by Ali McNamara
‘So who runs the shop now then?’
‘The local women’s group.’ He looks about him, then lowers his voice. ‘Fierce bunch, they are. Not really suited to the gentle ways of a delicate flower, if you know what I mean. They quite scare me.’
I nod sympathetically.
‘However,’ he continues, ‘I don’t like to say a bad word about anyone. The ladies run the shop voluntarily out of the goodness of their hearts – which is never a bad thing in my book.’
‘Yes, of course.’ I smile politely at him.
‘But they close on a Monday, see. So if you’re looking for flowers, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck.’
‘Oh, never mind then,’ I say, hoping he’ll leave me alone. ‘Maybe another time.’
‘Staying in St Felix long, are you?’ he asks, obviously wanting to continue our conversation. He looks up at the sky. ‘Not the best day to see the town at its finest.’
‘I’m not sure. Hopefully not too long.’
He looks surprised at this.
‘I mean, maybe a few days.’ I look up at the sky like he had. ‘Depends on the weather…’
‘Ah, I see. Good plan. Good plan.’ He smiles. ‘Sorry about the shop, but – and I don’t mean any offence to the ladies when I say this, you understand – their ways with flowers are a bit old fashioned. If you’re in need of something more modern you could always pop up the hill to Jake. He’ll see you right.’
‘Jake being…?’ I enquire, wondering if I’ll regret asking.
‘He owns the local nursery up on Primrose Hill. They deliver flowers all round the area. Just between us –’ he leans in towards me and lowers his voice once more – ‘I always go there when I need flowers for the special lady in my life.’
‘And would that be… your mum?’ I can’t resist teasing him. This constable is completely unlike the officers of the Metropolitan Police I’ve encountered in London. Although, thinking about it, most of those encounters hadn’t exactly been amicable, I was usually being arrested. Nothing serious – my misdemeanours ranged from disturbing the peace, to drunk and disorderly, to my favourite: trying to climb on top of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. I’d been a bit of a rebel in my younger days, that’s all. I wasn’t exactly a criminal.
‘Yes. Yes, that’s right,’ he mumbles, his cheeks reddening. ‘Flowers for my mum. Well, I must be off – things to do, you know. This town doesn’t run itself.’
I feel bad for teasing him, he seems a nice enough fella.
He gives me a quick salute. ‘Nice meeting you, miss.’
‘Yes, and you, PC…’
‘Woods,’ he says proudly. ‘But everyone around here calls me Woody. I try and stop them, but it’s kinda stuck now. I dread to think what my superiors would say if they knew – it hardly conjures up an air of authority.’
I grin. ‘I think it suits you. Well, thanks for the tip about the flowers, Wood—, I mean PC Woods. I’m sure it will come in handy.’
He nods. ‘Just doing my job, miss.’ Then he turns smartly on his shiny black shoes and sets off briskly up the cobbled street, arms swinging by his sides.
I turn and look at the shop again.
‘Right, let’s see what you’ve left me, Grandma Rose,’ I say, reaching into my pocket for the key my mother had pressed into my hand this morning, just before I dropped her and my father at Heathrow ready to fly back to the States. ‘Or should I say, let’s see what you’ve left me to sell…’
As I warily open the shop door for the first time in fifteen years I feel my throat begin to tighten as yet again I’m cast back to the day of the funeral.
‘Why on earth has Grandma Rose left me her flower shop?’ I’d protested in the quiet of the hotel lounge. ‘I hate flowers, and she knew that. Did she really hate me that much?’
‘Poppy!’ my mother had admonished. ‘Don’t say that about your grandmother, she loved you very much, as you well know. That shop is the original link in The Daisy Chain empire, she wouldn’t have left it to you unless she thought…’ There was a pause, and I knew what she was thinking: her mother must have been losing her mind to leave her precious shop to me.
You see I’ve heard it all before, too many times – how flowers have been in my family for ever… passed down through every generation. How at least one person in every branch of the Carmichael family owns, runs, or works for a florist. It was like a broken record that never came off the turntable. But it didn’t stop there. The Daisy Chain was now international: my mother had opened a flower shop in New York, a distant cousin had a florist business in Amsterdam, and another would be opening a shop in Paris later this year. Every Carmichael loved flowers – every one except me. I may have been burdened with my family’s tradition of calling all children flower-inspired names, but that’s where the floral affinity stopped. There were no flowers in my life, and I didn’t intend for that to change any time soon.
‘Go on…’ I’d prompted. I wanted to hear my mother say it. I knew I was the black sheep of the Carmichael family; I knew I was the one they talked about in hushed tones at family parties. Maybe my grandmother had seen past that, maybe she thought by leaving me her shop it might help me. How could she be so wrong?
My mother took a deep breath. ‘She wouldn’t have left you her shop unless she thought you could do some good with it.’
‘Perhaps.’ I’d shrugged.
‘Poppy,’ my mother said, rubbing her hands comfortingly over my upper arms, ‘I know this is difficult for you, really I do. But your grandmother has given you an opportunity here. An opportunity to do something good with your life. Please, at least give it a chance.’
