The Charity Shop

Is it possible to eradicate totally the sad, decaying smell in charity shops? Death lives in dormant forms in such places. The smart old brogues that once donned living feet. The knitted baby clothes. The modern jazz CDs that belonged to a wise old head who drove his wife crazy with Ornette Colman.

They have an empty wardrobe smell that no amount of pot-pouri will ever fully extinguish.

They have ornaments that belong in a different century, usually from the 1970s when everyone went ornament mad. Harlequin figures and chunky ashtrays with brewery names. What became of all the pub ashtrays?

Fitting, then, that this death-soaked place should be the place the auld wifie works as a volunteer. That auld, auld lady there behind the till messing up the amounts so that the manager, a wee baldy guy with a moon-gut, has to assist her. Yes, her. She communes with the dead!!

Her that’s joshing about her lack of till-competency in her old-style lowland Scots.

“It’s aw new-fangled, son. Different fae ma day when ye jist punched in the prices in the till the size ae a jawboax”.

The wee man is English and widnae know a jawboax from an Apollo mission.

Neither is he fully cognisant of the fact that this wee woman could maybe get in touch with his dead maw for him. He’s heard she attends the Spooky Church just a hundred yards away in this wee seaside town, but he doesn’t know she’s the star attraction at the Sunday night spiritualist meeting when she gets up on the wee stage and has the congregation roaring with her wee asides as she tells them about their dead loved ones who are ‘on the spirit side’.

“They’re aw happy as linties up there,” the auld yin genuflects to ‘above’ and they all howl gleefully.

She has the gift of the gab and the gift of being a medium between the dead and those they left behind.

 

Outside the rain is lashing which means more and more people in the wee shop – ‘Thrift Shops’ they cry them in the States – and there are clouds of evaporation as folk shuck off the rain and let their dripping clothes warm. The auld woman, Rosie, tries not to look at them. She doesn’t like crowds, because a crowd to her isn’t just a crowd the way it is for other people. Each person in the crowd has an array of brilliant shining ‘lights’ around them that, quite frankly, is too much for her old eyes to bear.

The overall effect, though, is somewhat celestial! Like the wee charity shop has turned into a heavenly chamber. The dead are here in spirit and only she among the living is aware of the fact.

The folk all chatter and complain about the weather as if rain is a rare occurrence in Scotland like plague. The auld yin sneaks a peak and sees an angelic spirit-child beside an elderly well-dressed man who is peering at the ‘two for a pound’ books on the shelves. The young girl is reaching out to him imploringly. She wears clothes that would befit a child around the mid-1970s.

Who is this child? Is a question only the auld yin can ask.