Page 56 of The Village Shop for Lonely Hearts

‘OK then. How about one of those boxes of beers I’ve seen lying around the place.’

‘Done,’ said Josh, with a nod. ‘You can have two if you’re any good with a paintbrush.’

‘Nah, mate,’ Del replied, shaking his head. ‘But I can wire in those new LED strip lights you were asking me about the other day.’

At least the lighting would be up to date, thought Josh the following day as he watched Del tear out the old strip lighting and start to hang the new ones across the ceiling. Hopefully painting and plugging the many holes in the ceiling would make it look better, he thought, catching Amber’s horrified face.

‘Does he know what he’s doing?’ she whispered.

‘Of course,’ lied Josh. ‘Anyway, at least it’s warmer in here. You can’t complain about that.’

He nodded to where the wood-burning stove finally had a fire crackling away inside. It had cost him to pay the chimney sweep but he had to admit that it was definitely a feature worth having.

‘Mind the tractor!’ he called out as a shower of dust came down as Del drilled through the ceiling. Thankfully it was still covered with a plastic sheet.

‘Yeah, I’d hate for a museum piece like that to get mucky,’ said Del, laughing to himself.

Josh had quietly asked a mechanic who frequented the pub to check out the tractor to see if there was any way it could be moved. But he had taken one look at the engine and told Josh that it had totally seized up, as well as the axle. Towing wasn’t an option and it was more likely to need a crane to get it moved.

When he told Amber, he was surprised that she began to smile.

‘So it will have to stay here after all,’ she said, looking pleased.

‘That’s not what I said,’ Josh told her.

But he was having to reluctantly admit to himself that the tractor was probably stuck in the shop for the foreseeable future. In a way he was pleased that it wasn’t going to the great scrapheap in the sky quite yet. In another, he still didn’t know what anyone, especially his mum, was going to make of it all when they’d finished redecorating the place. He just hoped that the business would have picked up by the time she came back from holiday. Thankfully that appeared to be slightly later in the year than she had originally intended.

‘It’s just for a few more weeks,’ she had told Josh the previous day. ‘I’m having such a lovely time in Singapore. It’s just delaying heading out to New Zealand, that’s all.’

So it sounded as if Amber was going to be staying at least until the end of November. To which Josh was secretly pleased.

Amber’s mention the previous day about the sustainability of the business had him wondering though. They still had all the stock to use up that wasn’t out of date or broken. Her suggestion about it being a lifestyle shop and having it all out on display might mean they could shift the odd item. But it was the lack of sustainable items that was making him think. Was there a way to run the shop and sell environmentally friendly goods?

At least his new light bulbs were low energy and the heating came from a wood-burning stove, of which there was a plentiful supply nearby of fuel. But the rest of it? He had no idea.

But, in truth, it wasn’t that which was keeping him awake at night. It was the thought of Amber leaving him to decide all this for himself. He was enjoying keeping her counsel and her companionship. To his astonishment, they were making quite a team and he was actually beginning to enjoy himself.

Del tried and failed to flirt with her when he worked on the new lights. She smiled at his jokes, but there was clearly no attraction there. At least that’s what Josh was hoping. Because he could feel a growing attraction to her himself that was becoming harder to deny. The trouble was that he had no idea if she felt the same way.

23

Amber was finding the redecoration of the shop a lot more fun than even she had imagined.

She had thought she had bitten off more than she could chew initially, but it was actually quite interesting working out where everything should go and the layout of the whole shop.

It all appeared so much bigger now that the space was beginning to get cleared. Once she had told herself that it was really just a big shop window, it had started to click inside her brain that she was up to the task.

Thankfully, Josh had mostly gone along with her ideas, although he was still not convinced about leaving the tractor in the middle of the shop.

‘At least you’ve covered it up,’ he’d said, when he saw that Amber had placed a cloth over it.

Luckily, he never thought to peek underneath at any point as Amber had begun to think of the tractor as her secret project. In the evenings, whenever Josh headed over to the pub for his pint of beer, she used the time to continue to transform the tractor. She buffed and polished the silver lights and used leather wax to clean up the interior. She had also begun to prepare the main body of the tractor for its final coat of new colour. She just hoped Josh would like the finished result when she finally revealed it to him.

In the meantime, they were both busy getting on with the renovation. The new white paint on both the ceilings and walls had certainly given the place a fresher feel. And despite her concerns about the quality of Dodgy Del’s electrical skills, the new lights were also brighter. The whole shop felt less turgid and yellow and far more modern.

They finished cleaning up the oak shelving units and placed them back against the wall. Amber was pleased to see that they looked more in keeping with the new feel of the shop. It would be far easier to display all the goods now that the customers could actually see what they were buying.

Their idea of splitting items into appropriate sections was certainly a good one, she thought. Thus one part of the wall next to the fireplace held all the food, as well as the tall refrigerators, which had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected so that they gleamed white once more. On the opposite side was the household section, which displayed the toilet rolls and cleaning products. Towards the back of the shop were the DIY goods, such as the string, screwdrivers and various sized nails and fixings. Finally, nearest to the till was a wide range of goods that didn’t come under any kind of section, such as greeting cards and rolls of material.