My father had stepped forward then. ‘Couldn’t you at least go and look at the shop, Poppy? For your mother, if not for yourself? You know what your grandmother’s shop means to her – and the whole Carmichael family.’
It’s begun spitting with rain, so I stop dithering on the doorstep of the shop, and dart inside, swiftly closing the door behind me. The last thing I want is for any of the other shop owners in the street to see I’m in here and come banging on the window for a chat. I’m not intending to stay long.
I resist the urge to turn on the light, so I have to try and make out the interior of the shop as best I can from what little daylight there is coming through the window.
It’s bigger than I remember. Perhaps that’s because I only ever saw it filled to the brim with flowers. When my grandmother was in here you couldn’t move without bumping into a tin pot filled with brightly coloured blooms waiting to be arranged into a bouquet and sent out into the world to brighten someone’s day.
The shop is still filled with the same long tin pots, but today they stand eerily empty, as if waiting for someone to come along and fill them with the latest buds.
I sigh. Even though I don’t like flowers or want anything to do with them, I loved my grandmother, and I can remember spending many a happy, sunshine-filled holiday here in St Felix with her. It was here that my brother and I graduated from building sandcastles on the beach, to learning to surf when we were that bit older and stronger. When the evening tide was high in St Felix, huge waves would crash down on to the Cornish sand, wiping out the day’s carefully built, but now abandoned sandcastles. My grandmother would cheer us on from her red-and-white striped deckchair, a steaming hot flask of drinking chocolate ready to warm our wet and aching bodies when we could battle the waves no longer…
I shake my head.
That’s all in the past now. I have to remain focused on what I’m here to do. So I begin to step carefully about in the dim light, trying to gauge the fixtures and fittings. I might have to sell those on separately if I put the shop up for sale and the buyer doesn’t want them. But to be honest, they don’t look like they’re worth much. Everything I can see is made of heavy dark oak. Huge dressers and cabinets all stand empty, pushed up against grimy cream walls. Who’s going to want to buy those? Shops these days opt for modern, light-coloured fixtures
– to make the ‘shopping experience’ as pleasurable as possible for the consumer.
I once spent a ghastly few months working on the tills in a large supermarket during the run-up to Christmas. I nearly went insane passing people’s huge festive shops over the barcode scanner hour after hour. It got so bad I began having nightmares about ‘3 for 2’ and ‘BOGOF’ offers, until it reached the point where I leapt on to the checkout conveyor belt in the middle of one of my shifts and used it like a treadmill, shouting to anyone that would listen that greed would kill us, and we should all – staff and customers alike – be ashamed of ourselves.
If that incident had only been a dream like so many others about the shop, it wouldn’t have been so bad… But I was dragged down from the checkout by two security guards who thought I was marvellous for giving them something to do other than look at security screens all day, then escorted to the manager’s office where I was fired on the spot and banned from every branch of this particular chain within a fifty-mile radius.
It was one more item on the ever-growing list entitled: Unsuccessful jobs Poppy has had.
Would this shop – my grandmother’s pride and joy – turn out to be yet another?
‘The rest of us would have jumped at the chance of taking on Grandma’s shop,’ Marigold had piped up at the will-reading. ‘It would be an honour. Goodness knows why she left it to you, Poppy.’
‘I know…’ Violet joined in whining. ‘You of all people. I mean, can you cope with that sort of thing these days?’ She’d tipped her head to one side and regarded me with fake pity. ‘I heard you were still taking medication.’
‘The only medication I’m taking is a pill to help me deal with annoying and ignorant cousins,’ I’d told her as she’d glowered at me. ‘I’ve been fine for some time, Violet, as you well know. Perhaps Mum’s right, perhaps Grandma Rose knew that and she wanted to give me a chance. Unlike some people.’
Violet had then stuck her tongue out at me like a petulant child.
‘I’m really not sure about this, Flora,’ said Aunt Petal, turning to my mother with a look of concern. ‘The Daisy Chain is such an important part of our heritage. Should we allow Poppy to be put in charge of it with her… history.’ She’d whispered the last word as if it was poison.
‘I am here, you know,’ I’d reminded her.
‘Poppy,’ my mother had put her hand up to quieten me, ‘let me deal with this.’ She’d turned back to Petal. ‘Poppy may have had her issues in the past, we all know that. Just as we all know,’ she’d added pointedly, ‘what caused them.’
The others had all looked slightly ashamed, and I’d closed my eyes; I couldn’t bear people pitying me.
‘But she’s a changed person now, aren’t you, Poppy. How long were you at your last job?’ my mother asked, nodding with encouragement.
‘Six months,’ I’d mumbled.
‘See!’ Marigold shrieked. ‘She can’t stick at anything.’
‘It wasn’t my fault this time. I thought the guy was coming on to me in the hotel room, what was I supposed to do?’
