Charlie and Pearl

by Robinson, Tammy

  I mentioned it causally over dinner that night with mum and Pearl. Pearl dropped her cutlery with a clatter and threw up her hands.

  “Well duh, hello!” she said.

  “What?”

  “Me! Hire me!”

  My initial reaction was confusion, she hadn’t mentioned wanting a job in the bay before now.

  “You want a job?”

  “I wouldn’t mind one. It’s a bit boring doing nothing every day. And the money would mean I could stay longer” she added, knowing it was all the incentive I could ever need.

  How did I feel about the idea? Happy of course, ecstatic even. It meant I would get to see her even more. Slightly cautious though, remembering what had happened the last time we spent too much time together. What if she got sick of me again in a week and threw a tantrum and stormed out of the shop? Oh who was I kidding, I didn’t care if she threw a tantrum every day on the hour.

  “You’re hired” I told her happily.

  “Just like that? You don’t need to run it past anyone else?”

  “Nope, totally my call” I said powerfully, feeling more important than I’d ever felt before.

  “Oh that’s fantastic!” she beamed and ran round the table to climb on my lap and squeeze her arms tightly around my neck, planting lasagne scented kisses all over my face.

  So from then she came into work with me. It felt terribly grown up to be going to work together. Getting up and taking turns in the shower, her making the coffee while I buttered the toast. Driving in together, arguing over which radio station to listen to, she favouring pop, myself something a little older and heavier, which she made fun of scornfully.

  “Stuck in the nineties much?” she’d scoff when I turned up the volume on a Gun’s and Roses song.

  It was like we’d hit the fast forward button to ten, twenty years in the future and were watching ourselves in one of those alternate parallel universes.

  Once there she looked around the shop and got a glint in her eye that I recognised from my own.

  “Can I...?”

  “Go for it”

  All morning I watched as she studied the layout of the shop, biting her lower lip as she concentrated on drawing pictures on a pad then furiously crossing them out and drawing new ones.

  All afternoon I did as I was told and dragged shelves and displays to where she pointed. At the end of it I was stuffed and perspiring unattractively but I had to admit the shop looked amazing. A different place. Newer and more spacious. Brighter, classy.

  “So?” she asked, triumphantly when she was satisfied with what we’d done.

  “It looks...”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, it looks a bit, I don’t know, like...” I was winding her up.

  “You hate it don’t you” and she drooped.

  “No, if you let me finish I was going to say that it looks...” her downtrodden look meant I couldn’t drag the joke out any longer, “it looks bloody awesome!”

  “Really?” she brightened, “You really like it?” and she started jumping up and down like a five year old on her first day at school.

  I laughed and watched her and wished I could make her happy like that all the time.

  “There’s just one thing missing,” she frowned, biting her lip again.

  “What?”

  “A couch. We need to set up an area...there” she pointed to a corner, “where people can pause in their day, have a little rest and a read and a relax”.

  “You think?”

  “Absolutely” she nodded firmly.

  PEARL

  Going to work with Charlie every day was more fun that I thought it would be. Sleeping with the boss has its benefits. He let me read whenever I wanted; take long lunches if I felt the need for a revitalising walk on the beach. Not that I would ever take him for granted. We worked hard, believe me. I rearranged the shop. Well, I planned it and Charlie did the actual hard physical part. I also went online and bought a second-hand couch off Trademe and we spent a weekend in Napier collecting it, staying at a small little B & B by the beach. A jaunty little blue and white striped affair, with shuttered windows and a barnacled old dinghy in the front yard.

  We’d borrowed a trailer from a friend of Charlie’s and tied the couch on with ropes. I was happy with our purchase, it may have been pre-loved but it was a tidy condition, black with a silver trim around the cushions. I wanted to set up a little area in the shop where people could relax. The memory of how I felt that day I stumbled in here inspired me.

  We ordered in a huge range of magazines so that we knew would have something to appeal to everyone. Hunting and fishing magazines, car magazines, House and Garden, Cooking, even Teenage heart throb magazines (which always seemed to have either Robert Pattinson or Justin Bieber on the cover).

  We had fun too though. Goofing off together, silly stuff that other people would probably think was stupid and juvenile but which we find hilarious.

  “Remind me to send that order in tomorrow ok, or we’ll miss out on the discount” he’ll say to me.

  “Ok” I’d say, then, 30 seconds later, mischievously, “Hey Charlie,”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember to send the order in tomorrow or you’ll miss out on the discount”

  “Oh ha ha” he said, “Remind me tomorrow I meant”

  “Ok”

  ...”Hey Charlie”

  “What?”

  “Remind me tomorrow to remind you tomorrow to send the order in ok?”

  Then he’d say, “Ok, but only if you remind me to remind you to remind me to send the order in tomorrow”

  And on and on we went until one of us lost track of which remind we were up to and we started laughing and then kissing instead.

  See told you, silly stuff. Silly stuff that you’re probably thinking....that’s it? That’s not funny!

