held her glass high, but before she could say the final word, a loud mechanical sound reverberated through the shop.
A shadow flickered across Dida’s beatific smile. ‘What the hell is going on out there…? Can someone please tell whoever that is, this is not the time for hammer drills.’
Izzy, peering past the crowd, could make out a ladder propped up on the pavement beyond the shop doorway.
As the crew moved towards the door and peered out, Luce got there first. ‘What are those two huge for sale signs propped against the window for?’ Her brow creased into a worried frown.
Dida staggered down from her trunk, and elbowed her way out onto the pavement. Then she grabbed an umbrella from a flower pot, rapped hard on the ladder with the handle, and shouted to the man above. ‘Excuse me, what exactly do you think you’re doing?’
‘98 Derwent Street, Commercial Freehold For Sale.’ The man said, glowering down from ten feet up and sounding casually confident.
Dida’s jaw dropped, but she squared her shoulders, ignored the collective gasp behind her, and shouted up. ‘I’m sorry, there must be some mistake.’
Izzy’s heart plummeted. She knew Dida’s husband, Aidie, was ruthless, but surely he wouldn’t do this to them. Although on second thoughts, this stunt had Aidie written all over it. From his snarky comments whenever he was around, which happily wasn’t that often, he clearly resented Dida’s growing independence. His wife’s success was a direct threat to a control freak husband like Aidie, and selling the building was a fast forward way to wrestle back his power, simultaneously wiping the floor with all of them. And if he was hell bent on bursting Dida’s bubble, in the most spectacular and public way possible, his timing was impeccable.
‘Definitely no mistake.’ The workman up the ladder sounded very sure of himself. ‘Don’t blame me, I’m only doing my job.’ His shrug and weary sigh suggested this happened a lot, then his tone became conciliatory. ‘Best ring the agents love, they’ll clear it up for you.’
Izzy, feet welded to the pavement, by a mixture of shock, and panic watched Dida bristle. She hated being called ‘love’.
‘Eldon and Trellis. Right. I’ll do that now.’ Dida’s growl was ferocious. ‘I hope you realise you’re wasting your time up there, you’ll be back in half an hour to take it down.’
Fighting talk, and good on Dida for not taking it lying down, but Izzy, whose stomach was languishing somewhere at pavement level, wasn’t so sure.
Dida bustled back through the shop waving her mobile. ‘So sorry about this, carry on with the cupcakes. One minute, I’ll sort this out.’
Nice try, but nothing flattened bubbly faster than bad news. Realistically, this party was over.
Izzy, Luce and Dida threaded their way past the customers, as they discarded their plastic champagne flutes on the counter next to the untouched cupcake tower, and discretely began to disperse. Izzy’s heart was racing, and she wasn’t sure if her shaking knees were due to anger or pure fear. Dida might have pulled off an upbeat exit to the kitchen, but Izzy had caught the wild whites of her eyes as she passed. The gash of her red lipped grimace reminded Izzy of the face in Munch’s The Scream, and it was enough for Izzy to know that Vintage at the Cinema was in big trouble here. And that had to be awful news for all of them.
Wednesday Evening, 4th June
IZZY
A building site in Bakewell
The downside of upcycling
‘Hey, you! Get out of my skip.’
Izzy froze, rammed her shoulder against the rusty metal container side, and crouched lower, cringing as the male voice resonated above her head and echoed across the building site.
Damn it. She kicked herself for coming back for one last look, when she should have got away. In some ways this afternoon’s bombshell news that the cinema building was up for sale made it more important than ever for her to get her hands on stock. They weren’t going to give up, they were going to fight to survive, and tonight’s skip raid was a symbol of that determination. Ever since she, Dida and Luce had launched Vintage at the Cinema, they’d dreamed of a time when business would be booming, and it was ironic that now it was actually happening, it looked as if it might be snatched away.
Something about tonight’s desperation spun Izzy back to the time when she’d first discovered the joys of skip scavenging, when her mum walked out on her dad. With four kids and an empty flat, skips had provided Izzy with most of her bedroom furniture. Those fledgling finds had kick started Izzy’s love of rescuing what other people threw away. It turned out she had a flair for making old, unwanted things beautiful. At least one good thing had come out of her parents’ break up, and the talents she’d discovered back then had exploded with the opportunity of Vintage at the Cinema.
A stripped out cinema building was a big place to fill, especially when the furniture you put in there was flying out as fast as it went in. But ending up on a building site, in a skip, with some guy yelling at you, wasn’t the best of places to spend a Wednesday evening.
‘Oi! I said move it!’ He was still there then.
Izzy shuddered. Luce, always teased her about her compulsion for searching through skips, but it was true that Izzy found it very hard, if not impossible to pass a skip without diving into it. In her experience, there was often treasure to be found, but right now, with an angry man bearing down on her, she was wishing she hadn’t let that last glance into the second, almost empty skip, entice her. She closed her hand around the small carved plaster cherub she’d found lurking at the bottom. Dusk was no time to get caught in the act, even if she had okayed it with the builders earlier.
‘Think you can come round breaking my windows do you, just because the house is empty?’ Enter one apoplectic guy, who’d totally got the wrong end of the stick. He didn’t sound too close, but he only had to walk across, and peer over the skip edge, and she’d be done for. ‘Did you hear me? I know you’re there.’
Fierce and well spoken – they were the worst sort. Izzy grimaced, braced herself for trouble, and began to unfold her legs. Time to face whatever was coming her way. It was a daily hazard of skulking round skips – sometimes it was inevitable, you pissed people off. And Izzy couldn’t bear to see old pieces with the potential to be pretty being tossed away. It broke her heart to think of lovely old things being smashed up by ignorant people who didn’t know any better. As she saw it, she was on a rescue mission here, and no one in their right mind would object to that, once they saw reason. Although from the way Mr Shouty was limbering up, she wasn’t sure reason was going to have much to do with this.
Slowly, she unfolded, to get a peep at what she was dealing with here, and as her nose drew level with the skip edge, she got a full frontal view of the man she was annoying. Talk about chiselled cheekbones. Add in eyes the colour of darkness, a body that would have made most women she knew ache to peel off his well-cut clothes, and for a fraction of a nano second she fell resoundingly, heart-stoppingly, scorchingly in love. She’d always wondered what her friends meant when they talked about thunderbolts, and now she knew. Before she could say “oh my sweet Jesus”, her lips had parted, and she was letting out a long, wavering sigh.
