The Second Chance Store: A Novel

Gift

It sits outside the shop, self-conscious in its splendor.

An odd sight among the usual split bin bags and supermarket carriers, spilling old sweatshirts and balled-up T-shirts like soft guts across the pavement. A gold holographic gift bag—pristine, not a reuse—with a foil rosette stuck to the side and carefully curled ribbons around the handle.

The bag stands proudly upright despite the wind. Something heavy inside weighs it down, from within a crinkling nest of polka-dot tissue paper. There is a tag on the side—inscribed, so now it can’t be reused—with a message in black ink, slightly smudged.

Suzy Q, saw this and thought of you. Hope you like it. Lots of love.

1

It was the dinner that did it.

Gwen sat, chewing. She rolled the braised ox cheek with buttery Parmesan polenta around her mouth, and as she did so the thought popped into her head. It arrived in two beats, ba-dum, like coins dropping into a slot machine.

This might be one of the nicest meals I’ve ever eaten, it went, and there is nobody here to tell.

It wasn’t self-pitying, exactly, the thought. She didn’t bat it away, the way she might have done—had done—so many times in recent years. She merely took the thought out as if from some mental filing cabinet, held it up and considered it as fact.

It was fact. There was nobody else here to share it with, except the waiter. The nice waiter, who had discreetly turned the sleeve of her coat the right way out again and picked up her hat in one clean, deft motion when she had dropped it on the floor with an apologetic oof. Did the waiter count? Not really.

She would tell him it was nice, but it wouldn’t be news to him. The waiter probably ate braised ox cheek with buttery Parmesan polenta for his dinner three nights a week, whenever he wasn’t eating leftover razor clams or picking at the blackened ends of rolled loin of pork. No, the waiter wouldn’t care that this meal set a kind of high watermark in the oral history of Gwen’s stomach. He would smile, because she would smile. He would smile, because she would tip.

She hadn’t even had dessert yet. What would happen when dessert came? Sticky toffee pudding with bourbon ice cream and—because Gwen liked to believe she had given up living within other people’s limitations, at least when it came to sweet condiments—a jug of custard. Both, not either/or.

Perhaps dessert would be disappointing, she thought. She half hoped it would be, for by now she was swept up in the idea of this dinner, this surprisingly good dinner in a near-empty suburban gastropub, as both pivotal and fateful. Perhaps the pudding would be dry and claggy with not enough sauce, and she’d snap out of it and remember all the reasons she was alone here with nobody to tell. Good reasons! Multiple reasons! Reasons she had recited once, over and over, in gulping half-sentences on the top of the 43 bus.

Or would she take one bite of the best sticky toffee pudding she’d ever had in her life, and cry in front of the smiling waiter?

The pudding came. It was dark, sticky and dense with dates, swimming in a generous lake of treacle. It wasn’t the best she’d ever eaten, but undeniably top five.

Gwen didn’t cry. Instead, she made a list.

Find something to do

This was too vague, she knew even as she was halfway through writing the sentence. The TED Talk she’d watched several months ago on Better Goal-Setting to Harness Your Untapped Productivity Superpower had made it clear: be specific. Or at least she thought that was the gist.

But if Gwen had specifics then she wouldn’t be writing the list, or surreptitiously licking a dribble of toffee off the paper with a smeary finger. Vagaries were the best she could manage right now. The weak, fridge-magnet platitudes of the suddenly unemployed.

Unemployed. She repeated the word a few times under her breath, plodding and ominous. Three dumpy syllables that felt too heavy for someone who hadn’t even left yet. Not technically. Not for another four days.

Officially, it was company cutbacks. The economic climate, necessary restructuring and streamlining in the face of a fast-evolving market, yada yada, blah blah.

Unofficially, it felt like no small coincidence that Gwen had lost her job a week after pointing out, in a client meeting, that the agency was overcharging a small not-for-profit with inflated rate cards and several billable services they weren’t providing at all. Gwen didn’t usually cause scenes. A tense silence had fallen over the sandwich platter.

