Page 23 of Second Chances at the Board Game Café

You idiot, Harry. You total idiot.

When the alarm went off a second time, he reached out once again and pressed snooze, hiding his face in the pillow.

When it went off a third time, he reluctantly swung his legs out of bed, went downstairs and ground his beans. Instead of leaving the cafetiere to brew whilst he showered and dressed, he stayed in the kitchen, gazing absently out of the window at the garden. Gardens were a rarity in Essendale; some houses had a postage-stamp-sized one, some had a backyard, and others had nothing at all. Harry was lucky; his garden was reasonably large. It consisted of a lawn that he mowed once a week in the summer, a border of nameless shrubs that he pruned back once a year and a large garden shed, the contents of which he couldn’t recall, aside from the lawnmower and the secateurs. He ought to clear it out one day. All this space, just for him. It felt like a waste.

Still in his dressing gown, Harry poured low-sugar muesli into a bowl, and added his usual handful of extra hazelnuts. He hesitated before adding the milk. Was he even hungry? The answer was no. In truth, he felt a little nauseated. His mind kept flashing back to the scene in the Oxfam shop, to Taylor standing in the doorway, and that feeling of abject horror that she’d heard what he’d said.

He put the milk back in the fridge, and tipped the muesli, extra hazelnuts and all, back into the packet.

Despite not eating breakfast, he was running slightly later than usual, thanks to his extra minutes in bed and the time spent staring at the garden. It was eight minutes past eight by the time he locked the front door, and hurried down the street in the direction of the station. As he dodged the white geese, who were guarding Costa today, he remembered that he’d forgotten his cheese and tomato sandwiches. He’d made them the previous evening as usual, after he’d got home from his Thursday evening at the board game café, but they were still sitting in their Tupperware in the fridge. He would have to buy some food, assuming the nausea had abated by lunchtime.

In his haste, he didn’t stop to look in the window of the Oxfam shop. If he had, he would have noticed that already displayed in the window were his jeans, only they didn’t look like his jeans anymore. Instead, he hurried on, wondering if he was going to miss a train for the first time in his life.

As luck would have it, the train was running two minutes late. When it arrived, it was also unusually full, and Harry couldn’t get his usual seat by the window so had to settle for an aisle seat instead. A youth wearing ripped jeans and a hoodie stood beside him, his earphones emitting a tinny sound, his eyes fixed on the screen of his phone. The lad was so close that Harry could smell his deodorant. Or maybe it was his shower gel. Either way, he felt uncomfortable being in such close proximity to another human being, and shuffled awkwardly in his seat. Looking out of the window didn’t seem so appealing since he had to look past the woman on his right who was clutching a large shopping bag to her bosom. Instead, he took out his phone and wondered if he should text Taylor and apologise.

As the train arrived at Hebbleswick station, he peered past the large shopping bag and saw Taylor sitting on a bench on the opposite platform, and beside her, the boy engrossed in a book.

He would text her, he decided. He spent the rest of the journey tapping out variations on a theme of I would like to apologise… but none of them felt adequate, so he didn’t press send.

The desk that Harry still thought of as ‘his desk’ was already occupied when he walked into the office. For the first couple of weeks of this hot desking malarkey, his colleagues, recognising that he was a creature of habit, had left this desk free for him. When the home-working initiative had proved popular, Grayson Accountants Limited had given up some of their office as a cost-cutting measure, so space was now at a premium. Since then, finding a desk in a morning had become something of a free-for-all, and Janice had nabbed it already and was swinging from side to side as she talked on her mobile. Judging from her relaxed body language, this was a personal rather than a business call.

Harry looked at the three empty desks remaining, weighing up the merits of each one. The first was in a corner, so there would be less disturbance, but little natural light; the second near the corridor, so a quicker route to the kitchen, but there’d be a lot of through traffic. He could sit by the back window; it was nice and bright, but it overlooked the bin area. He chose the corner, because it was a hiding-away-in-a-corner kind of a day.

By the time he left for home later, he was in a better mood, soothed by the routines of entering numbers into boxes and checking capital gains calculations. He managed to secure a window seat on the 17.18, and was feeling more like himself as he watched the Yorkshire countryside rolling by. He was looking forward to an episode of Michael Portillo that he’d recorded a couple of weeks ago, and perhaps a solo game of Friedemann Friese’s Free Ride.

Essendale was quiet as it usually was at this hour. The shops had shut, but the Friday night pubgoers hadn’t come out yet. The white geese were standing guard outside the Oxfam shop. Harry stepped into the road to avoid them, but something in the shop window caught his eye: his jeans.

At least, he thought they were his jeans, but they were almost unrecognisable. They had what his mother would have called bell bottoms in a bright tartan fabric. He wouldn’t wear them himself, but they were rather splendid.

He went up to the window to take a closer look. The geese hissed, and one of them had the audacity to peck at his leg. Harry shooed it away with his hand, still transfixed by the garment in the window. Taylor had done a superb job. He knew little about sewing, but had once accidentally caught an episode of The Great British Sewing Bee, and had learned enough to recognise that her stitching was flawless. They were perfectly symmetrical too; she was obviously a dab hand with a tape measure.

The shop had closed for the day but he resolved to come back the following morning and take a closer look at them.

*

Saturday morning. Armed with a flask of coffee and a Tupperware containing his sandwiches, Harry set off early for the station and his usual trip to the National Railway Museum in York, intending to go via the Oxfam shop so he could take a closer look at those jeans. He was disappointed to see they were no longer in the window; the volunteers didn’t usually change the displays that often.

He was even more disappointed to discover that they were no longer in the shop.

‘Sold first thing,’ said the volunteer on the till. ‘A young man came in as soon as we opened. Said he’d seen them in the window last night on his way to the pub.’

‘Several people asked about them,’ came a voice from the back room where the donations were sorted. A woman appeared in the doorway and Harry recognised her as the volunteer he’d originally handed the jeans to. ‘They caused quite a stir.’

‘One man asked if we had them in other sizes,’ said the woman behind the till. ‘I’m not sure he realised we were a charity shop.’

The two volunteers laughed.

Harry checked the non-fiction shelves, wondering if Taylor knew how popular the jeans had been, and then went on his way to York.

By the time he returned to Essendale, the shops were all closed or closing. He paused by the Oxfam shop, wishing he’d had the opportunity to see the jeans properly. He waved at Emily through the window as he passed the board game café, but she was serving customers and didn’t notice him.

Nearby was one of the few shops in Essendale that Harry hadn’t ventured into: the florist. In the window, upturned wooden crates bore little plant pots adorned with colourful ribbons and shiny steel buckets full of hand-tied bouquets. He’d never sent that text apologising to Taylor; perhaps flowers would be a better way of saying sorry. He gazed into the shop window, trying to decide which bouquet he’d choose. Lilies had such a beautiful scent but were perhaps a little funereal. Roses? Carnations?

Harry had never turned up with flowers on a woman’s doorstep. He imagined the scene. A large bunch of dusty-pink roses. Taylor’s face lighting up as she opened the door and saw them. Him delivering an eloquent apology then saying, ‘By the way, I’ve heard those jeans created a huge stir in Oxfam. The customers are clamouring for more.’

Might she then forgive his faux pas? It was worth a try.

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