mrs Barelli back or not and getting flustered but also dimply in the confusion. As it was, she never did kiss Mrs Barelli back. The very notion seemed outlandish: her, Cherize’s, chapped pale lips against Mrs Barelli’s porcelain smooth cheeks! Impossible.
Then Mrs Barelli would draw her to the table in the window and order two teas from Jeremy – imagine being served by Jeremy!! And there they would sit for five, maybe ten minutes together, sip their Lipton’s and chat about womanly things!
Nobody ever chatted to Cherize about womanly things. Cherize was not really a womanly type of person. “But hon,” Mrs Barelli would say, “you should buy yourself one of those new tops that are so fashionable now, they would bring out your figure to great advantage! And you know that new colour lipstick that’s out? That would suit you ever so well. Don’t you think?”
Cherize only ever nodded in response. She had never worn lipstick more than twice or thrice in her life, and she certainly didn’t think of herself as having a ‘figure’ of any sort whatsoever. The mail-order brochures her mum got in categorised Cherize’s dress size under the heading ‘the fuller figure’, her mum called her ‘ample’, and Cherize herself only ever shopped at Woolworth’s for clothes – floral patterns, sweatshirts with tiger babies on the front, floppy T-shirts in discounted pastels. Mrs Barelli’s ‘tops’ seemed as remote from Cherize’s horizon as did Mrs Barelli’s camel-coloured overcoats, her shiny beige stilettoes and her double strings of pearls. “You can tell they’re real because they’re not even. See how each one has a different shape? Don’t be shy, hon, just bend your head closer to have a look. Jeremy, more milk!”
And Jeremy scuttled.
Jeremy normally hardly ever entered the shop. He worked out the back, between the ovens and the cake racks. Every morning, he opened the roll door of the delivery entrance and hauled in the crateloads of ready-rolled dough. Mr Patani brought those crates, and sometimes other crates as well, crates that were kept locked and stacked under an old tarpaulin next to the freezer-fridge. Cherize didn’t know what was in those locked crates but the open ones were full of blonde snails of pastry, little humps of scones, sausage-shaped buns, flat pancakey ones that Jeremy would have to roll up into cones, round ones, square ones, half-moon ones, and ones with open mouths waiting to be stuffed with cream from the giant cream syphon in the fridge.
So it was strange to be sitting at the table near the window with Jeremy coming in, his hands and face all white with flour, and with his thick glasses fogged because of the different temperatures in the oven room and the shop, and with his hands clasped round the tea tray.
“Thank you, Jeremy. Put them down here.”
Sometimes Jeremy would spill a bit of tea down the side of one of the paper cups, and once he’d forgotten to take the tea bags out before bringing in the drinks, and Mrs Barelli had had to chide him. Jeremy had looked foolish and barely managed to stutter an apology but later, when Mrs Barelli had gone, he’d got mildly annoyed. “I’m not the one supposed to be doing the teas,” he’d grumbled, “you’re supposed to be doin’ that, Cherize. That’s your job, that is. Not mine.” But it was only a mild annoyance. Cherize had never seen Jeremy get really annoyed. Jeremy was permanently mild. He didn’t even get very excited, not even over that episode in Eastenders where that girl had got shot. The only time Jeremy ever got the tiniest bit worked up was when he was planning a Dungeons & Dragons night with his mates and didn’t know whether to lay out a Level 10 adventure or to go for Level 8 because someone’s little brother was coming along and he’d never played and could Drobbo be the Dungeon Master, please, except that was a stupid idea because Drobbo was hopeless and only wanted to do it to impress Charlie who was the one with the little brother… And by this stage of Jeremy’s ramblings, Cherize had generally switched off her attention and was silently counting the hundreds and thousands on top of the teddy-bear cookies.
“Thank you, young man,” Mrs Barelli would sometimes say to Jeremy when he’d finished putting the tea cups down. And that was strange, too, hearing Jeremy called ‘young man’. Cherize never thought of Jeremy as a man, young or old. Jeremy was just Jeremy, the lad out back, with the thick-rimmed glasses and the watery eyes and the tufts of black curls twisting their way into his earholes because he never went to the barber’s but had his mother trim his hair every fortnight or so.
Until noon, that is. Everything changed at noon. On that particular Tuesday.