Her redundancy package—her boss had insisted on calling it a package, as though the money might come wrapped up with a complimentary tote bag and a selection of snacks—was generous, enough to live on for a few months at least. It was a token of appreciation for her loyalty to the company, he’d said, though this felt spiked with irony. Besides, Gwen knew the amount was stipulated by contract on the basis of how many years she’d been either too lazy or too underwhelming to get hired elsewhere. HR were probably kicking themselves for making her too comfortable. She was kicking herself for not dumping them before they could dump her.

Still, it turned out mediocrity had a price tag, and it was enough to cover her rent and bills and food while she found something new. Gwen should feel lucky, really—and perhaps she would, once she had stopped putting herself into the recovery position to ease the breathless panic that choked her sleep every night. Once she’d stopped sitting down in the shower.

For now the future was hazy, a distant shape at the end of a long corridor that could be squinted at more closely in time. It was tomorrow and the next day that worried her. She could see their form clearly: an arse-shaped indent in an already sagging sofa, strewn with hairs and crisp crumbs.

So: find something to do. She muttered it under her breath. Anything. Do a thing! Next.

Instigate social occasions

Gwen regretted this one before the ink was dry, because nobody wanted to come to social occasions instigated by a person who called it instigating social occasions. But she supposed it did the job. She would, she vowed, make more effort. She would take a pair of jumper cables to the friendships that had begun stalling over the years, and get them . . . ah, back on the road. (Gwen couldn’t drive).

But how did anyone do that? How did a person in their thirties round up their friends without the three-line whip of either a wedding, baby, or significant birthday as their weapon?

How did you text someone and say Hey! Fancy going to the cinema tomorrow? without making it sound like you were going to look deep into their eyes and tell them you were secretly in love with them, or had cancer?

If she knew the answer to that then she wouldn’t be here, slurping at what had been gin but was now a glass of lukewarm molten ice, resisting the urge to chew the lemon slice in case the nice waiter saw her.

Losing her job, was that anything? Enough to warrant coos and a sympathetic head tilt, yes—but enough to summon people to dinner on a weekday night at will? Unclear.

She had long fantasized about something she liked to call the rally round. Friends dropping everything to race across town and appear on each other’s doorsteps, the way they did so frequently and easily on TV. In recent years, in darker moments, she’d caught herself cooking up elaborate daydreams about divorces, bereavements, broken hearts, broken limbs. Any tragedy in which distance and practicality might go out of the window and people would simply turn up, diaries cleared and arms outstretched.

But even in her daydreams she was never the object of the rally round, just a willing participant with a bag full of wine and frozen pizza, briskly running baths and tucking her friends into bed with the kind of intimacy and affection they hadn’t seriously enjoyed since about 2008. She watched the shows and the films and read the books about intense female friendships and wondered if it was bad that nobody had ever wanted to share a bath with her. Gwen had never held anyone’s skirt while they peed on a pregnancy test, and sometimes this felt like a fundamental failing.

Still, it hadn’t always been this way. At one time it had been easier: back when her social life simply happened around her like a fast-moving river, and it was actually more effort to resist than to give in and let it carry her off to another pub quiz, another semi-ironic dinner party, another round of leaving drinks for the friend of a friend’s boyfriend who was going backpacking in Acton. (The drinks were in Acton, not the backpacking.)

Once upon a time, Gwen and her friends had done things for the sake of anecdote and little else. And thank god they had, because without being able to say Remember the time . . . ? whenever the conversation flagged, their sporadic meetups now would be painful. Perhaps friendship in your twenties was like storing nuts for winter. You spend as much time as you can frantically filling the pantry, so you have enough to live on in your thirties once stocks start to dwindle.

She scooped up the last bite of pudding, making an effort to sluice every remaining bit of sauce from the bowl with it—and then, carefully, poured the last of the custard directly onto the spoon. Gwen looked at it for a second: the final, glistening mouthful. Forced herself to stop and savor a moment’s delayed gratification before shoveling it in. She’d always been sentimental about endings.

