Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
‘Don’t tell your dad,’ whispered Mam down the phone the next day.
‘Of course I won’t!’ I said, not just because she’d asked, but because the prospect of discussing strawberry-flavoured lube and love eggs with Dad made me shudder. ‘Why is there so much of this stuff though?’
‘I’d just signed up for all that, and then I went through a bad spell with my MS. If I’m honest, when I got better, I’d lost the nerve to sell it. I felt a bit out of my depth. I mean, what do I know about strap-ons and what-not?’
Just hearing my mam utter the word ‘strap-on’ took a year off my life. I braced myself to plough on.
‘So, before you lost your bottle, how were you going to sell it?’
‘I was going to do parties. Private soirées for groups of friends: wine, nibbles, pin the willy on the swimwear model, that kind of thing.’
‘Right. Well, I’m not sure I can do that kind of thing in the shop. Not unless I do it in the dead of night and hang up sheets over the window.’ I chewed my nail. ‘I need to figure this out.’
‘What about a secret sale? Under the counter, like in the war.’
I nodded, cogs starting to whir. ‘Black market ball gags,’ I murmured.
Mam tutted. ‘There’s nothing of that sort in there. The leaflets said nothing about sadomasochism.’
There went another year of my life.
‘So, I could advertise them discreetly… Christa said they’re desirable products, so people should know what I’m on about with a thinly veiled description. Then there’s no risk of alienating other customers.’
‘That’s very sensible,’ agreed Mam. ‘I can help if you like?’
I declined. The last thing I needed was my mother coming up with creative puns about how to pleasure oneself.
I hung up and immediately set to work on my plans. There was no time like the present; I needed an injection of cash, and fast. I’d received my latest rent invoice from Mike, and it was due any day.
I took some arty, obscure pictures of the packaging with my phone, using the dim lighting of the back room to create a sensual atmosphere. I made sure the exact titles and contents of the boxes weren’t in plain sight. I just had to hope that the design was recognisable enough that those in the know would pick up on it, and that my stock of Liaison Secrète would also then spread by word of mouth.
I added the caption , If you know, you know … then hit ‘post’ and almost immediately there were some likes. All I could do now was sit back and wait – I would post more through the day to drip-feed some more teasers. I literally sat back and waited; the shop was quiet so I sat on a box and rested back against the wall, closing my eyes. This had to work. It had to .
I’d been sitting there for ten minutes when Penn came out back. He looked at me askance before foraging through some of the boxes on his side.
‘I’m just resting my eyes,’ I said, getting up.
‘Mmhm,’ he replied, taking out a stack of albums and starting to sort through them. ‘I saw your Instagram post.’
‘Really? I only added it ten minutes ago.’
‘It came up on my notifications.’
‘You follow me?’
‘Yeah,’ he said begrudgingly. ‘I thought I ought to. So I know what kind of vibe it’s giving. To check it’s in keeping.’
My nostrils flared. ‘Maybe I should follow you . To make sure you’re ‘in keeping’ with my shop.’
He shrugged. I went to go back into the shop when he spoke again.
‘What is it you’re posting about? It looks very cryptic.’
‘That’s for me to know.’
‘I haven’t seen any of that packaging in your shop. What’s the big secret?’
‘None of your business,’ I said, my cheeks starting to warm. I didn’t think he’d be delighted to know that our premises was about to become a den of iniquity. ‘And there’s no need for you to know, but don’t worry. I won’t be flogging any more squeegee mops that might cramp your style.’ I flounced off into the shop with him staring after me.
The afternoon passed without incident, other than Christa coming in and whispering excitedly to me about my treasure trove. Penn looked on with suspicion. I posted a few more mysterious pictures with captions like, I have a little Secrète… and Make a Liaison with Everything Must Go.
Then just as I was about to close up for the evening, a woman came in, looking furtively around. She hurried up to the counter, wrapping her wool coat around her.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Um, is this the right place for…?’ She glanced uneasily at Penn, who was looking on with unbridled interest. She lowered her voice so he couldn’t hear and turned her face away. ‘For Liaison Secrète?’
I beamed. ‘You’ve come to the right place.’ I’d bought a nice-looking hardback folder from the stationery shop down the road and inserted all of the literature for the product lines inside. I handed it over and tactfully left her at the desk to peruse it. She spent five minutes leafing through and then coughed twice. I presented myself behind the counter again, like a porn-peddling Mr Benn.
