Chapter 1 #2
He takes a tentative step further in and touches a hand to the side of his head, indicating the starfish clip in my hair. ‘You’re really committed to the role, with the hair and the T-shirt.’ He runs a hand across his chest, meaning the slogan across my top.
It’s not a uniform as such, but I collect T-shirts with mermaids on them and I’ve amassed quite a collection of pun slogan tops, and today’s one is blue with waves and a mermaid’s tail diving into them, and the words ‘Nice to sea you’. ‘I love mermaids. I wanted this place to feel just like Ariel’s underwater cave of wonders but on dry land.’
If he was going to say something disapproving in response, he doesn’t get a chance because a shout comes from the other side of the shop. ‘Oh my God, I love it! I have to have it!’
There are footsteps as Ava comes barrelling back into the main shop with an ornament tucked under her arm. It’s a skeleton in an elegant sitting position with a huge pair of colourful butterfly wings on its back. I’ve been calling it a dead fairy and I knew someone would love it one day.
‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen!’ she squeals. ‘It’s going to look incredible in my Instagram photos! All my friends are going to love it!’
‘Ava… Not everything is about social media.’ When she turns and glares at her father, he trails off and pinches the bridge of his nose, and I feel a bit sorry for him. Despite his harshness, he seems out of his depth, and that look crosses his face again – the one that suggests he’s secretly wishing for someone to rescue him.
‘I want to buy literally everything.’ She puts the butterfly-winged skeleton on the counter and I hurry back over to serve her. ‘This place is so cool.’
‘Thank you.’ I blush as I say it. It’s been a while since my shop was complimented like that. It used to be cool, but it doesn’t feel cool these days, not even to me. It feels cluttered, and if I’m honest, maybe a bit stifling? I used to love spending the days in here when my dad ran it, but now…
‘You have the best taste. And I love your starfish clip. And, oh my God, you’re even wearing Ursula’s necklace.’ Personal space is not an issue for her as she reaches over the counter and lifts the large gold-painted shell that’s hanging on a cord around my neck, an exact replica of the necklace the Sea Witch uses to capture Ariel’s voice. ‘That’s so awesome.’
‘Thanks. My best friend, Lissa, runs the Colours of the Wind museum and she had it made for me as a birthday present. If you’re staying on Ever After Street for long, you should go there. It’s the coolest place.’
Ava nods excitedly.
‘Maybe next time,’ her father mutters, sounding like there might be an icy blizzard in hell before there’s a next time.
The tension between them is palpable and I try to ease it. ‘Right, one dead fairy coming up. I have a box somewhere.’
Ava laughs at my description and I can feel her eyes on me as I crouch down to root around behind the counter. Most things I sell don’t come boxed, but I keep a selection of boxes that are likely to fit certain items, and bubble wrap for fragile things, and it’s all in a heap under the counter shelves and I can never find anything when I want it.
‘Is that a mermaid on your arm?’
Ava has spotted my tattoo and I stand back up and lift my sleeve, revealing the outline of a mermaid sitting on a rock. We can only see her back and her long hair as she looks out into the distance, and most of her is hidden under the sleeve of my T-shirt, but her tail wraps around my elbow.
‘That’s so cool.’ Her fingers reach out and brush over the scales of the mermaid’s tail. ‘I want a tattoo but Dad won’t let me.’
I laugh out loud and then glance at her dad. ‘I don’t think me and your dad would agree on many things, but he might have a point with that one. Maybe one day, eh?’
‘Why doesn’t it have any colour when you’re so colourful?’
I blush again because I haven’t felt colourful for a while now, but my cheeks go so red that they definitely qualify.
‘I couldn’t decide what colour I wanted it. I was going to go for a green tail and red hair, but she wasn’t meant to be Ariel, so then I thought of a blue tail and black hair, but… I was going to go back when I’d decided but I never did. What colour would you choose?’
‘ All the colours! A rainbow mermaid! Something bright like you.’
