The Beachside Sweetshop

by Karen Clarke

  ‘You were the natural heir,’ he said, putting on a theatrical voice. ‘The successor to the family empire.’

  It sounded quite good when he put it like that. ‘I suppose so.’ I paused. ‘No one else in the family wanted to take it on, but I couldn’t bear for it to be sold.’ Every time I said the word ‘sold’ there was a pinching sensation in my chest. ‘It wouldn’t have felt right.’

  ‘Your boyfriend didn’t fancy running it with you?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ I said quickly. ‘My ex was a sound engineer, though he did love the sweet shop. He was good at coming up with ideas, like guess how many jelly beans in a jar, and …’ I broke off. I didn’t want to discuss Alex with Josh. Apart from anything, mentioning his name reminded me he’d be on a plane right now with Bobbi-Jo, and within hours would be introducing her to his parents. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I said, rather desperately.

  ‘Nah.’ He pushed a lock of hair back. ‘Well, I did for a while, last summer.’ He rested his head against the wall. ‘We went to loads of music festivals, but at one, these guys started pissing in cardboard cups and flinging them into the crowd.’

  ‘Ew, that’s gross,’ I said. Mum had invited me to Glastonbury once, to see a tribal musician she was dating. He was playing in an area called The Common and the performance involved ritual paint-throwing and tomato fights. It had been fun to spend time together, in spite of the biblical rain that weekend, and the musician boyfriend sloping off with a groupie.

  ‘I know,’ Josh said, making a sucking-lemon face. ‘She went ballistic, said all men were animalistic bastards, and she never wanted to see me again.’

  ‘Charming.’

  He took a sip of his coffee. ‘It’s OK,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I mean, I was really into her at the time, but I got over it.’ When he looked at me again, there was a tinge of shyness in his eyes. ‘She was hot, like you,’ he said, unexpectedly. ‘All dark hair and eyes.’ He made a shape with his hand, presumably demonstrating a shapely figure, though he could have been swatting away a spider. ‘Long legs, nice boobs, and all that.’

  A wave of heat attacked my face, and I was glad he couldn’t see me clearly. ‘That’s nice,’ I said, ridiculously flattered.

  ‘And a great personality,’ he added, as an afterthought.

  A smile tugged at my mouth. ‘Not that great, considering she dumped you in case you threw wee at her, one day.’

  ‘I know, right?’ He looked mildly indignant. ‘What a bitch.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  There was a moment of charged silence. Even the rain had eased. There was just the occasional plop of water dripping off the roof.

  ‘I could show you a card trick,’ Josh announced, at the same time as I said, ‘I suppose we should get back to work.’

  ‘Card trick first.’ As Josh shifted a buttock to pull free his pack of cards, his mug toppled from its perch, spilling coffee across the pallet and seeping into my jeans.

  ‘Oh shit, sorry,’ he said, lunging forward. He grabbed the mug and set it upright, then tried to stem the flow of liquid dripping through the slats with his hands.

  ‘It’s fine, I’ve been soaking wet all morning one way or another,’ I said, realising too late it sounded smutty.

  Josh obviously thought so too.

  His eyes locked with mine, our faces so close our breath mingled hotly. His coffee-scented hands were suddenly on my face and my fingers had tugged up his T-shirt and were roaming across his stomach of their own accord. His lips grew closer, eyes deepening with desire …

  ‘What in the name of Barbara Windsor …?’

  We sprang apart as if we’d been tasered, light flooding the stockroom with the force of a helicopter searchlight.

  I turned to see Doris in the doorway, hands on her hips, eyes twice their normal size, as if she’d found us in the act of copulation which – to be fair – a couple of seconds later she might have.

  ‘There are customers outside,’ she went on, before I could mount a defence. ‘This shop has never been closed on a weekday in all the years I’ve lived here, and what do I find?’ She glanced at Josh, who’d grabbed a box of sweets and was holding it in front of his crotch, then back at me. I realised a couple of shirt buttons had come undone, revealing the white lacy bra I hardly ever wore, and must have put on by mistake. ‘I find the pair of you, at it like rabbits, ripping each other’s clothes off like, like … beasts in the wild …’ She paused, breathing rapidly. As I buttoned my shirt I caught a manic glint in her eyes, and a hectic flush on her cheeks, and remembered overhearing her boasting to Celia once that she and her husband Roger had enjoyed a ‘robust’ sex life and that she ‘missed that side of things’.

