Charlie and Pearl (14 page)

And on and on we went until one of us lost track of which remind we were up to and we started laughing and then kissing instead.

See told you, silly stuff. Silly stuff that you’re probably thinking....that’s it? That’s not funny!

But it was funny to us, and it was
silly stuff that
meant the world to me
in its normality
.

CHARLIE

Working with Pearl is a distraction.
A
very nice distraction, but a distraction nevertheless.

She’s lucky I’m her boss because she’s a crap worker. Takes long breaks, reads instead of working, goes next door to chat away to Julie and leaves me on my own, which ok, in a small town like ours is
no big drama
because I’m not exactly inundated with customers during the day, but when she does it on a Saturday night when almost everyone in town is queuing up to buy their lotto tickets then it’s a bit hectic.

She’s good with the customers though.

The lotto for example. If I had a dollar for every time I asked a customer which ticket they wanted and they answered with “The winning one thanks”, I’d have a division of my own, maybe not first, but
definitely
fourth or fifth. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard that same joke for years but I can barely summon a smile anymore,
groaning inwardly instead,
however she laughs
like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard
, every single time, and the customers love her for it.

She’s had some good business ideas. Pete made a comfortable living but he didn’t have big aspirations. His needs were simple, and his tastes were more on the arty side. He liked to order books by Russian/Danish/South American authors with names we couldn’t pronounce, with hidden abject meanings.

And novels about war of course. 

With Pearl and I at the reins we’ve increased profits on the shop by triple, according to the accountant. We held a massive sale and heavily discounted all the
old stock just to get rid of most of it
.
We moved some but the rest I’m fairly positive we’ll be able to shift this summer when the hordes of tourists come to town. W
e ordered in new, current books. Books on the NZ and New York bestselling lists, reviewed in popular magazines rather than the obscure titles Pete favoured.

Some days I looked around at how much things had changed, and watched Pearl work her magic on a customer, and I felt like I had everything I could ever possibly need in the world. Managing a small town bookshop may not be the stuff most twenty something guys dreams are made of, but for me, with Pearl by my side, it was enough.

PEARL

Woke up in a contrary
, unreasonable mood, with an
itchy, twitching, low down gut feeling that I
was
missing out
on something
.
I’ve been working with Charlie for
nearly three
weeks and as much as
I was
enjoying it, I’m back to wishing I had time to do other things. This is
very
typical of me. When I had
all the time in the world
I didn’t make use of it,
and
now that I don’t have the time
because of working,
I want it back. I used to be like this back in my school days. Count down eagerly to the school holidays, thinking of all the cool things I would do, and then when the actual holidays came I would spend the whole time either in bed or front of the TV.

I don’t want to quit work or anything drastic, I just want us to do other things, like we did before we were ‘dating’, or whatever it is we are doing right now. Charlie works six days a week, Sunday’s are his only day off. I work Tuesday’s through to till late Saturday night, to cover the lotto rush. It’s good, because I get Mondays off to myself, but it means we only get Sunday’s off together, and even though I understand that he needs to relax, I’m impatient to do things as a couple. Which
,
yes, I realise goes totally against everything I have spouted on about us not being a ‘couple’, but even I have to admit that that is what we are, although I will
not admit this to him.

On the fourth
Sunday
since I started work
, after breakfast, when Charlie is happily reading the papers at the table and I am sitting there bored, I tell him we need to “do more with our lives”.

“Like what?” he says, puzzled because for him this is out of the blue.

“I don’t know”
I say, and
I am frustrated because I
don’t
know exactly what it is I want. I gather
ed
up the breakfast dishes, took them to the kitchen
.
I just know I want to do something.

“You want to go back to bed?” he winked suggestively at me.

I rolled my eyes at him. He would have us spend the whole day in there if I let him.

“Ok, do you want to go for a picnic?” he asked, coming to stand behind me, massaging my shoulders in a comforting way.

I shrugged.
“
No,
Picnics are nice, but I want to do something different”

“Ok” he said, “I’m up for it, I’m just not sure what ‘it’ is. You tell me what and where and when and I’ll be there.”

Which made me cross because why should I be the one to do all the initiating? I wanted him to read my mind
.
To know what I wanted. So I threw the dishcloth at him and told him “just think about it will you?” and I went for a walk off the beach, half expecting him to follow me, but he didn’t.