My cheeks burn as I blush even harder than I ever knew it was possible to blush. ‘Do you want to colour it in for me?’
‘She’s thirteen, she’s not a tattoo artist.’ Her father sounds exasperated.
‘I know, but I meant… Look, I found these a few weeks ago.’ I crouch down again and root around underneath the counter, wondering where the heck I put the pack of pens in question and how things manage to go walkabouts in this shop as soon as I take my eyes off them.
‘Here they are— argh!’ I stand up to thrust them in the air victoriously and let out a scream of surprise. The father has finally stepped into the shop, and now he’s leaning so far over the counter to see the disorganisation behind it that I nearly collided with him. He jumps backwards and holds his elegantly fine jaw like I’ve punched him in the face with the pens, even though I’m certain I would’ve felt it if I’d made contact with that stubble, and my shop has surely caused him enough injury for one day.
I put them down on the counter with a satisfied nod, and he peers at them. ‘You shouldn’t put ink on your skin. I have enough problems without strangers in shops teaching my daughter that it’s okay to draw on her skin with Sharpies.’
‘They’re not Sharpies, they’re tattoo pens. They’re completely safe for skin – you use them to test out designs and placement for tattoos before getting anything final done. They wipe straight off.’
His raised eyebrow has ‘disbelieving’ written all over it, so I add, ‘Look, I’ll prove it.’
I draw a star on the back of my left hand, shake it for a few seconds to let it dry, then clumsily tip water out of my bottle and wipe it away with a tissue. It fades slightly but leaves a definite star-shaped stain. I hide my hand behind my back. ‘Well, it’ll come off with a bit of soap.’
‘Can I, Dad?’ Ava is already selecting her colour choices from the pen pack.
‘Only if…’ He looks bewildered as he holds a hand out towards me, asking me to fill in my name.
‘Oh, Mickey. I’m Mickey.’
‘Only if Mickey doesn’t mind,’ he finishes.
‘It would be an honour to see someone else’s vision for my plain tattoo.’ I rest my elbow on the counter and stretch my arm out so she can reach the entirety of the mermaid.
Her hand clamps around my arm to hold me in place. ‘Mickey like the mouse?’
I laugh because it’s not the first time I’ve heard something similar. ‘Mickey as in short for Michaela, but no one’s called me that since the headmaster in primary school when I helped the class hamster make a bid for freedom.’
She giggles. ‘I’m Ava.’
The dad doesn’t offer to introduce himself, so while she colours my arm like a colouring book, I look at him expectantly until he relents with a reluctant grunt.
‘Ren.’
‘Ren?’ I raise an eyebrow. ‘Is Stimpy nearby?’
For the first time since they came in, his mouth turns from a thin line into a smile, and it’s a thing of beauty. ‘You must be a nineties kid with exquisite taste in childhood cartoons.’
‘They don’t make TV like they did when we were growing up,’ I say, because I assume he’s roughly a year or two older than me. ‘Is Ren short for something?’
‘No.’ His huff suggests that it is but he’s not about to enlighten me.
‘Dad’s name is Brennan,’ Ava says without looking up from her work.
‘Dad’s name is only Brennan when he’s in very severe trouble with your grandmother,’ he clarifies.
She looks up at me. ‘He’s in very severe trouble with Grandma all the time.’
I glance up at him and meet his eyes. ‘That I can believe.’
It’s almost like he wants to smile again, but he looks away instead, taking another moment to cast his nit-picky eyes around my shop. ‘Okay, I get that there are weird things in here, but why on earth is there a jar of forks on the counter?’ He takes a step closer so he can pull one out and hold it up to the light. ‘And why are they all bent and twisted?’
I go to answer, but Ava gets in before me. ‘Dad! They’re not forks, they’re dinglehoppers!’
