Chapter 1 – Louise

The dink of the doorbell is the second of the afternoon. The first was Louise letting herself in coming back from lunch. It’s nearly half-three. Wednesday is always and ever her valley day. Almost without intention, she moves adhesives to the shelf recently vacated by Polly Pockets. She could call it a slow day, but who would she be fooling?
Who have we here? Another JL – Just Looking. The woman is tall; her black bob streaked with a grey that works well on her. A mother of teenage children, most likely; sent in to get an item for school. Louise edges in her direction.
‘Nice enough afternoon out there, but they’re giving it for rain later,’ she ventures.
The first exchange with an unknown customer is often inane. But what can you do? That such-and-such a politician ‘sounds like an awful yoke, doesn’t he?’ wouldn’t cut it either.
‘You’d wonder what they know at all. They missed the snow entirely last week,’ the woman replies.
She could put this woman out of her misery by asking what she’s looking for, but that would be to breach the retail code. If a customer needs your help first off, they’ll tell you. Browsers must be allowed to winkle out what they want. When they’ve run aground, you can bail them out. And you can’t take chances with customers on the second last Wednesday of January at Inkspire Stationery & Art Supplies – or any other day, for that matter. January isn’t alone in its hunger anymore.
The woman rambles down the first aisle, past Rulers, Pencils and Compasses. She does a full circuit and returns to consider Envelopes, Folders, Journals and Diaries. She surveys a diary. During in-between periods like this, Louise might normally take to scrolling through Facebook, but she’s working hard at curing her phone addiction. It’s turned off and left under the counter.
‘I’m looking for an A4 one, a page for every day – I don’t see any here,’ she says.
‘I know the one you mean. Let me go out the back and check if I have any left,’ Louise answers.
The notion of storing diaries ‘out the back’ at the end of January. If Louise had any, they’d be on the display just scoured by the woman, advertised with a fluorescent sign trumpeting 50% Off.
‘I’m sorry, we’re out of them,’ Louise sighs upon return.
There is no value to be got from admitting that she had never stocked them in the first place. She’s been ordering off a tight leash for the longest time.
‘See this one with a full week across a two-page spread, would that work?’ she ventures.
‘No,’ the woman replies, ‘I like a full page for every day.’
‘You could try Tesco, they sometimes have niche items I don’t stock,’ Louise says, knowing only too well that page-a-day diaries do not fall under the heading of niche.
The woman says ‘okay, I’ll do that.’ The way she says it, the nod she pairs with it, her failure to maintain eye contact, and the sag of her shoulders all lead Louise to conclude that the woman has already been to Tesco.
How much longer can this go on? It was by the skin of her teeth the business made last month’s mortgage payment. Dipping into her savings would feel like defeat but the day can’t be far away.
The most notable item ‘out the back’ is the ominous formality of a brown envelope with a harp on it. What genius thought it appropriate to put such a beautiful instrument on letters from the Revenue Commissioners? The letter is bound to bite hard. It has lain unopened since its arrival four days ago. Three times, maybe four, she has picked it up and put it back down again. Louise is fifty-eight, but some days feels like sixty-eight.
Shops like hers are on the way out. What few company reps still come about the place tiptoe around stories of independent operators moving onto other ventures. Most of them can’t find buyers and have to wind up operations. What troubles Louise is what ‘other venture’ she can find. She’d get her enthusiasm back, she knows she would, if only she could land on a good idea. She’s young enough to have another go. She wouldn’t be Uncle Tony’s niece if she were afraid of diversification. Could it be one of those coworking spots? A juice bar has been on her mind too. On city breaks, she makes for high-end vintage clothes shops. There’s nothing vintage about the price tags. Would there be enough customers for the likes of that here? In those shops, she generally turns out to be a JL herself. Gahon’s Lane isn’t the worst of stands. It hasn’t as many shops as it had thirty years ago, but few rural towns have. People come and go from the car park all day long. There are customers there to be hooked but the passing trade keeps passing.
When the girls and herself go away on trips to follow the county team, she scans the streetscapes for ideas. In Killarney last St Patrick’s weekend, the women went for afternoon drinks in Tatler Jack’s while Louise traipsed the streets to study the shops. Same in Armagh. Same in Ballybofey. She’s come across more book shops in provincial towns than she expected. And they’re busy too; lively, warm places. In comparison, Inkspire lacks personality.
The Kindle’s triumph has not been total. She did an audiobook trial but didn’t finish out the first book. The solitary voice of the narrator failed to hold her attention. Every now and then a news item on the radio reports that books continue to hold their own. Rathfin is on the small side for a book shop. And are books a stationery sector all over again – those parts that online shopping won’t swallow up just waiting to be colonised by Tesco? The place she most loved was on the main street in Portlaoise, a fine spot combining a book shop with a coffee corner.
Emphasis on corner. Food preparation on a commercial scale wouldn’t be Louise’s thing but what interested her was how the man kept the number of menu items to a minimum.
‘People come in here for the ambience, maybe buy a book or a magazine and sit down with a coffee and a treat to read some of it before they go – if they want more variety, they go to one of the places up the street,’ he told her.
He had stationery before, and art as well, but ‘got out of them completely’ for the same reasons Louise knows she must abandon ship.