I can’t explain to him why I don’t want to waste time.

I just need him to know.

CHARLIE

“We’re wasting our lives” she announced one Sunday, after a nice sleep in and a leisurely breakfast of scrambled eggs.

I could tell from her tone she was in one of her moods so I stopped reading the paper, push
ing
it to one side.

“Ok” I said cautiously, “Um, is there something you’d rather be doing?”

“Well obviously”

“Like what?”

“Why do I have to think of everything?” she frowned at me.

“You don’t, I just thought you had something in mind”.

“We used to do fun stuff before we became a...before we started working together”.

She’d been about to say “a couple” I knew it. Ha. She’s in denial.

“You want to go back to bed?” I winked at her and patted my lap.

She rolled her eyes at me.

“I just think we need to do something else with our time off”

“Ok, sure” I smiled at her “like?”

She got stroppy and flounced off to the kitchen with the dishes, banging them in the sink and angrily turning the taps on. I may be just a dense male, new to the mystery that is relationships, but I was almost 100% sure it wasn’t me she was mad at. I got up and went and stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders while she ran the dishwater, squeezed some dishwashing liquid into the sink
and angrily swirled it round with the scrubbing brush
.

“
Pearl
” I said, “I’m up for it, I’m just not sure what ‘it’ is”.

The look she gave me left me quite clear that I should know. The she went for a walk and left me to “have a think about things we could do”
.

Personally, I’d be happy if we spent all our time off in bed together.
I love everything about her body. Especially the feel of it, soft and smooth and moist. I can tell you how many freckles she has on her back, and I could close my eyes and trace you the outline of the light brown birthmark on the back of her right thigh. She has a scar on her
lower
stomach. It’s pink and raised at the edges, s
o I didn’t think it was too old. S
he said it was from having her appendix out a few years back.

I guess she had a point though. We did start out with a bang, movies, and picnics and visits to hot pools. Actually, the more I thought about
it
the more freaked out I got. What if she broke up with me because I had become too complacent? What if, in the city, she was used to being wined
and dined and treated to expensive nights out dancing or whatever it is they do in the city and here I was arguing over who would have control over the remote each night? I worked myself up into a bit of a state, and started a list of all the things in the area that I thought she might
feel
like doing but then she came back and I could tell straight away her mood was better and she was light and laughing and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me deliriously and we went to bed. She didn’t mention the whole wasting our lives thing again so neither did I.

PEARL

Charlie’s convinced Pete is haunting the shop.
While
I will admit there have been some,
unusual
,
incidents
, I
certainly
don’t believe in ghosts.

“We’ll how
else
do you explain it then?” asked Charlie, eyebrows raised
mysteriously
.

And
I couldn’t.

But still.

They weren’t big things like moved furniture, but sometimes we’d come in and the light and the heater would be on in the back office. There was no way we’d left them on, we always checked and double checked before we left because ever since my friend Anna’s house burnt to the ground when I was thirteen and her family lost everything I have been paranoid about fire. To the point of unplugging every appliance before leaving the house. Charlie says it’s a pain in the ass because when we come back home he has to plug the TV back in again and wait for
the Freeview
to reboot before he can watch anything. I tell him to get over it.

And o
ne morning there was a book about World War II submarines on the counter. Even though I couldn’t be 100% sure that I or a customer hadn’t left it there Charlie totally freaked out. 

“I’ve had enough” he declared. “It’s time to do something about this.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, I’ll ask Cushla, I bet she has an idea”.

And so it was that three nights later we held a cleansing ceremony. Several elders of the local Maori tribe attended, and they sprinkled
holy
water around the shop
corners
and
we all held hands while they
said karakia (prayers) designed to help Pete’s sprit moved on. It was the first time I’d been to anything like it and I have to admit
that listening to their melodic deep voices and observing their rituals,
the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Afterwards we drank
some whiskey
, and after the elders left Rangi, Charlie, and I went to the pub (Cushla went home to relieve her mother from babysitting duties) and there we met up with some friends of theirs that of course they’d known their whole life and after the introductions I seemed to be constantly supplied with drinks by my new
best
friends and we stayed there until 3am in the morning singing “American Pie” and “Ten guitars” amongst a whole host of other classics.