I grin. ‘Exactly. You know how Ariel thinks a fork is called a dinglehopper and it’s for brushing her hair, and then she goes to dinner with Prince Eric and sits there combing her hair with one? I get a lot of old mismatched cutlery collections that are useless for selling, so why not make the most of them with a quirky touch? A bit of heat from a hot air gun, and I can curl the tines to make them a little bit different. Some people think it’s weird, some people get it.’ I nod to him and then to Ava in turn – the former and the latter. ‘They’re free. You can take one if you want.’
He looks at the jar like he’d rather stick a bent fork up his own nostrils, but Ava stops colouring to carefully select one. Her brown hair is in a side plait, and she uses the dinglehopper to brush through the ends and then hands it to her dad to hold for her. ‘Thank you so much!’
‘Yeah, we’ll be sure to treasure it forever,’ Ren mutters. I have no doubt that, if it was up to him, he’d be looking for the nearest bin as soon as they get out the door.
Eventually Ava steps back from the masterpiece on my arm, where my mermaid tattoo has now got her tail scales neatly coloured in every shade of the rainbow, and purple streaks amongst her black tendrils of hair, and it’s such a bright explosion of colour that I’ll be sad to wash it off in the shower tonight.
‘Best fun ever! Can I take a photo?’
‘Only if you take one for me too.’ I get my phone out and hand it to her and she makes an effort to get the perfect angle.
I tidy the pens back into the packet, and Ava moves the skeleton to the middle of the counter again, and I go back to hunting for a box under the counter, and when I stand back up again, one clutched in victory, she’s opened a purse and started counting money out onto the counter. There’s a five-pound note, a two-pound coin, and I can see the panic on her face as she desperately roots through her purse, counting out small change. She looks towards her dad like she’s about to ask him for the extra money, and I decide to save her the trouble. ‘You know what, I’ll take a fiver for it.’
She gasps. ‘Will you really?’
‘Sure.’ It was priced at ￡10, but I’d rather things go to someone who really loves them, no matter what they can afford. ‘I don’t own anything in this shop – I’m just keeping it safe until it can find love again with a new owner, and this dead fairy has definitely just found her new owner.’
‘Oh my God, thank you so much, you’re the best!’ She looks so delighted that she might be about to vault over the counter and hug me, and I can’t help smiling at how happy it’s made her. This is how I want customers to feel when they find a treasure they can’t live without.
Ren’s look of disdain suggests he thinks otherwise. I meet Ava’s eyes and roll mine in solidarity as I fit it into the box and poke polystyrene packing in around it. ‘Maybe your mum will like it.’
His lack of wedding ring has piqued my interest and, when I see an opportunity to work it into the conversation, I can’t stop myself pushing for more info…
‘I don’t have a mum.’
…and regret it immediately.
‘Ava! That’s categorically untrue. Just because your mother’s not here right now?—’
‘Mum left.’ She interrupts him to explain to me, and then turns back to him. ‘Why do we have to pretend she didn’t? I used to have a mum, now I don’t. Now she’s swanning around in Italy with her new boyfriend and she’s forgotten we exist because all you do is read and drink tea!’
I cringe internally at the oversharing, but he cringes visibly. He turns to me with his hands held up. ‘Sorry, Ava hasn’t learned that we don’t share personal matters with people in shops yet.’
‘It’s not personal, it’s fact. What am I supposed to say when someone mentions her like that? “Oh yeah, I’m sure she’ll love it, except she hasn’t bothered answering a text message in over a year and couldn’t care less if we were alive or dead?” If I pretend everything’s fine, you’ll have a go at me for lying!’
‘Ava!’ He pinches the bridge of his nose again, looking like he’s trying and failing to stave off a headache. ‘Mickey doesn’t care. She doesn’t know us. We don’t know her. This isn’t a conversation to have with a stranger.’
