Frankenplot: Orginal Sin.

He’d agreed to meet John Doe here. But he hadn’t showed. Not as far as he could tell and he was rarely wron. He crinkled his nose and noticed the smell of something. It was the wrong smell for a MacMillan charity shop whose signature was the scent of musty old clothes and highly polished shoes pushed too close to the radiator masked by the faint perfume of lavender.

He backed into a ceramic display and made it tinkle. He grabbed the edge of the table before any harm was done. Blue dolphins. Wee houses painted too brightly. Pipe-smoking gnomes. All looked fine. But there was a gap between them and other ornaments. His eyes flickered over them because they looked as if they might actually be worth something.

‘Sorry,’ he said to some old buddy helping out in the charity. Interchangeable with the others. Grey hair, name tag—Rosie—and a nylon blue bib. But she looked out of it. As if she’d taken something.  

‘What happpend?’ she asked.

‘No sure,’ he told her. ‘Just knocked against the table.’

She grasped his arm as he walked away.

He sighed. She’d a firm grip for such a thin-faced wee woman. 

‘Let go, Rosie.’ He offered her a flag of red hair and a slow smile lit up his boyish face. His long eyelashes and the lustre of his mother-of-who-can-tell skin usually did the trick with older women and a few select men.  

She brandished an ornament she’d picked up at him. ‘You need to take it.’

He shrugged her off and walked away. ‘No lady, I don’t want any o’ that ceramic crap’.

She followed on his heels. Stalking him to the shoe racks and men’s clothing. She hissed, ‘You don’t get to choose. The angels choose you. The angels see all. They see you watching…watching small children and touching yourself. The angel writes it down in his book. Your name and the names of the o’er watchers. Those that hurt children will need to answer for their iniquity on the last day, when Gabriel’s horn sounds. Better a millstone be tied around their neck…’

He tried to walk around her, but she blocked his path. An older guy with a Graham Greene novel in his hand pretended not to squint sideways at them. The bell dinged and an Eastern European couple blocked the doorway as they stood squat and shoulder to shoulder, looking about and getting their bearings among the clothes racks, ziggurats of board games and plastic toys. Cheap jewellery showcased in the windows behind them. Hearts in gold, amethysts, rubies, and diamonds at cut-throat prices, the interior lights added a watery green tinge is if looted treasure washed by the deep sea.   

‘The angel said you’ll burn unless you take him and let him into your heart.’

He whispered. Head tucked into his chin. ‘Fuck off, you old bastard.’

But she was having none of it. He found the ornament in the palm of his hand. ‘Ouch,’ he winced as if it burned him and slipped into his pocket. Kneading the flesh of his hand between heel and thumb where a red welt appeared.  

Rosie wandered away towards the book section as if she’d forgotten something. And she began talking to the elderly man reading a novel. When she glanced in his direction, she seemed an entirely different woman. Frailer, more of a dotard.  

He lifted a hand to his chest and half-waved. She frowned and looked away and turned away, taking a half-step towards the customer as if embarrassed for him. Somebody she didn’t know.

Raggedly breathing. Shallow breaths in his inner ear. The beginning of high-pitched keening. He tilted his head. Held his hand up to the shell of his ear. But just as quickly as it had begun, it stopped.

His chest heaved. And he breathed through his nose to settle his stomach. He stood stunned among the bric-a-brac, suddenly exhausted. Felt the shadows and wings of a bird that tried to escape from his mouth. He swallowed it down with difficulty.

Relief washed over his skin in a clammy sweat. He made for a door like a much older man.

The woman with a hair-extension at the till flicked her head from following the movements of the Eastern Europeans and gave him her full attention. ‘That will be £6.99, sir!’

He felt the full weight of the thing in his pocket and wanted to remove it and wanted to put in on the counter and laugh. Explain he’d never buy such cheap tat and have done with it. But he remembered the burn.

His hesitation made her double down. ‘We’ve got CCTV,’ she added.

She was middle-aged with big boobs. He tried joking with her, knowing she was lying. ‘You take crypto?’

‘Cash sir.’ She sounded slightly shrill as if ready to kick off. ‘Or card. We do credit cards too.’

‘6.99?’ He half laughed, inviting her to join in. He thought her hair was the biggest part of her, but it was her big gob. In some ways she reminded him of his mum. ‘Cheap at half the price.’

She remained thin-lipped as he dipped into his side pocket and brought out a tenner. Her eyes were already drifting away from him towards the Eastern Europeans as she rung it up and counted out he change.  ‘Would sir like us to wrap the angel of the apocalypse?  Or would he prefer to keep it hidden in his jacket pocket?’

‘Yah fat cow,’ he pushed the change towards her. ‘Keep yer fucking change.’

Rosie appeared like a wraith at his back. ‘The angel speaks with the voice of thunder. No man can understand him, but all will hear him and fear him and know his majestic presence.’

He whipped around to sneer and say something cutting, but her eyes had narrowed and flickered back and forward, her face had a glow about it and the words petered out.  

‘Your dad would be proud of you,’ the woman at the till offered her opinion as a parting gift as he stalked toward the door. ‘Bullying an old woman. You’re barred. Don’t come back.’

Bell dinging.

‘I’ve no got a da,’ he muttered. ‘Yah fat cow.’