Call Mum and Dad

This one was not so much from a desire to be a better daughter, but because it had now been five weeks, three days and Gwen was forced to admit that her latest game of emotional chicken had failed. Again. What had started as an experiment, to see how long it would take them to worry and check in on her, had only highlighted their ongoing lack of concern while exacerbating her own.

Things had been heading this way in the Grundle family for years. At first, it was a forceful jollying-on; a refusal to go all touchy-feely in the face of tragic events that, by most people’s estimation, would warrant it. Not wanting to drag each other down, or rile each other up, or puncture the thin skin that had begun to grow again over the open wound, like clingfilm on a too-full jug of gravy. Better not to ask than to get an honest answer. She understood, even as she resented it.

But more recently she’d started these games: leaving longer and longer between her phone calls, waiting with curiosity to see when her silence might jolt them into making contact. It hadn’t yet. And what if something terrible had happened to them in the meantime? What if she was forced to explain to the authorities that she was a grown woman playing hard-to-get with her own parents?

She decided to call tomorrow, to check they were alive. Then get off the phone before she was dragged into a lecture on herbaceous borders.

Go to the dentist

At some point over the past decade, going to the dentist had quietly evolved from something nobody actually did, to something everyone did but never talked about. And so Gwen had been merrily ignoring the regular text reminders for years, assuming everyone else was too, until Sonja at work had taken a morning off for a dentist appointment that turned out to genuinely be a dentist appointment—not, as Gwen assumed, a covert job interview or leisurely bikini wax—and the question had come up.

It turned out that nobody over twenty-five on her team had gone longer than eight months without a checkup. Some of them even owned floss, and used it. Gwen was, as the interns said, shook.

She wasn’t even afraid of the dentist. In fact she had a respectable threshold for pain, and a secret fondness for any activity that involved being intimately cared for by a stranger. Having her hair vigorously washed by a salon junior, for example, or her pulse checked by a soft-handed GP. She had once spent hundreds of pounds on six months of appointments with an osteopath above a chicken shop, who failed to fix her bad knee but would cup it, tenderly, while they both talked about Masterchef. She never examined this memory too closely in case it made her a pervert.

Gwen even quite liked the idea of taking an afternoon off for the dentist, and sitting in a coffee shop afterward. A treat.

Really there was no reason at all for never going, except that the dentist tended to fall into that unreachable void in her head, along with the texts and emails left unanswered until it was too embarrassing to reply, the birthday check from an aunt she still hadn’t deposited and the yogurt that had moldered at the back of the fridge for going on eight months now. Seemingly easy, straightforward tasks slipped into this void, sometimes without warning, and leaning in to retrieve them took more effort than Gwen could muster. So she didn’t. But now she would.

Get rid of it

To anyone else reading her list this one would be confusing, she realized, then felt briefly embarrassed for even thinking the thought. When would anyone read this, Gwen? As your estate sorts through your personal effects, perhaps, looking for things to publish after you’ve died? Is that likely to happen, to a senior account manager from Dorking?

A former senior account manager.

Gwen blushed and scrunched up her face as hard as she could, a form of outward grimace that doubled as an inward sneer. Don’t be ridiculous.

It meant the piles of relationship detritus she had bagged up, methodically, ritualistically, all those years ago. Your emotional baggage, Suze had called it at the time, as she tripped over the black plastic sack every time she went to get the Hoover out of the landing cupboard. After a month it had been gently suggested that the emotional baggage needed to go somewhere—a bin, ideally, but if not the bin then perhaps back into Gwen’s room, where she could trip over it herself?

She’d relented, and so the bag had taken up residence behind her bedroom door, where it could be forgotten in the presence of others but would taunt her each time she was alone.

