Break Out The Bubbly Read online

  Chapter 1

  SHEILA’S

  29th December

  I didn’t fall in love with Matthew straightaway.

  When he started work with us at Sheila’s, I did fancy him, but I had so much on my mind right then that it seemed reckless and irresponsible to add to the load.

  I’d not long broken up with David, my store manager’s ex-husband, the shop itself was doing abysmally in terms of sales figures and morale, not to mention the recurrent thefts, only ever of champagne, that no one could either understand or solve, and I was at one of those points in my life when I was questioning what the heck I was doing with myself and wondering just where on earth I was heading...

  All in all, not a good place to be to suddenly meet the man of my dreams, but then that’s exactly the time when the best of the opposite sex seems to walk into our lives.

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning, four days after Christmas.

  I was stationed at the front till when the call came over the loudspeaker system:

  ‘Emily Tranter, Emily Tranter, report immediately to the Manager’s office’

  I sighed and looked up at the long queue snaking away down the first aisle – how did Tabatha expect me to just get up and walk away from all those customers?

  ‘Is that you, dear?’ asked the lady I was serving.

  She peeled open a new bag and packed away some more of her groceries, humming to herself all the while.

  I looked at her and smiled.

  She had a kind, elderly face, and I wondered as I watched her merriness what kind of charmed existence she’d led that had left her with such warmth towards others and the world.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I sighed again, passing some more of her items through the scanner, ‘and I’ll be severely reprimanded if I don’t get along there straightaway. The Assistant Manager does not like to be kept waiting.’

  As though in confirmation, the call came again, and this time aggressively:

  ‘Emily Tranter, to the Manager’s office, now!’

  ‘You’d better go,’ said the lady warmly. She turned to address the rest of the queue. ‘We’ll be alright here for a moment, won’t we?’

  Several people nodded.

  Sheila’s was a convenience store in a village, not some supermarket serving a huge town, and time was not an issue to most folk who shopped here, or across the road.

  One person, however, was having none of it.

  ‘No!’ she barked from about three or four people down the line, ‘we most certainly will not. The girl is here to serve. She must do her job, or find some other assistant to do it for her.’

  There was stunned silence.

  Everyone stared at her, but the ill-tempered woman simply glared back at us with disdain.

  She had a hard face, a hooked nose overhanging cracked lips that had been plastered with bright red paint, far too much mascara failing to hide cheeks riddled with wrinkles, and I could smell her overpowering perfume even as I stood a good ten feet away from her.

  She was terrifying.

  I had only ever met one person before who displayed the same contempt for others.

  ‘Ginger,’ I cried as she floated towards the till, ‘thank you. Tabatha’s just summoned...’

  But I should have known better.

  For my colleague, well my nemesis really, floated regally past us all and stepped haughtily on towards the last aisle in the shop.

  My heart sank.

  Again the tannoy sounded, this time with even more vitriol:

  ‘Tranter! Office. Now!’

  ‘Go on, Emily,’ whispered the kindly lady, ‘you must obey your summons.’

  I glanced at the rude woman some customers back.

  In one of those rare instances of good fortune which befell me, she had broken off to fetch another item.

  I signed off quickly and lifted the hatch, watching Ginger sweep on out of sight.

  I hated her more than ever now, and the fact that I could do nothing about her attitude only added to the sense of frustration I felt as I headed up aisle one and on towards the Manager’s office.

  Behind me, I could hear raised voices, the customers turning on each other with the obstreperous woman’s bawling the loudest of all.

  Why couldn’t people just get on, I pondered for the nth time in my life as I reached the office, and why did the loudest, most unpleasant bully always rule the roost?

  I thought of the journalism course I had recently enrolled myself on, and its current unit on the breakdown of, well, everything seemingly.

  The world was a playground for the greedy, the manipulative, the ruthless egotist (or so we had been taught) yet in the interiority of my own soul I knew that somehow this wasn’t the case, or certainly shouldn’t be if those who possessed the virtues to check these vices stood up to be counted, whatever the cost to their integrity.

  I reached the office and pushed open the door.

  It stuck (when would that ever be fixed?) so I pushed it further and entered the office.

  I gasped.

  It looked as though Tabatha had picked the room up from the carpet and turned the entire thing on its head.

  Books littered the place, paperwork perched precariously on every available surface, and food, great globules of food marked every surface.

  How on earth, in one day without Carol being here, had she turned the office into such a ruinous dump?

  The Manager would go crazy tomorrow.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, turning suspiciously away from a monitor I’d never seen before, ‘about time. What were you doing out there?’

  ‘I was on the front till, Tabatha,’ I said testily. ‘What is that?’

  ‘I thought Ginger was on duty there this morning,’ she sniffed, consulting a messy chart with scrawling and scribbling all over it, ‘oh, right, well you’re here now.’

  ‘It’s like Armageddon out there,’ I said, thinking at the same time that it didn’t look so different in here, ‘and Ginger didn’t offer to help at all.’

