The old antique shop - part one
There was an old antique shop, one of the old kind, the real kind, close to where I grew up. I used to go down to it on Thursdays after school and sometimes the owner was in, sometimes he was not.
When he was away the shop was always managed by a Miss D (or Dee, I was never completely sure, and I never dared ask). She was an odd woman, my mother would say that she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t gotten married while she had the chance. As it was she was a bit too old, but her looks were good and she had a certain air about her - a scent of perfume perhaps, or mystery.
Despite this, she seemed perfectly happy to tend to Mr. Sullivans shop for him while he was away. She’d stand there behind the counter, back as straight as a pin in a high-collar dress, and I would wander about the store and marvel at the many wonders that Mr. Sullivan had brought with him from strange countries.
”Be careful with that, it’s very expensive,” she’d say when I got too close to a delicate vase that stood on a pedestal. Sometimes she’d have her nicer days and let me touch a heavy fur coat that had belonged to princess this-and-that in some land far to the north, or a piece of amber with a toad in it - which I found disgustingly fascinating.
The days I loved, however, were the ones when Mr. Sullivan was in. He’d always just returned from a new exciting country (some of which I wonder if they were even discovered at the time) and would always treat me to a cup of tea and a strange kind of chinese biscuits that had messages in them.
”It’s all truth.” He’d say, and his eyes would twinkle. ”But you’ve got to learn how to read them.”
I used to get messages like ”a bird in the hand gathers no moss” and other cryptical variations on familiar proverbs that I never could make any sense of, but every once in a while, Mr. Sullivan would get terribly excited and jump up from his chair, waving the little piece of paper.
”Strange happenings in Tibet! Oh, the opportunities!” Was the kind of thing he could shout, and the next week when I came to visit he would be gone, and Miss D would be back.
I never minded his disappearances very much though, because there was always so many exciting things with him when he came back.
”This,” he said once - putting a huge, sharp thing in my hand - ”is the fang of one of the long-gone sabre-toothed tigers, an animal that preyed upon our ancestors.” My little hand was barely large enough to clutch it, and I stared at it in marvel.
”Tomorrow I will sell it to a Lord” he said, and his eyes twinkled in that peculiar way of his. ”He will use it as a letter opener, and brag about it to all his guests, and it will finance my next trip to Africa.”
Oh, how I loved to hear his stories.
Mr. Sullivan had been everywhere, it seemed, and knew people of the royal houses in no less than twelve countries. He’d sell them his treasures, and they’d sell him some of theirs, and so it came to pass that a lot of very valuable items found their way into the old antique shop.