Over time, the bag had become buried. In an old towel, a fallen-down dressing gown, a sheet of bubble wrap saved for a hypothetical future padding emergency. The grain at the center of a shitty emotional pearl. Before long, the bag had slipped further into The Void than perhaps anything else ever had, until the very idea of unpicking the dusty layer cake and extracting that black sack of memories felt so beyond her it was almost hilarious. When she’d moved out, she’d simply scooped up the whole heap in her arms, dressing gown and all, dumped it into a blue Ikea bag and carried it calmly into the next place. Then the next. In this way she managed to almost neutralize the bag; it became a piece of admin, something to be shunted aside while looking for a lost sneaker. It caused her physical pain roughly twice a year, when it fell on her head from a top cupboard, and emotional pain only slightly more often than that.

But not anymore. She was going to get rid of it. The list had spoken.

Gwen might have continued into further specifics, but at this point the nice waiter appeared in her peripheral vision, doing the polite hover that signaled it was time to pay up and let him get back to . . . what? Wife and kids? Husband and schnauzer? Comrades in a warehouse squat? Hot bath and tin foil package of three-day-old vanilla cheesecake with sea buckthorn coulis? Gwen forced herself to look up as though she’d only just noticed him, caught his eye and mimed the universal bill please mime. Unfortunately the nice waiter had moved closer in the last few seconds, so that she was now silently mouthing the word please at an audible distance, to a man standing five feet away in an empty restaurant.

Flushing from neckline to hairline, she folded the list three times into a neat square and slipped it into her pocket, then made a show of rummaging in her bag for lip balm to fill the silence while her card payment went through. Eventually it did. The nice waiter bid her goodnight and disappeared into the kitchen. She watched his retreating back, then put on her scarf and left, issuing a small-voiced thank you over her shoulder.

Gwen stepped out into the biting April wind and began to make her way along the street toward the hotel room where her laptop and a whisky miniature were waiting.

It wasn’t actually the worst birthday she’d had, she concluded.

Not the worst, but undeniably bottom five.

2

The worst birthday Gwen had ever had was six years earlier. Her thirty-second, which had been spent at a crematorium, a B&M Homestore, and an out-of-hours walk-in clinic, in that order.

This one was fractionally better than her thirty-fourth, which had come to an abrupt end at 9:42 p.m. as her three companions all waved away the dessert menu and started pulling their coats on, muttering things about last trains and yoga in the morning. She knew the exact time the dinner had ended because she remembered looking at her phone, having decided that anything after 10 p.m. was acceptable. Gwen often entered into these private contests with herself. She usually lost.

It definitely wasn’t as good as her thirtieth (Thirty, hurty, and thriving! she had bellowed into various ears on the dancefloor at the Old Grey Bugle, which had a DJ until midnight on Fridays outside wedding season) but better than her thirty-fifth, when a minor terrorist attack at the other end of the Northern line had given everyone slightly-too-convenient reasons to cry off. Since then she’d stopped planning anything, always in the faint hope that someone—Suze, she supposed, maybe one of the interchangeable Claires and Gemmas at work—might organize something for her, the way people did for their friends in TV shows. She would protest, of course, because the whole thing would be agonizing and people would only come because Suze or whichever of the Gemmas would have guilted them into it. But she never had to protest, because it had never happened.

The circumstances in which Gwen found herself alone on her thirty-eighth birthday in a gastropub somewhere vaguely south of Leicester were too pathetic to go into. Not a long story, just one that began with her manager asking her to make nice in his place at a two-day client immersion session, and ended with Gwen being too adept at making nice to say, It’s my birthday that day, so no.

Or, You’ve just sacked me, so no.

Or indeed, What’s an immersion session?

She could have left the company immediately. They’d offered pay in lieu of notice, for a swift and painless exit. But a strange mix of fear and obstinance had led her to dig her heels in and hang on for one final, awkward week.

I’d prefer to wrap things up myself, she’d sniffed, trying to sound gracious. It feels only fair to the clients.

The idea that this trip might constitute any sort of treat, a final taste of the executive high life before she was booted out into the corporate snow, was a stretch. Even for Chris, the sort of boss who was perpetually one weeping intern away from a mandatory HR course. He had looked shocked when Gwen had agreed she would still go; had asked Gemma Three to book her the penthouse suite as a thank-you-slash-bribe not to shame the company in retaliation. This ended up meaning a family room on the fourth floor of Lutterworth Travelodge, but still. It was a moral high ground of sorts.

