I Owe You One: A Novel(2)

Nicole was as drifty and vague then as she is now, but Jake dominated everything. He was focused. Bright-eyed. Quick to anger. I’ll always remember the time he got in a row with Mum and went and kicked a can around the street outside, shouting swear words into the night sky. I watched him from an upstairs window, gripped and a bit terrified. I’m twenty-seven now, but you never really leave your inner eleven-year-old, do you?

And of course there are other reasons for me to feel rubbish around Jake. Tangible reasons. Financial reasons.

Which I will not think about now. Instead, I smile at the old man, trying to make him feel that I have all the time in the world. Like Dad would have done.

Morag rings up the price and the man gets out an old leather coin purse.

“Fifty …” I hear him saying as he peers at a coin. “Is that a fifty-pence piece?”

“Let’s have a look, love,” says Morag in her reassuring way. Morag’s been with us for seven years. She was a customer first and applied when she saw an ad pinned up on a postcard. Now she’s assistant manager and does all the buying for greeting cards—she has a brilliant eye. “No, that’s a ten-pence,” she says kindly to the old man. “Have you got another pound coin in there?”

My eyes swivel up to the Coke can and stained chessboard again. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. There isn’t time to sort it now. And the visitors won’t notice it. They’re coming to show us their range of olive oils, not inspect the place. Just ignore it, Fixie.

Ignore it.

Oh God, but I can’t. It’s driving me nuts.

My eye keeps flicking upward to it. My fingers are doing that thing they do whenever I’m desperate to fix something, when some situation or other is driving me mad. They drum each other feverishly. And my feet do a weird stepping motion: forward-across-back, forward-across-back.

I’ve been like this since I was a little kid. It’s bigger than me. I know it would be mad to drag a ladder out, get a bucket and water, and clean the stain up, when the visitors might arrive at any moment. I know this.

“Greg!” As he appears from behind the glassware section, my voice shoots out before I can stop it. “Quick! Get a stepladder. I need to clean up that stain.”

Greg looks up to where I’m pointing and gives a guilty jump as he sees the Coke can.

“That wasn’t me,” he says at once. “It definitely wasn’t me.” Then he pauses before adding, “I mean, if it was, I didn’t notice.”

The thing about Greg is, he’s very loyal to the shop and he works really long hours, so I forgive him quite a lot.

“Doesn’t matter who it was,” I say briskly. “Let’s just get rid of it.”

“OK,” Greg says, as though digesting this. “Yeah. But aren’t those people about to arrive?”

“Yes, which is why we need to be quick. We need to hurry.”

“OK,” says Greg again, not moving a muscle. “Yeah. Got you. Where’s Jake?”

This is a very good question. Jake is the one who met these olive-oil people in the first place. In a bar, apparently. He’s the one who set up this meeting. And here he isn’t.

But family loyalty keeps me from saying any of this aloud. Family loyalty is a big thing in my life. Maybe the biggest thing. Some people hear the Lord Jesus guiding them; I hear my dad, before he died, saying in his East End accent: Family is it, Fixie. Family is what drives us. Family is everything.

Family loyalty is basically our religion.

“He’s always landing you in it, Jake is,” Greg mutters. “You never know when he’s going to turn up. Can’t rely on him. We’re short-staffed today too, what with your mum taking the day off.”

All of this might be true, but I can hear Dad’s voice in my head again: Family first, Fixie. Protect the family in public. Have it out with them later, in private.

“Jake does his own hours,” I remind Greg. “It’s all agreed.”

All of us Farrs work in the shop—Mum, me, Jake, and Nicole—but only Mum and I are full-time. Jake calls himself our “consultant.” He has another business of his own and he’s doing an MBA online, and he pops in when he can. And Nicole is doing a yoga-instructor course Monday to Friday, so she can only come in at weekends. Which she does sometimes.

“I expect he’s on his way,” I add briskly. “Anyway, we’ve just got to deal with it. Come on! Ladder!”

As Greg drags a stepladder across the shop floor, I hurry to our back room and run some hot water into a bucket. I just need to dash up the ladder, wipe the stain away, grab the can, jump down, and clear everything before the visitors arrive. Easy.

The leisure section is a bit incongruous, surrounded as it is by tea towels and jam-making kits. But it was Dad who set it up that way, so we’ve never changed it. Dad loved a good board game. He always said board games are as essential to a household as spoons. Customers would come in for a kettle and leave with Monopoly too.

And ever since he died, nine years ago now, we’ve tried to keep the shop just as he created it. We still sell licorice allsorts. We still have a tiny hardware section. And we still stock the leisure section with games, balls, and water guns.

The thing about Dad was, he could sell anything to anyone. He was a charmer. But not a flashy, dishonest charmer; a genuine charmer. He believed in every product he sold. He wanted to make people happy. He did make people happy. He created a community in this little corner of West London (he called himself an “immigrant,” being East End born), and it’s still going. Even if the customers who really knew Dad are fewer every year.