Stopping Charity Starting At Home
“It’s a bit tacky isn’t it?” Mark asked, looking every bit as uncomfortable as he felt. It had been Clarissa’s idea to get their new furniture at a charity shop, not his, but he was still going to be lumbered with that monstrosity of a lampshade to stare at. That wasn’t the worst part though, not the part which was really making him uncomfortable. That honour went to the store salesman.
“No, no, no. It’s, uh, it’s prime colour chic isn’t it? Bold, bright shades of red, blue, and green are very ‘in’ right now. Very lively. Makes the room energetic.” The salesman said, his oiled-back hair reflecting the lamp colours horribly. He seemed to have confused himself for a used-car dealer, but pushy sales techniques felt out of place for a third-hand, five pound lampshade. The commission just wouldn’t be worth it.
“I don’t think that ‘prime colour chic’ is a thing.” Mark muttered uncertainly.
“Of course it is! It’ll liven everything up.” Clarissa argued. He couldn’t believe that she was taking the salesman’s side on this. Or that the salesman had taken her side and she hadn’t immediately swapped over to Mark’s side for solidarity’s sake. Or something. They should definitely be forming a united front on this, that was the point, and it should clearly be an anti-‘hideous lampshade’ stance.
“It doesn’t look very thick either. It won’t do much shading at all will it?” Mark continued, changing tactics.
“It’s not meant to make the room dark is it, you walnut.” Clarissa argued back.
“No, but it’s also not meant to be the actual light source. Look at it! I’m yet to be convinced that it’s not lighting the shop.”
The salesman let out a loud, insincere laugh. Mark tried to see what his nametag said, but it was at a funny angle and reflected lampshade colours were obscuring most of it. There was definitely a ‘D’ at the start, and maybe some kind of vowel next, but the rest was anyone’s guess. Probably the man’s mother’s originally. Mark settled on ‘Dumpert’. He looked like a ‘Dumpert’. That was probably it.
“Very good, sir. But no, let me assure you that this lampshade blocks out the perfect, exact amount of light you’d want it to. Enough shade to mask the bulb whilst still keeping the room bright. You’ll both love it.” He said baselessly, moving quickly from simpering, to speculative, to lying all in one statement. Mark looked at him questioningly.
“You’ve put it up in here and checked that?”
“Mark!” Clarissa chastised, slapping him on the arm. She was clearly in no mood for verification of claims, which was peculiar given that she demanded proof of Mark having not eaten her half of the trifle that morning. Dumpert smiled smarmily but said nothing. Mark had a grim suspicion that the silence wouldn’t last.
“I like it. We’ll take it. Put it in the basket, please, Mark.” Clarissa said decisively, if not sensibly.
“Really?”
“Really. It’s bright! Like I want our house to be. You’d regret it if we got home and you’d let a bargain like this slip by.” She justified, in a loose sense of the term.
“I know that he’ll regret us not buying it.” Mark muttered as he placed the lampshade in their basket as slowly as possible, performing the most regrettable act he could conceive with relation to that item.
“Brilliant choice, madam. Now what else can I do for you?” Dumpert said with his sickening, simpering smile.
‘You can piss off.’ Mark thought. ‘Peddling these shoddy ugly wares on poor exploitable Clarissa. And in the name of what? Charity?’ his train of thought slowed down. That didn’t sound particularly diabolical in the grand scheme of things. ‘But manipulating people into anything is never fair, especially when horrors like that lampshade are inflicted on them, and more importantly their otherwise innocent partners.’ He rationalised to himself.
“Do you have any fairy lights? We’d love some for the border around our mirror.” He heard Clarissa saying to Dumpert. Mark wasn’t convinced that ‘we’ wanted fairy lights at all, but given that she did, it was functionally the same. It wasn’t like she would force anything onto him that he really didn’t want in the house, but generally he just didn’t care enough to argue. He had absolutely no clue as to how to begin to worry about whether their walls were ‘eggshell’ or ‘eggshell on a bright but overcast day’. Their house was, therefore, slowly turning into her idea of a perfect home. At some point in her life she’d apparently gained the capacity to visualise how she wished to have her kitchen cabinets laid out, and since then she’d even gone so far as to introduce the concept of a ‘feature wall’ to their collective consciousness as a couple. It seemed to Mark that the primary, defining feature of a wall was to separate a room from everything else around it, and that all other walls were being declared implicitly ‘featureless walls’ despite doing their job perfectly well. It didn’t seem fair.
Whilst debating the moral conundrum of a brickwork caste system was an interesting problem, it wasn’t one to which Mark was going to dedicate any thought. As long as Clarissa was living in the house with him, Mark didn’t care about much else. Except the curtains. There was no way Mark would be willing to put up with that absolute jackass across the road, Mr Cavette, being able to look in through gaps in a Venetian blind, the nosy old bastard. No, there absolutely had to be a net curtain for privacy, and the main curtains were thick, they were black, and they were staying closed.
“I had some when I was younger, and I saw them in a few magazines recently so I think they’re coming back into fashion.” Clarissa continued, providing justification and details for her fairy lights that Dumpert would only use against her in the coming moments, given half a chance. It was one of the few situations in which Clarissa behaved in a stereotypically ‘girly’ way. She didn’t seem to have suffered too much gender conditioning in her time, although her hair conditioning was always second-to-none. But when it came to cute furnishings it was quite possible that all the stereotypes were in fact based on her.
“Ah, right here.” Dumpert said, lifting a box from a low shelf and opening the top. “These will be perfect.”
“They’re Christmas lights.” Mark said bluntly. Bright red, blue, green, and white plastic bulbs budded from the twisted wires like an aggressively festive vine.
“Nonsense! They’re multi-purpose string lights for internal use only. The cable has enough flexibility to wrap around a coniferous plant brought into the household at any time of year, for the celebration of your choice. Or you can tack them up to a wall, like the lovely lady wants, as a vibrant border. It’s coming back into fashion, you know?” Dumpert schmoozed, probably thinking that he was being clever. Mark was fairly sure that Clarissa would be buying the same items with or without his help, but didn’t know if he found that comforting or not.
“You wanted white lights for that, didn’t you?” he asked Clarissa directly. “These are clearly coloured. And that one’s a reindeer! They’re definitely Christmas lights!” He observed, noticing the shape of the plastic bulb for the first time.
“It’s just got a deer and er…” Dumpert cast a glance over the lights “bells and sleighs theme. Wouldn’t you want a cute deer in your living room?”
“It would be fairly precious.” Clarissa agreed. Mark stared at her. He knew she wasn’t that easily led or taken in, so there had to be something else going on. She was probably just agreeing with Dumpert so that it was two versus one against him, stripping him of social power in arguing back. Clarissa gave him a conspiratorial wink and sly smile, subtle but clear, when she caught his eye. Mark wasn’t even sure she wanted the damn lights after that; she was just loving winding him up. “Plus, we could just take the coloured plastic bits off and bam! White lights with no deer theme at all.” She added, hammering further nails into the ‘no-Christmas-lights’ coffin.
“You’re a pro!” Dumpert praised with overenthusiastic energy. “She’s a keeper this one, with good ideas like that.” he added to Mark, jabbing him with an elbow in the way which he probably thought seemed friendly. It only made Mark want to choke him out with the lights a little more. He liked to think that Clarissa was a ‘keeper’ for better reasons than ingenuity regarding string lights. “You’re completely right madam; these lights are so versatile that they’d be a bargain at twice the price.”
“I’ll take them. Basket please, Mark.” Clarissa said with a wide grin, winding the lights back into the box and holding it towards him. Mark took the box with an unimpressed expression, and made a point of pointing at where the box said ‘Economy Christmas Tree Lights’. Clarissa blew him a kiss, and then span on her heel to face deeper into the store.
Mark despaired. They’d only been in the shop for a few minutes and they’d already been duped into buying a lampshade made from melted down children’s toys and a string of Christmas lights for the summery bedroom. At this rate they’d be broke by lunchtime and have to give up the house anyway. He considered telling Dumpert that he was a priest and had to make it back to church in time for mass, but without a dog collar it’d never work. Besides which, it was a Wednesday. Clarissa usually had his back with those kinds of things, especially when it came to theocratic deception, but Mark suspected that she’d find a way out of it under these circumstances. Ending the shopping spree would not be on her agenda.
