Page 3 of A Wish for Jinnie
Wending her way home after promising to report for duty at 9am, Jinnie tried not to feel too despondent about her new job. Really, it amounted to being a glorified cleaner crossed with a shop assistant. Then she reprimanded herself for being negative. Sam seemed a nice man and at least she’d be earning something. In the meantime, she had lunch with her family and a night out with Hannah and the girls to look forward to.
Chapter 5
‘Do you get a lot of customers?’asked Jinnie on Wednesday morning. She’d been welcomed enthusiastically by Sam, with mugs of coffee and fresh croissants from A Bit of Crumpet to start the day.
‘Not as many as I’d like,’ he replied, stirring two large sugars into his drink. ‘But this is really more of a hobby for me. I inherited the shop from my dad when he died, and only started trading myself a couple of years ago.’
‘So what’s your real job then, if you don’t mind me asking?’ Jinnie put down her mug and pulled out a handful of dusters and a can of polish from the box of cleaning products Sam had brought from the storeroom. She’d decided to start with a bit of a clean, then move on to rearranging the stock to make it look more appealing. At the moment grimy ornaments and tarnished cutlery were jostling for shelf space with piles of plates, tangled jewellery and ornate boxes in all shapes and sizes. With a little order restored, Jinnie was confident the place could look a lot more enticing.
Sam leaned forward. ’If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.’
Jinnie’s can of polish tumbled from her hand and rolled towards a stack of hideous figurines. She lunged forward, fearful of them being knocked down like skittles. Scoring a strike would be a very bad thing.
He laughed. ‘Sorry, my sense of humour is a bit on the dark side. As is my real job, which I tend to keep quiet about.’ Sam stuck out a foot to halt the can’s progress.
Gosh, was he a secret agent, or some kind of undercover cop? She could picture Sam on some covert operation, clad head to toe in black with a bullet-proof vest and an arsenal of weapons strapped to his body. He certainly had the physique for it — not that she was interested in him inthatway. Nope, Jinnie had sworn off men for at least a year, if not longer. She’d mentally removed the batteries from her ticking biological clock, and warned her mum that the subject was totally off limits.
‘Earth to Jinnie … hello!’ Sam waggled a hand in front of her face. Steering her thoughts away from men and chubby-cheeked babies, she looked at him expectantly.
‘I’m a writer,’ said Sam. ‘A reasonably successful one, but I like to keep a low profile especially round here. Ken and Mags know, but that’s about it.’
Before Jinnie could ask any more, the door opened and a customer entered. At least, sheassumedit was a customer. It could also be the gasman, or a fan of Sam looking for an autograph. No, definitely a customer, who nodded a hello before rummaging through a box of odds and ends. Definitely at the odder end of the spectrum, as he attempted to untangle a stringed puppet from a knot of stringed pearls. Moving out of earshot, Jinnie whispered, ‘So, are you famous? I love reading; maybe I’ve read some of your stuff!’
Sam grinned, and took her arm, pulling her into the back room. Jinnie’s heart did a little jig, totally at odds with her brain saying that men were off limits.
‘Moderately so. I write crime thrillers set in and around Edinburgh, but I use a pen name,’ said Sam.
As Sam released her arm, Jinnie’s heart ceased its jig, and she chided herself for getting carried away. Sam was now her boss and — hopefully — on his way to becoming a friend. Attractive as he was, she didn’t need more than that for the foreseeable future.
Peering round the door, she saw the customer waiting patiently at the counter with a stack of plates and a fob watch. ‘I’ll just deal with him, then you can reveal all,’ Jinnie said, then blushed. Oops, unintentional double entendre!
Sam merely winked and told her how much to charge. ‘And if he wants to haggle, go for it. But not more than ten or fifteen per cent below the asking price.’
Clearly happy with his deal of fifty pounds, the customer departed, and Sam joined Jinnie again with more coffee.
‘So where were we? Oh yes, my pen name. I use the name Alistair Scott. Alistair is my middle name, and Scott because I love the Scott Monument in Edinburgh. It’s such an incredible structure, don’t you think?’