  But it was funny to us, and it was silly stuff that meant the world to me in its normality.

  CHARLIE

  Working with Pearl is a distraction. A very nice distraction, but a distraction nevertheless.

  She’s lucky I’m her boss because she’s a crap worker. Takes long breaks, reads instead of working, goes next door to chat away to Julie and leaves me on my own, which ok, in a small town like ours is no big drama because I’m not exactly inundated with customers during the day, but when she does it on a Saturday night when almost everyone in town is queuing up to buy their lotto tickets then it’s a bit hectic.

  She’s good with the customers though.

  The lotto for example. If I had a dollar for every time I asked a customer which ticket they wanted and they answered with “The winning one thanks”, I’d have a division of my own, maybe not first, but definitely fourth or fifth. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard that same joke for years but I can barely summon a smile anymore, groaning inwardly instead, however she laughs like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard, every single time, and the customers love her for it.

  She’s had some good business ideas. Pete made a comfortable living but he didn’t have big aspirations. His needs were simple, and his tastes were more on the arty side. He liked to order books by Russian/Danish/South American authors with names we couldn’t pronounce, with hidden abject meanings.

  And novels about war of course.

  With Pearl and I at the reins we’ve increased profits on the shop by triple, according to the accountant. We held a massive sale and heavily discounted all the old stock just to get rid of most of it. We moved some but the rest I’m fairly positive we’ll be able to shift this summer when the hordes of tourists come to town. We ordered in new, current books. Books on the NZ and New York bestselling lists, reviewed in popular magazines rather than the obscure titles Pete favoured.

  Some days I looked around at how much things had changed, and watched Pearl work her magic on a customer, and I felt like I had everything I could ever possibly need in the world. Managing a small town bookshop may not be the stuff most twenty somethin
g guys dreams are made of, but for me, with Pearl by my side, it was enough.

  PEARL

  Woke up in a contrary, unreasonable mood, with an itchy, twitching, low down gut feeling that I was missing out on something. I’ve been working with Charlie for nearly three weeks and as much as I was enjoying it, I’m back to wishing I had time to do other things. This is very typical of me. When I had all the time in the world I didn’t make use of it, and now that I don’t have the time because of working, I want it back. I used to be like this back in my school days. Count down eagerly to the school holidays, thinking of all the cool things I would do, and then when the actual holidays came I would spend the whole time either in bed or front of the TV.

  I don’t want to quit work or anything drastic, I just want us to do other things, like we did before we were ‘dating’, or whatever it is we are doing right now. Charlie works six days a week, Sunday’s are his only day off. I work Tuesday’s through to till late Saturday night, to cover the lotto rush. It’s good, because I get Mondays off to myself, but it means we only get Sunday’s off together, and even though I understand that he needs to relax, I’m impatient to do things as a couple. Which, yes, I realise goes totally against everything I have spouted on about us not being a ‘couple’, but even I have to admit that that is what we are, although I will not admit this to him.

  On the fourth Sunday since I started work, after breakfast, when Charlie is happily reading the papers at the table and I am sitting there bored, I tell him we need to “do more with our lives”.

  “Like what?” he says, puzzled because for him this is out of the blue.

  “I don’t know” I say, and I am frustrated because I don’t know exactly what it is I want. I gathered up the breakfast dishes, took them to the kitchen. I just know I want to do something.

  “You want to go back to bed?” he winked suggestively at me.

  I rolled my eyes at him. He would have us spend the whole day in there if I let him.

  “Ok, do you want to go for a picnic?” he asked, coming to stand behind me, massaging my shoulders in a comforting way.

  I shrugged. “No, Picnics are nice, but I want to do something different”

  “Ok” he said, “I’m up for it, I’m just not sure what ‘it’ is. You tell me what and where and when and I’ll be there.”

  Which made me cross because why should I be the one to do all the initiating? I wanted him to read my mind. To know what I wanted. So I threw the dishcloth at him and told him “just think about it will you?” and I went for a walk off the beach, half expecting him to follow me, but he didn’t.

  I can’t explain to him why I don’t want to waste time.

  I just need him to know.

  CHARLIE

  “We’re wasting our lives” she announced one Sunday, after a nice sleep in and a leisurely breakfast of scrambled eggs.

  I could tell from her tone she was in one of her moods so I stopped reading the paper, pushing it to one side.

  “Ok” I said cautiously, “Um, is there something you’d rather be doing?”

  “Well obviously”

  “Like what?”

  “Why do I have to think of everything?” she frowned at me.

  “You don’t, I just thought you had something in mind”.

  “We used to do fun stuff before we became a...before we started working together”.

  She’d been about to say “a couple” I knew it. Ha. She’s in denial.

  “You want to go back to bed?” I winked at her and patted my lap.

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  “I just think we need to do something else with our time off”

  “Ok, sure” I smiled at her “like?”

