Charity

Gerald had retreated to dither amongst the hillocks of bin bags in the stockroom, pungent with stale sweat, embrocation and just a hint of wet dog. He had given a customer change for a fiver instead of a tenner. The customer had shouted. Then Gillian had come over and shouted. It had been an average sort of morning for Gerald so far.

As a younger man, he had dithered for the electricity board, his weak blue eyes peering at banks of switches, quite unable to decide between ‘on’ and ‘off’.  Then after nearly forty years, they’d given him early retirement.  His wife had sent him along to the charity shop with a donation of unwanted thrillers, and he’d been there ever since.

With Gerald safely upstairs and the manager out for the day, Gillian was alone on the shop floor, her perfectly fitting suit just concealing her naked ambition.

Since volunteering at the shop a few weeks ago, she’d reorganised the books, previously shoved on the shelves haphazardly, into Adult, Teenage and Children’s, then sub divided by subject, then by author and, if there were several books by the same author, alphabetically by title. Exceptions to this were local interest, special editions, classics, foreign language books, very large books, copies of the Bible, very small books, dictionaries, annuals, collections of poetry, plays other than by Shakespeare, books on art, school text books or anything stolen from the public library, all of which were subject to their own special procedures know only to Gillian.

She had gone on to rebrand Household, and colour co-ordinate Children’s Wear. And this was merely a warm up for the real objective, Ladies Fashion.  

She headed straight for the racks of dresses and skirts.

“Three size twelves marked as size sixteens.” Gillian noted down the exact details of her colleagues’ incompetence on to her printed sheet.

Of course, the culprit would turn out to be Gerald. Women’s clothes were a mystery to him. He’d never know a tunic from a midi dress, let alone a snood from a fascinator. And there’d been that unfortunate incident when he’d become so entangled in a bra and suspender set he had to be cut free. Gillian had felt obliged to make a full report to the manager.

“Have you got this in navy?”

The customer, stiff in new tweed and pearls, appeared from nowhere, taking Gillian by surprise. She must have strayed beyond the fitting room, where walking frames, golf clubs and lengths of curtain track had entwined to form a dense thicket.

“No, we haven’t.” Gillian looked up briefly from her clipboard. “This is a charity shop.”

“What about black? Black would do. I’m just not sure about the red.”

Gillian raised her head again and spoke slowly and rather too loudly. “We only have that one. We only have in stock what’s been donated.”

“Will you be getting any more in soon?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Well, I’ll call in again in a couple of weeks anyway to see if you’ve had another delivery.”

“We’re a charity shop. We only have…”

But the customer had departed, leaving the unwanted dress and jacket swinging from the bookshelves. Gillian snatched it down, adding to the armful of offending garments she was already carrying.

But before she could return any of the clothes to their proper places, a purple woolly hat came into view, weaving its way uncertainly towards Household. Gillian peered around the display of greetings cards.  The fallen bust and the unsteady gait confirmed it was Ada.

There were two ways of dealing with Ada. You could either hover next to her so she couldn’t load half the stock into her shopping basket on wheels, or you could lay in wait by the door and search the dreaded trolley before she left the premises.  Both options had their drawbacks but the thought of putting her hand into the dark interior of Ada’s filthy wheeled contraption was too much for Gillian to bear. She abandoned her post and followed the hat.

“Can I help at all?”

“Oh, I didn’t see you there, dear”, lied Ada who had deliberately taken the most circuitous route around the displays to avoid Gillian.

“Are you looking for anything in particular today?” Gillian felt like adding “to steal.”

“Nigel.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Or is it Roger? Him with that beard that doesn’t grow properly.”

Gillian thought the description of Gerald was rather apt. Even his beard wasn’t sure whether it should grow or not.

“You mean Gerald.”

“Yes, that’s him. He was going to find me a rucksack and put it aside for me.”

For once Gillian believed Ada. It was the sort of offer she could imagine Gerald making, even though it was absolutely contrary to shop policy. Staff were allowed to have first pick of items that were donated as long as they paid for them in full, and often these items were ‘put aside’ in the stock room until the staff member in question took them home. Gillian did this regularly and had even produced a spread sheet to keep a proper record of such purchases. However, this privilege was never to be extended to customers.