‘I care.’ I bite my lip, feeling stuck between the metaphorical rock and hard place. He’s right, of course, whatever’s going on in their family is nothing to do with me, but Ava clearly needs someone to talk to, and I recognise her need for someone, anyone , to know what she’s going through. ‘I like hearing stories. Every object in my shop has one, and so does every person. Everyone deserves to have their story heard. And I’m sorry,’ I say to Ava. ‘It was presumptuous of me to mention your mum. I know all too well what it’s like to grow up with people assuming you have one, and how awkward it is to have to explain that your family isn’t like other families and to feel different and out-of-place.’
‘You don’t have a mum?’
‘My mum died when I was five. I grew up with my dad who was trying his best too. I’m sure there are many, many…’ I glance at Ren and give him a half-smile to let him know I’m joking. Well, half-joking. ‘… many things to insult your father about, but is drinking tea really one of them? Would he be a better person if he drank lemonade instead?’
‘At least it might fizz him up a bit!’
We both giggle, and Ren is trying not to laugh too. ‘Oi! I think tea-drinking is a gene that every Brit has but it lies dormant until you hit your twenties and then you suddenly realise there’s nothing better than a cuppa.’ His blue eyes flick up to me under thick black eyelashes. ‘And the reading is for work. I’m a history teacher and I take my students’ books home with me for marking.’
A history teacher? Colour me surprised, although that explains the knowledge of aluminium and Victorian times. ‘You’re way too—’ Hot. Gorgeous. Um… I’ve got myself into hot water with this unfinishable sentence. ‘Young!’
A spark of imagination strikes at last, but I’m certain they both know what I was really thinking. ‘You’re way too young to be a history teacher. When I was in school, my history teacher was so decrepit, the entire class joked that he taught history because he’d been alive since the 1700s. He used to drone on and on about various battles. Sometimes he’d go quiet and someone would have to poke him to double-check he hadn’t died mid-lesson.’
Ava giggles and Ren gives me a grateful nod, like he realises I’m trying to ease the atmosphere. ‘I’m sure your customers don’t usually overshare this much.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised. I know everything there is to know about Mrs Moreno’s bunion trouble, her wait for a hip replacement, and her cat’s urinary incontinence problems. There’s oversharing and there’s over sharing.’
Ava giggles again and Ren tries to suppress a smile. I can see the tension in his shoulders physically ease under his blue jacket, and it gives me a warm glow inside to have given them a moment of light relief. It didn’t seem like they were having the best afternoon. This is exactly why I like trying to engage with strangers who come in. Everyone has a story. Everyone is going through something, and most people are all too happy to talk about it, and I love hearing stories.
‘What’s the story behind the skeleton fairy?’ Ava’s hand rubs over the box as I wait for the ancient till to finish printing the receipt.
‘I think she was waiting for a boy she loved. It’s the way her hand is reaching out towards someone. Maybe he was a fairy prince, promised to someone else, but he swore that he was going to be true to himself and come to her, but ultimately he was too much of a coward, and she died waiting because she never gave up on love.’
‘Awwwww.’ Ava’s looking around like she wants to know the stories behind more objects. ‘How about those plates?’
She points to a display of a dinner set, the key pieces shown off in a glass-fronted cabinet, the rest boxed up underneath. They’re a beautiful pearlised white plate with delicate red roses and green stems around the edges. ‘I got them from an auction. I like to think they belonged to a young married couple. Maybe they got them as a wedding present. I can picture them sitting down to their first meal together as husband and wife, or maybe this was the good china that they only got out on special occasions. Maybe this was saved for the meals when both sets of in-laws came over. Maybe one disapproved of the other, but the only thing they could agree on was how pretty the china was.’
Ava looks enthralled, but Ren looks confused. ‘But what make are they? Are they a sought-after brand? How old are they? Are they in good condition? Are they valuable?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not running an antiques shop here. I think they meant something to someone once and they will do again one day, they’re just waiting for their new owner to find them.’
‘And, meanwhile, gathering dust and taking up a huge amount of space you could use to display something that might actually sell or clear some of this clutter.’
‘Dad! You can’t call it clutter! It’s a collection, like Ariel’s!’