  ‘How did you get in?’ I said, heading over to close the stockroom door that led outside.

  ‘It was unlocked.’ Her eyes hovered around Josh’s midriff. ‘Not very security conscious at all.’

  Not daring to make eye contact with Josh, I linked my arm through Doris’s and shepherded her into the shop. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ I murmured, positioning her in front of the counter. ‘We’ve had some bad publicity, I’m afraid. Josh was, um, comforting me.’

  ‘I could see that,’ she said, puffed up with something I didn’t want to think about. ‘But did he have to do it with his shirt off?’

  ‘It wasn’t off,’ I started, then changed tack. ‘I don’t suppose you saw someone spray-painting a skull and crossbones on the window earlier, did you?’

  To my relief, she snapped back into being the Doris Day I knew. ‘That’s vandalism,’ she tutted, producing a spiral notebook and biro from her handbag and scribbling something down. ‘Do you have CCTV?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  She sucked in her breath and adopted her Miss Marple expression. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out,’ she said, tapping the side of her nose with her pen. ‘I saw the paper this morning,’ she added, putting the notebook away. ‘Don’t let them get you down.’

  ‘I’m trying not to,’ I said, smacking away a vivid image of Josh’s lips approaching mine in slow motion. ‘But it’s difficult.’

  ‘What would your grandfather do?’

  ‘This wouldn’t have happened in his day,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s because of winning that award.’

  ‘Well use it as an opportunity to exercise that brain of yours, and come back and be better than ever.’

  I remembered the sweets I’d made the night before, which had turned out better than expected. ‘I’m trying,’ I said, feeling a flicker of pride.

  Doris’s face collapsed into a smile. ‘You always were brighter than you let on, Marnie Appleton. Your granddad used to rave about how brainy you were, not like that lazy mother of yours.’

  ‘She wasn’t lazy,’ I protested. ‘She just wanted different things.’

  Josh’s thighs are so strong, his stomach so hard, his …

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Doris’s alarmed voice brought me out of my trance.

  ‘Nothing!’ I looked past her to see that the window was finally paint free, and fingers of sunlight were poking through the clouds.

  ‘Customers,’ I added, as Josh headed to the door with the keys, throwing me a loaded glance. ‘It’s time to open the shop.’

  Nineteen

  ‘Wow, Mar, you look great!’ said Phoebe, rising from her seat at the bar to give me a bear-hug. ‘I’m loving the denim jacket and the hair,’ she added, with a grin, though my cousin’s tawny curtain made mine look as if it had been styled by a tipsy chimp.

  I’d texted her on impulse after work to see if she was free that evening, remembering she was going to be in Bournemouth visiting Uncle Cliff. She suggested we meet at The Anchor, a favourite haunt years ago, that had transformed from traditional spit ‘n’ sawdust to trendy pub and bistro.

  ‘You don’t look so bad yourself,’ I said, though charcoal shadows cradled her hazel eyes, as if she’d not slept for a year.

  ‘I’m
knackered,’ she confirmed, in her usual forthright way. ‘Burning the candle all the way through and forgetting to light it again.’

  At the tender age of eighteen, Phoebe had been the first Appleton to move to London, and landed a job as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant, much to Uncle Cliff’s horror. He’d clawed at his hair, imagining all kinds of horrors befalling his beloved daughter; most of them involving drug cartels and the Mafia.

  But when a fiery relationship with her manager ended, and he fled back to his native country, Phoebe ended up running the place. She brought in a new chef, a young and as yet unknown talent, and within a couple of years El Mirador was one of the most sought after restaurants in London, attracting celebrities from around the globe.

  Phoebe invited Beth and me to stay once, and we spotted a tiny Kate Moss with some friends, drinking sparkling water and smoking a cigarette, and when Alex and I went there he swore he saw a Kardashian going into the ladies.

