Page 61 of The Little Board Game Café

‘We’ll talk about this later. What I need from you now is a date. When do you think you can be ready? What do you still need to do?’

‘Buy the games.’

‘You’ve not ordered them yet?’ Kate shook her head. ‘Honestly, Em. You can’t open a board game café without games.’

‘I’ve been too busy.’

‘Get them ordered. Do you think you could be ready by a week on Saturday?’

‘A week on Saturday? That seems soon…’

‘What else is left to do?’

‘Apart from the board games? Shelves to put them on. A bit more painting. New pictures for the walls. A sign with the new name.’

Kate was jotting everything down. ‘Let’s go for a week on Saturday. You should prioritise ordering the games, and then finish the painting. I’ll get on with the publicity. Invite a couple of prominent people. It’s gonna be great, Em. You’ll see.’

*

Once the sanding was finished, Emily and Mr B painted a base coat on the tables and chairs in a lovely shade of slate blue. They managed to get them all done in a day.

Painting the game boards on the table tops was a different matter. It was intricate work, requiring a level of detail and steady hand that she hadn’t envisaged when she’d first come up with the idea, sitting on that Grand Central train. The chess boards were easy, but Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo and Scrabble were far more difficult. Mr B had made templates to scale using pictures from the internet and they painstakingly began transferring the designs onto the first two tables.

‘It’s going to take hours,’ Emily said.

‘Perhaps we could paint some of the table tops and leave the others plain.’

‘But what if loads of people want to play the games? I don’t want people fighting over where they sit.’

Mr B looked sad. ‘Emily, I’ve wanted to tell you this since you first arrived. I’ve been coming here for years, and I’ve never seen more than three tables occupied at any one time.’

‘But…the café was popular, wasn’t it? I mean, I checked the books before I bought it.’

‘I wouldn’t like to accuse Mr Panagi of fiddling the books but…well, there were never many people here when I visited. Maybe at other times, but I doubt it.’

Had she been tricked into buying what basically amounted to a failing business? Perhaps so, but it wasn’t going to be a failing business anymore. She was even more determined to turn things around.

Chapter Twenty-Two

These days, when Emily walked through Essendale, she could sometimes put names to faces. Not many, admittedly. Mr B could often be seen perusing the books in Oxfam’s window or popping into the Red Lion for a quick half. She’d meet Mrs Scott and Mrs Sinclair, trundling up and down the high street with their trolleys. Of course, she didn’t know which name belonged to which woman, but it was a start.

On Friday, she walked through the town, whistling to herself despite her exhaustion, breaking off her little tune to say good morning to a handful of people. Even one of the angry white geese taking a peck at her knees as she walked back couldn’t dent her mood. The Little Board Game Café was almost ready for its launch.

Or should that be her launch? ‘Its’ sounded a bit impersonal. Ships were always referred to as ‘she’. Why not cafés? Emily was very attached to her little café and was beginning to feel that it almost had a personality. Nico wouldn’t recognise the place.

The Lancashire photos were now stacked up in her room at Kate’s. She was planning to take them home for Dad; as a Yorkshireman, he’d be sure to appreciate them. In their place in the café hung huge canvases that Emily had had printed using photos from Google images: close-ups of meeples, dice, Scrabble tiles too and chess pieces; and an artistic shot of a Monopoly board.

She couldn’t afford to hire a sign-writer as the canvases had cost more than expected and she’d splashed out on some salt and pepper pots in the shape of meeples – a bit of an unnecessary indulgence but they were cute – so, for the time being, she had ordered a stick-on one for the front window saying The Little Board Game Café with a pair of dice at each end.

Thanks to Kate’s printer, Emily had new menus and had put posters up all over Essendale and Hebbleswick, advertising the launch event.

And thanks to Kate herself, there would be an article in the local paper the following week.

There was one thing that Emily still needed to do. The most important thing of all: buy the board games.

And that was where she hit a problem. She had hoped to buy twenty or thirty games to stock the shelves she’d bought for the café, but she hadn’t realised how much they’d cost. At these prices, she could only stretch to one Ticket to Ride, one Settlers of Catan and one Carcassonne, and she bought them all second-hand. She had enough money left to buy a spare stable for Agricola, but not Agricola itself.

‘Don’t know what to do,’ she said to Mr B on Friday morning. ‘I can hardly run a board game café without board games.’