‘Ariel had a cave full of junk, and so does Mickey. The only difference is that Mickey thinks other people want to see hers, whereas Ariel had the decency to keep hers private. Disposophobia is what it’s called – the fear of getting rid of things.’
Ouch . I recoil like an insect has stung me. I square my shoulders and try to look unbothered, even though he’s hit a nerve. ‘Well, it’s a good thing it has absolutely nothing to do with you then, isn’t it? Why are you so interested in how I run my shop anyway?’
‘I’m not, I…’ He seems stumped for a moment, like he’s just realising how his opinions are coming across, and then he waves around the cloth he was still holding to his forehead. ‘If there was less clutter, there’d be fewer head injuries. My interest is solely from a health and safety perspective.’
Ava gives him a death glare and then turns back to me. ‘Just ignore him. He doesn’t mean it.’
‘It’s okay. He was raised by wolves, right?’ I try to cover it with a carefree grin, but that comment hurt . It shouldn’t. His opinions shouldn’t be relevant to me, but the lack of customers lately has made me wonder if he isn’t the only one who thinks this, but he’s the only one both brave enough and rude enough to say it out loud. He’s also unwittingly confirmed one of my underlying fears – that there’s too much clutter in here and, one day, a customer could get hurt.
‘Some people will always be too uninspired to believe in the magic of things, and will never understand how wonderful it is to find an item that feels like it was meant to be yours, or to look at something and be transported into another world.’
I think he can hear the wobble in my voice because that look of guilt crosses his face again, and he goes to say something but stops himself before any words come out.
‘We’re all puzzle pieces. Parts of us are scattered across the world, and every so often, someone will find one of their missing pieces and it’s a joy to witness. That’s what my dad wanted when he started this shop and that’s what I want with my collection.’ I’m fighting to keep my voice calm, but they can definitely hear the internal struggle.
One man’s disparaging opinion is no different to every other person’s disparaging opinion. Usually I can shrug those off, but there’s something about Ren, a sharpness combined with a softness that makes me wish he was one of the ones who got it.
‘Well, this is the best shop I’ve ever been in.’
‘Thank you.’ I try to cling onto Ava’s words, while he shoves a hand through his product-filled hair awkwardly, knocking one foot against the other, like he still wants to say something.
‘We should go.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ Ava replies.
‘I think Mickey’s about to evict us,’ he says with the guilty look again.
‘ You , maybe.’ I frown at him. ‘Ava can stay as long as she likes.’
She gives him a ‘so there’ look.
He edges towards the door, keeping a watchful eye as if other items of my stock are about to leap out and attack him. ‘Well, as the adult in charge of today’s activities, we’ve got about ten minutes of paid parking left before we get a fine, so now , please.’
Ava huffs like a typical teenager, complete with an ‘it’s not fair’ eye roll, and picks up the box with her skeleton ornament in it. ‘Thanks for everything! We’re totally coming back soon!’
He holds the door open to ensure she goes through it without being distracted by anything else, and once she’s safely outside and taking a photo of the mermaid’s tail statue, he turns back to me. ‘And thanks for looking after her when she’d run off. At least when they’re toddlers you can put them in reins, but people frown on that when they’re teenagers and you’re just expected to be able to keep track of them… a glaringly impossible task.’
I appreciate the difference between what he said at first and now he’s calmed down. ‘No problem. And I’m sorry about the…’ I point to my own forehead and grimace. ‘I will move the birdcages. I didn’t mean for that to happen.’
‘It’s okay. Not much harm done. I’m sorry about the teenage drama and the oversharing and the…’ He waves a hand in the general direction of my stock, probably meaning being so forthright with his unfavourable opinions. ‘Maybe we’ll see you again. If you’re not crushed to death by an avalanche of dinner plates, that is.’
‘Hah hah!’ I call even though he’s already closed the door, just to let him know how utterly hilarious his quips are. It’s highly unlikely that an avalanche of plates would actually kill me. A serious maiming, perhaps, but death is unlikely.