Lingering further beyond the lampshades, Christmas decorations, and deeply unpleasant kitchenware was a whole lot more shop. Untold quantities of tat were resting there and waiting for a gullible victim to claim them. These things were literally discarded by their previous owners for being of no use, of no aesthetic value, or in the case of that flipping lampshade both. And here Clarissa was, paying - actually paying real money - for something which had been declared worthless enough to give away to a shop. Still, it was better than paying thrice as much for a cleaner but equally crap new version. And the money went to the 'Save the Charities' campaign, which supported impoverished charitable organisations against dissolution. Mark had always hoped that the dissolution was literal, and that failing charities were doused in acid, but was yet to find any evidence that it was the case.
Mark found instead that he had been staring blankly at an integrated salt and pepper shaker whilst lost in his thoughts. Panic set in, as he worried that an onlooker might assume he was trying, unsuccessfully, to work out how it could function for both salt and pepper. Fortunately there was no-one else in the shop except for Clarissa and Dumpert, so his embarrassment would be limited to both of them knowing that he was agreeing to purchase that bloody lampshade. He looked up to see where Clarissa had gone, hoping that it was ‘out of the shop forever’. When he noticed that she was only a few feet away, browsing a set of tablecloths, it was the only time that he had ever been disappointed to see her. His disappointment at seeing Dumpert, especially within smarminess range, grew every time.
“We’re going for a very earthy theme in the dining room, sort of a terracotta colour for the walls and natural tones for the furniture.” Clarissa told Dumpert, as if he could possibly offer any insight into which of the five table cloths in the shop would be best. She knew all the colours it was supposed to go with, and therefore held all the information. If she was only telling him out of politeness then she should have been able to work out by now that Dumpert did not deserve it.
“Earthy is a very good choice for a dining room. I’d recommend this muted but dazzling brown woollen tablecloth. These tassels will give it that ‘hanging moss’ look to really blend it all into a forest theme.” Dumpert reeled off, doing a vocal cattle defecation impression but with much higher throughput.
“Yeah, so I don’t really want the forest brown. I like this linen cloth in Moroccan blush.” Clarissa said. Mark hurried over and looked closely; it sounded like she’d just discovered an entirely new colour, but he realised with deflation that the words she had meant to say were ‘light brown’.
"Do you like the colour then, Mark?" Clarissa asked with some surprise, misinterpreting his energy as enthusiasm for the tablecloth.
"I don't dislike like it. It's fine." Mark opined, or more accurately anti-opined.
"That counts as consent, I suppose.” Clarissa said begrudgingly, turning slowly back towards the tablecloth. “But I don't really like the texture. It's a bit thinner than I was hoping. If we could find something half way between the thick forest brown one and the thin Moroccan blush one then that would be about perfect."
"Looks like they only have these five though. We can just look online or something. Or try another charity shop if you're that dedicated to this." Mark said, trying to steer her away.
"Let's not be too hasty." Dumpert said, leaning over their shoulders. "What about..." He said, meandering away like the worm he was. A few seconds later it returned "...these!?" He asked, holding up what was clearly a pair of light brown curtains. The curtain rings facing right towards Mark and Clarissa.
Clarissa stifled a laugh. Mark just stared incredulously. Did Dumpert really think they were going to choose to lay curtains over their dining table in lieu of a tablecloth?
“Those are-” Mark started, but Clarissa hit him on the arm again to shut him up.
“Tell me more, please.” Clarissa said, shaking with the brave effort to fight down her grin. “What are those rings for?”
Dumpert clapped his hands together.
“What are they for? Well, what aren’t they for?”
“Chilling food for long term storage.” Mark said with alarming speed. Clarissa was forced to take a moment and wonder why that was on his mind. Mark himself had been taken completely by surprise, so no-one would ever know for sure. Her attention returned quickly to Dumpert.
“Seriously though, what are they for?” she asked, curious with what he was about to come out with. She hoped it was good. Or absolutely awful. Either option would be entertaining.
“Well, they’re, uh, they’re for keeping the tablecloth secured to the table aren’t they? You can, er, you can pass a cord through them and hold it in place.”
Clarissa snorted and tried to pass it off as a cough, unconvincingly. It was still more subtle than Mark, however, who raised one eyebrow and lowered the other, glaring at Dumpert. Did he really think that he’d get away with that? It was an accusation that not only would he and Clarissa mistake curtains for a tablecloth, but they’d confuse tablecloths with trousers too. Mark couldn’t bring himself to form words, his tongue locked in place by the shackles of disbelief and feeling mildly insulted. Dumpert offered no further explanation or justification, perhaps electing that adding anything more to the story would only risk exposing the ruse.
“Oh… oh right.” Clarissa finally managed, once she’d regained her control. “Of course. I’m not sure I’ve had many problems with my tablecloths spontaneously falling off the table.” She paused, grinning. “It seems a bit strange to only have belt loops at one end of the tablecloth as well.”
“The table might be on a slight slope.” Dumpert offered, at least paying them the courtesy of not sounding entirely convinced himself.
This time Clarissa was powerless. She doubled-over cackling and nearly collapsed onto a nearby shelf of garden ornaments and old calendars, leaning on a tasteless, and seatless, wicker chair for support. Mark wrapped his arms around her and tried to keep her from crushing any of the already broken furniture or somehow devaluing the already worthless calendar collection. It also provided an ideal mechanism with which to hide his own descent to laughter from Dumpert’s brave attempt at selling the curtain loops as a useful addition.
For his own part, Dumpert was indulging himself in another of his insincere laughs in an effort to be inclusive. Sustaining it for as long as Clarissa’s mirth continued, however, proved to be beyond even his considerable talents for deception. Eventually he just settled on waiting quietly, staring awkwardly at Clarissa and Mark as they tried to compose themselves, and clutching his multi-purpose fabric sheet complete with utility rings.
“Sorry! Sorry. Thankfully our dining room floor isn’t on a slope, so we don’t need to suspend the cloth from one end.” Clarissa told Dumpert. “I think we need to pass on the… erm…”
“They’re obviously curtains.” Mark helped, finally making the point that Clarissa was taking pleasure in dancing around. “And we’re not eating our dinner off them.”
“You’re not yet, but give them a chance. I bet you’ll never go back.” Dumpert pressed on with admirable determination.
“And I bet they’ll never get to the table in the first place. We’re really not interested in putting curtains, venetian blinds or frosted windows on the table.”
It had been an unsuccessful gambit to bank on the interchangeability of dinnerware and window dressings, but Dumpert refused to be beaten. He’d shift something onto these two to cover their table, somehow. Through his head he ran a roster of all the items in the shop, like a slot machine wheel racing through similarly unrelated symbols. There was an awful lot of white noise to sift through, but he caught a glimpse of something with potential in the chaotic assortment.
“One minute.” He said, dashing off with the spurned curtains.
“They were close to the right colour, at least.” Clarissa said sweetly, smirking at Mark. He simply shook his head.
Lurking among the ornaments, sundries and miscellany of the shop was a tiny cushion. No buttock would ever feel its support, for it was smaller than the palm of a hand. But it held far greater value than that, since it was in the shape of an owl and, as with all such items, Clarissa’s gaze darted through every distraction to fall upon it. The manifold other goods in the store may as well have been invisible. She had a special sense for picking out the owl’s shape, even through walls, and found herself drawn to it like a baby to its mother, or a doomed asteroid towards a black hole. Mark had long suspected that she heard them calling to her through some kind of psychic ether; it was probably why they were in this shop, in hindsight. She must have had a premonition of owl presence and subconsciously lured them here to find it.
Clarissa didn’t plan for the whole house to be owl-themed. Nor did she have designs on going out to buy memorabilia decorated with owls. But as soon as she saw them that was it; she had to have it. And the less business something had being owl-shaped the better, seemingly.
“Look at him!” Clarissa squealed, snatching the cushion up in one hand from between the loom and the mangle which had flanked it. “He’s adorable!”
“Yeah, it’s cute.” Mark agreed, with rather less vigour. He mostly said it to avoid dulling her sparkle, as was always the case when she inevitably presented him with an owl in a shop.
“He’d be great for the bedroom. Just imagine him snuggling up against the pillows!” she said with childish glee, imagining her anthropomorphised cushion feeling happy and safe in its new home. “We can’t just leave it here.”
“Get it if you want it.” Mark said magnanimously, after seeing the fifty pence price tag. Her happiness was probably worth at least that. The lampshade, on the other hand, definitely wasn’t.
Clarissa carefully perched the owl cushion between her lights and her lampshade as Dumpert re-appeared. Mark saw that the ‘Moroccan blush’ curtains had disappeared, and in their place he was carrying a bedsheet which Clarissa was probably about to call ‘Iberian embarrassment’.
“How about this lovely number? Fits right in with the colour scheme, it’s got no curtain loops or rings, and it’s soft so it won’t scratch your plates.” He espoused.
