Jo lets Ruth and Malcolm out of the front door of the shop. She watches them wander down the alleyway arm in arm, Malcolm’s head bent to listen to Ruth, and again she is flooded with a feeling of melancholy.
She closes the door and stands still in the silence, the lights from the little Christmas tree (the only illumination) casting a ghostly glow over the shelves of stationery and the old oak cabinet. She moves over to the window and breathes in the smell of polish, which is now mixing with the scent of pine needles. She rubs a hand over the smooth curved edge of the cabinet, then picks up a Christmas card from her mum that is lying on the counter. She pins it up.
It fills the final gap on her noticeboard.
Does that mark the end of filling her time here, or has she created something of worth during these months? She thinks maybe she has, but she knows this is not where her heart lies. So, what about the future? She could go back home and easily get a job in a company working on databases. But so what? Her fingertips trace the outline of some of her precious collection: the words, the drawings, the cards. She then places her hands flat on the wall of the shop, as if she will be able to feel something of the person who works on the other side of that wall.
But she can get no sense of Eric the Viking, just the feel of cold plaster beneath her palms.
The ping of her phone from her dress pocket makes her jump. Malcolm or Ruth? Or – she brightens – maybe it will be a text from Lucy?
She pulls out her phone and it takes her a few seconds to assimilate the words.
She just stares at the screen, her mind blank.
It is nearly Xmas (and at Xmas it’s the time you tell the truth). And the truth is I miss you Babe and I want you back. Come home where you belong. James x
Her brain seems to go from completely empty to full in less than a second, like a thunder of thoughts are all arriving at once:
Isn’t that a quote from the film,Love Actually?
James hates that film.
Comehome? She has no idea where home is.
He wants her back.
He wants her back.
Isn’t this the text she dreamt of for all those weeks?
Babe?
He never called her Babe.
Has he sent it to the wrong person?
But she knows he hasn’t. This is meant for her, Jo Sorsby.
Then come the slower thoughts. She drops onto the shop stool, unsure if her legs are going to hold her. It is as if they are unable to carry the weight of all that she is thinking.
Wouldn’t this be a way out – a way back?
A way to a family?
This catches her for as much as thirty seconds.
But James?
James?
When she thinks back to how she was with him, she is not sure she recognizes that woman. Or wants to acknowledge her.
Words come into her head, words writtenby George Eliot and spoken by the kind and gentle Malcolm Buswell:It is never too late to be what you might have been.
She isn’t sure what she might have been, or what she wants to be. But one thing she is absolutely sure of: she does not want to be the woman that she was when she was with James.
AndBabe?