In my last job I’d been quite content working as a maid in a 5-star hotel in Mayfair. It was hard work, but not taxing, and I hadn’t minded it anywhere near as much as I thought I would. In fact I’d stuck it longer than any job I’d had before. That was until one evening a guest had got a little too frisky for my liking when I knocked to turn his bed down one night – a pointless part of the job, if you ask me. I mean, who can’t pull their own sheets back? However, it was part of my job description, and every evening at around six o’clock I’d begin knocking on doors. On this particular occasion I was told I’d over-reacted by tipping a jug of water over the guest’s head after he’d suggested from his bed that I might like to help him ‘test his equipment to see if it was working’. How was I to know that five minutes earlier he’d called down to reception to ask if someone could come and sort out his room’s surround-sound system, which didn’t appear to be working?
So I’d been asked to leave yet another job…
Ignoring the interruption, my mother had fixed her smile and continued:
‘Well, however long it was, it’s an improvement, and that’s all we want to see.’ She’d nodded at the others, hoping to gain their approval. ‘I think we need to give Poppy a chance to prove herself to us, and to herself. I know you can do this, Poppy,’ she’d said, turning to me. ‘And Grandma Rose knew it too.’
I peer through the gloom towards the back of the shop to see if the old wooden counter that I remember my grandmother serving behind still remains. To my surprise it does, so I make my way carefully across the shop towards it. As I do, I knock into one of the empty tin buckets standing on the floor and it crashes to the ground. I quickly stand it upright again and continue on my way.
I approach my grandmother’s desk slowly; my brother and I had spent many fun-filled hours hiding under here when customers came into the shop; for a laugh, sometimes we would leap out from our hiding place to make them jump. Well, I did; Will was always too polite and well mannered to go through with it and scare someone.
I run my hand gently along the soft, warm, now heavily worn wooden surface, and recollections of the three of us fill the room as I do. It’s as if I’ve rubbed a magic lantern and released a genie made up of memories.
I wonder?
I crouch down behind the desk and pull out my phone, activating the torch on the back. The underside of the desk is suddenly filled with light, and I direct the beam into a corner.
It’s still there.
In the upper left-hand corner of the desk is an inscription. It had been carved roughly with a pair of my grandmother’s floral shears in a moment of madness; it might well have been a dare – from me.
W & P was ’ere July 1995
That’s what Will had written. I smile at his correct use of an apostrophe to represent the missing h. Even graffiti had to be grammatically correct with Will.
Rebels together forever…
That’s what I had scribbled underneath.
Except we weren’t really rebels; we were good children, if sometimes a bit mischievous. I was ten when we wrote that, Will was twelve.
I never thought I’d still be rebellious twenty years later.
‘I… I don’t know,’ I’d stuttered to my expectant family as they had awaited my decision. ‘I hate flowers – you all know that, and I don’t like responsibility either, it’s just not my thing. Maybe I should sell the shop?’
There had been gasps from all round the room.
My mother had sighed heavily. ‘Give me a minute,’ she’d told the others before they could all jump on me. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the hotel foyer.
‘Poppy, Poppy, Poppy,’ she’d said sadly, shaking her head, ‘what am I going to do with you?’
‘Well, I’m a bit too old to be spanked,’ I’d joked, my usual defence mechanism when faced with a serious situation. ‘You don’t see many thirty-year-olds being spanked with a hairbrush – well, not in the foyer of fancy hotels like this. Perhaps in the rooms…?’
My mother looked at me reprovingly. ‘This –’ she’d placed her finger gently on my mouth – ‘will get you into very big trouble one day. You’re feisty, Poppy, feisty with a sharp wit and a quick temper. It’s a dangerous combination.’
I’d smiled ruefully. ‘Already has, on a number of occasions.’
My mother had stepped back to look at me. ‘You probably get it from her, you know,’ she’d said reflectively, ‘your temperament. I remember your grandmother keeping my father in check with her sharp tongue. She never meant anything by it though, it was always in jest – same as with you.’ Then she’d reached out to stroke my hair. ‘When she was younger, your grandmother had a mane of raven hair just like yours. I remember spending ages combing it for her in front of her dressing-table mirror. In those days, she didn’t have the joy of straighteners to keep it tamed the way yours is – I guess that’s why I remember her weari
ng it up most of the time.’ She’d sighed as her pleasant memories made way for present concerns, which as usual involved me. ‘I don’t know what my mother was thinking of, leaving her precious shop to you, Poppy, really I don’t. She was under no illusions about what you’re like. But knowing Mum she had her reasons… and although I would never admit it when I was younger, she tended to be right about most things.’
She’d looked at me then; her dark eyes imploring me to change my mind.
‘OK, OK – I’ll go,’ I mumbled quietly, looking down at my Doc Marten-clad feet. There was an unusual gleam to them today because I’d polished them up especially for the funeral.
‘Really?’ Her face had lit up, like I’d just told her she’d won the lottery. ‘That’s wonderful news.’
‘But here’s the deal. I’ll go to St Felix and check the shop out, but if it’s not for me or I have any… problems while I’m there, then I’m selling it. OK? No guilt trip.’