Another broad grin crept its way across Clarissa’s face, but she kept control of herself. All she could think about was if he’d eventually work his way through all fabrics in the shop until he offered them a rug. Or perhaps a collection of socks to tessellate together for superior table-shape versatility. She was almost shaking with anticipation.
“Bedsheets will probably wear through, though, won’t they?” Mark counter-pointed, after a brief pause to question himself over why exactly sheets were a bad idea. There had to be a reason they weren’t considered an adequate dinner table covering solution, after all. It had been a tough one to justify to himself, but he was determined not to give Dumpert the satisfaction.
“It’s not even a fitted one! At least the elastic would help in the event of our dining table being on a hill.” Clarissa observed helpfully, snickering.
Dumpert smiled, but if it had been empty before, it was now the embodiment of a powerful and spiteful god of hollowness. It was no longer enough that nothing lay behind the row of teeth and stretched lips; it was now an environment so hostile that survive beyond it was utterly impossible. But still the superficial façade persisted.
Mark caught Dumpert's eye as it drifted down to their basket and came to rest, with a suspicious squint, on the owl cushion. He rotated the basket a little to try to mask the cushion from the viper’s gaze, but that only made the situation worse; he'd just proven to Dumpert that he had found a weakness, a crack in their already patchy armour. Mark could see the oiled gears turning underneath the slicked-back hair.
"What if the multi-purpose cloth cover had an owl on it?" He said, barely even disguising that he already knew what the answer would be.
Clarissa perked up, her head rising in time with her piqued interest. Either there was more cute owl merchandise to find, or she was about to hear some really ambitious product framing. Either way, it was going to be good.
“Owls on it, you say?” she replied, attempting coyness but failing in the face of how obviously excited the prospect had made her.
Dumpert’s smiled broadened. It was the smile of a crocodile closing in on a thirsty wildebeest or careless tourist. It was the smile of a snake emerging from a vent into a ‘world’s most muscular mouse’ competition. It was the smile of a gecko getting away with insurance fraud. In fact, it would have suited any reptile about to come into good fortune at the expense of another.
“Right this way then!” Dumpert said. The pied piper of peddling tat led the way, playing his flute of owl-promises. Mark realised that he’d just, in metaphor, called Clarissa a rat. Despite being a lover of rodents, she probably wouldn’t like that insinuation very much. Electing to re-frame his thoughts before accidentally uttering them, he decided that Dumpert was the Rumplestiltskin to Clarissa’s, whatever the name of the maiden from that story was called. Mark wished he’d been able to think of more apt metaphors, but Dumpert had finished leading them to the display of bedsheets, so he had to pay attention again. Literary devices would need to wait.
“What else can I say to convince you to walk out of here with this beauty?” Dumpert said, patting a child’s duvet cover. But this time, there were no smirks or sniggers. Clarissa didn’t send a knowing look to Mark. She was mesmerised by the barn owl swooping across the centre of the folded sheet, staring wide-eyed into every feathered detail.
“It’s so cool…”
“It’s still a duvet cover, Riss. We don’t have a child, or a child’s duvet, nor is it a good table cloth.” Mark said softly, using his most comforting tones. This was a delicate procedure, and the wrong move could lead to Clarissa’s independent streak shining through.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a tablecloth or anything does it. Imagine a tapestry for the feature wall.”
“A tapestry? We don’t live in a thirteenth century castle, Riss, we live in a three bed semi.”
“Every man’s house is his castle.” Dumpert reminded them both.
“We can have tapestries if we want to.” Clarissa asserted, agreeing with Dumpert’s assertion.
“If we’re going to have a tapestry then let’s get a good quality one from the…” Mark scrabbled in his mind for the correct term to describe a purveyor of tapestries. There probably hadn’t been such a term for a good few centuries, and not without good reason. “…from the national trust?”
“We’re not robbing a stately home, and we can’t afford historical relics.” Clarissa said firmly. She really wished that she would stop having to remind Mark of that.
“I know, I’m not contesting that! But we’re also not hanging up a second hand duvet cover as an artwork.”
“Who’s to say what constitutes art? As long as the lady likes it, what does it matter?” Dumpert said softly, slipping it into conversation like a stiletto blade between the ribs. Mark glared at him. It was a chess game pitting logic, taste, and frugality against irrational desires for a duvet cover, and Mark didn’t need someone trying to map Clarissa’s arguments onto a sensible basis for her.
“If you want a wall-hanging that badly then why don’t we have a look online for a decent picture that you really want, rather than just leaping for this one because it’s here?” he said, steering her away from the duvet without robbing her of the principle.
“Mmm, fine.” She resigned, pouting slightly at being deprived of the barn owl.
“What about this owl hot water bottle, then?” Dumpert offered, lifting it from a shelf to the side of him. “Just pour water in through this hole between his feet and you’ll be cosy all night.”
“You already have three hot water bottles, Riss.” Mark leapt in before Clarissa could agree to it. Or think too much about potentially agreeing. “If you get any more, then the bed might very well catch fire. Besides, I’m not totally convinced that you’ll enjoy the idea of pouring boiling water up an owl’s bottom.”
“Cloaca.” Clarissa corrected reflexively.
“Any orifice seems like a breach of trust.” Mark clarified.
“Or how about this owl tea cosy?” Dumpet tried, continuing the theme of inserting hot fluids into a bird of prey’s rear end, one way or another.
“We don’t own a teapot.” Mark parried, turning the blow aside.
“But we could buy one, and drink loads of tea.” Came the unexpected riposte from Clarissa.
“Yeah, but…” Mark paused. “Actually, no. That’s a great plan.” He conceded, taking the tea cosy from Dumpert’s hand and dropping it into the basket.
Dumpert smirked, relishing the victory, however slight it had been. This was a rich vein of exploitative marketing, and he intended to mine it dry. Mark, on the other hand, steeled himself as guardian of the house, preventing an outright invasion by tenuously owl-themed crap.
More and more ambitiously marketed stock came flying towards the beset couple, Dumpert apparently possessing a limitless supply of incredibly niche goods. With the reactions of a caffeine-doped gazelle, Mark spat reasons for them not to purchase various items like a machine gun of negativity. Large items wouldn’t fit. Small items were needless clutter or served no practical purpose. Their soft furnishings were already soft enough, and the towels they had at home were both plentiful and not suspiciously stained.
Battling for the side of darkness, as Mark now interpreted the charity shop, Dumpert was also unleashing his full fury. He was flying high on updrafts of nonsensical consumer yearnings, and it fuelled increasingly bold sales gambits. The definition of an owl drifted outwards, first encompassing other birds of prey, then just birds, and then even particularly large-eyed mammals. These were easy targets for Mark, but as long as the flood of products didn’t abate, he would eventually let something slip through the net. The tea cosy had been a gateway, and an acknowledgement that all Dumpert needed to do was get a reason, however small, for them to need it. Clarissa would do the rest, and Mark would be powerless.
After fifteen minutes of relentless marketing, Dumpert disappeared into the store room at the back to search for anything he might have missed. Mark was exhausted, both emotionally from the debate, and physically from having to push some of the larger goods on offer away. He had no idea where all these donations had come from, but was beginning to suspect that an owl sanctuary had recently been shut down.
“This guy’s pretty persistent isn’t he? Has some nice things though…” Clarissa said, overwhelmed by the concentration of owl products in proximity to her. It must have been completely whitewashing her special owl sense.
"He's just trying to manipulate you into buying things you don't want or need. Just because you like owls he's offering anything with an owl on it to tempt you." Mark said irritably.
"You mean, he learned what my tastes are and then offered me products from his shop which match those tastes?" Clarissa challenged.
"Would you- ugh, that's not the point. The point is that we don't need a tapestry or wall hanging of any variety, we don't need a set of owl-embossed silver plates, and there is absolutely no way that an owl-themed cross-trainer exists. You can clearly see he just slapped this owl sticker on the front. I’m doing what I can to keep this junk out of the house and I could do without you backing him up."
“At least he’s trying to find things which fit in with the theme. It’s more than you’ve been doing. Everything I look at in here you try to put me off.” Clarissa snapped. It hadn’t been such a problem when she was playing this game for sport, but now that she was genuinely tempted by the items on offer, it hurt to see Mark being so negative about it all. She’d been trying so hard to get their house to look like a home and Mark hadn’t exactly been trying to impact that process very much.
What really infuriated her, though, wasn’t the lack of effort on his part. It was that whilst Mark had no idea what he wanted from decorating the house, and repeatedly said he didn't have any strong opinions on the matter, he certainly knew exactly what he didn't want. Mostly, that seemed to be whatever she finally puzzled towards as a solution, with little to no help from him in getting there. Boundless problems were always difficult to solve, but doubly so when they in fact did have bounds, but secret ones which weren’t mentioned until the last minute.