  She got stroppy and flounced off to the kitchen with the dishes, banging them in the sink and angrily turning the taps on. I may be just a dense male, new to the mystery that is relationships, but I was almost 100% sure it wasn’t me she was mad at. I got up and went and stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders while she ran the dishwater, squeezed some dishwashing liquid into the sink and angrily swirled it round with the scrubbing brush.

  “Pearl” I said, “I’m up for it, I’m just not sure what ‘it’ is”.

  The look she gave me left me quite clear that I should know. The she went for a walk and left me to “have a think about things we could do”.

  Personally, I’d be happy if we spent all our time off in bed together. I love everything about her body. Especially the feel of it, soft and smooth and moist. I can tell you how many freckles she has on her back, and I could close my eyes and trace you the outline of the light brown birthmark on the back of her right thigh. She has a scar on her lower stomach. It’s pink and raised at the edges, so I didn’t think it was too old. She said it was from having her appendix out a few years back.

  I guess she had a point though. We did start out with a bang, movies, and picnics and visits to hot pools. Actually, the more I thought about it the more freaked out I got. What if she broke up with me because I had become too complacent? What if, in the city, she was used to being wined and dined and treated to expensive nights out dancing or whatever it is they do in the city and here I was arguing over who would have control over the remote each night? I worked myself up into a bit of a state, and started a list of all the things in the area that I thought she might feel like doing but then she came back and I could tell straight away her mood was better and she was light and laughing and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me deliriously and we went to bed. She didn’t mention the whole wasting our lives thing again so neither did I.

  PEARL

  Charlie’s convinced Pete is haunting the shop. While I will admit there have been some, unusual, incidents, I certainly don’t believe in ghosts.

  “We’ll how else do you explain it then?” asked Charlie, eyebrows raised mysteriously.

  And I couldn’t.

  But still.

  They weren’t big things like moved furniture, but sometimes we’d come in and the light and the heater would be on in the back office. There was no way we’d left them on, we always checked and double checked before we left because ever since my friend Anna’s house burnt to the ground when I was thirteen and her family lost everything I have been paranoid about fire. To the point of unplugging every appliance before leaving the house. Charlie says it’s a pain in the ass because when we come back home he has to plug the TV back in again and wait for the Freeview to reboot before he can watch anything. I tell him to get over it.

  And one morning there was a book about World War II submarines on the counter. Even though I couldn’t be 100% sure that I or a customer hadn’t left it there Charlie totally freaked out.

  “I’ve had enough” he declared. “It’s time to do something about this.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, I’ll ask Cushla, I bet she has an idea”.

  And so it was that three nights later we held a cleansing ceremony. Several elders of the local Maori tribe attended, and they sprinkled holy water around the shop corners and we all held hands while they said karakia (prayers) designed to help Pete’s sprit moved on. It was the first time I’d been to anything like it and I have to admit that listening to their melodic deep voices and observing their rituals, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

  Afterwards we drank some whiskey, and after the elders left Rangi, Charlie, and I went to the pub (Cushla went home to relieve her mother from babysitting duties) and there we met up with some friends of theirs that of course they’d known their whole life and after the introductions I seemed to be constantly supplied with drinks by my new best friends and we stayed there until 3am in the morning singing “American Pie” and “Ten guitars” amongst a whole host of other classics.

  When we stumbled home, arm in arm, to Rangi’s house Cushla opened the front door and said fondly as we made our way slowly and sometimes sideways up the path, “Rangi, when are you going to grow up?” to which he declare
d “Never!” and burped loudly. “Who wants to grow up!” he declared, “Not me, I is hoppy...hic...happy, to still know how to have fun,” then he started singing at the top of his voice “Singing in the rain” even though he couldn’t sing and it wasn’t raining.

  “Shush you idiot” said Cushla, “you’ll wake the whole bloody town!”

  “Don’t care boring old stuffy shirts” he slurred, then he tripped over his own feet and all three of us fell headfirst into a hedge.

  CHARLIE

  She has nightmares sometimes. Thrashing, violent nightmares where she wakes me with an accidental elbow to the head. The first time it happened I didn’t know what to do, I got confused with sleepwalking and I didn’t know whether to try and wake her up or not. Eventually she calmed down that night but sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes I do wake her. She emerges from her sleep blearily, tearful, and it takes me awhile to settle her, comfort her, and reassure her that she’s safe. I hold her while she cries ever so softly and I kiss her hair.

  She says she can’t remember what they’re about, only that something or someone is trying to get her.

  I keep on holding her while her breathing softly slows and she drifts back into sleep.

  PEARL

  July came, and with it an acceptance of something I’d been both avoiding and dreading. The clothes I had brought were with me were no longer enough now that I was working and the weather had turned so cold. Who’d have known it can get so cold at the beach? Not me that’s for sure.

  So I bit the bullet and called mum and asked her to please go to my flat and bring some of my winter wardrobe over. She was over the moon to hear from me and even more excited that I would let her visit, so arrived the next day. She would “stay a few days”, she said on the phone when I called; just to “make sure you’re looking after yourself properly”.