More importantly, the real reason: it had gotten her out of London. It meant she could roll her eyes and adopt a what a martyr, me! face if anyone asked what her birthday plans were. She could say something self-deprecating about enjoying the bright lights of Lutterworth. And now she could climb into the starchy-clean void of her budget hotel bedsheets with her swollen belly and watch Netflix, farting freely, until she fell asleep. All without having to question what she would have been doing at home on her birthday instead.

Plus, she now had a plan of action. A five-step program for life recovery. Tomorrow there would be tiny toiletries, warm butter pats spread on cold toast, and the mercifully early confirmation that the immersion session would not require a swimsuit. It was a good decision.

Gwen murmured this to herself, the time-honored old mantra she’d used many years before, as she kicked at the tucked-in sheets until her feet were finally freed. Trying to believe it.

As she listened to the whirr of the hotel air conditioning, a baseline under the orchestral gurgling of her stomach. And as she set her phone alarm, ignoring the messages on the locked screen—a text from Suze, brief but laden with emoji balloons, and a happy birthday email from a tapas restaurant she’d visited once in 2014.

It was a good decision.

3

Her next good decision came a week later, when Gwen carried her emotional baggage into a local charity shop and deposited it triumphantly in front of the counter.

Hiiiii! trilled the man behind the till, without looking up from his crossword. He was slim, shrewlike, anywhere between forty and sixty, with a tanned, sheeny complexion that gave him the air of a recently retired waxwork at Madame Tussauds.

I’ve brought you some donations, Gwen replied in the same bright tone, trying to sound as though she hadn’t rehearsed it.

Lovely! What are they? asked the man, licking a finger to turn a page. He had a soft, melodious Birmingham accent. He still didn’t look up.

They’re—it’s—well . . . Aha, Gwen stalled, thrown off script by his friendly voice and entirely indifferent body language. "It’s men’s . . . ah, wear? Menswear, she repeated, firmly. Some jumpers, a couple of shirts. Some T-shirts. A hat. A terrible hat, actually, I’m sorry for . . . um, what else. CDs! Do you take CDs? I wasn’t sure, seems so archaic . . . but that’s insensitive isn’t it, there must be lots of people who still . . . ah . . . books, too, a few paperbacks. I can’t vouch for quality but one of them won the Pulitzer so I suppose my opinion is . . . um . . . there’s some flip-flops, I think, not very seasonal but I thought you could keep them for the summer, or . . . well, those people who wear flip-flops in the rain. Shin pads! I think they’re shin pads, not to protect anything . . . else. Um. Two sets of whisky stones. An unopened tin of something called beard butter."

She paused, cleared her throat. Took an emotional run-up.

And this.

Gwen took the small leather box out of her pocket and placed it on the counter. She opened it, in a moment of painful parody, to reveal the emerald-cut diamond glinting inside.

That is, if you take rings too?

A week, it had been, of incremental progress. First taking the blue bag down from the top cupboard and leaving it in the middle of the carpet for a couple of days. Then, slashing the bin bag with a pair of kitchen scissors, in a way that felt to Gwen vaguely reminiscent of a TV crime drama, to rifle through the stuff inside and check it hadn’t morphed at some point over the past six years, into counterfeit handbags or several hundred wraps of cocaine.

This took a while, because every time she caught a whiff of the clothes—their curious signature blend of laundry detergent, Mitchum for Men, and Fishermen’s Friend cherry lozenges taken for chronic sinusitis—she had to steel herself against the urge to climb into bed with her laptop and cruise his locked Instagram account via the fake profile she’d created for the purpose.

She had tried the ring on again, because of course she had. She’d briefly considered keeping it, wearing it on another finger, as . . . what? An empowering reclamation? A comedy prop to unsettle people with at parties? She’d thought about selling it many times over the years, whenever a council tax bill landed or a hen weekend threatened to bankrupt her. But profiting from it, even now, made her feel itchy all over. Giving it to charity might not shake her conscience clear like an Etch A Sketch, but it was the best solution she could come up with.