“What? I’ve been trying to help you get the decorations right!” Mark defended himself incredulously.
“And you hate everything in here, do you? There’s so much which would go with our home in here, but all I get from you is ‘no’. Even a hint of what you actually like would be great, and don’t even come with all that ‘I don’t care’ nonsense because obviously” she indicated the raft of rejected items around herself “you do. I’m getting pretty sick of having to do this all myself and play the guessing game.”
“Where the hell did that come from? I… I’m trying to do my best but I’ve never sat around and thought about the dream shade of brown I have for my dining room. I can’t even begin to visualise what would look right or wrong, or what I would want from it aside from a place for food to be.”
“You seem to do a pretty good job of visualising when things wouldn’t work.” Clarissa muttered, annoyed.
“I’m sorry, Riss. I don’t do it on purpose.” Mark said, reaching a hand towards her shoulder.
“Check out, this beauty!” Dumpert declared proudly, striding back into the shop and making Mark jump. Clarissa’s jaw dropped so far that Mark was worried she might have become a python, preparing to swallow him whole for failing to pull his weight in furnishing the house. He couldn’t say he’d blame her, given how much it seemed to have hurt her. Just on the off-chance that imminent consumption wasn’t the case, however, he followed her gaze over to Dumpert. His own jaw made a similar break for reptilian standards.
Leaning backwards slightly to better carry the weight, Dumpert stood in front of them holding a solid wooden perch. Atop it, balancing unconvincingly on one leg was a Eurasian Eagle Owl which had undergone the indignity of amateur taxidermy and the humiliation of storage in the back of a charity shop. To its credit, Mark had immediately recognised the type of owl it used to be. However, it had started with the distinct advantage of looking exactly like what it was, and the work of its mounter had exclusively counteracted that.
This was untested ground, entirely unknown territory. It was one thing to have an owl-shaped cushion on the bed, but completely another to have the preserved body of a bird perched on the windowsill, looking at you. At least, looking at you with one eye; the other seemed far more concerned with something inside the owl’s own head.
“We could have our very own owl!” Clarissa finally said, her eyes alighting once more. Mark’s worst fear had come to fruition; she wanted the monstrosity.
“But…” he started, before checking himself. She’d just told him off for being so negative, and he already felt guilty enough. Turning her away from this when she looked so enthralled by it would just be another blow, but looking into that formaldehyde-addled face every day was in no way appealing. He just needed to make Clarissa see for herself what a terrible product this was.
“Hm?” Clarissa responded, daring him to tell her no.
“I… I mean… I think the top half of the beak is traditionally meant to be in line with the bottom half. And that they should both be at the same angle, rather than that… erm… arrowhead shape, I guess? But if you’re willing to overlook that then I am too.” Mark tip-toed through, uncertainly.
“It’s a surrealist piece.” Dumpert said from somewhere behind the head.
“An artistic conversation piece and so cute!” Clarissa said, still on the side of making the awful purchase.
“Yeah, great…” Mark said, trying to think. “It’s interesting, the way that the leg it isn’t standing on is all… erm… horizontal. On some level, I think we both knew that owls were destined to be ballerinas.”
Clarissa squinted suspiciously at Mark.
“That is fairly weird.” She accepted.
“Unique. It’s an objet d’art.” Dumpert interjected, offering an alternative explanation.
“Very unique.” Mark agreed. “I didn’t know that the bones in an owls foot would even let the claws make a perfect cross shape but… well here we are. They don’t look very broken so I guess they’re fine.”
Clarissa looked carefully at the raised foot and saw that Mark was right; it looked as if the owl was, in its eternal stance, attempting to explain how to draw a perfect plus symbol. In fairness it was doing a reasonably effective job, but between that, the ocular confusion and the interesting beak arrangement, the cuteness was diminished.
“Hmm. Yeah, well, perhaps it’s not the best one we could be picking up…”
Dumpert’s smiled wavered. Ten months he’d spent trying to shift this, until finally consigning it to the back room. To have such an opportunity present itself but then be swept away at the final moment was unacceptable.
“Sounds like the gentleman will be getting his way again.” He said conversationally, but with words steeped in venom.
Mark glared at him, nostrils flared. Manipulation and lying was one thing, but that statement was a nuclear bomb dropped onto the quiet homestead of Clarissa and Mark. He must have overheard their discussion from the back room, and he was using it against them both, not even slightly caring whether or not it damaged their happiness. He looked across to Clarissa, whose expression was morphing into one of conflict, and not necessarily aimed away from him. Time was of the essence. Whatever he said next would have to be good, and it would need to shut everything down.
“It does. Doesn’t it Mark?” she said, with the calm that lurks above unbridled rage.
He swallowed. Among the limitless reasons that buying this stuffed and desecrated owl was a bad idea, nothing was safe. Every turn was another nay-saying dismissal of something that Clarissa wanted. And he couldn’t very well say that he didn’t want owls in the house because that really might be the end of his relationship. If he’d only taken more of an interest in anything about the decoration, expressed positive opinions about a single aspect of the process. Even the colour of the flooring would have been something.
That was it.
“If you want it, then I’m perfectly happy to have it.” He said, starting slowly to buy time and organise his words. “But…”
“But what?”
“But… I’m not sure it’ll go with the colour scheme of any of the rooms in the house. It’s not enough of a… erm… Morrocan blush?” he said, not entirely confident in his own words, since describing African emotions rarely related to colour, but committing to it regardless. Clarissa’s rage didn’t deepen, so he carried on. “Owls are forest brown, because that’s where they live, so it’ll clash with the other furniture and the floor and stuff, won’t it? It’ll only physically fit in the lounge-diner, and we wanted that room to be earthy, and not woody.” He waited for approval, like a school child giving a spoken answer, and Clarissa’s expression evolved into evenness; better, but not perfect. His own face started to twist into confusion, but he was in too deep to stop now. “If there’s a difference, that is. Which I think there is. And I like the colour of the lounge-diner as it is, so it’d be a shame to have to change it for just one accessory. That’s why I think there is probably a better owl to purchase for the room than this one. Even though it’s lovely.” Mark finished, now looking like a panicked deer in the headlights of Clarissa’s judging gaze, and having spouted what might well have been a load of old tosh.
Dumpert said nothing. Mark tried a half-smile. Clarissa kept her even look for a few moments, then finally it twisted into a smirk. Fairly rapidly, the smirk descended into full-blown laughter.
Mark and Dumpert looked at one another, neither of them knowing exactly what this meant. There was no clear checkmate, no obvious victory on either side, just a cackling lady leaning on a cross-trainer with a sticker of a barn owl on the front. On and on she kept emitting gales of laughter, pausing for strained breath, and then laughing some more. Mark was worried that she might be about to die from hysteria.
“Ohh…” she finally managed when she could hold air in her body again. “That was fantastic. Some real marketing-grade meaningless waffle.” Clarissa said, grin beaming out and hands on her sides. “I thought that the sloped table was good but you attempting to talk about colour palettes is something else.” She said, sniggering again as she thought about it.
“I’m trying.” Mark said, with a pathetic sincerity.
“I know sweetheart, I know. Thank you. I don’t think we need this particular goose-stepping owl after all.”
“Would you like a receipt?” Dumpert asked. His over-friendly demeanour had taken a bashing in his defeat, and the owl staring, or half-staring, at him from the counter was a reminder of it. Another long stretch in the store room out back awaited.
“Please.” Clarissa said amiably as she moved Dumpert’s small victories from their basket to the tote bags she and Mark had brought with them. All told, it hadn’t been a bad day for the store; they’d shifted a set of Christmas lights, the ugliest lampshade, a tiny owl cushion, an owl tea cosy, several owl coasters, a watch with a picture of a snowy owl on the face, and a ‘HOOTY’ necklace. Mark would rather not have had documented evidence of how much they’d spent on this rubbish, but recognised that this at least gave him the means to return the goods, given half a chance.
The juddering sounds of a receipt printer spat out the memorial to Dumpert and Mark’s great battle, listing the causalities the young couple had suffered at the hands of the tyrannical charitable peddler.
“Your receipt, and fifty-seven pence in change.” A small paper bundle of coins changed hands.
“Here you go.” Mark said, dropping the coins into a collection tin by the till. A peace offering felt necessary, after committing the man to another day of looking at the abominable taxidermy.
“Thank you, sir. Hope to see you both again soon.” Dumpert said, with the normal amount of honesty.
“Thanks for that.” Clarissa said with a grin. “It was a hoot.”
