First Aid Read Online Free PDF Page A

tell you something else, Trevor. I swallowed some buttons. They came with a new blouse in a nice little plastic packet. I didn’t know what they were. Thought they were my pills. Swallowed them with a glass of water.’
    â€˜Easily done. It’s the memory. I’m always forgetting things, losing things. I lost your address but then it turned up.’
    He bent down and lifted one of the boxes. ‘I’ll be back for the others in a tick.’
    â€˜You’ll take them home with you, will you, Trevor?’
    â€˜To the shop. But I need to load the car first. I’ll wash up the glasses before I go.’
    â€˜If someone takes a fancy to something let them have it. Tell them I said so.’
    â€˜I’ll do that, Mrs Tiemann. Thank you. You’re a good woman.’
    Every now and then he went on one of these hunting sprees. They usually involved visiting ageing people, mostly women, whom he’d heard were about to go into one of the local nursing homes. He had friendly arrangements with the female owners of Borrowdale, which he thought of as Borrowed Time, and another, which genuinely seemed to be called Fallowfields. They tipped him off about prospective new clients and he would call on them at their old familiar addresses. He commiserated with them about having to cull their treasured possessions and offered to take the surplus off their hands. This was a good idea in theory, but in practice, the old ladies crammed as much as they were allowed, without infringing fire regulations, in the new small space. Their relatives, cleaners and hairdressers took the better pieces, and he was left with things from the apex of the corner cupboard.
    He’d been in many rooms like this one. All curtains and carpets and furniture and breakables. Never a window open. They called him round and talked about their possessions. One or two were always singled out for special attention. Valuable, someone or other had told them. That was the word they always used. Not beautiful or unusual. Something that went for ten, twenty quid at the most in the shop. Yet these old women were decent, not grasping. They needed to know it had all been worth it. Often the items they were selling had belonged to their parents. They felt bad about parting with them. They believed that, having been kept for so long, they too must keep them. For decades these objects had stood in exactly the same spot, fixed like eyes, nose or mouth on a face, and rearranging them meant disfigurement. A few, like Ena Tiemann, hid the relics away for years. It took real courage to ditch them. Lois, his mother, had been different. She had known the selling side. She understood what happened to
things
and had gone out like a lady – leaving nothing but a few sticks of good furniture, enough Jardin de Bagatelle to cover the bottom of the scent bottle and a small overdraft at the bank.
    The gentility of the shop had ebbed after Lois’s death. Trevor hadn’t been able to cope with the detail – the drawers slightly open and the inch of lace-edged linen hanging out. The double room with the staircase rising invitingly up the middle had come to look less and less like an over-stocked drawing room and more like auntie’s house after a burglary. He had put a notice on the door asking for a few hours’ help a day. A WOMAN’S TOUCH, he had written in capitals across the bottom. No one had responded. Then about a fortnight later a woman had called in. She had looked at the books and tried on a few rings from the table. She had eventually come up to him and asked, in a rather starchy way, what the job entailed. ‘Entailed’ he had repeated and she had started, embarrassed, and told him that this was one of her gran’s words, probably not suitable for general use. She had said she couldn’t remember ever having used it before. Trevor had warmed to her then and had waved his arms at the furniture and said it