2
I do
Jo sits behind the old oak counter looking up at the sliver of sky that she can just spy – if she leans out far enough on her tall stool. This is where she has perched for the past six weeks, minding the shop, watching the pedestrians who move in an intermittent stream through the alleyway, and scanning her sliver of sky for signs of change. Today, the sky is a troubled grey and the rust-coloured brickwork of the alleyway wall opposite gleams wet from squally, October rain.
Whatever the weather, Jo finds her small slice of sky strangely soothing. She knows that beyond the alleyway (its entrance between a hairdresser’s and a café), the same sky is a canopy to a larger world: Highgate High Street, with its broad avenue of shops and restaurants. A mixture of the enticing and the functional – at times managing to combine both in one establishment. Like the shop papered with old newspapers that sells cherrywood-handled knives with sculpted steel blades, or the haberdasher’s that displays on its door a wreath madefrom ribbons, the colour of autumn fruit.
Beyond the High Street, if she were to walk up the hill to the left, she would reach the expanse that is Hampstead Heath. There, the same sky she can glimpse from her stool sweeps across a landscape that is part parkland, part pleasure garden, part wilderness. It is good to know this larger world is out there, but also that her slice of sky is contained, bordered by a wall and a rooftop – giving definition to her place in a city that, to Jo, is an alien world.
She has tried to imagine this same sky stretched out, flapped like a huge bedsheet or tablecloth to cover her old home: the terraced cottage on the outskirts of a Northumberland village. But they had different skies up there. Broader, bigger, and more magnificent in their changing moods. She cannot imagine ever being able to capture a slice of those skies.
But then, she never needed to. It was enough to walk out onto the fells and gaze up at them.
Today, as usual, Jo is wearing Lucy’s dungarees. Vintage is not really Jo’s style (she’s not quite sure what is), but it seems fitting to wear borrowed clothes, sitting here, in her borrowed life. Jo reaches for the dungarees each morning, her jumpers underneath changing from green to orange to yellow to red, depending on the weather, her mood and the washing pile. Sometimes she feels like a traffic light, solid and static, glimpses of colour recycling, as life moves slowly past her. The high, fitted waist holds her tight just under a heart that aches for her friend’s company.
Since living in London she has tried to text Lucy more regularly, but it has been hard to find the right words. The words that do keep returning to her are from their final conversation before she left. She’d always known Lucy didn’t like James, but never until that conversation, just how much. Jo knew her best friend’s outburst was fuelled by Lucy seeing how hurt Jo was, but she wonders why Lucy thought she would want to hear it, or in what way she imagined it could ever make her feel better. Not while she held onto that slender thread of hope. She hadn’t told Lucy about this. But now she wonders if she needed to. Wasn’t that part of what made Lucy so furious?
And James? Jo spends most of her time tryingnotto text him. It has been hard. Texts written and then deleted. Only one thing stops her pressing send. The thought that James’s phone might be picked up and the texts read by his new girlfriend, Nickeeey. Jo can never think of her old work colleague, Nicky, without extending her name with a whine. They had only worked together briefly, but Jo won’t forget her endless complaints and whinging in a hurry
Jo glances up at the small, square calendar that is still the only thing pinned to the large noticeboard behind her. At the close of each day, she crosses a date off. Sometimes she does this well before the end of the day, as if urging time to hurry up.
Six weeks on, Uncle Wilbur is still in the home that he moved into (temporarily) for some respite care. It is near to her parents, and Jo’s mother visits her brother most days. What started as confusion (that her mother put down to a ‘very nasty tumble’) has revealed itself as something else. Thedoctors talk about the things they can do to manage the progression of dementia. Jo’s mum talks to her about how Wilbur is feeling much better and it won’t be long now before he can come back to the flat and the shop.
Her dad rarely talks to Jo on the phone, leaving all that to his much more talkative spouse.
But when he is the one who answers her call, he says quietly to Jo, ‘Just give her time.’
So this is what she is trying to do.
Jo turns her attention to the sole customer in the shop. It is late morning, and the woman has been lingering by the reels of parcel tape and rolls of brown paper. Jo is about to ask if she can help when another customer walks in.
The first customer is extremely tall, the second one short and rounded. As they browse, the smaller women obscures the taller woman, giving the illusion of double-decker heads. Jo’s mouth edges towards a smile.
The taller woman moves away and the tableau is broken. She approaches the counter.
A pause.
Jo looks expectant and, she hopes, keen to please.
The woman glances down and frowns.
‘Of course, no one writes with a fountain pen these days.’
She says this with composed certainty. She is not trying to be rude or to imply that Jo is a simpleton for selling them. In fact, she does not seem to have made the connection: she, customer, one side of the small wood and glass-topped counter; Jo, shop assistant, the other side, with a range of fountain pens on sale underneath this same glass-topped counter.
‘The thing is, we don’t write, do we?’ The woman looks up, but doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘It’s a lost art.’
Jo has been here before. She would like to say,I do. I write with a fountain pen.But she knows she would be wasting her breath.
The tall woman in front of her frowns uncertainly, as if Jo is somehow in the wrong place (which Jo thinks is not far from the truth), then she moves on to handwriting: ‘They don’t even teach them to write in schools.’
Jo wonders what this woman does for a living. She is thin and neat and precise. Pharmacist? Dentist, maybe?
‘I mean, what’s the point of all of this, really, when you think about emails and social media?’
Jo contemplates what this woman would think if she sat in her dentist’s chair and said,Well, of course, there must be something wrong with you, if you want to spend all your time rooting around in other people’s mouths.But it’s not the sort of thing she would ever say. Well, certainly not to a woman with a drill in her hand.
Jo glances over the ‘dentist’s’ shoulder to the small woman in an overlong raincoat who is now waiting patiently in line, and she gives her a tiny nod of acknowledgement. The woman lifts both eyebrows and rolls her eyes, and Jo is surprised into stifling a laugh.