“Yeah, cheers Dumpert” Mark added.
“What did you just call me?” Dumpert asked. He looked down at his own nametag, and then up again, but Mark was walking hurriedly out of the door.
“No, no, no. It’s, uh, it’s prime colour chic isn’t it? Bold, bright shades of red, blue, and green are very ‘in’ right now. Very lively. Makes the room energetic.” The salesman said, his oiled-back hair reflecting the lamp colours horribly. He seemed to have confused himself for a used-car dealer, but pushy sales techniques felt out of place for a third-hand, five pound lampshade. The commission just wouldn’t be worth it.
“I don’t think that ‘prime colour chic’ is a thing.” Mark muttered uncertainly.
“Of course it is! It’ll liven everything up.” Clarissa argued. He couldn’t believe that she was taking the salesman’s side on this. Or that the salesman had taken her side and she hadn’t immediately swapped over to Mark’s side for solidarity’s sake. Or something. They should definitely be forming a united front on this, that was the point, and it should clearly be an anti-‘hideous lampshade’ stance.
“It doesn’t look very thick either. It won’t do much shading at all will it?” Mark continued, changing tactics.
“It’s not meant to make the room dark is it, you walnut.” Clarissa argued back.
“No, but it’s also not meant to be the actual light source. Look at it! I’m yet to be convinced that it’s not lighting the shop.”
The salesman let out a loud, insincere laugh. Mark tried to see what his nametag said, but it was at a funny angle and reflected lampshade colours were obscuring most of it. There was definitely a ‘D’ at the start, and maybe some kind of vowel next, but the rest was anyone’s guess. Probably the man’s mother’s originally. Mark settled on ‘Dumpert’. He looked like a ‘Dumpert’. That was probably it.
“Very good, sir. But no, let me assure you that this lampshade blocks out the perfect, exact amount of light you’d want it to. Enough shade to mask the bulb whilst still keeping the room bright. You’ll both love it.” He said baselessly, moving quickly from simpering, to speculative, to lying all in one statement. Mark looked at him questioningly.
“You’ve put it up in here and checked that?”
“Mark!” Clarissa chastised, slapping him on the arm. She was clearly in no mood for verification of claims, which was peculiar given that she demanded proof of Mark having not eaten her half of the trifle that morning. Dumpert smiled smarmily but said nothing. Mark had a grim suspicion that the silence wouldn’t last.
“I like it. We’ll take it. Put it in the basket, please, Mark.” Clarissa said decisively, if not sensibly.
“Really?”
“Really. It’s bright! Like I want our house to be. You’d regret it if we got home and you’d let a bargain like this slip by.” She justified, in a loose sense of the term.
“I know that he’ll regret us not buying it.” Mark muttered as he placed the lampshade in their basket as slowly as possible, performing the most regrettable act he could conceive with relation to that item.
“Brilliant choice, madam. Now what else can I do for you?” Dumpert said with his sickening, simpering smile.
‘You can piss off.’ Mark thought. ‘Peddling these shoddy ugly wares on poor exploitable Clarissa. And in the name of what? Charity?’ his train of thought slowed down. That didn’t sound particularly diabolical in the grand scheme of things. ‘But manipulating people into anything is never fair, especially when horrors like that lampshade are inflicted on them, and more importantly their otherwise innocent partners.’ He rationalised to himself.
“Do you have any fairy lights? We’d love some for the border around our mirror.” He heard Clarissa saying to Dumpert. Mark wasn’t convinced that ‘we’ wanted fairy lights at all, but given that she did, it was functionally the same. It wasn’t like she would force anything onto him that he really didn’t want in the house, but generally he just didn’t care enough to argue. He had absolutely no clue as to how to begin to worry about whether their walls were ‘eggshell’ or ‘eggshell on a bright but overcast day’. Their house was, therefore, slowly turning into her idea of a perfect home. At some point in her life she’d apparently gained the capacity to visualise how she wished to have her kitchen cabinets laid out, and since then she’d even gone so far as to introduce the concept of a ‘feature wall’ to their collective consciousness as a couple. It seemed to Mark that the primary, defining feature of a wall was to separate a room from everything else around it, and that all other walls were being declared implicitly ‘featureless walls’ despite doing their job perfectly well. It didn’t seem fair.
Whilst debating the moral conundrum of a brickwork caste system was an interesting problem, it wasn’t one to which Mark was going to dedicate any thought. As long as Clarissa was living in the house with him, Mark didn’t care about much else. Except the curtains. There was no way Mark would be willing to put up with that absolute jackass across the road, Mr Cavette, being able to look in through gaps in a Venetian blind, the nosy old bastard. No, there absolutely had to be a net curtain for privacy, and the main curtains were thick, they were black, and they were staying closed.
“I had some when I was younger, and I saw them in a few magazines recently so I think they’re coming back into fashion.” Clarissa continued, providing justification and details for her fairy lights that Dumpert would only use against her in the coming moments, given half a chance. It was one of the few situations in which Clarissa behaved in a stereotypically ‘girly’ way. She didn’t seem to have suffered too much gender conditioning in her time, although her hair conditioning was always second-to-none. But when it came to cute furnishings it was quite possible that all the stereotypes were in fact based on her.
“Ah, right here.” Dumpert said, lifting a box from a low shelf and opening the top. “These will be perfect.”
“They’re Christmas lights.” Mark said bluntly. Bright red, blue, green, and white plastic bulbs budded from the twisted wires like an aggressively festive vine.
“Nonsense! They’re multi-purpose string lights for internal use only. The cable has enough flexibility to wrap around a coniferous plant brought into the household at any time of year, for the celebration of your choice. Or you can tack them up to a wall, like the lovely lady wants, as a vibrant border. It’s coming back into fashion, you know?” Dumpert schmoozed, probably thinking that he was being clever. Mark was fairly sure that Clarissa would be buying the same items with or without his help, but didn’t know if he found that comforting or not.
“You wanted white lights for that, didn’t you?” he asked Clarissa directly. “These are clearly coloured. And that one’s a reindeer! They’re definitely Christmas lights!” He observed, noticing the shape of the plastic bulb for the first time.
“It’s just got a deer and er…” Dumpert cast a glance over the lights “bells and sleighs theme. Wouldn’t you want a cute deer in your living room?”
“It would be fairly precious.” Clarissa agreed. Mark stared at her. He knew she wasn’t that easily led or taken in, so there had to be something else going on. She was probably just agreeing with Dumpert so that it was two versus one against him, stripping him of social power in arguing back. Clarissa gave him a conspiratorial wink and sly smile, subtle but clear, when she caught his eye. Mark wasn’t even sure she wanted the damn lights after that; she was just loving winding him up. “Plus, we could just take the coloured plastic bits off and bam! White lights with no deer theme at all.” She added, hammering further nails into the ‘no-Christmas-lights’ coffin.
“You’re a pro!” Dumpert praised with overenthusiastic energy. “She’s a keeper this one, with good ideas like that.” he added to Mark, jabbing him with an elbow in the way which he probably thought seemed friendly. It only made Mark want to choke him out with the lights a little more. He liked to think that Clarissa was a ‘keeper’ for better reasons than ingenuity regarding string lights. “You’re completely right madam; these lights are so versatile that they’d be a bargain at twice the price.”
“I’ll take them. Basket please, Mark.” Clarissa said with a wide grin, winding the lights back into the box and holding it towards him. Mark took the box with an unimpressed expression, and made a point of pointing at where the box said ‘Economy Christmas Tree Lights’. Clarissa blew him a kiss, and then span on her heel to face deeper into the store.
Mark despaired. They’d only been in the shop for a few minutes and they’d already been duped into buying a lampshade made from melted down children’s toys and a string of Christmas lights for the summery bedroom. At this rate they’d be broke by lunchtime and have to give up the house anyway. He considered telling Dumpert that he was a priest and had to make it back to church in time for mass, but without a dog collar it’d never work. Besides which, it was a Wednesday. Clarissa usually had his back with those kinds of things, especially when it came to theocratic deception, but Mark suspected that she’d find a way out of it under these circumstances. Ending the shopping spree would not be on her agenda.
Lingering further beyond the lampshades, Christmas decorations, and deeply unpleasant kitchenware was a whole lot more shop. Untold quantities of tat were resting there and waiting for a gullible victim to claim them. These things were literally discarded by their previous owners for being of no use, of no aesthetic value, or in the case of that flipping lampshade both. And here Clarissa was, paying - actually paying real money - for something which had been declared worthless enough to give away to a shop. Still, it was better than paying thrice as much for a cleaner but equally crap new version. And the money went to the 'Save the Charities' campaign, which supported impoverished charitable organisations against dissolution. Mark had always hoped that the dissolution was literal, and that failing charities were doused in acid, but was yet to find any evidence that it was the case.