Jinnie, to her shame, had never given it much thought. She’d always been more focussed on the shops across the road on Princes Street. She knew it was a tribute to the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, and something like 300 steps to climb to the highest point. She’d never attempted it, preferring to stay on the flat whenever possible.
‘How many books have you published?’ Jinnie asked. She sipped her coffee and flapped a duster over a dark wood box with an intricate mother-of-pearl inlay.
‘Fifteen so far, with another couple in the works,’ replied Sam. ‘They pull in decent money and I have a pretty faithful band of followers. I just prefer to keep it quiet around here. I’m Sam the antiques man, and that suits me fine.’
He left for the fair a couple of hours later, with Jinnie vowing to protect his ‘secret’ identity. With mop in hand, she began scrubbing the grime off the floor, all the while itching to look up Alistair Scott on Amazon…
Chapter 6
The restof the week passed quickly. Jinnie found herself enjoying the whole cleaning and reorganising business more than she’d expected. Left mainly to her own devices — Sam was approaching a deadline and only dropped in a handful of times — she’d buffed silverware to an eye-watering shine, hung various pieces of art on the wall, and repainted the wobbly IKEA shelving units with a tin of white gloss. After a few turns of a screwdriver they wobbled no more, and were now home to various knick-knacks and colourful pieces of pottery. Standard lamps and table lights were fitted with bulbs and new plugs, providing ambient lighting throughout. Jinnie had gone to town with Sam’s pricing gun where she could, and elsewhere she’d cut rectangles of craft card and used silver and gold pens to write out the prices in her best writing. Customers were still thin on the ground, but a few curious locals had dropped in, having heard both of the ‘new girl in town’ and the changes taking place.
‘Aye, you’ve done a good job, hen,’ declared Janette Cameron, when Jinnie popped into the post office/corner shop for a few things. Janette worked there part-time, and was a colourful and opinionated character. ‘It was a right old shite heap before, excuse my language.’ Janette looked anywhere between fifty and eighty, with fiercely cropped grey hair, a mouth so tightly pinched that it resembled a cat’s arse, and a wardrobe that must contain at least half of Scotland’s Crimplene supply.
Determined to also make Brae Cottage more attractive, Jinnie had finally unpacked. That ordeal over, she had covered the weathered sofas with colourful throws, hung the handful of cheap but cheerful prints she owned on the faded walls, and added a few lamps with low-voltage bulbs to turn its inherent gloominess into something warmer. Hannah had often said Jinnie should consider doing a course in interior design. ‘You’ve definitely got a knack for making crap look good,’ she’d announced when Jinnie had spent a productive afternoon re-jigging her friend’s flat to ward off the post-Mark blues.
In her short time in Cranley, Jinnie had bought stamps and basic groceries from the shop. Milk, bread and tinned soup were essentially her staple diet when she wasn’t being treated by Jo or Sam. But Jinnie knew her mum would have a couple of bags of goodies to take away when she visited for Sunday lunch. ‘Just some bits and bobs, pet, to tide you over,’ she’d say, handing over enough food to fill a Red Cross parcel.
Jo had also been impressed with Jinnie’s handiwork at Sam’s shop, though less fruity in her choice of language. She’d arrived with a bag of scones and a slab of gingerbread, shooing away Jinnie’s protests that she was too kind. ‘There’s always stuff left over, sweetheart, and I can’t bear it going to waste,’ she’d said, before oohing and aahing over the transformation. ‘What a difference! Sam might not uncover any treasure on his antique-finding missions, but I think he’s discovered a true gem in you!’ Jinnie had blushed and stammered her thanks, hoping Jo didn’t see her as a charity case; some kind of downtrodden waif exiled from her native land (a mere five miles away).
Now it was late Friday afternoon, and Jinnie had the boss’s permission to shut up shop, grab her overnight bag and head to the city for a girls’ night out. Sam had appeared at lunchtime and handed her an envelope. ‘Your first salary from Out of the Attic,’ he said. ‘Plus a little extra for making the place look a bit less “car boot sale”, and a lot more “hidden treasures within”.’