It started out normally enough. There was the normal flurry of customers at breakfast time, crowding in for their buns and rolls. Then there was the elderly couple from down the road. They came every morning at half past eight to have a cup of tea and a vanilla Danish at the table near the window. They had been having their half-past-eight cups of tea ever since the table was first introduced to the shop. Mr Elderly Man would sit to the left, near the doorway, and Mrs Elderly Lady would sit to the right, in the corner, and they sipped their teas and ate their pastries, being careful to catch all the crumbs on the white paper napkins that they’d spread out to full size as substitute plates. Once, Cherize saw Mrs Elderly Lady dunk her Danish but that never happened again. Mr and Mrs Elderly spoke to each other about once every minute, saying slow frail things like, “That tea’s not too hot, is it?” or “The Danishs are nice today.” “Yes, that they are.”
Cherize wondered whether her own mum would ever sit like that with her dad when they were older but that thought was too weird to dwell on so she didn’t. For one, Cherize’s mum was about five times the size of Mrs Elderly Lady, and she didn’t have pastry for breakfast, she had eggs and bacon and baked beans, and she never talked to Cherize’s dad in anything lower than a foreman’s holler.
The very table in the window had been Mrs Barelli’s idea. The others had been dead against it. “We’re a shop, not a cafeteria,” Ruth had mumbled. And Jeremy hadn’t liked having to shift the old boxes and rolled-up awnings that had been collecting dust in that corner. But Mrs Barelli had oozed perfume and elegance, and she’d carried in one of the fold-up chairs herself, and she’d said, “It adds a bit of class to the place, and it will bring in extra customers.”
Secretly, Cherize thought that Mrs Barelli had introduced the table because she herself liked to sit at it when she checked up on the shop. She didn’t like just to stand around in the middle of the floor or squashed up between the cake racks out back. Sometimes she’d sit there for an hour or two, all told, after having finished her tea with Cherize, filing her nails and speaking very softly into her mobile telephone.
Nobody ever came to tow her car away. “It’s Alfas, that’s what,” Jeremy said, “even the cops is afraid of them cars.”
After Mr and Mrs Elderly had left, silence descended on the shop. The flies buzzed suicidally. The chimes clanged forlornly but only because the hot air wafting in from out back made them jingle. Outside, cars rolled by; people hurried to work or to school or wherever they hurried to; someone’s dog peed against the post box. Cherize smoothed back her hair, every inch as black and shiny as Jeremy’s curls, unpinned her cap and pinned it back again, wiggled her bottom on the stool, hummed a song from last night’s Top of the Pops, kicked her shoes (flat, unpolished, with a dishevelled bow on the front), yawned without covering her mouth, looked at the clock (Ruth not due for another two hours), counted the charms on her charms bracelet – nine in all, including the little silver-plated puppy her sister had given her for her birthday and the four-leaf clover she’d won at the fair and her favourite, the little fairy with real emerald wings – well, not real emeralds but if she held her up against the light, she could imagine that they were real, they glittered so brightly.
The door chimed and in came Mrs Barelli.
Cherize dropped her hands and jumped off the stool.
Mrs Barelli’s coat flapped open. Her hair was as shiny as ever, blonde and piled up and stiff with spray. Her cheeks were as smooth as ever, and her nails as lacquered but there was something about her, something not quite right. Cherize craned her neck: the flame-red car was not there. Cherize looked back at Mrs Barelli: her necklace was askew, and one of her front teeth had a stain of red lipstick on it.
“Hello, hon,” Mrs Barelli said, and her treacle-sweet voice sounded breathless.
“Hello, Mrs Barelli.”
Mrs Barelli did not take Cherize’s hands in hers. She did not kiss Cherize, nor did she invite her to sit at table with her. She swept past, coat tails swishing against Cherize’s shellsuited leg, and disappeared into the back room.
“Jeremy!” Her voice was harsh over the hum of the ovens and the fridge. “Jeremy, help me shift these crates, would you, dear?”
Dear? Mrs Barelli had never called Jeremy ‘dear’ before.
The chimes jingled. A man came in. He was wearing a roller-neck jumper and carried a thermos. He stood staring at the doughnuts.
Mrs Barelli appeared in the door, opened her mouth, looked at the man, looked at Cherize, said, “Honey, don’t let anyone into the back, will you? We’ve got business to attend to.” Then the door to the back room closed and clicked. A key – a key! -- turned in the lock. There was a muffled crash from the other side.
“What’s the jam in these?” the man with the thermos asked. “Is it raspberry or strawberry?”
“It’s…” Cherize glanced at the door. She had not even known that this door had a key. In all her time at the shop, that door had never been locked. It had not even been shut. There was another crash and the sound of the back door rolling open.
“Or is it apricot?”
“Oh,” said Cherize and wiped the hair from out of her eyes. “It’s… it’s damson jam.”