She pointed to a small selection of items and I said, ‘Coming right up.’ After a brief forage in the stock room and placement of the goods in a discreet paper bag, I exchanged her swag for a cool ￡120. She didn’t bat an eyelid and left with a very satisfied smile on her face, promising me that she would tell all her friends.
Penn eyed me once more as he swung his jacket over his shoulder. His gaze roved over me questioningly, and for a moment my brain released a little dopamine hit from the attention.
‘That was… weird,’ he said.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said, beaming widely as I buried the flicker of chemistry I’d just imagined. ‘Have a good night. See you in the morning!’
He scowled and left, while I cashed up, ￡120 the richer.
That night, I lay on my bed. Neo had gone out with some hairy friends to the pub, so the flat was devoid of battle cries and farts drifting from under his bedroom door.
I scrolled through Instagram and Facebook, smiling at the build-up of likes and comments. The comments were as cryptic as my posts, with emojis such as love hearts, side eyes, and the occasional aubergine; it was reaching my target audience and spreading faster than I’d dared hope.
I’d been scrolling for a while when my eyes fell on the stream of ‘follow suggestions’. There, on my Insta feed, was a box suggesting I follow back an account called penn_be. The Honourable Mr Burton-Edwards himself. Curious, I clicked on his profile, feeling as intrusive as if I was digging through his underwear drawer, mildly embarrassed in spite of there being no witnesses.
It mostly comprised of grainy pictures of him and his band, none of which were recent. This seemed to be an old personal account rather than one for his shop. There were snapshots of dark venues lit with reddish lights, or some with a bright white glare highlighting the stage. Penn was in most of them, a guitar against his hip, dark hair hanging down over his face. A memory of seeing him for the first time flashed into my mind. I then noticed that I was unconsciously biting my lip, and a strange warmth radiated through the lower half of my body. I shook my head abruptly. Musician Penn is not Shop Penn .
Other photos showed him relaxing with some of the guys, bottles of whisky and beer dotted around shabby living rooms, smoke clouding the ceiling. In a few of these, he was laughing, his eyes screwed up and his mouth open wide. I’d never seen him do that. Not with me… The realisation that I wanted him to was as disconcerting as it was tantalising.
I scrolled further, starting to delve into the deeper past, my thumbs flicking and flicking. Eventually I paused on a photo that stood out from the rest. It was a picture of a wedding – a summer outdoor affair with a festival theme. The bride was shoeless and had a ring of flowers around her strawberry blonde head; the groom was wearing a mint-coloured suit with a white T-shirt underneath. I struggled to see the context until I spotted Penn in the background. He was wearing a slim-cut suit and trainers and was pulling a blonde woman in close to his side, his hand resting on her waist – she was wearing a soft pink dress that showed a lot of boob, and was pouting and holding her fingers up in a peace sign. I squinted. I recognised her; it was the snooty one from the pheasant shoot – the one who’d branded us all ‘animals’. The proprietorial way she’d spoken to him that day now made complete sense. She was his girlfriend.
A strange feeling trickled through me. He’d never mentioned her either before or after the day of the shoot, and she’d certainly never visited the shop as far as I was aware. It hit me, with surprise, that I felt affronted. Not jealous – the man was an arse after all – but something more subtle. It made me feel like the rift between us was deeper than I’d thought; not only did he have a secret upper-class identity, but he didn’t deem me worthy of knowing he was in a relationship, or anything at all about his life other than the most superficial veneer of it. I was working alongside a misanthropic enigma.
Sighing, I went to shut down my phone but fumbled it. It slipped around in my hand as I tried to regain a hold, and in doing so my fingers mashed the screen. I turned it over, knowing the danger I was now in, being two years deep in Penn’s profile. With a sickening lurch, I saw the bright red heart under the picture of him and his girlfriend, signifying that I had indeed accidentally ‘liked’ the photo. With a whimper, I pressed it again to ‘unlike’. But I knew it was too late. If he had notifications turned on, he’d now be reading hard evidence that I’d stalked him good and proper.
For the next hour, I lay on my bed and stared at the damp patch on my ceiling.