  ‘Does that surprise you?’ she asked, breaking into a smile. ‘Never mind, I’ll fetch her on my way out. Honestly, Emily, sometimes I really do wonder at your ability to judge other people.’

  Mine!

  Tabatha was the worst judge of character the world had ever produced; sure, she got there in the end, but for years she had thought Ginger and Carol were the good apples whilst Sarah and I were rotten to the core.

  Sarah manned the Lottery kiosk.

  She’d been the loveliest girl you could ever hope to meet until she sank into what had now become a hideous, everlasting state of dejection, but Tabatha (without noticing the change of course) had been on her case since day one and, if anything, had seemed to intensify that persecution over the last few weeks.

  And yet, there was something about our Deputy Manager that had always drawn me to her; sure, she was messy and she was brusque, and she could antagonise you quicker than a condescending customer, but she did have a good heart, and it shone through that smile of hers, as sure an indicator of her fundamentally benevolent personality as any verbal tetchiness she displayed might prove otherwise.

  I liked Tabatha, I knew she liked me, and I was just about to ask about the monitor again when she threw me a curve ball out of left field.

  ‘There’s a new employee starting today,’ she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A new employee. You know, member of staff, worker?’

  ‘I know what you mean, Tabatha, I just didn’t know we were recruiting at the moment, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, well I’m sorry we didn’t consult you on the matter, Emily. Carol should have run it past you first, how stupid of us!’

&n
bsp; ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. Where is she?’ But Tabatha was away again, looking at the monitor. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Nothing that concerns you.’

  ‘Are you spying on us?’

  ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘You haven’t told me where to go. I suppose you want me to meet this, this worker?’

  ‘Staff room,’ she said sharply, and as I turned on my heel she added, ‘and be welcoming. This one’s important.’

  I did not have the first clue what she was talking about.

  No employee of Sheila’s had ever been important.

  Carol had named the shop after her first and deepest love, an Australian down-and-out with a moral compass about as steady as Tabatha’s hand after her daily dose of whiskey in the stock room.

  Carol loved men so much after that one dumped her that she vowed only ever to have women in her life for the rest of her days, and she’d almost managed it.

  When she founded the store twenty years ago, and once she’d taken Tabatha on board several months after that, she made it her policy to employ women only, a trick she was able to get away with for a long time before the employment laws were tightened and she became duty-bound to consider men also for positions in the shop.

  But we all know what they say about we women scorned, and if hell doesn’t stand a chance with its fury then legislation was hardly going to stop her from sticking to her original declamation.

  No boy or man had ever been employed here, and if it hadn’t been for her personal life taking off again when she married David then her original vow would have held for over two decades.

  At work, Carol was a strident woman of her word, at home, the boundaries became blurred and discrepancies were allowed to foster, then fester, before threatening to defenestrate her completely.

  As I walked towards the staff room, I started to consider my Manager’s attitudes to her staff and wondered about what sort of woman would now be deemed suitable to fit into the shop’s community.

  Well, that’s what Carol called it, but it had never really felt like that, at least not in the time I’d been there first as a Saturday girl and now full-time.

  Community was about cohesion, unity, support and love, and I can tell you for a fact that not one of those qualities was in the make-up of this store’s particular nature.

  As far as I could see, money ruled the roost, or to be more specific, profit, and I had never liked either of those things since first hand experience in the shape of, amongst other people, Carol herself had shown me how pursuit of them could twist and completely corrupt an otherwise decent person.

  Of course, I knew this was a business, of course I knew that to succeed as a shop we needed to make money, of course I knew that in order to do that good service, hard work and smart sales technique were our absolute watchwords, but sometimes, just once maybe, I wished Carol would treat us as people rather than as disposable commodities like the ones on the shelves of her store.

  Only that was never going to happen, and that’s because my Manager had sold out.

  She’d also named the store in honour of a man who’d treated her like dirt, who referred to women in that disparaging manner whilst he was treading all over one, so you can imagine that working her psychology out was a bit like trying to cut and blow dry Ginger’s hair - with so many vipers nesting in there trying to bite you, eventually you gave the whole thing up as a bad job and moved onto easier fare.

  Like men.

  Except in my experience, that was a minefield too.

  I mean I got them, I think, I understood that they were competitive, that they needed to bond with each other, that they got flu worse than anyone else in the world, that they needed a cave, or a den, or whatever they called it, to retreat to, on their own, to regain peace of mind, to re-gather themselves, to prepare for next off, or sally, or conquest, what have you, but what I didn’t understand, nor ever had I suppose, was what they really made of us.

  As I say, I’d just broken things off with Carol’s ex-husband, so the thought of meeting someone new let alone considering a long term relationship was about as low on my list of priorities as welcoming a new employee to the fold, pretending to them that Sheila’s was the best place in the world to start your career, and then spending the rest of the day explaining to them how the tills worked including the nightmare that was the lottery counter at the back kiosk.

