On the edge

Chapter 1: James Winter

About a month had passed since Sue had set free her father's spirit, and ashes, at the top of Dover's white cliffs. She had been helping him with the shop before, for years actually, but he had refused to stay at the hospital until almost the very end. And once George had admitted to himself that he wouldn't be able to die in his home of over thirty years, his daughter had closed down his shop for several weeks and stayed at his side every waking minute. She had never had to take care of the business completely on her own. Now that he had gone well further away than a twenty minutes car drive, Sue was the one to open the small establishment in the morning and to close it at night; sweep the floors, clean the windows, and keep an eye on the stocks. And for a long while, she felt as if she had woken up in the wrong bed. As if she wore someone else's shoes and was, in fact, but an imposter. Besides the many cheesy little items they – she – sold as souvenirs to tourists, and the so-called antiquities many, including Sue, merely referred to as the old stuff, there also was a small fridge in the back of the shop; hidden behind the many rows of old metal shelves and racks, and filled with nicely cooled water, several kinds of soft drinks and juices, and mechanically prepared ham sandwiches.
And every single day, ever since they were twelve and his mother let him walk home alone from school, James Winter would drop by at noon, just before lunch, and get a bottle of still water. Sue had never quite understood why; the grocery store down the street sold water for about half the price.
"Capitalists!" Sue remembered her father curse them.
"As if we, the small businesses, could keep up with those prices!" he had shouted, and his daughter thought that maybe the boy, James, fought the same battle as her father had.

Then again, he was a weirdo, so maybe there was no concrete reason for his behaviour. He was the carpenter's son, and his story a truly unfortunate one. James, who went by Jim most of the time, was a nice, gentle man, and before that, he had been a nice, gentle boy. A tender soul that rested in the well-shaped body of a six feet tall lad, with a sweet smile and soft features; an oval shaped face, a broad nose, rather close-set, hooded, hazel-brown eyes, and dirty blond hair. It was of a strange colour, really. Something in between a dark-blond and a light-brown, with a silver-greyish underdone. He still sported the same, sideways parted, curtain cut he had twenty years ago, in the nineties, when it was actually considered fashionable. Helping out his father since very young for some pocket-money, and recently having taken over the business, James had always been carrying chairs, tables, cupboards and heavy pieces of wood. Over the years, his shoulders had broadened, his upper arms gotten larger, and his chest stronger; and the young boys that used to push him around in primary and middle school, eventually set for mental bullying only. Life had been very generous and laid down at his feet many physical traits for him to become the popular kid. He could have been envied by the boys and adored by the girls, had he not decided at a young age already to wear jeans every single day of the year, and pair them with nothing but shirts; no pullovers in winter, no t-shirts and no shorts during summer. Being shortsighted and condemned to wear oversized, round glasses with a thin, metallic-silver frame wasn't exactly helpful with looking cool or in style; or anything we would have had to look like, would he have wanted to be admired by his classmates. But that was a role he wouldn't have fit in anyway; because James was weird.
He believed in extraterrestrial life and at age seventeen, he still took much greater interest in comic books and figurines than girls. He would assemble paper models of ships and planes, and colour seemingly anything, as long as it was tiny enough to make magnifying glasses mandatory, from world war two tanks to fantastic beast from other worlds. He knew all the names of all the characters from any science-fiction TV show and apparently, he read and spoke a bit of Elvish too. James Winter was what the other children called a nerd and a weirdo, and thus, no matter his looks, he was classified and frowned upon.
Once, when they both were almost eighteen years of age, Sue's father had sent her to drop off a small wooden jewellery box at the carpenter's shop, for Sean Winter to fix one of its drawers.
"Antique doesn't mean broken," George had shared his wisdom with his daughter.
And when Sue couldn't find a soul in the shop, she had gone to the back, the atelier, where she had walked in on James lacquering a wooden cupboard his father had just finished building. Like in a stereotypical teen movie he had taken off the clothing that would usually cover his torso, and dear Lord, two minutes into that sight James was no longer the only one sweating.