Mark found instead that he had been staring blankly at an integrated salt and pepper shaker whilst lost in his thoughts. Panic set in, as he worried that an onlooker might assume he was trying, unsuccessfully, to work out how it could function for both salt and pepper. Fortunately there was no-one else in the shop except for Clarissa and Dumpert, so his embarrassment would be limited to both of them knowing that he was agreeing to purchase that bloody lampshade. He looked up to see where Clarissa had gone, hoping that it was ‘out of the shop forever’. When he noticed that she was only a few feet away, browsing a set of tablecloths, it was the only time that he had ever been disappointed to see her. His disappointment at seeing Dumpert, especially within smarminess range, grew every time.
“We’re going for a very earthy theme in the dining room, sort of a terracotta colour for the walls and natural tones for the furniture.” Clarissa told Dumpert, as if he could possibly offer any insight into which of the five table cloths in the shop would be best. She knew all the colours it was supposed to go with, and therefore held all the information. If she was only telling him out of politeness then she should have been able to work out by now that Dumpert did not deserve it.
“Earthy is a very good choice for a dining room. I’d recommend this muted but dazzling brown woollen tablecloth. These tassels will give it that ‘hanging moss’ look to really blend it all into a forest theme.” Dumpert reeled off, doing a vocal cattle defecation impression but with much higher throughput.
“Yeah, so I don’t really want the forest brown. I like this linen cloth in Moroccan blush.” Clarissa said. Mark hurried over and looked closely; it sounded like she’d just discovered an entirely new colour, but he realised with deflation that the words she had meant to say were ‘light brown’.
"Do you like the colour then, Mark?" Clarissa asked with some surprise, misinterpreting his energy as enthusiasm for the tablecloth.
"I don't dislike like it. It's fine." Mark opined, or more accurately anti-opined.
"That counts as consent, I suppose.” Clarissa said begrudgingly, turning slowly back towards the tablecloth. “But I don't really like the texture. It's a bit thinner than I was hoping. If we could find something half way between the thick forest brown one and the thin Moroccan blush one then that would be about perfect."
"Looks like they only have these five though. We can just look online or something. Or try another charity shop if you're that dedicated to this." Mark said, trying to steer her away.
"Let's not be too hasty." Dumpert said, leaning over their shoulders. "What about..." He said, meandering away like the worm he was. A few seconds later it returned "...these!?" He asked, holding up what was clearly a pair of light brown curtains. The curtain rings facing right towards Mark and Clarissa.
Clarissa stifled a laugh. Mark just stared incredulously. Did Dumpert really think they were going to choose to lay curtains over their dining table in lieu of a tablecloth?
“Those are-” Mark started, but Clarissa hit him on the arm again to shut him up.
“Tell me more, please.” Clarissa said, shaking with the brave effort to fight down her grin. “What are those rings for?”
Dumpert clapped his hands together.
“What are they for? Well, what aren’t they for?”
“Chilling food for long term storage.” Mark said with alarming speed. Clarissa was forced to take a moment and wonder why that was on his mind. Mark himself had been taken completely by surprise, so no-one would ever know for sure. Her attention returned quickly to Dumpert.
“Seriously though, what are they for?” she asked, curious with what he was about to come out with. She hoped it was good. Or absolutely awful. Either option would be entertaining.
“Well, they’re, uh, they’re for keeping the tablecloth secured to the table aren’t they? You can, er, you can pass a cord through them and hold it in place.”
Clarissa snorted and tried to pass it off as a cough, unconvincingly. It was still more subtle than Mark, however, who raised one eyebrow and lowered the other, glaring at Dumpert. Did he really think that he’d get away with that? It was an accusation that not only would he and Clarissa mistake curtains for a tablecloth, but they’d confuse tablecloths with trousers too. Mark couldn’t bring himself to form words, his tongue locked in place by the shackles of disbelief and feeling mildly insulted. Dumpert offered no further explanation or justification, perhaps electing that adding anything more to the story would only risk exposing the ruse.
“Oh… oh right.” Clarissa finally managed, once she’d regained her control. “Of course. I’m not sure I’ve had many problems with my tablecloths spontaneously falling off the table.” She paused, grinning. “It seems a bit strange to only have belt loops at one end of the tablecloth as well.”
“The table might be on a slight slope.” Dumpert offered, at least paying them the courtesy of not sounding entirely convinced himself.
This time Clarissa was powerless. She doubled-over cackling and nearly collapsed onto a nearby shelf of garden ornaments and old calendars, leaning on a tasteless, and seatless, wicker chair for support. Mark wrapped his arms around her and tried to keep her from crushing any of the already broken furniture or somehow devaluing the already worthless calendar collection. It also provided an ideal mechanism with which to hide his own descent to laughter from Dumpert’s brave attempt at selling the curtain loops as a useful addition.
For his own part, Dumpert was indulging himself in another of his insincere laughs in an effort to be inclusive. Sustaining it for as long as Clarissa’s mirth continued, however, proved to be beyond even his considerable talents for deception. Eventually he just settled on waiting quietly, staring awkwardly at Clarissa and Mark as they tried to compose themselves, and clutching his multi-purpose fabric sheet complete with utility rings.
“Sorry! Sorry. Thankfully our dining room floor isn’t on a slope, so we don’t need to suspend the cloth from one end.” Clarissa told Dumpert. “I think we need to pass on the… erm…”
“They’re obviously curtains.” Mark helped, finally making the point that Clarissa was taking pleasure in dancing around. “And we’re not eating our dinner off them.”
“You’re not yet, but give them a chance. I bet you’ll never go back.” Dumpert pressed on with admirable determination.
“And I bet they’ll never get to the table in the first place. We’re really not interested in putting curtains, venetian blinds or frosted windows on the table.”
It had been an unsuccessful gambit to bank on the interchangeability of dinnerware and window dressings, but Dumpert refused to be beaten. He’d shift something onto these two to cover their table, somehow. Through his head he ran a roster of all the items in the shop, like a slot machine wheel racing through similarly unrelated symbols. There was an awful lot of white noise to sift through, but he caught a glimpse of something with potential in the chaotic assortment.
“One minute.” He said, dashing off with the spurned curtains.
“They were close to the right colour, at least.” Clarissa said sweetly, smirking at Mark. He simply shook his head.
Lurking among the ornaments, sundries and miscellany of the shop was a tiny cushion. No buttock would ever feel its support, for it was smaller than the palm of a hand. But it held far greater value than that, since it was in the shape of an owl and, as with all such items, Clarissa’s gaze darted through every distraction to fall upon it. The manifold other goods in the store may as well have been invisible. She had a special sense for picking out the owl’s shape, even through walls, and found herself drawn to it like a baby to its mother, or a doomed asteroid towards a black hole. Mark had long suspected that she heard them calling to her through some kind of psychic ether; it was probably why they were in this shop, in hindsight. She must have had a premonition of owl presence and subconsciously lured them here to find it.
Clarissa didn’t plan for the whole house to be owl-themed. Nor did she have designs on going out to buy memorabilia decorated with owls. But as soon as she saw them that was it; she had to have it. And the less business something had being owl-shaped the better, seemingly.
“Look at him!” Clarissa squealed, snatching the cushion up in one hand from between the loom and the mangle which had flanked it. “He’s adorable!”
“Yeah, it’s cute.” Mark agreed, with rather less vigour. He mostly said it to avoid dulling her sparkle, as was always the case when she inevitably presented him with an owl in a shop.
“He’d be great for the bedroom. Just imagine him snuggling up against the pillows!” she said with childish glee, imagining her anthropomorphised cushion feeling happy and safe in its new home. “We can’t just leave it here.”
“Get it if you want it.” Mark said magnanimously, after seeing the fifty pence price tag. Her happiness was probably worth at least that. The lampshade, on the other hand, definitely wasn’t.
Clarissa carefully perched the owl cushion between her lights and her lampshade as Dumpert re-appeared. Mark saw that the ‘Moroccan blush’ curtains had disappeared, and in their place he was carrying a bedsheet which Clarissa was probably about to call ‘Iberian embarrassment’.
“How about this lovely number? Fits right in with the colour scheme, it’s got no curtain loops or rings, and it’s soft so it won’t scratch your plates.” He espoused.
Another broad grin crept its way across Clarissa’s face, but she kept control of herself. All she could think about was if he’d eventually work his way through all fabrics in the shop until he offered them a rug. Or perhaps a collection of socks to tessellate together for superior table-shape versatility. She was almost shaking with anticipation.
