A Couple of Stops (Light Transports Book 1) Read online

  I suppress a giggle. We’ve got a Starbucks on every corner, and Pound Stretchers is now North by Northwest; Java decaff and double lattes, Belgian beers. ‘Café culture’, ‘More like our European cousins’ – civic leader phrases. But no amount of fancy lagers and saying have a nice day is going to change the locals. Window dressing, that’s what it feels like. Surface.

  ‘Pleasure,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘No problem.’

  After they leave, I zoom off to the loo, but the ladies’ is fenced off with blue and white tape, so I go next door to the men’s, keeping an eye out for my floor manager, who doesn’t like that type of thing. When I come out, I notice a bunch of flowers on the floor.

  ‘Did somebody die?’ I ask Tess. She’s OK, Tess – forty-something, always going on about what lazy bastards her teenage sons are.

  ‘Oh, Chris, didn’t you know? An abandoned baby. A little girl, newborn. Found in the women’s toilets this morning.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Still alive, only just, it was minus three last night. The police have been. Where were you?’

  ‘The bus was late,’ I mumble, and shiver.

  I work hard with the next pair of customers, knowing it’s my last day in white goods for a while. They encourage us to move round in Boulders, change departments occasionally to get a feel of other ways of working. Shifts have come up in the display department and I’ve volunteered. They’re working on the Christmas theme.

  I persuade the couple into a Boulders’ card. ‘It really does give substantial discounts. Would you like to be invited to our selected customers pre-Christmas sale? Drinks and nibbles served of course, and each customer will receive a valuable free gift.’

  The couple, who tell me they are newly married, squeeze their hands together, and giggling, look so delighted at my offer I nearly backtrack. But I stay quiet and they sign up. I tell them to read the small print, knowing they won’t. Imagine leaving your baby in the toilets. Did she wrap it up? Feed it? Were her breasts dripping as she left? I complete the forms and watch the young couple walk out, still holding hands. My eyes stray back to the toilet. The mother must have waited until it was quiet. Did she place the baby inside the toilet cubicle? Or outside, on the floor, next to the radiator? Did she worry about insects? Or mice?

  It’s a bare place, the toilet, tiled and cold, the lights bright and harsh. There are notices; ‘These toilets are inspected five times a day’, with a row of ticks, a tampon machine and adverts for car insurance. Toilet paper is left carelessly on the floor, and the sanitary towel bin often overflowing. This time of year there is frost against the windows. Outside, barrels of beer roll down a plank to the basement of The Blue Bar. The baby would sleep with its arms out, trusting. Did the noises wake her up? Did she cry? And then stop crying when no one came? I wonder if the mother ever shopped in Boulders, I might have served her. Whether she ever worked here?

  At home that evening, I finger the container with my mother’s ashes, opening and closing the lid. By the time she died, she was so thin her skin was transparent and there were gnarled blue veins all over her hands. Her favourite ring kept slipping off her fingers, so she took to wearing it on a chain round her neck. There are sparkling fragments in the dull grey ash. I imagine they are bits of her ring. Gold, five diamonds and an old fashioned setting.

  Next morning I get in early. ‘The theme this year is The Future’ says the plump window dresser who shows me the props and tells me to watch out for ‘the bitch in black on the prowl’. The Future is to be represented by a beautiful snow maiden. There will be clocks balanced on silver trees, and watches hanging from branches. The bitch in black, our self-styled Operations Manager, as if we’re flaming NASA, promptly appears, tells us to get a move on. ‘Can’t waste shopping opportunities. It’s already November 18th.’

  I cast my eye over the display. I know nothing about window dressing, but even to my eye the window looks over-done. That’s the Boulders’ style – lay it on thick.

  ‘Plenty of Excess’, as my mother would say. I’ve had the feeling lately that my mother is hanging around, waiting for me to notice signs, make a move. Sometimes I think I’ve seen her, but there are loads of women who look the same; headscarf, hunched over, stick thin legs. She once told me that when she was young, she would meet her friends in town for hot chocolate in the Italian café, and then go round all the Christmas displays. She especially liked Boulders.

  ‘They did Babes In The Wood once. It made you feel as if you were in there, in the landscape.’

  ‘Boulders,’ she would recite, knowing the phrase sixty years later. ‘For all your needs. Even the unexpected ones.’

  So when the bitch in black goes off for a break, leaving me to mix the paint and glue that will provide a basis for the glitter – ‘the ambience’ – I pull the plastic container from my bag and mix the ashes in, then paste the stuff all over the floor and walls, and – this is the fun part – scatter glitter over it.

  When she comes back from her coffee, I’m ordered out to ‘survey my operations’ from the street. She doesn’t like getting cold herself but I breathe in fresh late afternoon air, the pavements heaving with shoppers elbowing each other, their arms full of bags. Someone is selling chestnuts, and the burnt smell tickles my nostrils. Someone else fronts a stall with flashing Santas and snow globes that kids pick up and shake. He shouts, ‘No touching.’ The kids ignore him, as they do the baritone hymning a Paul Robeson song outside the newsagent’s. A man with a weathered face, wearing a trilby with a feather, pushes a trolley. There are plastic bags draped round his boots. Buses inch up against each other, cyclists squeeze through the gaps, rub their gloved hands together at red lights.

  I stare at the snow maiden, brought alive by the lights, stare at the clocks and watches on the trees. Light bounces off the glistening walls and floor.

  ‘It wasn’t just window dressing,’ my mother used to say. ‘Real art. Real craft. Magic.’

  When I move my head, glitter sparks and flashes, one point of light flaring now, then fading as another burns my eye.

  Authors Biogs

  Winifred Holtby was born in Rudston in the East Riding in 1899 and died in London in 1935 just before her great novel South Riding was published. Tom Spanbauer is the author of the cult classic The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon and three other novels, a Pulitzer nominee he runs the legendary Dangerous Writing workshop in Portland, Oregon. Mandy Sutter lives in Ilkley and has published two collections of poetry and had numerous stories anthologised, she’s also Writer in Residence at Leeds General Infirmary. Steven Hall lives in Hull and his first novel is to be published by Canongate in 2007. Ellen Osborne lives in Sheffield and this is her first published story. The Zimbabwean poet, novelist and journalist Chenjerai Hove was Yorkshire Arts International Writer in Residence in 1995, he is currently Guest Writer in Stavanger, Norway. Kath McKay has published a novel and poetry and lives in Leeds, recent work has taken her to Malawi and Finland.

  For more biography and background on all the Light Transports writers go to www.light-transports.net

  Verso Page

  First Published by Route

  PO Box 167, Pontefract, WF8 4WW

  e-mail: [email protected]

  web: www.route-online.com

  ISBN: 1 901927 29 6

  Editor:

  Steve Dearden

  Thanks to:

  Emma Smith, Isabel Galan, Ian Daley

  GNER, Network Rail, Midland Mainline

  and First TransPennine Express

  Cover Design:

  Steve Dearden and Andy Campbell

  ‘The Celebrity Who Failed’ by Winifred Holtby is reproduced from Remember, Remember!: The Selected Stories Of Winifred Holtby, published by Virago Press, an imprint of Little Brown Book Group.

  ‘Linden Trees’ by Tom Spanbauer originally appeared in Willamette Weekly, in Portland Oregon.

  For more on this book and for Route’s full programme of books please vis
it www.route-online.com