Unwanted Baggage
Published February 2017
Like any self-respecting Englishman, I'd been feeling rather circumspect after St Hunniford's, the local C of E school, had burned down. All those children. Not to mention the teachers. All that paperwork left unticked...
However, at the nadir of my existentialism, I was confronted by "Biege" Barry McGee, the otiose local misanthrope. Muchly at odds with his quotidian omphaloskepsis, he had pranced over gaily with a moist smile smeared across his boat race. I welcomed the tricksy dichotomy as a distraction from my gloom, and asked Barry what had prompted his jocund countenance.
"I'm light as a feather," Barry warbled inanely as we ordered a rancid, overpriced coffee from a glass mausoleum masquerading as a national chain of coffee shops, the sort where mothers go to squawk at one another as their toddlers defecate obstreperously. Barry also requested a proliferation of profiteroles. Utter obscenity. "I went to that new shop just opened in town."
"What new shop?" I enquired. I brought the cup of ostentatious brown to my mouth, but my nostrils commanded me to abort the vulgar attempt at social acquiescence.
"Unwanted Baggage," gurgled Barry. "Just opened on the high street, next to the Lithuanian viticulturists."
I lit a fag with élan – the Devil take smoking regulations! – and sucked it down in one almighty inhalation. "So what did you buy to lift the weight from your soul, my dear old thing?"
"That's the thing. Nothing. I gave him something." Barry's voice wavered slightly, like an ambitiously stacked tower of pancakes left out in a strong breeze. "I gave him my old budgerigar."
"Trevor?!" Well that threw me, and no mistake. Trevor was Beige Barry's one true friend, the loser.
"Indeed," plumped Barry, posting profiteroles mouthbound. "Can't fathom it, me old chunturer, but since plopping him orf I've felt like a million gallons!"
My eyebrows danced about in eddy-like formations at the sheer curiousness of it all. I stuffed a sufficient amount of serviettes into my coffee cup to soak up the hideous beverage, thrust the dog-end of my fag into the rotten liquid where it drowned with a fizz, thanked Barry for his appalling company, and left.
#
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The next day I visited this Unwanted Baggage meself. It was a weird old tumbledown emporium, like it had grown rather than been built by men. Inside, the dusty, mouldering shelves – strange for a new shop – propped up an array of strange junk. Books without covers, bells without clappers, portraits, a pair of secateurs, candles, coins of various defunct demoninations, watches, billfolds, bits of chalk, rings, withering potted plants starved of the chance to photosynthesise, animal parts, blunt knives, the skeleton of a small bird in a cage - perhaps small enough as to be an ex-budgerigar, I pontificated mutinously - and a wheelbarrow-load of other old tut stacked many feet high.
A clacking noise, like a squirrel slung in a washing machine without having first been relieved of its nuts, greeted me, and I turned with a start. A seven-foot pipe-cleaner stood and clapped his hands before me, a triumvirate of spectacles balanced delicately on his nose.
"Good morning, customer," said the pipe cleaner. "I am Umbleton Turk. Welcome to my shop, Unwanted Baggage."
I nodded. He had a queer sort of accent, a sort of hybrid monstrosity of New York Jewish, Haitian Creole, Ural Russian and working class Australian, with a dash of Raj English and the merest hint of the most vicious of the secessionist French-Canadians. I treated him with caution.
"What do you need?" he asked.
I again studied the menagerie of crap. "Why don't you tell me about the shop?" I said, attempting not to heave at the mildewing odour of the place. The grave weight hanging on me the previous day had returned.
"I came to this place after me famlee drownded in that Crete shipping catastrophe," Umbleton laughed, using a Swiss army knife to fish a piece of grout from his teeth. He inspected it with the relish of a ladybird discovering a colony of whitefly larvae, and voraciously swallowed the rocken crumb, smacking his lips as he did so.
"The shipping disaster that was in the newspapers?" I asked.
"Indood, indood! The very same. Oh, I lost everything: me mam, me pam, and..." he attempted an arthritic wink, which came across more like a stroke. "...I lost me emotions. Can't feel a ruddy thing!"
"No emotions?"
"Nein, guv. I'm as cold as ice! So I opened up this shop, to feed on the feelings of others." He cast an inspectious eyeball over me, magnified grotesquely through his multi-strata approach to prescriptive ophthalmological lens-based treatment. "I wonder, what do you feel?"
"Me?" I pressed a hand to my chest in mock-something.
"Yes, you, friend. You got any emotions?"
"Um... maybe."
Umbleton clicked his fingers twenty-nine times, and looked at me. "Tells you what. Hand me any trinket of yours; anything you like. I promise you, you'll feel like a new cove."
I rummaged around in me pocketses and found me fags and Zippo. I brought them out, to Umbleton's apparent delight.
"I'll take 'em!" Umbleton descended into a whirligig of decrepit laughter as he swiped the unassuming doobreys. He shook the box of fags by his ear and gave the lighter a little lick. "Ooh, it tastes of guilt. Has somebody been a naughty monkey?"
Before I could answer he booted me out the shop, and put the 'We are indefinitely closed for LUNCHINGS' sign in the window. I was left on the pavement to ponder my queer encounter.
Whaddaya know? He was right. Guilt, all gone.
Next time I burn something down I'll feel like a million gallons.
​
END