  Since then, Phoebe had opened another, equally successful, restaurant in the city. I was in awe of her success, but it had come at a price. She hadn’t had a relationship in years, and her last visit to Shipley was to attend our grandfather’s funeral.

  ‘So what’s been happening in your life?’ I said when we’d collected our drinks and moved to the only available seating area – a leather-covered alcove next to a party of women celebrating a birthday, judging by the ‘Happy 40th’ balloons, and the empty cocktail glasses littering their table.

  After bringing me up to date, making me laugh with her stories – one involving a cat-fight at El Mirador after a double booking between rival reality shows – we were halfway down our second bottle of red wine when she said, ‘I heard you were having some problems at the shop since winning that competition.’

  ‘How did you know?’ I said, shrugging off my jacket and getting comfy – though someone had been at the seat with Mr Sheen and I kept sliding forward.

  ‘Celia keeps Dad and my brothers informed, and they let me know.’ She showed me her iPhone. ‘We have a WhatsApp group called Family Matters.’

  ‘Sensible,’ I said. ‘You probably know more than I do about what I’m up to.’

  ‘I like to stay in the loop.’ She flashed the wicked grin I remembered from when we were children. Two years older and bossy with it, she’d loved having a younger cousin to impress but was fiercely protective too, and used to become quite motherly whenever my mum vanished to pastures new, or turned up with a new boyfriend. ‘It sounds like you’ve got your work cut out,’ she said, swilling her wine around her glass.

  ‘You could say that.’ I gulped the rest of my drink. I needed it. After Doris had left earlier that day, with a complimentary bag of pineapple cubes, there’d been a steady flow of customers into the shop. Several had wanted more details about the makeover, while others wanted to know why I’d become the target of a hate campaign.

  Dealing with them had left no time to dwell on what had almost happened in the stockroom, and to my relief Josh hadn’t alluded to it – other than letting his fingers linger near mine when we both dived for the till at one point.

  ‘I’d better go and do the banking,’ I’d said around four, escaping to the office and then to the building society, wondering whether the butterflies rampaging around my stomach were due to lust, anxiety, or hunger.

  As I went to lock up, he’d looked at me with a troubled expression, as though about to apologise, and I’d briskly said, ‘Let’s go then, Josh. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  He gave me a rueful smile, grabbed his skateboard and pushed off down the road, hitching up his jeans as they slipped around his hips.

  ‘I might be getting away from it all soon,’ I said to Phoebe, slightly slurring my words.

  She paused in the act of opening a packet of peanuts. ‘Away?’ she said, screwing her face up. ‘What do you mean, away?’

  ‘I mean away away.’ I jabbed my finger in the direction of the door, wine sloshing about in my almost empty stomach. I’d only managed half my dinner, too scared to turn on the television to watch the local news. ‘Across the sea to Skye.’

  ‘You’re going to Skye?’ Phoebe looked perplexed. ‘But why?’

  ‘No! It’s a song,’ I said with a giggle. ‘You know.’ I began to warble the words, but couldn’t remember them all and segued into, ‘ … country ROADS, taaaake me home … ’

  ‘Have some nuts,’ ordered Phoebe, grabbing my hand and tipping some into my palm.

  I shovelled them in and chewed obediently. ‘I need to get away,’ I repeated, spraying crumbs on the glossy black table between us. ‘It’s what I always wanted you know, to leave Shipley.’

  ‘Well, you did get away.’ Phoebe sat back and crossed her legs, her black-booted foot swinging. She’d stopped smiling, and suddenly looked like Celia when she was about to tell Chester off – which admittedly wasn’t very often. ‘You went down the Amazon with the gorgeous Alex, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘That ended up being more of a holiday,’ I said, helping myself to more peanuts, and washing them down with a slug of wine. ‘We were going to stay away longer, but Gramps got sick.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you were glad to be back, as I recall.’

  ‘I was very glad I made it home to say goodbye.’ I swallowed hard at the memory of his slight figure in the hospice, worn thin by the cancer that swept through him with frightening speed, only weeks after his diagnosis. ‘But I never intended to stay.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ scoffed Phoebe, tearing open a bag of crisps with her teeth. ‘You could have left again, but you didn’t.’