Seeing the ring there on the counter, Gwen fantasized about picking up a golf club, taking a huge swing and, with an almighty thwack, hitting it far, far into the distance. She could almost feel the impact of it reverberating through her arms.

Finally, the wax man glanced up from his paper. He looked at the ring, then at Gwen, and blinked, his expression unchanging.

I do! he replied.

Dust

To the ignorant, all charity shops are the same.

The particular smell of softening biscuits, yellowing paperbacks and aged storage heaters turned up slightly too high. The distant sound of Steve Wright in the Afternoon crackling through a portable stereo. The racks, a little too close together for comfortable browsing, laden with items at once both too old and too new to be fashionable. A bookshelf of indeterminate filing system that will reliably contain several copies of Shantaram, The Dukan Diet, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. A glimpse through an open door into a stockroom beyond, filled with bin bags, half-drunk cups of tea, and the theatrical hiss of a steaming machine.

And behind the counter, a kindly soul whose job is to scrutinize you. A generous person who has given up their time for the benefit of those less fortunate, who will probably rifle through your donations after you’ve gone and laugh at how gross they all are. An angel on earth, who will nonetheless hold up your ill-judged holiday shorts from 2009 while shrieking, Cor, Brenda, get a load of these!

And they’re allowed to, because after all, what have you sacrificed to help others recently? The shorts? Is that it?

To the uninitiated, all charity shops have the same air. A potent blend of the depressive, the nostalgic, and the worthy. The lingering essence of a grandparent, distilled into boxes of clumsy bric-a-brac. The unbearable sadness of unwanted gifts, never taken out of their plastic packaging. A childhood memory too far gone for conscious recollection, which now exists only as an occasional twang in the pit of the stomach, triggered by a waft of a certain perfume or the feel of bobbled cotton between two fingertips.

And death. The thing that squats like a fat elephant in the corner of every charity shop in the land. The reason half this stuff is here, and often the reason it’s being sold. Dead people’s clothes, in aid of dead people diseases, sold by people closer to death than you are. It’s a lot to take on for a cheap T-shirt.

But the truth is, there are as many flavors of charity shop as there are charities to run them. There are posh charity shops and hip charity shops and hippie charity shops and minimalist charity shops and obsessively neat charity boutiques and muddled, must-addled junk emporiums. There are charity shops for every neighborhood, for every purpose, metabolizing all that waste and using it to generate a new kind of energy. Each shop becomes different each day, as more new-old bundles are unpacked into its belly. Continually reconfiguring to reflect the world around it. Or, the world that was around it five to ten years earlier.

And if you can learn a lot about people from peering into their trolleys at the supermarket, you can learn even more from the things they give away. They’re a telling inventory of hobbies that never caught on and relationships that never bedded in. Every castoff has a story, from For sale: baby shoes, never worn to For sale: Nutribullet, never opened. It’s a story that’s only half-written at point of sale; off to live another life and inspire another volume with some new owner.

Second chance saloons, Michael liked to call them, in reference to himself as much as the stock. It’s ironic, he thought privately, that the people who are squeamish about buying secondhand are often the same people who like to pretend everything was better in the past.

The volunteers referred to him as St. Michael, named more for his ability to identify a piece of old Marks and Spencer at twenty paces than for his heavenly customer service. In fact, in the grand tradition of the virtuous, he often came across as a raving misanthrope. St. Michael was fine with this. He had learned the hard way in life that there’s usually more to be gained from watching people than there is from charming them.

Charity shops make people uncomfortable because they do so much good, Michael was fond of saying at parties, at bars, or to people he met in queues. They raise money, they reduce waste, they help poor people, they help mad people [here, he would gesture to his own face and wait for a small laugh], they give rich people a place to offload their crap and feel better about it. But all the ways they’re good just serve to remind people of all the ways they, personally, are shitty. That’s why people turn their noses up. Nothing to do with the smell.