“Oh. What’s that when it’s at home?”
Cherize didn’t know what to answer but the man was laughing now.
“Just kidding,” he said. “Look, luv, just give me five of them plain ones, then. With icing sugar.”
Cherize bagged the doughnuts, folded the paper lip over at the top, keyed in the amount, pressed 5, took the ten-pound-note, counted out the change, and all the time her ears were trained on the back room and on the noises coming from behind the back door.
There was another bang, and then a melodic tinny tune which Cherize recognised as Mrs Barelli’s ring tone, and then Mrs Barelli’s voice, speaking very rapidly. Speaking in a language that was not English. Cherize had never heard Mrs Barelli speak in this voice.
The man with the thermos left. The shop was quiet. Except for the thumping of Cherize’s heart. She didn’t know why it was thumping. She thought of those locked crates under the tarpaulin. She thought of Mr Patani’s whippet face. She thought of how red Mrs Barelli’s nails looked, and how red her lipstick looked against her mouth.
Then everything went still out back.
It was worse than the noise.
The Tuesday-lull continued to hold so Cherize crouched down next to the door, one eye always on the door, and pressed her ear to the keyhole.
Nothing.
She turned around and pressed her eye to the keyhole.
Nothing. Well, nothing visible but there was a sound now. A strange, new kind of sound. It wasn’t a sound Cherize had ever heard. But no, it was… It reminded her of something. Of some movies she’d seen, and of once, when it was summer and all the windows were open and her mum and dad hadn’t realised she’d come home early… But that was years ago. That was when she was still at school. Now it came rushing back, that sound, the memory of that sound, and Cherize’s ears heated up, and suddenly, suddenly all at once and with the full force of something she seemed always to have known but just not to have admitted to— Suddenly, she remembered that yes, Jeremy was indeed a young man.
He had never, never ever, made that sound before in the back room, however.
Cherize stuffed her fingers into her mouth, all ten of them, and bit hard. She tasted ginger and sugar and hundreds and thousands. She tasted the sour tang of used bills and the gritty stickiness of glazed sultanas. She shouldn’t be tasting all these things, she should be wearing her plastic surgical gloves at all times. She should keep her hair covered and her hands in the gloves, and Jeremy should, too, and the wares must be kept neat and tidy, that was for the sake of hygiene, and where was Ruth, why was Ruth late?
There was another sound, a quite helpless one. It reminded Cherize of the puppies that her cousin’s dog had had last Christmas. Poor little lambs, they’d all had to be given away to the animal shelter, and one of them had died on New Year’s Day. Such a tiny, weak thing he’d been. Cherize had cried all morning, and she was crying now, although she didn’t know why.
Then the door burst open so fast that the chimes snapped off their hinge and clattered to the ground.
Cherize sniffed and blinked. Two men stood in the shop. They were impossibly big. They seemed to fill out the entire space with their peaked caps and their big, pale blue chests and their crests and their shiny shoes and their holsters at their sides.
And outside, on the pavement, where by rights Mrs Barelli’s Alfa Romeo should be parked, there hulked a sleek white car with a rotating light on top, and two more uniformed men stationed themselves next to the door, and another one was running towards the corner.
One of the men, she didn’t know which, they were too difficult to tell apart— One of them flashed a card at her of some sort and said in a deep, pickle-barrel voice, “Good morning, ma’am. We’re looking for Lola Cardelli Smith. Is she here, by any chance?”
Cherize had never been called ‘ma’am’. And she had never heard of a Lola Cardelli Smith. The ‘ma’am’ made her mute, and the ‘Lola Cardelli Smith’ made her shake her head, and the way the two men were now shouldering past her to the locked door made her shake more than just her head; it made her shake all over.
“There’s only…” she said, but her sentence was cut off by a splintering crash. One of the men had kicked the door in.
She had seen this done on television. In fact, the whole situation was turning into something out of television. The men pulled guns from their holsters. They charged into the back room. They yelled something, but Cherize couldn’t tell what. The phone on the counter rang. Ruth appeared and banged her hands on the window. Ruth! But the policemen outside grabbed her arms and wouldn’t let her come inside. Cherize shrank against the display case. One of the guys outside motioned to her. Did he want her to come outside? She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t leave the till. “Never leave the till,” Mrs Barelli always said. “Never leave the till.”
And she didn’t. She hadn’t ever. No matter how long Mrs Barelli talked on the phone or rummaged round in the back.