‘There’s a great little bakery out in Rathdowney. They deliver the food every morning. I can shoot out to get more during the day if I want. But I keep it tight. And it’s no harm at all if you run out of stuff an odd evening – people think they’re missing out,’ the man explained.
The third dink announces the woman’s departure. She turns right to head further down Gahon’s Lane. If she was going to Tesco, it’d have made sense to turn left and walk the couple of hundred yards, while she’s on the diary mission.
What about this Sixty Soon, Sixty Something lark tonight? The novelty of the name caught her attention. The HSE aren’t known for catchy titles. She signed up for it a couple of days after the McLoughlin man came in to put up the flyer on the window. Annie’s widower, what’s his name again? Louise is great at faces, bad beyond belief with names. She got on grand with Annie, in the superficial dealings she had with her. There was always the impression that Annie could be pass-remarkable, a bit too quick with the tongue at times. But there’s none of us perfect. She must check Annie’s death notice on RIP.ie to find out his name.
An interest, a distraction, to lift her out of herself, that’s what she needs. It mightn’t be the Sixty Soon, Sixty Something club. And it might be too. It’s not in her nature to back down. Better be there doing something – even the wrong thing – than succumbing to rumination.
Pull yourself together, woman! You were never like this.
Sorting recalcitrant envelopes keeps her busy and stops the wrong thoughts from gaining ground. When she was young, Uncle Tony told everyone she was busy an hour before getting up in the morning and an hour after going to sleep at night. Speedy Louisey, he called her. On summer Thursdays and Fridays, when she’d join him on the travelling shop, never-ending days of discovery, he’d ask people ‘what do you think of Speedy Louisey, home from Manchester, as good as three workers this one.’ Some would thrust coins into her hand and whisper playfully ‘that’s for you, don’t tell Tony, you know what he’s like, mad for money that fella.’ In the evenings, he’d ask her how much she’d got in tips – and match it with his own money. That was how she was paid. She had more money than she would ever need. The last few weeks of his life, as the fight finally went out of him, she couldn’t be sure he even recognised her, let alone favour her with a pet name. She tries now to conjure up his voice saying Speedy Louisey, but can’t. Lately she’s started to look at life like a conveyor belt, shuffling everyone along, some dropping off, more coming on, just the way it goes.
How might bringing down the shutters even look? Stop ordering stock entirely and stay there, unnecessarily tidying and fussing, until the very last piece is gone? And how long might that take? There’s stuff here she’d struggle to give away. Plus, she’s sure some people are too embarrassed to come in anymore. There was an Indian restaurant in town a few years back. Every time you went in, he took the good out of the food by telling you how bad business was. He badmouthed, by name, those who hadn’t ‘been in for a while’ and, with his defeated face, puppy-dog sad eyes and the low tones of a local radio death notices announcer, he punished those who bothered to give him the twist. In the early, optimistic days of his enterprise, he told her that his name, Ishrat, meant happiness. She hopes people don’t fear she’ll be as morose as him if they come in for something. The decline of a business that has endured through several generations contributes to people’s reluctance, she believes. There are enough funerals where you have to show your face without going out of your way to attend another one. But she can’t be entirely sure there isn’t the touch of the Ishrats about her sometimes.
And the taken-for-granted fixtures and fittings? Will the shelving start to slink away bit by bit like conscripts at a slack party? Will families of plastic display stands get separated? From time to time, will she be able to go see them?
There’s another shelf she can re-arrange. She’s finding something to do where, in reality, there’s nothing doing. She recognises some class of a philosophical statement in those words; the ingredients for a country and western number with four plain minutes of simple truth to live by? When There’s Nothing Doing Man, Find Yourself Something To Do. That’d make a great title. Nanci Griffith would kill for a song like that.
It’s a quarter past five when she turns on her phone for the first time since coming back after the lunch. A Google Calendar reminder pops up about the Sixty Soon, Sixty Something club. Starting, 6pm, the community centre. She’ll go back to paper-based diaries if her digital detox works. Seven days across two A5 pages will be fine for her. The time was the first thing that caught her eye about this new club. In Rathfin, people go home first, or wind down their farmwork, or put kids to bed, or all three, and come out for things later. Half-seven or eight are the trending times since the year dot. ‘Come straight from work,’ the flyer said. That alone suggested that someone had put a bit of thought into it, not just followed the time-honoured way. Plus, anything that elevates a Wednesday is entitled to a fair hearing.
She has her yoga mat with her, as instructed. She’s wearing the loose-fitting trousers too. Now that it’s imminent, it’s easy to give it a miss. Stick or twist? Evening time is when she most catastrophises things. If she decides to go straight home, she’ll frustrate herself with trash TV. She should get back into her habit of her ‘town lights’ evening walk. She can hit the ten thousand steps even in the dead of winter. She always means to. She never does anymore. If she goes home, she’ll get half way down a Ben & Jerry’s – Salted Caramel Brownie. One ‘yes’ now might just break the cycle. She’ll go to the club. Decisiveness is a good trait to develop. Resolved. Is that stick or twist? She never knows the difference. She’ll grab a coffee in The Tavern to kill the forty-five minutes.