“Bedsheets will probably wear through, though, won’t they?” Mark counter-pointed, after a brief pause to question himself over why exactly sheets were a bad idea. There had to be a reason they weren’t considered an adequate dinner table covering solution, after all. It had been a tough one to justify to himself, but he was determined not to give Dumpert the satisfaction.
“It’s not even a fitted one! At least the elastic would help in the event of our dining table being on a hill.” Clarissa observed helpfully, snickering.
Dumpert smiled, but if it had been empty before, it was now the embodiment of a powerful and spiteful god of hollowness. It was no longer enough that nothing lay behind the row of teeth and stretched lips; it was now an environment so hostile that survive beyond it was utterly impossible. But still the superficial façade persisted.
Mark caught Dumpert's eye as it drifted down to their basket and came to rest, with a suspicious squint, on the owl cushion. He rotated the basket a little to try to mask the cushion from the viper’s gaze, but that only made the situation worse; he'd just proven to Dumpert that he had found a weakness, a crack in their already patchy armour. Mark could see the oiled gears turning underneath the slicked-back hair.
"What if the multi-purpose cloth cover had an owl on it?" He said, barely even disguising that he already knew what the answer would be.
Clarissa perked up, her head rising in time with her piqued interest. Either there was more cute owl merchandise to find, or she was about to hear some really ambitious product framing. Either way, it was going to be good.
“Owls on it, you say?” she replied, attempting coyness but failing in the face of how obviously excited the prospect had made her.
Dumpert’s smiled broadened. It was the smile of a crocodile closing in on a thirsty wildebeest or careless tourist. It was the smile of a snake emerging from a vent into a ‘world’s most muscular mouse’ competition. It was the smile of a gecko getting away with insurance fraud. In fact, it would have suited any reptile about to come into good fortune at the expense of another.
“Right this way then!” Dumpert said. The pied piper of peddling tat led the way, playing his flute of owl-promises. Mark realised that he’d just, in metaphor, called Clarissa a rat. Despite being a lover of rodents, she probably wouldn’t like that insinuation very much. Electing to re-frame his thoughts before accidentally uttering them, he decided that Dumpert was the Rumplestiltskin to Clarissa’s, whatever the name of the maiden from that story was called. Mark wished he’d been able to think of more apt metaphors, but Dumpert had finished leading them to the display of bedsheets, so he had to pay attention again. Literary devices would need to wait.
“What else can I say to convince you to walk out of here with this beauty?” Dumpert said, patting a child’s duvet cover. But this time, there were no smirks or sniggers. Clarissa didn’t send a knowing look to Mark. She was mesmerised by the barn owl swooping across the centre of the folded sheet, staring wide-eyed into every feathered detail.
“It’s so cool…”
“It’s still a duvet cover, Riss. We don’t have a child, or a child’s duvet, nor is it a good table cloth.” Mark said softly, using his most comforting tones. This was a delicate procedure, and the wrong move could lead to Clarissa’s independent streak shining through.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a tablecloth or anything does it. Imagine a tapestry for the feature wall.”
“A tapestry? We don’t live in a thirteenth century castle, Riss, we live in a three bed semi.”
“Every man’s house is his castle.” Dumpert reminded them both.
“We can have tapestries if we want to.” Clarissa asserted, agreeing with Dumpert’s assertion.
“If we’re going to have a tapestry then let’s get a good quality one from the…” Mark scrabbled in his mind for the correct term to describe a purveyor of tapestries. There probably hadn’t been such a term for a good few centuries, and not without good reason. “…from the national trust?”
“We’re not robbing a stately home, and we can’t afford historical relics.” Clarissa said firmly. She really wished that she would stop having to remind Mark of that.
“I know, I’m not contesting that! But we’re also not hanging up a second hand duvet cover as an artwork.”
“Who’s to say what constitutes art? As long as the lady likes it, what does it matter?” Dumpert said softly, slipping it into conversation like a stiletto blade between the ribs. Mark glared at him. It was a chess game pitting logic, taste, and frugality against irrational desires for a duvet cover, and Mark didn’t need someone trying to map Clarissa’s arguments onto a sensible basis for her.
“If you want a wall-hanging that badly then why don’t we have a look online for a decent picture that you really want, rather than just leaping for this one because it’s here?” he said, steering her away from the duvet without robbing her of the principle.
“Mmm, fine.” She resigned, pouting slightly at being deprived of the barn owl.
“What about this owl hot water bottle, then?” Dumpert offered, lifting it from a shelf to the side of him. “Just pour water in through this hole between his feet and you’ll be cosy all night.”
“You already have three hot water bottles, Riss.” Mark leapt in before Clarissa could agree to it. Or think too much about potentially agreeing. “If you get any more, then the bed might very well catch fire. Besides, I’m not totally convinced that you’ll enjoy the idea of pouring boiling water up an owl’s bottom.”
“Cloaca.” Clarissa corrected reflexively.
“Any orifice seems like a breach of trust.” Mark clarified.
“Or how about this owl tea cosy?” Dumpet tried, continuing the theme of inserting hot fluids into a bird of prey’s rear end, one way or another.
“We don’t own a teapot.” Mark parried, turning the blow aside.
“But we could buy one, and drink loads of tea.” Came the unexpected riposte from Clarissa.
“Yeah, but…” Mark paused. “Actually, no. That’s a great plan.” He conceded, taking the tea cosy from Dumpert’s hand and dropping it into the basket.
Dumpert smirked, relishing the victory, however slight it had been. This was a rich vein of exploitative marketing, and he intended to mine it dry. Mark, on the other hand, steeled himself as guardian of the house, preventing an outright invasion by tenuously owl-themed crap.
More and more ambitiously marketed stock came flying towards the beset couple, Dumpert apparently possessing a limitless supply of incredibly niche goods. With the reactions of a caffeine-doped gazelle, Mark spat reasons for them not to purchase various items like a machine gun of negativity. Large items wouldn’t fit. Small items were needless clutter or served no practical purpose. Their soft furnishings were already soft enough, and the towels they had at home were both plentiful and not suspiciously stained.
Battling for the side of darkness, as Mark now interpreted the charity shop, Dumpert was also unleashing his full fury. He was flying high on updrafts of nonsensical consumer yearnings, and it fuelled increasingly bold sales gambits. The definition of an owl drifted outwards, first encompassing other birds of prey, then just birds, and then even particularly large-eyed mammals. These were easy targets for Mark, but as long as the flood of products didn’t abate, he would eventually let something slip through the net. The tea cosy had been a gateway, and an acknowledgement that all Dumpert needed to do was get a reason, however small, for them to need it. Clarissa would do the rest, and Mark would be powerless.
After fifteen minutes of relentless marketing, Dumpert disappeared into the store room at the back to search for anything he might have missed. Mark was exhausted, both emotionally from the debate, and physically from having to push some of the larger goods on offer away. He had no idea where all these donations had come from, but was beginning to suspect that an owl sanctuary had recently been shut down.
“This guy’s pretty persistent isn’t he? Has some nice things though…” Clarissa said, overwhelmed by the concentration of owl products in proximity to her. It must have been completely whitewashing her special owl sense.
"He's just trying to manipulate you into buying things you don't want or need. Just because you like owls he's offering anything with an owl on it to tempt you." Mark said irritably.
"You mean, he learned what my tastes are and then offered me products from his shop which match those tastes?" Clarissa challenged.
"Would you- ugh, that's not the point. The point is that we don't need a tapestry or wall hanging of any variety, we don't need a set of owl-embossed silver plates, and there is absolutely no way that an owl-themed cross-trainer exists. You can clearly see he just slapped this owl sticker on the front. I’m doing what I can to keep this junk out of the house and I could do without you backing him up."
“At least he’s trying to find things which fit in with the theme. It’s more than you’ve been doing. Everything I look at in here you try to put me off.” Clarissa snapped. It hadn’t been such a problem when she was playing this game for sport, but now that she was genuinely tempted by the items on offer, it hurt to see Mark being so negative about it all. She’d been trying so hard to get their house to look like a home and Mark hadn’t exactly been trying to impact that process very much.
What really infuriated her, though, wasn’t the lack of effort on his part. It was that whilst Mark had no idea what he wanted from decorating the house, and repeatedly said he didn't have any strong opinions on the matter, he certainly knew exactly what he didn't want. Mostly, that seemed to be whatever she finally puzzled towards as a solution, with little to no help from him in getting there. Boundless problems were always difficult to solve, but doubly so when they in fact did have bounds, but secret ones which weren’t mentioned until the last minute.
