Chapter 12
I was still feeling unsettled the following morning when I woke tangled in my dressing gown-come-bedsheet, cuddling the axe.
I considered knocking on my neighbour’s door again to ask her to keep it down—for real this time—but after last night I found my courage waning.
Nevertheless, I was warm and I was clean, so that was something.
The first thing I did when I got up was test the door to the bedroom.
Its hinges shrieked and squealed. I must have left it ajar when I went to bed.
There was no way it could have opened in the night without waking me.
That settled it. Last night must have been one of those waking nightmares, a hallucination on the edge of sleep. That was all.
However, even with that matter sorted, the house felt alien to me that morning.
Every room was both too small and too large.
The doors were at wrong angles. The windows were in the wrong spots for light.
Doorknobs just too low. Counters just too high.
Lightbulbs in just the right place to leave shadows in every corner.
It was as if someone had built this place to repel people.
Like every detail was subconsciously making me dizzy and sick, broadcasting to my hindbrain, Danger!
Leave! This place might look like a home but it’s not.
It’s a praying mantis camouflaged as an orchid. It’s a grave in disguise!
I frowned at the joining wall. It was my neighbour’s fault. If she’d just keep things down, I wouldn’t have scared myself in the night. Is it any wonder I felt uncomfortable in my own home? I’d barely managed to get a proper night’s sleep in two days!
I decided that the last thing I wanted to do today was stay inside.
I left for Carlinsrest after a quick breakfast of cereal.
As I walked along the road, I puzzled away at how to make myself feel more ‘at home.’ I needed something cosy. Something inviting. Something practical. What I needed—what would cure the foreboding un-homeliness of the cottage—was a rug.
A rug to insulate my home and protect my feet.
Okay, so I couldn’t afford to fix my windscreen just yet.
Or replace the mattress. But I could shell out a little for a cheap rug.
No more errant splinters or whatever stabbing my soles.
That’s the kind of thing people bought to feel more at home.
Throw cushions, blankets, rugs. Soft tactile things to wrap around the hard edges of the walls we build around ourselves.
A rug for the fragile softness of myself.
Not that I like to think of myself as fragile. Not that I avoided giving away any hint of fragility, like a cat hiding an injury.
I shook the thought from my head.
No, I thought. Let’s go back to dreaming of rugs and making 1b Sgàthan Sìth as cosy as can be.
Back in Carlinsrest, I crossed Bodach’s Brig—no sign of the old man and his sleeping wife—and passed by the Celtic cross memorial.
The handful of pansies had been joined by a few buckets of hyacinth and tulips.
I cringed a little at my earlier judgement.
Maybe the other flowers hadn’t been set out yet and that’s why there’d been so few.
I followed along the river, past the pub and the tapas place, looking for some kind of homewares shop.
I’d considered Rowan’s hardware and supplies shop, but from what I could remember it was mostly tools and sundries.
I needed somewhere that sold fripperies.
Like a gift shop, or one of those posh interior design boutiques I saw around Edinburgh.
Further along the main street I found what I was looking for.
A squat stone building stood at the end of the row with sash windows complete with muntins and sage-green sills. The gilded sign above declared in a decorative, vintage font:
The Auld Antiques Shoppe
Bingo. Antique was just a fancy way of saying second-hand. And second-hand meant cheaper and better quality, right?
I went inside.
A real bell announced my arrival with a gentle tinkling.
The sunny front room was filled with beautiful items. Glass lamps.
Small drinks tables. Embroidered footstools.
Tea sets. Leather wingback chairs. An umbrella stand, full of walking sticks with various handles, some metal, some wood, some in the shape of animal heads.
Mounted antlers and stag heads lined the upper parts of the walls.
A lit scented candle beside the till perfumed the air with woody notes and toasted vanilla.
It smelled as if I’d fallen into the pages of an old book.
It was like someone had taken my every imagining of a cute antiques shop and made it real.
The only detail that stood out was a line of cactuses and succulents in the window.
Their spikes and spines felt oddly modern surrounded by all the soft curves and muted browns.
By the till, a sandy-haired man with a straw-coloured beard and a tanned forehead either ignored my presence or was so consumed by the book he was reading he hadn’t had chance to notice me.
My initial instinct was to leave him alone. But no, I was determined to be better, to be more outgoing and sociable. My memory of that first day at the agency, the fumbled invitation, haunted me. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
I cleared my throat.
“Hi, morning, uh, do you have any—”
“Scottish books to the left,” said the man, not even looking up from his novel.
I turned, struck dumb, to look at the shelves to the left of the front room. Green, tan and maroon cloth-bound books lined the shelves on the other side of the shop. I could make out multiple copies of Peter Pan and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
“Uh, actually I was looking for a rug,” I said.
The man sighed, his face suddenly sullen. He put away his novel and got up. I could practically see the irritation coming off him in waves.
“Sorry, I’m new around here,” I explained. “I’m trying to decorate and—”
“More homewares in the back.” He opened a heavy curtain in a doorway, revealing a cluttered back room full of dining tables, linens and orphaned drawers of cutlery.
“Oh, thank you—”
He returned to his book at the till. As I passed by, I peeked at the cover. Something with spaceships. It felt as mismatched to the surroundings as the cactuses on the sill.
The back room was difficult to navigate.
