‘So wait, you literally woke up and smelled the coffee?’ said Tara.
Charley nodded sheepishly. ‘Yup!’
‘About sodding time!’ said Tara, rolling her eyes. ‘I told you. But you just wouldn’t listen to your Auntie Tara, would you?’
It was just after they’d opened up the shop on the Monday morning, Tara having again pitched up bright and early.
‘Please don’t say anything to anyone else, not yet,’ begged Charley, not wanting her news getting round Cargo before she even spoken to Ricky.
‘I won’t tell a soul,’ Tara promised. Then a few minutes later she added casually, ‘Have you told Angie?’
‘No, not yet. Nobody knows, except you. Not even Ricky!’
‘Oh, right,’ Tara said, and Charley thought she detected a slight hint of gloating in her friend’s tone. She’d always suspected Tara was a little jealous of her friendship with Angie, which she put down to Tara having been an only child, unused to having to share attention and affection, making her over-protective of her friendship with Charley. Bearing that in mind, Charley nonetheless made a mental note to call Angie later that evening, after work, to let her know.
Tara nipped out to get them both some breakfast, and Charley set about refilling the displays and thinking she was glad she’d confided in Tara first. Working with her best mate was… challenging, to say the least, and putting a strain on their friendship, but Ricky’s loss had reminded her why she and Tara had grown so close, how much they’d been through together, and why she would never want to lose her as a mate. She just had to figure out how to work with Tara, the same way she’d had to manage working with difficult colleagues in the past. And what if Tara was opinionated and pushy? That was Tara, just the way she was. They could work it out; they were both adults, for crying out loud, and the fact that her mate had so willingly bailed her out on Saturday, and at such short notice, made Charley optimistic they could easily put their working relationship onto a better footing.
If only. Almost as soon as Tara returned with their breakfast, she opened her mouth, and instantly put Charley’s back up.
‘About the promo evening,’ she started. ‘I’ve had a thought.’
Charley slapped on her professional face and merely replied, ‘Oh yes?’
‘Well, we don’t have to do it if you really don’t want to…’ Too right, I don’t, thought Charley. ‘But there’s still piles of dead stock that’s just not shifting, so we do need to have a sale.’
A sale? Do we actually ‘need to’ or do you just think we should? Pulling herself up for being negative and forcing herself not to overreact, she tried to objectively apply the litmus test of whether Tara was overstepping the mark, or manoeuvring her into doing something she had neither the time nor the inclination to do. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I’m glad you asked me that!’ grinned Tara. Delving into her bag, she brought out a bundle of garish, plastic bunting in neon orange, green and pink.
Inwardly, Charley shied like a horse startled by a fluorescent traffic cone but, astonishingly, she managed to keep her expression impassive.
‘I’ve brought some of Monnie’s party bunting and I’m going to loop it across the window, and I made these…’ Digging into her bag again she brought out some home-made, A4-sized SALE signs, printed on a startling range of Day-Glo coloured paper. ‘We can plaster these all over the glass and then fill the window with marked down items. So what d’you think?’ beamed Tara, clearly expecting Charley to be thrilled to bits.
Charley was momentarily speechless, although her thoughts were crystal clear: over my dead body. When she’d set up the shop, Angie had put an enormous amount of effort into helping Charley create a signature style. Every item of furniture, the shelves, the tables, and even the wicker chairs, were painted matt white, and all the decals and slogans decorating the walls and window were in either black or gold. Even the gift bags reflected the theme, plain white with a minimal scattering of small gold stars and the words A Gift for You written in a simple, gold font. Put simply, the style statement of the shop pronounced ‘classy, shabby chic’. The style statement of Tara’s planned sale window screeched ‘ghastly, crappy tat’.
‘Well?’ Tara persisted, brandishing the bunting enthusiastically and Charley felt she detected a hint of challenge in her tone. She couldn’t keep turning down Tara’s suggestions, she realised, even if the thought of reducing her tasteful shop window into a lurid bargain-bucket store made her cringe. Taking a deep breath and rapidly making the calculation of likely income versus damage to shop’s image and, more importantly, the cost to her friendship with Tara if she refused, she queried carefully, ‘How long were you thinking the sale would last?’
‘One week. This time next week, everything back at full price.’
‘And the window back to normal?’ double-checked Charley.
‘Yep!’
‘Okay,’ said Charley and, with a verve and enthusiasm she really, really didn’t feel, cried, ‘Let’s do this!’ She only hoped Angie didn’t drop into the shop – she’d have a coronary. Either that or she’d kill Tara, very probably strangling her with her own bunting.
