All That She Can See(3)
‘I suppose I should get home,’ Margie finally said, without moving.
‘All right,’ said the lady, reaching for Margie’s coat and holding it open for Margie to put her arms through. When her coat was on and she was at the open door, Margie turned without warning and hugged the lady, who hugged her back just as hard.
‘Thank you.’
‘Go on. Get yourself home before it gets too late.’ The lady gave her a gentle push out of the door.
As soon as Margie’s feet touched the ground outside, Loneliness hopped towards her but was surprised to find it was shorter than when Margie had entered the shop. It still latched its fingers onto Margie’s soul but as its fingers were smaller than before, they didn’t fit the holes it had made as well any more – it had a harder time keeping hold of her. Margie walked to the road, but before the shop door closed she turned in panic.
‘Wait! I didn’t catch your name!’
The lady was now only a silhouette against the warm yellow light. ‘It’s Cherry. Cherry Redgrave.’
‘Nice to meet you, Cherry. I’m Margie.’
As she started to walk on, Cherry called, ‘Margie?’
She turned to look again at Cherry and even though she was still just a silhouette, Margie was sure she was smiling.
‘You’re always welcome here.’
1
The Usuals
Cherry had never wanted to be a baker. As a child, she had wanted to be a firefighter. She had dreams of gushing water from snake-like hoses, pouring onto burning, crumbling houses; of reuniting children with their mothers after carrying them from the flames and sometimes of rescuing dogs from wells and kittens from trees. But baking? Never. However, as life often does, it dragged Cherry off in a direction she hadn’t expected and she now found herself standing in her very own bakery, and it wasn’t even her first one. It may not have been her childhood aspiration, but she couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else now. When she unlocked the door at eight every morning, when she flipped the sign from CLOSED to OPEN and when her first customer of the day made the bell above the door jingle, something deep within her hummed, This is where you’re meant to be. Letting go of her firefighting dreams didn’t seem all that painful when she’d found she had an inexplicable talent in something so delightfully delicious.
After meeting Margie, it had taken Cherry another two weeks to get her bakery by the seafront in working order. There was no sign outside, nothing to signify this was a place to buy cake and sip tea, yet Cherry knew people would come. They always did.
This was Cherry’s eighth stop on what she called her ‘Flour Power Tour’. She would move to a small town, find a shop with cheap rent and set to work. Once she felt her task was done, that she’d done all the good she could do, she would move on to somewhere else and do the same all over again.
Some visits were shorter than others. The longest had been a year and a half, surprisingly in the smallest town she’d visited. Cherry had found that the smaller the town the bigger the issues, and had a feeling that maybe this latest stop might be one of her longest stays yet.
Merely days into her stay, she knew this would be a difficult place to leave. Each morning, she came downstairs from her flat above the bakery, wearing a freshly ironed pair of pyjamas, ready for a busy day ahead. Cherry always wore pyjamas – she didn’t understand why everybody didn’t. When a previous next door neighbour had insisted she get dressed into something a little more appropriate she had replied, ‘They’re the comfiest item of clothing known to man. Why anyone would choose to wear dresses you can’t breathe in and high heels you can’t walk in when pyjamas and slippers are readily available to everyone… well, it’s beyond me!’
So she tied her hair into two Minnie Mouse-esque bunches, donned a pair of flannel pyjamas, skidded across the shop floor in her matching slippers and unlatched the door. Within moments, her Usuals started to arrive.
Sally Lightbody, aged seventy-two and retired, was always the first person to show up. She’d breeze in at 8:15 every morning, swathed in layers of floaty silk. Her silver hair was tangled and matted into dreadlocks which she tied tight above her head with a purple and green patchwork scarf, a scarf that perfectly matched the satchel in which she kept a black box of Tarot cards. Sally had been drawn to Cherry’s shop one day not by fate but by a desperate need to relieve her bladder.
‘Go on,’ Sally had said, waving her box of cards at Cherry until she nodded. Sally shuffled and drew the first card, and her lips curled at the corners. Immediately, she swept her cards back into their black box and sipped her tea. Sally refused to tell Cherry what the card had revealed, but every day since, she arrived at 8:15 and would sit in her usual spot by the window until closing time. Throughout the day, customers would come to Sally to have their fortunes and futures laid out before them. She never asked for money for her services and she always bought her first slice of cake herself, but it had become customary to buy Sally a slice of something sweet in return for a reading. Her usual treat(ment) was a Will-Power Walnut Whip first thing, and from then on Cherry served her Victoria sponge, Sally’s favourite.
Sally looked calm but beneath the bundles of silk and crystal necklaces, she had an obsessive streak. She’d had many fixations over the years: food, alcohol, Dickens, Laurel and Hardy, obscure inventions no one ever heard about and now fortune-telling. One by one, each thing had consumed her and she would live, sleep and breathe them until there was nothing more of them to consume. Fortune-telling had kept her obsessed for almost thirty years now, however, and when Cherry asked why she’d stuck with it for so long, Sally had replied, ‘It’s the future, love. It’s always changing.’