  What sort of woman would voluntarily take a position here?

  Probably one like the rest of us had been when first we joined, desperate for money and genuinely believing that the experience of meeting people in a happy village store would afford her satisfaction and, more deluded I thought with great bitterness, fulfilment.

  No, Emily, that was wrong, it was selfish to foist my disappointment and disillusion onto the shoulders of someone who was starting here with hope in her heart, anticipation at the task ahead, a woman keen and eager to serve, a woman who no doubt owned a rich history of her own that I could plunder for ideas for my next assignment, a woman who I would take under my wing and nurture to give me a task to halt the putrefying non-eventfulness of everyday life at Sheila’s, and a woman who I was now determined would become a friend, bosom companion and ally in my perennial conflict with the powers-that-be in the shop.

  As it turns out, I was right on all counts but one - when I opened the door to the staff room, it wasn’t a woman standing there before me, it was a guy.

  And he was hot!

  Chapter 2

  CAROL’S RAGE (I)

  Did I say hot?

  Try sizzling!

  This boy hadn’t been boiled in a bag or charcoaled to burnt on some barbecued furnace, he’d been put in the oven nicely done for a couple of hours ready to be served now, to me, on a small-sized platter with a healthy dose of salad, baby potatoes and a medley of lightly cooked vegetables.

  Or to put it another way...

  His face was just beautiful, wavy dark hair sweeping effortlessly across a bright and strong forehead, his eyebrows in good shape, completely unlike David’s unkempt mess, his eyes lustrous and dazzling blue with an intensity that almost made me look away as he studied me in his turn, his eyelashes long and, goodness me, yes they fluttered for an instant as I looked, his nose firm and aquiline defining the rest of his features in that same manner, thin lips, perfect teeth, one chin, pronounced and solid unlike David’s three wobbly efforts, cheek bones high and unwrinkled, throat in fine proportion and, thank goodness, unmarred by a David-like Adam’s apple, and all of this gave way to a wonderfully athletic figure that even through the sterility of the Sheila’s male uniform (how on earth had Tabatha managed to procure one of those?) managed to portray his inherent fitness and zest for a kind of life I thought had been buried for me when I broke up with Carol’s ex-husband several months ago.

  Feelings of attraction stirred within me and emotions I had quite forgotten welled up from the bottom of my heart to erupt clean out of my mouth.

  It was only with the greatest of self-control that I managed to contain them, though their movement must have betrayed somewhat in my disposition.

  ‘Are you alright?’ he asked gently.

  For pity’s sake, his voice was as gorgeous as the rest of him, delightful in tone, honeyed in rhythm, its pitch and cadence even in three words completely disarming me, for he showed genuine concern, quite unlike...

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said tersely.

  He looked hurt. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘alright. I was only asking.’

  Sensitivity too.

  ‘No,’ I hurried, ‘I mean, yes. I’m fine, thank you. You’re the new employee, then?’

  He smiled. ‘Looks that way.’

  I smiled back at him. ‘You’d better follow me, then.’

  I turned on my heel.

  Spun on a sixpence.

  And that was when I slipped.

  How?

  How on earth, in flat shoes, did I manage to lose my balance, reach out to grab som
ething, and end up being saved from nose-diving into the floor by his strong grasp?

  Whose?

  I didn’t even know his name.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said as he lifted me up.

  I shook myself down and tossed my hair.

  ‘Shall we start again?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘Of course,’ he beamed, offering me his hand to shake, ‘I’m Matthew.’

  ‘Emily,’ I said, taking hold of it firmly, ‘Emily Tranter. Good to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  We continued the pleasantry, standing there looking into each other’s eyes, Venus busy plying her trade by jamming both our minds full of dreams, fantasies, past regrets, present lust, wanderings, yearnings, togetherness, separation, longings, needs, wishes, desires, and then he suddenly let my hand go and asked me if I was going to show him round his new place of employment.

  Men!

  There were five aisles in the shop, milk and dairy in the first, fruit and vegetables second, next up bread and condiments, meats and frozen down the fourth, and drinks and household at the back.

  That’s where we ended up, with the terminally in decline lottery kiosk in the very corner of the fifth and last aisle manned as ever by my now equally terminally in decline colleague Sarah, head down, looking straight at the floor beneath her feet.

  ‘This is Matthew,’ I said, knowing I’d get no reaction, ‘he’s our new colleague.’

  Sarah didn’t move.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t talk to anyone anymore, not even the customers.’

  ‘Well it was nice to meet you anyway,’ he said, ‘see you later.’

  We turned away.

  Sarah was still looking at the floor.

  ‘She used to be really happy,’ I explained as we made our way back to the staff room, ‘quiet but with a positive attitude. About six months ago though, things started to change. She’d miss shifts, turn up late when she did manage to make it in, and then she’d be generally unpleasant to anyone whenever they tried to talk to her. I thought she was just going through a rough patch, but it hasn’t got any better. If anything, she’s deteriorated over the last few weeks.’