When Tara bought into an idea, she was like a whirling tornado. So straight away she was up and down off the chairs getting boxes down from the top of the dresser and hoiking out the spare stock stashed behind the counter and under the display tables. Then she proceeded to ruthlessly, and tactlessly, rummage through them. Charley tried very hard not to take Tara’s comments personally. It wasn’t easy.
‘We’re never going to sell all of these,’ she announced, dumping a stack of tea towels onto the floor.
‘I think we might have ordered too many of those from the outset,’ explained Charley.
‘Just a few!’ quipped Tara before ripping open a box full of Prosecco-flavoured truffles. ‘The sell-by date on these is pretty short. Blimey! How many packs of these have we got?’
‘We had a bit of a run on them so I ordered a load more and then suddenly none of them shifted.’
‘Even so… Did you check the sell-by dates when they were delivered?’
It hadn’t even occurred to Charley to do that and she made a mental note to do so in future. Fortunately, Tara hadn’t bothered to wait for a reply, merely adding the truffles to the pile on the floor.
‘And why have we got all these Prosecco peel-off face packs? I mean, who wants to put Prosecco on their face? What a waste!’
Her joke brought a smile to Charley’s face, but nonetheless she felt the need to defend herself. ‘I had to get a load in to make up some party bags for the Avalon and then they suddenly wanted something else in the bags instead.’
‘You should have told them it was too sodding late to change their minds.’
Charley bit her tongue. Tara had hated working at the Avalon before she quit her job to help in the shop, and Charley decided to put her mate’s sharpness down to her feelings towards her previous employer.
‘And we can shift all this lot too,’ said Tara, brusquely consigning half a box of tealight holders to the growing sale pile.
‘Actually, they do sell rather well, it’s just that I’d forgotten to put any more out.’
‘Yeah? Well I’ve never really liked them so let’s get rid of them.’
Taking a deep breath, Charley decided to leave Tara to her savage cull.
In a little over an hour, the window – and therefore the signature look of the shop – had been completely transformed.
Standing outside, Charley gazed silently at the sale display in utter dismay, which deepened when Del from the florist’s called over to her.
‘Blimey Charley! That’s a bit in-your-face, isn’t it? Does it glow in the dark!’
‘Very probably,’ replied Charley. Still, it was only for a few days, she reminded herself.
Towards the end of the morning Pam called Charley to say she wasn’t going to be able to get in at all that afternoon, and very probably not for the next few days since her young guest was still ill. Charley assured her mother-in-law not to worry, and that she could cope. When she rang off, Tara immediately offered to stay a little later every day until Pam could get in. Charley had to swallow down her surprise.
‘As long as I leave by quarter to three, I should just make it to school pick-up on time.’
‘Don’t make yourself late for Monnie.’
Tara shrugged lightly. ‘Oh, she’ll be fine. Plenty of parents hang around for a natter after school, they’ll keep an eye on her. And anyway, there’s always a teacher on duty making sure none of the kids wander off, or get abducted by aliens!’
‘Well, okay, if you’re sure… Thanks.’
Charley knew she should be grateful, but it had belatedly begun to dawn on her that the more time Tara spent in the shop, the more it seemed to strain their relationship. Which was pretty bloody obvious, really. The supreme irony was that whilst she had been irritated beyond measure when Tara had treated the shop like a hobby, swanning in when she felt like it and leaving Charley to do the bulk of the work and decision-making, she was actually finding the newly motivated, full-on, hands-on Tara even more infuriating. It wasn’t only their clash of personalities; she was worn down by Tara’s seemingly constantly criticisms, telling her they ought to be doing something differently, or that they weren’t doing enough.
Charley’s self-confidence in her ability to run her own business had always been egg-shell thin, and it had taken all of her friends, plus Pam, to persuade her she was capable of running a shop in the first place, and her self-doubt was never far from the surface. The more Tara involved herself in the business, the more Charley felt her failings were being exposed. Loath as she was to admit it, she was gutted at how successful the sale was turning out to be. She tried telling herself not to be so bloody childish, but increasingly she was finding it hard to be objective towards any of Tara’s ideas and opinions and had to fight her knee-jerk reaction to oppose anything she proposed, simply because of the implicit personal criticism of the way she was running the shop.
By mid-week, Charley was counting the days until Pam would return – or she would have been, had she known when that might be. She took her phone out of her pocket, intending to text her mother-in-law for an update and noticed she’d missed a text from Ricky.
He’d be back at the weekend. Charley’s spirits soared and she immediately texted him a reply.
‘Three days,’ she told Carlo, giving the lurcher a loving scratch behind his ears. ‘Four at the most!’ The dog got to his feet, wagging his tail jauntily, looking for all the world as if he’d understood every word she’d said. Which was ridiculously fanciful, obviously. She put it down to him being able to detect her cheerful mood, which had made everything seem better – even Tara’s sale window.