Gillian toyed with explaining the shop’s policy in detail to Ada. On a less stressful morning she probably would have done just that.  And, although she knew she was letting her usual high standards slip, it was easier to say, “Gerald’s not here today. He’s on holiday. You’ll have to come back next week.”

“Oh, that’s all right, dear.”

Ada, completely satisfied with the lie, began her unsteady exit, only pausing to call back over her shoulder, “Tell Harold I’m after one of them exercise bikes as well.”

The clock in the town square struck eleven, the last chimes drifting into the shop through the open door along with another customer. Gillian ignored the dishevelled man as he approached her, determined to rectify the chaos of the morning, but the smell of cat food and damp grew ever stronger.    

“Young Gerald in today?”

“He’s…” Gillian tried to find a word to accurately describe what Gerald might be doing and couldn’t. “He’s…busy.”

“I’ve somat for ‘im.”

“All donations need to be bagged and placed by the door to the stock room stairs.”

Gillian could see the man wasn’t carrying anything and she was pretty sure they wouldn’t want anything he might be thinking of donating.

“And we don’t take perishable items or electrical goods,” she added for good measure.

“Should I give ’em to you then?”

From his coat pocket he pulled out a small plastic bag which appeared to contain blood, blood that pulsated with a life of its own. Gillian stared both fascinated and appalled. She was unable to think of an appropriate procedure for this circumstance.

“They’re for ’is frogs.”

“They?” She had thought the bag contained a single entity, but as she looked closer she saw a writhing mass of tiny beings, each one engaged in a desperate, futile struggle with its neighbour, and with fate.

“Bloodworms.”

Gillian thought it was ridiculous to hear yourself scream before you knew you were doing it, and then not be able to stop, even though you wanted to. But that was exactly how it happened. She couldn’t remember ever screaming like that before, but the sight of the wretched, seething creatures had been too much.

When she finally shut her mouth, she clenched her back teeth together until the muscles flicked in her cheeks. A fragile quiet washed slowly back across the shop floor.

“I’ll just leave ’em on’t counter, eh?” whispered the man.

Gillian nodded. She realised her head was beginning to throb. As soon as the man had left, she did something she’d never imagined possible. She went up to the stockroom and asked Gerald if he’d mind the shop whilst she had a coffee upstairs and if he’d remove the bloodworms to some safe place out of her sight.

Fifteen minutes later, Gillian returned. She did not feel any calmer; in fact, imagining what Gerald could get up to in her absence was making her head feel worse.

She found him, as she had feared, fiddling in Ladies Fashion.

“What are you doing?”

Gillian had caught Gerald unawares. He jumped, catapulting a lilac chiffon dress from its hanger high into the air. Together they watched its elegant decent to the floor.

“That’s mine.” Gillian suddenly spoke with a dangerous intensity. “I’ve bought that and two similar ones.”

“They were in the stock room,” Gerald offered meekly. 

“They were in the stock room because I’d paid for them and had them put aside.” Her words gathered speed and volume. A more experienced man would have known there was trouble ahead, but not Gerald.

“It can’t be yours. It’s far too big for you.” Gerald ploughed on to his doom. “You must be thinking of a different one.”

“Do you think I don’t know what I’ve bought? Do you think I don’t know what size it is? Do you think I’m a total idiot like you and everyone else that works in this God forsaken shop, including the so-called manger?”

“Yes… I mean no.”

But Gillian wasn’t done yet.

“So you think you know better than me, after all the mistakes you’ve made and I’ve had to clear up. You can’t use the till. You can’t give the right change. You can’t even remember what time we open, but you think, after all these years, that I don’t know what dress size my husband is?”  

Another gush of silence filled the space between Gerald and Gillian. She stared at the wiry carpet immediately at her feet. He tugged his beard uncertainly. Then Gillian began to cry.

“You go up to the stockroom and I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Gerald spoke softly yet firmly as if to a lost child.

Gillian sobbed and nodded and then turned slowly away.

“Or perhaps coffee with sugar would be better,” he called after her.

Gerald felt that it had turned out to be a better morning than he’d expected, if he could just remember where he’d put the bloodworms.

This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, places, events and incidents of the work are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.