There was a shout but it wasn’t Mrs Barelli’s voice. It was Jeremy’s. They were leading him out, with his hands held behind his back, just like on television, just like on that episode of Inspector Morse, and they were saying, “So you won’t tell us where Lola Cardelli Smith is?”
“No, no,” said Jeremy. He looked shocked. His T-shirt was hanging out of his trousers at the front. His cheeks were red.
“There is no Lola whatever here!” shouted Cherize. “There’s only us! We don’t know any Lola!”
“Yeah, sure, and my name’s Grumpy and I’ve never heard of a laundering operation,” said one of the cop men and guffawed. “Sorry, ma’am, but we’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”
“I didn’t do nothin’!” Cherize shouted and started to cry again. She was still shaking. She was shaking so much that clouds of flour puffed up from the cherry bun shelf against which she was leaning.
“We know that,” the cop man said, and then another man came in, quite an old-looking man; in fact, it was Mr Elderly Man, goodness, what was he doing here? And wearing that smart suit too, with creases down the trouser legs.
“Don’t worry, miss,” Mr Elderly Man said to Cherize in a voice that was almost kindly. He touched her on the arm. “We just want to ask you some questions. Then you can go home.”
“I didn’t do nothin’, either!” Jeremy looked desperate.
“Well, son,” said Mr Elderly Man, and suddenly he didn’t sound quite so kindly any longer. “We’ll see about that. I do believe you were consorting with the feisty Ms Smith whom, I believe, you know under the name of ‘Barelli’ and who seems to have let you into her little secrets and into her skirts, too, by the look of it, so that you may better aid and abet her in her felonious ways.”
Cherize wasn’t sure she understood all of that but one thing she did understand. “Jeremy ain’t been consorting!” she cried. “He ain’t… he ain’t been! Truly!”
Mr Elderly Man just cocked his eyebrow at her. That was also something he had never used to do. He appeared to be a different man altogether. Everything was different. Mrs Barelli was, it appeared, a felon, and Mr Patani, oh dear, who knew what he would turn out to be?, and Jeremy… Jeremy was…
“He ain’t been consorting; he’s my boyfriend!” Cherize shouted.
Jeremy’s head swivelled round.
“Well, miss, I’m sorry to have to tell you that even the love of a lovely lady like yourself is not always enough to prevent a young man from philandering…” said Mr Elderly Man smoothly but Cherize barely registered his voice now. All she registered was the look on Jeremy’s face, behind his glasses, and all she could attend to was the way he walked out of the shop, quite meekly, and the creak of the car door as it opened, and the warmth of his thigh against her own as they sat, squashed up together in the back of the patrol car.
“I didn’t really do anythin’, you know,” Jeremy said to her.
“I wonder where Mrs Barelli is now,” Cherize said, “and if I’ll ever see her again.”
She started to cry again, and Jeremy looked at her strangely. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt, and Cherize sniffed, and the car sped away down the street, with the neighbours and the business people and Ruth and the man with the thermos all crowding round and looking on.
--
THE END
Lobelia40@yahoo.com
24 October 2003
This story is copyright to Lobelia.
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-24 10:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-25 07:12 am (UTC)Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-27 12:37 pm (UTC)And money laundering - ahh, the nostalgia...
This was such a fabulous, zippy little story. I loved Cherize and the shop and Mrs Barelli. I liked the little whispers of sexuality, and the fact that we're slightly in the dark about stuff because poor Cherize is. I liked this:
Cherize stuffed her fingers into her mouth, all ten of them, and bit hard. She tasted ginger and sugar and hundreds and thousands. She tasted the sour tang of used bills and the gritty stickiness of glazed sultanas. She shouldn’t be tasting all these things, she should be wearing her plastic surgical gloves at all times.
Very enjoyable. I like it when people post orig fic, it should happen more often.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-27 01:10 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you got some sense of the characters because that's always what we're allegedly afraid of in origfic, creating people.
And yes: please post more origfic.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-27 09:47 pm (UTC)This is an excellent story. I've been trying to think of intelligent and useful feedback for two days now, but really, it's good! I too caught on to the locked boxes, but liked not being quite sure, and Cherize not knowing at all. And I liked the interactions with Mrs. Barelli, how they made Cherize feel special. I was sad when Mrs. Barelli was taken away, because who will make Cherize feel special now?
Thank you for sharing this! And I look forward to bits of your novel, if you post them!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 07:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-27 10:02 pm (UTC)For something so short, there is so much to it- so many glimpses into Cherize and her life; things like her shopping habits, the puppies, walking in on her parents as a child.
I love little stories like this- I eat them up like candy!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 07:32 am (UTC)