Page 2 of The Little Board Game Café

‘Let’s start again, shall we? I am in the very unfortunate position of having to let you go, but, as I said, it’s nothing personal…’

She made an odd noise at this point, something midway between a harrumph and a snort. He was in a very unfortunate position?

‘…it’s nothing personal. You’re just surplus to requirements.’

‘Surplus to requirements…?’ Her voice had reached a high pitch now, somewhere between wailing cat and warbling soprano.

‘We’re letting you go at the end of the month. You won’t be entitled to much of a pay-out since you’ve not been here long – but there’ll be something. I’ll put that in writing.’

He’d put that in writing! And no doubt – since she did all his typing – she’d be writing that letter to herself.

‘Fine,’ she said, standing up again. ‘I’d better get back to work then.’

‘Look, I can see this has come as a shock. Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? Go home. Chill out. Put your feet up.’

‘Thanks. I’ll do that.’

She turned away from him and walked towards the door with as much dignity as she could muster. Which wasn’t much. She placed a trembling hand on the handle and was about to open the door when he cleared his throat.

‘One more thing, Em,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could pick up some semi-skimmed on the way home?’

*

Emily was outside on the pavement, underneath the enormous sign that read Peter Ridley Engineering Ltd, when the tears began to roll. On autopilot, she rummaged in her pockets for a tissue then realised she had no pockets. Damn. She’d left her coat in the office. There was no way she was going back in for it.

It was bad enough that she’d Just Been Fired in front of everyone. What made it worse, so much worse, was the fact that the man who’d fired her – or, as he insisted on calling it, ‘made her redundant’ – was her fiancé.

She hadn’t even wanted to work at Peter Ridley Engineering Ltd and she’d never fitted in. The boss giving his other half a job – well, that move was never going to be popular with the workforce, was it? They were probably cheering now that he was letting her go.

It was chilly outside. Emily wanted to walk through the park to clear her head, but without her coat?

Oxfam, she decided. She needed a ‘new’ coat anyway.

She turned left towards the small centre of town. Essendale lay nestled in a little valley in the West Yorkshire Pennines. It mightn’t have been quite as picture-box pretty as towns in nearby North Yorkshire, but it had its own quirky charm. A chimney still stood, towering over the town, though the mill it was once part of was long gone. Higgledy-piggledy terraced houses were tucked into the hillside below fields and tumbling drystone walls. Some of the cobbles had now been tarmacked over, but on sunny days, lines of washing crisscrossed the narrow streets between the houses. Not that there were that many sunny days; this was the Pennines. The skies were often grey, the valley often misty and if it wasn’t raining properly, it was usually drizzling.

You never saw a policeman in Essendale – well, there wasn’t much crime – but the town had its own super-vigilant neighbourhood watch: a group of somewhat aggressive white geese who patrolled the streets, held up the traffic on a regular basis and hissed at any dog who dared get too close.

They were gathered now outside the small library – only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays – so Emily steered around them, keeping her hands well above pecking height.

She’d only walked another hundred metres or so when her phone pinged, and then pinged again shortly afterwards. Peter probably. She ignored it and pressed on, passing Alessandra’s, the only clothes shop in town, where her mother-in-law-to-be bought all her outfits. Emily couldn’t afford their prices, but even if she could… Well, much as Peter would have liked it, she wasn’t ready to turn into a mini version of his mother quite yet.

A man she vaguely recognised nodded and said, ‘Eyup’ to her as she passed him. Essendale was that sort of place; you greeted people even if you didn’t know them. Although most people here did seem to know everyone else. Emily knew Peter, Kate and her old neighbour Marjory, plus all her soon-to-be-former colleagues from Ridley’s and that was about it. She’d been here a few years and still felt like an outsider.

She passed the Red Lion, adorned with window boxes and hanging baskets, its sign promising real ales and a log fire. She and Kate spent many an evening there, mulling over the trials and tribulations of Kate’s love life.

There were only a handful of shops in Essendale, and each bore an old-fashioned, hand-painted sign. No neon here, the local councillor liked to boast. Emily walked by the mini-supermarket, which Peter always referred to as the grocer’s, the florist with its modest collection of potted hyacinths and daffodils on display and the Golden Wok, its windows now boarded up. She missed their chicken chow mein, though Peter wasn’t fond of take-aways.

She paused for a moment beside Sweet Delights, the only café in town, peering at the cakes in the window, the bustling waitresses, the happy customers. One day, she thought, one day. Then she pressed on towards her favourite shop in Essendale: Oxfam.

She loved browsing in charity shops, but Peter had banned her from buying second-hand clothes. ‘Mother says you’ll bring moths into the house and they’ll leave holes in all my cashmere,’ he’d said. But if Emily chose diligently, he didn’t notice that a new item of clothing wasn’t actually new. And now she was officially joining the ranks of the unemployed…well, it was the perfect excuse. She would find a coat then go for a walk in the park.

But first, the books. A book would cheer her up. Emily loved the kind of books that made her feel inspired to take up a new hobby or go on an adventure. Of course, she never actually took up the hobby or went on the adventure, but she knew all about mixed media collage, glass painting and drying flowers. In her imagination, she’d wandered the streets of Montmartre, sipped coffee in a tiny café beside the Seine and sniffed the lightly scented roses in the Jardin des Tuileries. She’d dropped plenty of hints to Peter about her longing to go to the French capital, but he wasn’t the most romantic of men and wasn’t great at picking up on hints.

She’d seen most of the books on Oxfam’s shelves already. In a small town like Essendale, the turnover in the non-fiction section wasn’t very high. But she loved browsing. That was the fun part of charity shops. You could order what you liked from the internet, of course. Any book under the sun. But looking for books in charity shops was like digging for treasure; you were never sure what you might find. Some days there was nothing. Like a metal detectorist walking away after a day on the beach with only a couple of ring pulls from Coke cans for his troubles, she’d walk away empty-handed. Yet on other days, she’d strike gold. An out-of-print Peggy Porschen about cake decorating or a photobook of vintage bridal gowns. Books that would make their way onto the pile on her bedside table. You could always tell what Emily was interested in at any given time by looking at the titles by her bed.

A few years back, before she’d met Peter, there’d been several weighty tomes about how to be irresistible, how to meet and keep a boyfriend, and how to apply what somebody or other learned at Harvard Business School to the world of dating. All borrowed from Kate. You wouldn’t have needed to be Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Barnaby to work out that Emily was looking for love.

The find-a-man self-help books had now been returned to their owner. In their place were how-to guides about creating hand-made wedding invitations, arranging bridal bouquets, cake decorating and making tiaras. She fancied being a ‘DIY bride’. She didn’t have the skills to sew her own dress, but had wanted to try her hand at making her own stationery and she could definitely bake her own cake. A three-tiered gooey chocolate cake, covered in a chocolate mirror glaze, decorated with red sugar-paste roses and shards of dark chocolate.