  ‘There was too much to do,’ I said. ‘Celia was grieving, Mum had just met Mario and was distracted, and Uncle Cliff had to get back to prising rotten teeth out.’

  She finished a mouthful of crisps. ‘So?’

  ‘So, someone had to take care of the business.’ Annoyance swept through me. ‘Why is it so hard to understand?’

  ‘You could have …’

  ‘ … sold the shop or got in a manager,’ I parroted. ‘So everyone keeps saying.’

  ‘That’s because it’s true.’

  I thought of Celia and Gramps, who’d done so much for me – parents and grandparents rolled into one, never begrudging a single second.

  ‘I wanted the sweet shop to stay in the family, for Gramps,’ I said, studying my empty glass to quell a surge of tears. ‘And Alex and I needed to save up before we could go away again.’

  ‘So why not take the opportunity when he was offered the job in New York?’

  ‘What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?’ I snapped, rearing out of my seat. The room tilted like a galleon.

  ‘I was just saying.’ Phoebe looked unfazed. ‘No need to go feral.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I thudded down again. ‘It’s been a really odd week.’

  ‘I heard he’s coming back today,’ she said. ‘For his parents’ anniversary party.’

  ‘WhatsApp?’

  She nodded. ‘Ben’s in the band they’ve booked to play,’ she said, referring to her younger brother. ‘I guessed Alex might be there.’ She gave me a sly little look. ‘Are you going?’

  ‘He’s met someone else,’ I mumbled, looking around for a waiter. They seemed preoccupied with the birthday party, which was descending into chaos. One of the women was weeping into a napkin, while her friend rubbed circles on her back. ‘You’re not too old for a baby, Sal,’ she was saying, over the hubbub of noise. ‘You could try another round of IVF.’

  ‘Oh Marnie, I’m sorry.’ Phoebe slid round to sit beside me, her musky perfume provoking a wave of nausea. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘But I think I need to get away to move on.’

  ‘Do you think if you’d gone with him …?’

  ‘I couldn’t go because Celia broke her leg,’ I said, chopping the air with my hand.

  Phoebe looked sceptical. ‘You could have joined him when she was better,’ she said. ‘From what I h
eard, you practically told him to go and he was heartbroken.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ I shouted. ‘Is nothing sacred around here?’ Seeing shocked stares from the birthday table, I dropped my voice. ‘This is why I want to leave,’ I hissed. ‘I hate everyone knowing my business.’

  Unperturbed, Phoebe patted my knee. ‘Going away’s fine, but there’s nothing wrong with coming home,’ she said sagely. ‘I should know.’

  ‘But you’re happy in London.’

  She sagged against the leather upholstery, as though her bones had melted. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit sick of being a high-flyer.’ She beckoned the waiter with a click of her fingers, and he trotted over as though glad to escape the mania now sweeping through the birthday party. Two more women were crying, one threatening the other with legal action if she didn’t return a petrol mower she’d borrowed six months ago. ‘More wine, please,’ Phoebe ordered. ‘And do you have any Scampi Fries?’

  ‘So you’re thinking of giving up the restaurant?’ I said, when he’d trotted off.

  She wound a strand of hair around her fingers. ‘I quite fancy coming back and opening an arts and crafts shop, or a flower stall.’

  ‘There’s already a flower stall,’ I said. ‘Ruby’s Blooms in the square?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said, not really listening. ‘I could help Dad on reception at the surgery, or just do nothing for a bit.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve so many good memories here.’

  I couldn’t believe this was Phoebe talking. Phoebe, who’d met George Clooney and his wife at the restaurant, had holidayed in Dubai, and employed a personal shopper to buy her clothes.

  ‘All your good memories are in Shipley?’

  She pouted a little drunkenly. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t have any.’

  At once my brain was swollen with them, and I seemed to be laughing in them all.

  ‘Do you remember that rope swing in the park?’ she said. ‘Every time we jumped on it, it snapped and we’d end up with mild concussion?’ She exploded into laughter. ‘Oh my god, you looked so funny lying there while Ben tried CPR!’