“What? I’ve been trying to help you get the decorations right!” Mark defended himself incredulously.
“And you hate everything in here, do you? There’s so much which would go with our home in here, but all I get from you is ‘no’. Even a hint of what you actually like would be great, and don’t even come with all that ‘I don’t care’ nonsense because obviously” she indicated the raft of rejected items around herself “you do. I’m getting pretty sick of having to do this all myself and play the guessing game.”
“Where the hell did that come from? I… I’m trying to do my best but I’ve never sat around and thought about the dream shade of brown I have for my dining room. I can’t even begin to visualise what would look right or wrong, or what I would want from it aside from a place for food to be.”
“You seem to do a pretty good job of visualising when things wouldn’t work.” Clarissa muttered, annoyed.
“I’m sorry, Riss. I don’t do it on purpose.” Mark said, reaching a hand towards her shoulder.
“Check out, this beauty!” Dumpert declared proudly, striding back into the shop and making Mark jump. Clarissa’s jaw dropped so far that Mark was worried she might have become a python, preparing to swallow him whole for failing to pull his weight in furnishing the house. He couldn’t say he’d blame her, given how much it seemed to have hurt her. Just on the off-chance that imminent consumption wasn’t the case, however, he followed her gaze over to Dumpert. His own jaw made a similar break for reptilian standards.
Leaning backwards slightly to better carry the weight, Dumpert stood in front of them holding a solid wooden perch. Atop it, balancing unconvincingly on one leg was a Eurasian Eagle Owl which had undergone the indignity of amateur taxidermy and the humiliation of storage in the back of a charity shop. To its credit, Mark had immediately recognised the type of owl it used to be. However, it had started with the distinct advantage of looking exactly like what it was, and the work of its mounter had exclusively counteracted that.
This was untested ground, entirely unknown territory. It was one thing to have an owl-shaped cushion on the bed, but completely another to have the preserved body of a bird perched on the windowsill, looking at you. At least, looking at you with one eye; the other seemed far more concerned with something inside the owl’s own head.
“We could have our very own owl!” Clarissa finally said, her eyes alighting once more. Mark’s worst fear had come to fruition; she wanted the monstrosity.
“But…” he started, before checking himself. She’d just told him off for being so negative, and he already felt guilty enough. Turning her away from this when she looked so enthralled by it would just be another blow, but looking into that formaldehyde-addled face every day was in no way appealing. He just needed to make Clarissa see for herself what a terrible product this was.
“Hm?” Clarissa responded, daring him to tell her no.
“I… I mean… I think the top half of the beak is traditionally meant to be in line with the bottom half. And that they should both be at the same angle, rather than that… erm… arrowhead shape, I guess? But if you’re willing to overlook that then I am too.” Mark tip-toed through, uncertainly.
“It’s a surrealist piece.” Dumpert said from somewhere behind the head.
“An artistic conversation piece and so cute!” Clarissa said, still on the side of making the awful purchase.
“Yeah, great…” Mark said, trying to think. “It’s interesting, the way that the leg it isn’t standing on is all… erm… horizontal. On some level, I think we both knew that owls were destined to be ballerinas.”
Clarissa squinted suspiciously at Mark.
“That is fairly weird.” She accepted.
“Unique. It’s an objet d’art.” Dumpert interjected, offering an alternative explanation.
“Very unique.” Mark agreed. “I didn’t know that the bones in an owls foot would even let the claws make a perfect cross shape but… well here we are. They don’t look very broken so I guess they’re fine.”
Clarissa looked carefully at the raised foot and saw that Mark was right; it looked as if the owl was, in its eternal stance, attempting to explain how to draw a perfect plus symbol. In fairness it was doing a reasonably effective job, but between that, the ocular confusion and the interesting beak arrangement, the cuteness was diminished.
“Hmm. Yeah, well, perhaps it’s not the best one we could be picking up…”
Dumpert’s smiled wavered. Ten months he’d spent trying to shift this, until finally consigning it to the back room. To have such an opportunity present itself but then be swept away at the final moment was unacceptable.
“Sounds like the gentleman will be getting his way again.” He said conversationally, but with words steeped in venom.
Mark glared at him, nostrils flared. Manipulation and lying was one thing, but that statement was a nuclear bomb dropped onto the quiet homestead of Clarissa and Mark. He must have overheard their discussion from the back room, and he was using it against them both, not even slightly caring whether or not it damaged their happiness. He looked across to Clarissa, whose expression was morphing into one of conflict, and not necessarily aimed away from him. Time was of the essence. Whatever he said next would have to be good, and it would need to shut everything down.
“It does. Doesn’t it Mark?” she said, with the calm that lurks above unbridled rage.
He swallowed. Among the limitless reasons that buying this stuffed and desecrated owl was a bad idea, nothing was safe. Every turn was another nay-saying dismissal of something that Clarissa wanted. And he couldn’t very well say that he didn’t want owls in the house because that really might be the end of his relationship. If he’d only taken more of an interest in anything about the decoration, expressed positive opinions about a single aspect of the process. Even the colour of the flooring would have been something.
That was it.
“If you want it, then I’m perfectly happy to have it.” He said, starting slowly to buy time and organise his words. “But…”
“But what?”
“But… I’m not sure it’ll go with the colour scheme of any of the rooms in the house. It’s not enough of a… erm… Morrocan blush?” he said, not entirely confident in his own words, since describing African emotions rarely related to colour, but committing to it regardless. Clarissa’s rage didn’t deepen, so he carried on. “Owls are forest brown, because that’s where they live, so it’ll clash with the other furniture and the floor and stuff, won’t it? It’ll only physically fit in the lounge-diner, and we wanted that room to be earthy, and not woody.” He waited for approval, like a school child giving a spoken answer, and Clarissa’s expression evolved into evenness; better, but not perfect. His own face started to twist into confusion, but he was in too deep to stop now. “If there’s a difference, that is. Which I think there is. And I like the colour of the lounge-diner as it is, so it’d be a shame to have to change it for just one accessory. That’s why I think there is probably a better owl to purchase for the room than this one. Even though it’s lovely.” Mark finished, now looking like a panicked deer in the headlights of Clarissa’s judging gaze, and having spouted what might well have been a load of old tosh.
Dumpert said nothing. Mark tried a half-smile. Clarissa kept her even look for a few moments, then finally it twisted into a smirk. Fairly rapidly, the smirk descended into full-blown laughter.
Mark and Dumpert looked at one another, neither of them knowing exactly what this meant. There was no clear checkmate, no obvious victory on either side, just a cackling lady leaning on a cross-trainer with a sticker of a barn owl on the front. On and on she kept emitting gales of laughter, pausing for strained breath, and then laughing some more. Mark was worried that she might be about to die from hysteria.
“Ohh…” she finally managed when she could hold air in her body again. “That was fantastic. Some real marketing-grade meaningless waffle.” Clarissa said, grin beaming out and hands on her sides. “I thought that the sloped table was good but you attempting to talk about colour palettes is something else.” She said, sniggering again as she thought about it.
“I’m trying.” Mark said, with a pathetic sincerity.
“I know sweetheart, I know. Thank you. I don’t think we need this particular goose-stepping owl after all.”
“Would you like a receipt?” Dumpert asked. His over-friendly demeanour had taken a bashing in his defeat, and the owl staring, or half-staring, at him from the counter was a reminder of it. Another long stretch in the store room out back awaited.
“Please.” Clarissa said amiably as she moved Dumpert’s small victories from their basket to the tote bags she and Mark had brought with them. All told, it hadn’t been a bad day for the store; they’d shifted a set of Christmas lights, the ugliest lampshade, a tiny owl cushion, an owl tea cosy, several owl coasters, a watch with a picture of a snowy owl on the face, and a ‘HOOTY’ necklace. Mark would rather not have had documented evidence of how much they’d spent on this rubbish, but recognised that this at least gave him the means to return the goods, given half a chance.
The juddering sounds of a receipt printer spat out the memorial to Dumpert and Mark’s great battle, listing the causalities the young couple had suffered at the hands of the tyrannical charitable peddler.
“Your receipt, and fifty-seven pence in change.” A small paper bundle of coins changed hands.
“Here you go.” Mark said, dropping the coins into a collection tin by the till. A peace offering felt necessary, after committing the man to another day of looking at the abominable taxidermy.
“Thank you, sir. Hope to see you both again soon.” Dumpert said, with the normal amount of honesty.
“Thanks for that.” Clarissa said with a grin. “It was a hoot.”
“Yeah, cheers Dumpert” Mark added.
“What did you just call me?” Dumpert asked. He looked down at his own nametag, and then up again, but Mark was walking hurriedly out of the door.