Chapter 4
Chapter 4
I ’ve told you about this before,” said Mr. Wainwright, as Gertie sat behind the till, her fingers—which had been clicking her needles under the register—now fallen silent.
“When we’re quiet, you dust.”
Gertie bit her lip.
“But!” said one of her co-workers. “Remember when you turned the heating down because it was too expensive? Gertie knitted us all vests!”
“Yes,” said one of the other women, Barb. “I mean, it was a kind of nothing color...”
“It was sandstone,” said Gertie quietly. “I thought it was a beautiful color.”
“... but it worked perfectly.”
“And I’d have had a lot more days off with my arthritis if it wasn’t for the gloves,” chipped in Kel, who did the boxes out the back. “Although, yeah, what about a nice blue once in a while?”
Mr. Wainwright scowled. This was not in the manual.
“Gertie, go clean the windows.”
This was clearly punishment, and Gertie sloped off. She’d been offered a job in the wool shop that Jean had said she couldn’t take unless she wanted to dance on her grave as quick, and she’d absolutely meant to apply to a crafting course at college—she had, for ages—but the pandemic had got in the way and it had suddenly got so hard to motivate herself to go and do something... She didn’t like, sometimes, the number of years she’d been working at the supermarket.
She glanced at the local messages board as she passed with her bucket. It must have been updated since she’d last looked. Dog walking, dog trimming, dog minding; quite a lot of dog stuff. The ScotNorth was now officially the last shop in the town you couldn’t take your dog into, as everyone informed them, crossly, when they stopped them coming in. In vain Gertie would explain they had bread rolls on the bottom shelf and it wasn’t fair to ask a dog not to accidentally eat a roll at dog height, but the owners were still cross with them, and it wasn’t much fun for the staff either when the local Irish wolfhound, Finn MacDrool, had to be tied up and howled so loudly up and down the street for his owner that it set off car alarms.
There were a couple of yoga/aromatherapist/homeopathic/crystal/tarot types. It was not a very big town, so if you were into that kind of thing, it helped to be able to do a bit of everything. And there was, heavens to Betsy, was that... an advert for a flat ? Those never came up these days. Perhaps one of the people who taught yoga also had a beautiful home. Maybe it was a really lithe beautiful man who looked a little like Joe Wicks, who didn’t really need to advertise on the classified noticeboard of a small-town supermarket, but wanted someone really down to earth, someone who maybe had always wanted to try yoga but had always been too shy to join a class, and in the bright beautiful sunny sitting room started carefully showing her some moves that would make her all lovely and toned and...
Suddenly Gertie caught sight of two people out of the corner of her eye. And ice water ran down her back. The two figures approached, laughing and chatting. She remembered them well from school and shuddered. It was Morag MacIntyre and Nalitha Khan.