Despite it only being 3p.m. when they leave, they’re the last customers of the day. I wanted a string of visitors to metaphorically prove Ren wrong, but it isn’t to be. I tidy the displays outside, hoping to encourage people in, but no one comes, despite there being plenty of activity on Ever After Street.
We’re a little shopping street in the foothills of a castle in the Wye Valley. Every shop is themed after a different fairytale, like me with The Little Mermaid , the Neverland Sweet Shop next door, or Marnie, a few doors up the street, who runs the Tale As Old As Time bookshop. As it’s the school holidays, there are a lot of parents and children running around. The old music of the carousel turning fills my ears and I stand and watch children shouting joyfully with their arms flung out as their wooden horses glide up and down, filling the clearing at the bottom of the steps up to Lissa’s museum, full of fairytale artefacts and wishing wells and magical fountains, and I wonder again what I’m doing wrong. Every shop on the street seems to be busy, except mine.
After another couple of hours of staring at the door, willing it to open and hordes of treasure-hunting customers to pour in, I give up and flip the shell-shaped sign over to ‘closed’.
I leave the starfish hair clip and Ursula’s shell necklace on the counter, because they’re part of my costume for work, not really me, and I walk home with Ren’s words ringing in my ears. I tell myself it’s because it sticks in your mind when you meet someone so rude, but I can’t help dwelling on it. Dwelling on how anyone can have so much nerve, I try to tell myself, but the dwelling isn’t on that, not really.
I purchase more stock than I sell, and the money my dad left to keep the business going is dwindling. Fast. Customers are few and far between, even when the rest of the street is busy – a fact I’ve been trying to ignore, but Ren has hit a nerve. My shop does nothing to encourage people to come in. In fact, there’s a good chance that so much clutter actively encourages them to stay out. And I keep replaying the sound of my Victorian-style hanging birdcages clattering into his face today. Every time I’m in the shop, I’m constantly bumping into things and knocking things over. I’ve wondered if a customer could get hurt one day, and now that day has come, and it feels like I have to do something about it. I just don’t know what. There’s so much stuff that it’s debilitating, and I haven’t got a clue how to make the shop like it was when my dad ran it again.
At home, the house is surprisingly empty. A few ornaments that I’ve fallen in love with over the years. Some of my dad’s most-loved things. There’s a tiny framed photograph of my mum, partially obscured by the double-exposure of an old film camera, and now it’s been joined by a photo of my dad, smiling before he got ill, and I talk to them like they’re really in the room.
I spend most of my time at work, because in the shop, I can pretend to be someone else. The items in my shop let me escape and live in someone else’s shoes for a while. I can imagine where every item has been, who it belonged to and how that person came to own it, the romance of the people in their lives and the stories behind who gave it to them and what it signified.
So much of our lives and our loves centre around objects. My fingers rub over the necklace that I wear all the time, under my slogan top and Ursula shell necklace. A small, nine-carat gold mermaid’s tail on a delicate chain. The one thing of my mum’s that remains. That’s all I have to remember her by, apart from a few clothes in the wardrobe upstairs, things that Dad recognised but I was too young to remember. That’s why I run the shop the way I do – because we know what it’s like to be parted from sentimental items and if I can help someone else to find things that might matter to them, then that’s what I want to do.
But Ren’s got to me. I keep thinking about him. I hope I never have to see him again, and also, kind of hope… they might come back one day. He might have been harsh, opinionated, and unfair, but there was obviously a lot going on beneath the surface, so much tension between them, and they both seemed so unhappy. My instinct has always been to dig into people’s stories, and I can’t help thinking about his soft eyes and acerbic grin, and Ava’s hopeful optimism, like most kids at that transitional age – wanting to both grow up and also cling onto the belief in Disney castles, princes, and fairytale endings, and even though I know fairytale endings don’t happen in real life, I want there to be people in the world who still believe they do, and I’ve always wanted my shop to be part of that.