“No, I’m not going to eat it. It was in the returns bin. Where do you think it came from?” I said.
“Erm…the chip shop? Maybe?”
I nodded. “Well, yeah, obviously, I know that, but who would have posted it through the door?” I was sad that Liv wasn’t as excited as me.
Olivia shrugged, shook her brolly and headed to the kitchen leaving me alone to ponder the mystery with the cast of The Breakfast Club.
“Any thoughts on this one?” I said, addressing the giant cardboard promotional cut-out. I showed the battered sausage to Molly Ringwald.
“Stop talking to the Breakfast Club,” shouted Liv, over the boiling kettle.
“I’m not,” I mumbled, turning away from the cardboard cut-out, which had seen better days. I took the mystery fast food package to the bin on the other side of the shop. I paused at the Cocktail poster to see what Tom Cruise thought but before I could ask him, Liv was returning from the kitchen with our coffees. “And don’t even think about talking to Tom Cruise. We’ve talked about this.”
“Fine,” I said. Liv didn’t approve of me talking to the promotional posters. But now that we didn’t have any customers at all I found myself doing it more and more. This was the first week since I’d been back that we’d had absolutely no customers whatsoever. The only thing that had kept the shop going for as long as it had was no one seemed to pay any attention to our little Worcestershire town.
Cable television arrived here ten years after everywhere else so the shop had trundled along quite nicely. The only time anyone had ever heard of Broad Hampton was when a newspaper revealed we had officially the worst broadband in the country. The town wasn’t close enough to the city to be a suburb and not far enough away to be considered rural and had been pretty much overlooked by everyone for years. We kept the “worst broadband” label for a good few years, which meant no one was able to stream films so the shop kept its customers. But eventually, broadband arrived and the customers had been dwindling ever since. We hadn’t even had anyone buy anything out of the fifty-pence VHS bargain bucket recently, and as far as we could tell, no one had even stolen anything.
At nine o’clock, I turned the sign on the door around to open, and pulled the bargain basket outside onto the street. Looking around the Broad Hampton High Street, which hardly seemed to have changed at all in the last ten years or so, I again reminded myself this was only meant to be temporary.
“I think it’s okay to fancy him in Cocktail still, and maybe in Mission Impossible, but you can’t fancy him when he’s doing a red carpet or on Graham Norton or whatever. What I mean is, you can’t fancy actual Tom Cruise, but you can fancy the characters he plays,” said Liv when I came back in.
I nodded in agreement although I preferred Judd Nelson anyway. He was more my more type.
I took a long look at Judd as Liv settled herself at the desk with her laptop out, ready to stream whichever box set she was currently addicted to from Netflix. Liv said it was the best thing she’d ever watched and we should get the box set for the shop. I’d rolled my eyes at that and I could tell by the look Judd was giving me that he thought the same.
After a little bit of dusting to clear a few cobwebs from Molly Ringwald’s head and then tidying the already tidy covers and drinking more tea, it was almost ten a.m. Right on cue Weird Roger with the greasy hair and the shopping trolley showed up. He pushed open the front door of the shop and shouted “Have you got Free Willy 2?” like he did every day before making his hur hur hur sound. I was pretty sure he’d been doing that every day since the film came out – or at least as long as I’d been here, which apart from a gap of a few years where I attempted, and failed, to do something interesting, was a very long time.
At eleven a.m. the phone rang and Liv answered and said, “No. No such film.” She hung up. When I asked her what they wanted, she explained someone had asked for “Shaw Hawk’s Red Temptation” and said if they couldn’t even be bothered to find out what things were called, they didn’t deserve to watch films in the first place.
Neither me nor Liv could understand why the owner continued to keep the shop open. We thought it was because he had so many other small businesses he had perhaps forgotten it was there. We also speculated that it was some kind of “front”, but while he continued to pay our wages we decided it was best not to mention it to him, and if he wasn’t concerned that the shop wasn’t making any money, then neither should we be.
I slumped over the counter and pressed the side of my face against the cool surface.
“I’m fed up, Liv. We’re going to have to get other jobs. This can’t go on much longer.”
“I think we both will.” Liv shook her head.
“It is so boring in here. When I was in Cardiff—”
“Stop right there,” said Liv.
“What?” I lifted my head up from the counter.
“Is this another story about how when you worked at the hotel in Cardiff and everything was brilliant and much better than here?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure?” she asked sternly.
“Well, maybe.” I sighed. Obviously things didn’t go that spectacularly for me otherwise I wouldn’t have ended up back here, but I had loved simply not being here, where no one knew me and I could start again.
“Anyway,” said Liv. “It’s cool working here.”
“No, Liv, it is most definitely not cool, not cool at all. It might have been cool when I was a Saturday girl fifteen years ago; in fact, it may very well be the coolest thing I have done, but it is not cool being thirty and having a glorified Saturday job.”
I loved it here when I started. It was like working in Empire Records but with films instead of music. There were ten staff and the shop was busy all the time. It was the first place and the first time in my life I felt I could be myself, instead of trying to stay under the radar like I did at school. I loved it. The customers were excited to get the latest releases and I got to talk about films all the time. There’s a joyous moment when you talk about “that bit” in a particular film and the experience is shared, like you and the other person are sharing in the magical movie moment. But now it was about as glamorous as working in Open All Hours. It was depressing. How had all these years passed and I was still here?
“I miss it, Liv, how it was. I miss how people loved films.”
“People still love films, Cara.”
“I miss talking about them. I miss talking about the little moments of magic. The bits that make you go ‘ahh’ or the surprising bits, the twists that no one saw coming and the happy endings that everyone did see coming, but still loved them anyway.”
“People still talk about them. I’m talking about what I’m watching now.” Liv turned her laptop round to show me she was two-screening with her box set and Twitter.
“It’s not the same, Liv. When I first worked here people were so excited to come and get the latest releases, it was like handing them little parcels of magic.”
“You’ll have to look for another job, then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. Again.”
I folded my arms. I hadn’t planned to stay in Boring Hampton as long as this anyway. It was just a little breathing space while I gathered my thoughts.
When I left here, I decided I would never come back and live in this town, which no one noticed and where no one noticed me. My distinctly average school grades meant I couldn’t go to university, so I took a job as an assistant in events management at a hotel chain in Cardiff, but realised that I was about as good at managing events as I was at managing myself.
I imagined I would be organising glitzy events