Change of Fortune

The day the men came to change their locks, Nancy was covering for Shonagh at Wee Giftie. Only £6.00 an hour, but the shop was warm and any money coming in was a help given their current predicament. She was explaining Haggis Hunting Season to a couple of giddy middle-aged ladies from Saskatchewan when Fiona came in, breathless, and told her about what was happening. Nancy left Fiona with the Canadians and drove home as fast as her elderly Ford Escort would let her.

Just in front of the flat was a man in a Land Rover, talking into his mobile phone. Two well-fed men were standing in front of the flat, talking, one carrying a toolbox and the other clutching a clipboard. They looked up when she approached, then quickly away. Beyond them Nancy could see a notice pasted to the front window, telling the world that the chattels inside still belonged to her even if the flat did not.  Chattels. Her potted plants, the laundry she’d left on the radiators, their cracked mugs, the sagging bed they slept on – chattels.

‘Do you live here, madam?’  The man with the clipboard addressed her. Nancy could see names written on the paper on his clipboard -- oh God, there was hers. And Stewart's too, right next to it.  She nodded, hardly trusting herself to speak.

‘Sheriff’s orders. You can come and collect your things, but you’ll have to contact us to let you in. One of us has to be present.’

Nancy nodded dumbly. She was aware of a roaring in her ears. The world around her seemed to have allowed her to spin off and she had the feeling that any minute she would be sucked up into a void. And no one would notice her absence, not one detail in her former surroundings would have changed.  People would eat, talk, laugh; cars would move along the roads; men with clipboards and toolboxes would go home to their warm flats and hot dinners and tell their families about the poor sods who hadn’t been able to make their mortgage payments. After all those warnings, too.

The two men, she noticed, could not quite meet her eye. One of them proffered a card. He tapped a number scrawled on the back. ‘That’s my mobile. Just call when you want to collect your things.’

Nancy nodded again. Stewart would be up in Lanark; he’d worried fleetingly that this might happen, but the finance company had come through before – no reason it shouldn’t happen again.  In two months’ time the dispute over his severance pay might even be settled – and it was even possible that one of the interviews he kept going on would pan out.

The two men left, looking both furtive and solemn. They got into their shiny late- model cars and drove away.

Nancy sat down on the front step and put her bag in her lap, her head aching as it all began to sink in. She’d left dishes in the sink. Trash day was tomorrow, and the bin was full – and they’d had fish for dinner; it would be stinking up the flat.  All of her houseplants needed watering; she’d meant to do it last night and the night before that... She was exhausted; every joint ached and she still had the remnants of last week’s cold. How in the world could they afford to pay a removals company to do it all?

This was all so crazy, so horrible. Three years ago they had a comfortable income and money in the bank. How could it all go wrong so fast?  Okay, maybe they'd taken a few unwise risks, made a few bad investments. And Stewart losing his job like that hadn't helped at all, especially when the severance pay they'd both been expecting hadn't been forthcoming. But to go from that to this in such a short time -- it just didn't seem fair.

Suddenly there was a streak of black as something shot into the hedge. Nancy looked up and could just see the tail of Casper, one of the local stray cats. He’d lived like a lord for a few years when he’d been taken in by an elderly lady who had coddled him; after she died he was on his own again and had to manage by scrounging and hunting. Some of the neighbors still fed him occasionally and Stewart, who loved cats, had tried to lure him with bits of chicken and fish, but Nancy had no patience with cats, never had.  They shat in your garden, scratched the furniture, yowled all night and kept you awake.

The cat crouched, eyeing her warily as if about to flee at the slightest movement. For a few moments, they stared at each other. Then the cat blinked and got stiffly to its feet. Perhaps remembering Stewart's offerings, it began to move towards her cautiously.

Nancy looked at the cat with distate. It had grown thin and scruffy living rough. She wished she could get up and go into her flat, make herself a cup of tea, turn on the fire, sit in a comfortable chair. Instead here she sat on the hard stoop, this bloody cat coming to her for a handout. She scooped up a handful of gravel and flung it at the cat with all her might.

The cat turned tail and ran. Nancy watched as it disappeared into the hedge. She sat a little while longer, wondering what on earth to do. The cat, crouching in the hedge, regarded her balefully. Nancy sighed.

She slowly rose to her feet and sighed again as she fumbled in her bag for her mobile. She hadn't eaten lunch yet, and she'd left the house without breakfast. She wondered if Fiona would put her up for a night or two.