The Bargain Store

Alas, my little story failed to find a friend amongst the judging panel at RTE. Hopefully it will make a few acquaintances here…

I remember, a long time ago admittedly, being obsessed with toy soldiers – the poorly moulded variety that you could pick up in any self-respecting bargain store. As I was always in Nana Kat’s house (owing to having two parents in full-time work), it was her that regularly took me to Ballindee’s forever-dilapidated-looking one; aptly titled The Bargain Store.
	Having perused the many, many, many oddly stocked shelves along its choking, musty aisles we’d leave some time later with a bag of green ones and a bag of grey ones. Then, once home, I’d race to our shed and begin reenacting the same imaginary battle over and over; the greens trapped inside their fortress, surrounded on all sides by the greys who were joined by kitchen-roll cannons, tanks constructed from discarded firewood, bits of broken Barbies and the recycled corpses of their melted comrades (whom I had previously executed by grinding their heads off on a treadmill set to its highest speed).
	I was an industrious child to put it lightly, though it certainly drowned out the sound of slamming doors and smashing plates.
	On one day in particular I had been minding my own business, battling, decapitating, constructing conflicts the likes of which Ireland had never seen, when my older Brother entered (eleven years older to be precise). If not for the steam permeating his clothes like he had just been rode at Leopardstown, then it was the maroon of his cheeks that tipped me off to his mood. Before I could awkwardly greet him he stomped over and lifted my battlefield, fortress and hapless combatants away with a wound-up kick, sending them against the wall in wails of unsettling crashes that I’d never forget.
	‘Grow the hell up,’ he roared before storming away.
	I remembered that version of me well, I could see her as if I was standing just beyond the door of the shed. She cried, sobbing at what someone she loved could do to her imagination, to something she cared so deeply about. Sure, she knew he was prone to fits of rage, but never had it been directed at her. Having bawled a sleeve’s worth of tears she calmly stood, marched to her ruined toys and began putting them back just as they were before he had interrupted – the second time she’d been too afraid to fight back, unlike her soldiers would have.
	That moment. That was a moment that changed me. It taught me that the people we love can sometimes hurt us the worst. Still, Nana Kat knew exactly what to say, ‘Don’t you mind him lovey, he’s only mad with himself.’ As if her words were gospel Brother apologised a few weeks later; mad with himself just as she’d said.
	Seven years passed in a blink and I was suddenly fourteen (there or there about, anyway). Mam and Dad decided to go their separate ways, leaving whatever hope I had of having a normal childhood in ruins. It was also around that time that I started smoking; Lights, which is what Nana Kat smoked when she wasn’t coughing up her last lung. Like some choose to do when backed into an emotional corner, I grabbed a bag, packed it with chocolate digestives, those butter biscuits with the ships on them, a share pack of Capri-Suns and ran away forever. It hadn’t even been two days before I was discovered outside The Bargain Store; ravenous, tired, sore and in desperate need of a hug from my Nana.
	That particular stunt cost me whatever credibility I had left in the malls outside the classroom. Yet for all the gossip, all the strange looks, all the passing remarks, there was one amongst the mob I could call friend; Sadie Kane. Like me, Sadie had her own troubles and, also like me, Sadie’s parents were separated. She liked the music I liked, she liked the food I liked, she loved her Nana as much as I loved mine... Had I’ve been born with the appropriate appendage we’d have been boyfriend and girlfriend; best friends would suffice for this lifetime, however.
	Still, they all thought we were together anyway. As did Nana Kat who once remarked, ‘Ooh, I do only be worrying about you, Cassie... People might be saying that you’re one of them Lebanese, y’know?’ Her off-hand, off-the-cuff comment would forever be cherished as an in-joke amongst family, but little did I know that it would be the last of Nana’s one-liners. On a fine Summer’s day in 2009, my safe, icy fortress that I had spent years building around my wounded soul was shattered: The day Nana Kat died.
	For the following seventy-two hours, “I’m sorry for your loss” was all I was going to hear.
	Everyone had their own version, their own way, their own timbre and tone when saying it. Some even chose to forgo the “I am” prefix. Patsy Fagan’s way, forever inebriated as he was, had a certain je ne sais quoi about it; a deeply touching slant – “Jaysus, Jaysus, shockin’, shockin’ sorrfoyahlawss” – shaking your hand all-the-while with his threadbare, leathery ones; warm too, as if he had left them on the windowsill to soak in the Sun. The ones who were deeply affected though, they didn’t say it, they just hugged you and whispered “I know, I know” over and over in your ear; nodding as you destroyed their shoulder with snots and tears. When I finally came free from Sadie’s her blouse should’ve been rang out and hung on a line.