He would leave a pause here, but not such a long one that people would think he had finished speaking and move on.

Personally, I lean into it, he would add, with a conspiratorial smirk. It started as therapy for me, but now I’m the therapist. The counter is my couch. And honey [here, he would affect an American accent with Joan Rivers-esque hand gestures], let me tell you—sometimes everybody needs charity.

If anyone asked for examples, which they rarely did, he would tell them. About the stories he filled in between the gaps, the way he did with the Evening Standard crossword. About the elderly widower, handing over faded floral blouses from the drawer he finds another man’s letters in. Or the woman who needs clothes to wear to the interview she needs for the job she needs to earn the money she needs to come back to buy the clothes her children need. The millennials who buy vintage to offset the guilt of their coke habit. The boomers who donate cashmere to offset the guilt of voting Leave.

The teenager patching together a new identity from pieces of other people’s wardrobes. The couple who buy latex and masks for Halloween in April. The millionaire who can’t make peace with spending more than £4 on a shirt. Or the woman who walks in one afternoon with a bin bag, and hands over an engagement ring.

If charity shops remind you of death then that’s only because they’re so full of life.

4

Gwen had seen the sign in the window as she walked in, though she was preoccupied in the moment. She noticed it again as she left, walking slowly this time, stroking an idle finger along the sleeve of a nearby sweatshirt and pausing to have a cursory flick through a box of thick magazines marked ARTY, £2.

She lingered, because it felt strange to walk out again so soon after such a monumental task. Gwen half-expected someone to run out of the back room shouting, Wait! Stop! Would you like to talk about it?

But once she had reached the door, moving so slowly she stumbled over her own feet at one point, nobody had and there was nothing left to do but walk through it and into her baggage-free future.

Unless! There it was again, written in Sharpie and stuck to the window with masking tape at the corners. VOLUNTEERS URGENTLY NEEDED.

It would be nice to be urgently needed was the first thought that occurred to her, which was bleak. That wasn’t supposed to be the main reason you volunteered for something. But Gwen reassured herself that if anyone asked, she could always lie. She could say she wanted to give something back. That she had decided to diversify her hobbies and reconnect with her local community. This wasn’t entirely untrue, after all; it was point number one on the action plan, or thereabouts. Find something to do. And now here was something to do, right in front of her, conveniently piggybacking on point number five.

It was the day after her redundancy payout had landed in her bank account, giving her a buzz of illusory wealth in the same way Student Loan Day used to. She’d need to find a proper, paying job again soon—sure. Within five months and two weeks, if her most wildly optimistic sums proved true. But didn’t she deserve a bit of a break? And yet didn’t the idea of more downtime fill her chest with thick terror? And anyway, wouldn’t volunteering look good on her CV? Yes. Yes to all three.

It was important to follow through on this now, she knew, while she was still giddy from the rush of admin successfully completed. Before it fell into The Void. So Gwen performed an exaggerated double take in case anyone was watching, turned around and walked back up to the counter, where Wax Man had just reached the property section.

Hi again! she half-sung at him.

Hiyaaa, he replied, eyes fixed firmly on a feature about why Bognor is the new Bexhill which was once the new Balham.

I was wondering about volunteering, she continued, smiling broadly at the top of his head.

Without looking up, Wax Man reached beneath the counter and smoothly produced a form, SO YOU WANT TO VOLUNTEER? printed along the top in Word Art. He slid it across the counter with a single, assertive finger. Gwen took it, awaiting further instructions, but it seemed their interaction was over. He yawned and turned a page of his paper. She left.

In a coffee shop up the road, she dunked chunks of banana bread into a flat white with a spoon and thought about the qualities that would make her a good candidate for volunteering. It was quite hard to look beyond the most obvious: being willing to volunteer. She couldn’t see how a charity shop would be so overwhelmed with offers that they would need further criteria.

I have a strong interest in old things, she wrote, then worried this sounded as though she was referring to the patrons. Or the staff. Although from her limited interactions with the shop so far it didn’t look like it was run by shuffling