Pale light filtered in through a frosted window on the back wall, illuminating dancing motes of dust but barely lighting my way through the clutter.
I squeezed past a wardrobe, turned a corner between warring chests of drawers and walked straight into another person, their surprised face just inches away from me.
I put up my hands to apologise before realizing the face was mine.
My reflection stared back at me from a tall gilt mirror leant against the wall.
God, that had been close! I breathed a sigh of relief, chuckled at myself, and then backed into a vase on a pedestal.
It made a horrible ringing sound as I managed to catch it just in time and slam it back onto its wooden perch.
My eyes darted to the curtained gap, waiting for the sullen-faced man to come and give me a scolding.
He must have been absorbed in his novel still, because no one came.
I found the rugs at the back of the room, rolled up and leant against the wall lengthwise like mummies, or victims of the mob. There was a stuffed fox on a high shelf next to them, all glassy-eyed and snarling mouth. I turned my face away so I couldn’t look at it.
I ran my hand down a large, classic Persian-style rug.
The pattern was a little busy for what I was imagining, but it would be warm, and it would protect my feet from splinters.
And there had to be a way to style it right.
I’d seen plenty of women on Instagram style their homes with an effortless manner that looked like witchcraft to me.
I checked the price.
I had to check it again.
There were four figures on that tag! And that was before the decimal point as well.
My hand retracted as if the price had physically burned me.
I don’t know what the going price for rugs was, but that seemed excessive.
Especially for second-hand. Maybe it was a size thing.
I looked at the price of the next rug down.
My eyes felt like they popped out of my skull.
How was this one more expensive? It was smaller.
I eyed the rest of the rugs lined up against the wall.
With growing dread, I began to suspect that they were all out of my price range.
I also began to realise that I might have mixed up the rules of antiques shops with those for charity shops.
Or ‘shoppes’ for that matter. Maybe these were those tourist prices Rowan had talked about.
Though I couldn’t imagine many tourists buying a rug on their way through to the Highlands.
There had to be a cheaper option.
I doublechecked the curtained doorway—still no sign of the sullen-faced-man—then I got out my phone.
I typed the name of the most memorable home décor site I could think of into my browser.
I checked ‘products.’ No rugs section. I sighed.
‘Decorative items?’ No, just umpteen candles in jars.
‘Textiles’ then. Cushions. Curtains. Tablecloths.
Rugs! Two thousand results. The first page alone had twenty more or less identical looking ivory-coloured mid-pile rugs.
Inoffensive. Would go with anything. I felt my mouth pull to the side.
I checked the ‘style’ filter. My choices were Traditional, Geometric and Abstract.
What the hell was a ‘traditional’ rug? One that goes on the floor, I hoped.
Would an abstract rug be a metaphysical rug, then?
Here, let us sell you the concept of a rug.
Geometric, well, I supposed that would be square or rectangle or circle.
I’d never seen a triangle rug before. Suddenly I wanted one.
I searched for a triangle rug and found five hundred options with tessellated triangles over them in sad shades of white and grey.
“Do you need a hand or something?”
I nearly threw my phone into the air.
The sullen-faced man was at my shoulder, looking at my screen. My cheeks throbbed with embarrassment. Oh no, he’d seen me browsing online for cheaper versions of his stock. Oh shit. Oh fuck. I thrust my phone into my pocket.
“No. No, no, no,” I said. “I’m alright, thanks. Just browsing.”
A cruel little smirk hitched up the side of his mouth. “You should check one of the bigger supermarkets just outside Glasgow. I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for there.”
My pulse suddenly thrummed in my ears. All embarrassment leaving me on a hot wave of indignation.
Did this fucker just call me cheap?
Arse. Face like a slapped arse. Should slap his slapped-arse face. Slap his slapped-arse face!
I bit back the insults boiling up my throat and plucked up the closest—and smallest—rug within reach.
“Actually, I’d like to buy this rug. Please.”
He rolled his eyes.
“You don’t have to—”
“No. Please. I wish to buy this rug.”
He furrowed his brows at me a moment. There was that evaluating look again. Just like the one Rowan had given me. Then he shrugged and said, “Alright, fine.”
I followed him back to the front room where he rung it up, jabbing each key on the ancient till like it had personally wronged him. I hid my flinch at the total and handed over my bank card.
He paused a moment, shook his head then put the payment through.
“I’ll write you a receipt,” he said.
“No-thank-you-don’t-need-one.” It slipped out of my mouth quicker than my good sense could tell me, steady on! Normally I would have chickened out by now. Well, that was the old me.
I snatched my bank card from his fingers and left the ‘shoppe’, rug clutched under my arm.
Once I’d walked a few feet away, I checked what exactly I’d bought. It was fluffy and cream. A sheepskin. Not terrible. Though I was doubly sure I could have bought it cheaper from the big supermarket the sullen-faced man had suggested.
I then realised I hadn’t asked about delivery.
Tonight was the meet-up at the pub. I could hardly walk around town with a rug under my arm all day, let alone take it out for drinks with me.
I looked at Bodach’s Brig and the road back out of town.
My shoulders drooped. I would have to walk all the way home to drop off the rug and then walk all the way back.
Good work, genius! You chose the most inconvenient moment to have a backbone.
I shifted the rug under my arm and started the long walk home.