	I wasn’t crying solely out of grief, though. A cruel hatred had seeped into my bones off the back of it; hatred for Janey McEnroe.
	Hate.
	I thought I knew what it was to hate, to feel that, that heat, spread from your heart and worm its way like fire-scored vines into each and every fibre of your flesh until it was all that you could feel. It would pulse then, lasting for a minute, or two, or maybe five depending on how much you were willing to let flow. I hated School. I hated when I had homework to finish. I hated when Dad made Spaghetti Bolognese and secretly put onions in it...
	Hate. I didn’t know hate at all.
	Not until it’s blaze-spewing, smog-belching, all-consuming roots had flourished beneath my boots, broke through their soles, wrapped themselves around my legs and blossomed into ember-smoked flowers in the place where my heart lay in twain.
	I knew it then.
	I knew it well.
	I thought it was all I would ever know.
	Hate. Hate; burning, furniture-breaking, curse-screaming hate. Hate for Janey McEnroe and what she did to me and my Nana years ago, the things she said and the jokes she made, what she had made little of.
	Hate. Hate mighty enough to make me want to drag her from her house in the middle of the night, throw her on the dew-dripped grass of her front lawn and beat the innocent look off of her face. At other stranger, darker hours of the day I wished to berate her whole family in front of her, then steal her cat, her dog and her stupid budgie that she wrote stupid short stories about. But now, as she shook my hand on what was the second morning of Nana’s wake, trying her best to hold herself together, now it was smouldering.
	‘Cassie, I’m so-so-so-so sorr-’ Sadie was swift to usher her on, eager to keep us as far from each other as Nana’s tiny cottage permitted.
	Janey McEnroe, Brainy Janey, who had made fun of me and my Nana outside The Bargain Store when I was seven; for not wanting or, perhaps, not being able to browse a proper toy shop’s supposedly superior range; for buying the cheapest toys possible; for wanting to buy soldiers in spite of me being a girl; for laughing, like a hyena, at Nana’s attempts to shoo her away; for turning back once satisfied that she’d upset me enough and leaving us with a smarmy “you mean nothing to me” grin.
	Forgetting about how she made me feel, forgetting about how little she had made Nana feel, her unforgivable sin was having uttered anything bearing a remote resemblance to a bad word about that bloody Bargain Store. The Bargain Store that, in my mind’s eye, kept my most cherished memories amongst the rest of the clutter on its metal, vignetted shelves; of times I’d been happy, of times I’d been curious, of times I’d been cheered up and treated by the most wonderful woman in the world, the same woman who had been a second mother to me.
	While her body was in a box and she had been planted with a smile; her spirit, her essence was not in her home on Lamb’s Terrace, nor was it in the shed we shared in her tiny back garden. No. For me she was still in that Bargain Store, wandering patiently around its strangled arteries, nodding and smiling at the cheap curios and plastic curiosities its owner had chosen to display, eventually finding her way around to helping me fish out a bag of green lads from behind a bag of black and brown horses. That was where she was, where my memory of her would forever remain; a painting filled with milk-chocolate browns, forest greens, stop-sign reds, pearl whites and rusty oranges on a canvas brought to life by the gentlest strokes of love.
	Much to Sadie’s surprise, I text Janey a few weeks after the funeral. ‘Hey.’
	‘Hi Cassie,’ came her quick reply. ‘How are you feeling?’
	A ridiculous question, but that was besides the point as to why I’d bothered to text her at all. My fingers, like blades of grass caught in a gust, trembled at what I was forcing them to type. ‘Do you remember that time... outside The Bargain Store?’
	Minutes passed as if they were months. ‘I’ve thought about it at least once a week,’ she replied. That cruel hate had since become slowly dying embers, but that killed their guttering flames entirely. Still, I was determined to carry out my mission, to exact my revenge, to make her feel small, little and stupid, to make her feel insignificant.
	A quiet, cancer-riddled grumble rang out; some ethereal echo that had been imprinted upon my soul. It bounced along the ruined aisles of my mind and resonated deep within my aching heart, now reduced in intensity to that of a worried whisper. ‘Ah lovey; that was her Winter, she’s Summer now.’
	Janey was still typing, but I managed to get there before her; a far different message to the one I had planned. ‘I forgive you.’
	Those three bouncing dots vanished for a solid hour. Finally, they reappeared as I sat down to eat dinner. ‘Thank you.’
	I’d often wondered if I was the girl that her ghost had been referring to, but I think I knew the answer anyway. Like seasons, everyone can eventually change; Brother, Janey McEnroe, Nana who had been my rock, my anchor, my lighthouse in the storm that was life.
	But even me it seemed, because of her... Because of Ballindee’s Bargain Store.