Baverstock's Allsorts Volume 2: A Short Story Collection

By Jessica Baverstock

A circus runaway who wants to be an accountant, a hostage in a crisis call center, and a walrus in search of love.

These are just three of the stories in the second volume of Baverstock’s Allsorts, covering genres from science-fiction to romance and plenty in between.

Lovers of heartfelt storytelling will enjoy these eleven stories, all bound together by a central theme: the discovery of identity—be it a character’s true name and history or simply the moment a hidden need or wish is first discovered.

As always, Baverstock traverses the emotions, from the depths of grief to the heights of humor. This heartwarming collection with bring a tear to the eye, but leave you with a smile on your face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Baverstock
• Release date: Jun 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463237762

Jessica Baverstock

Jessica Baverstock has been a storyteller since she learned how to talk, and dreamed of becoming a writer from the day she first saw a typewriter at age 3. She writes an eclectic mix of endearing stories, crossing from science-fiction to historical fiction and everything in between.She is an Australian author and blogger. In her early twenties she moved to China. Now she lives in the South West of Australia with her husband and a modest book collection. When she's not busy working on her next story or globetrotting across oceans, she's usually curled up watching a good movie.

Book preview

Baverstock’s Allsorts

Volume 2

A Short Story Collection

Copyright 2018 Jessica Baverstock

Published by Jessica Baverstock at Smashwords

Cover design © Jessica Baverstock

Cover art © Maria Uspenskaya/Shutterstock

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Mrs. Merkle’s Cats

The Unexpected Day

The Runaway

Identity

The Covent Garden Cafe

London to Florence

Teppanyaki for One

Facing Fears

Crybaby

The Importance of Shoes

Earnestine

About the Author

Other books by Jessica Baverstock

Dear reader,

Welcome to the second volume of Baverstock’s Allsorts!

If this is not the first time you’ve picked up a Baverstock’s Allsorts volume, then I welcome you back and humbly take it as an honour and complement that you have returned.

If this is your first time reading a Baverstock’s Allsorts volume, let me explain the concept.

I write in many, many different genres. I can’t pin myself down to one thing and so after a decade of waiting to see what genre would actually be my brand, I finally realized that my brand was variety—heartfelt stories told wherever and whenever they belonged. And so I created the Baverstock’s Allsorts series to give my short stories somewhere to live.

The best way to approach a Baverstock’s Allsorts volume is to think of it as a chocolate box filled with a variety of flavours wrapped in multi-colored foil, just waiting for you to pick and choose among them. Some might be instant favourites while others might not be quite your thing. The trick is to taste-test your way through them and savour the ones you love!

Usually a volume of Baverstock’s Allsorts is random, the commonalities between the stories being the period of time when I wrote them rather than genre, theme, or characters. But in this case, as I compiled these eleven stories into this volume, I noticed a pattern.

All these stories are about characters working out who they really are, discovering a part of themselves or a need they didn’t know they had. Often it results in them altering their life or environment or understanding of themselves to better care for that need.

This makes for a more unified volume than the first one, by theme at least. And it ends with two decidedly humorous stories to send you off with a smile.

I do hope you enjoy these eleven stories.

—Jessica Baverstock

Muswellbrook, Australia

March 2018

Introduction to Mrs. Merkle’s Cats

When I was in my mid-teens, I asked my father to install a very large whiteboard on the wall of my bedroom so I could scribble my random thoughts and to do lists somewhere visible and easily cleanable.

The first line of this story was scrawled on that whiteboard one morning, just because it sounded interesting. It took me several years before I finally sat down and discovered the story behind Mrs. Merkle and her three intriguingly named cats.

Mrs. Merkle’s Cats

MRS. MERKLE HAD three cats: Tinnitus, Reflux, and Mange.

Tinnitus, a Siamese, was plagued with a head twitch which kept his rusted silver bell tinkling constantly, making Mrs. Merkle yearn for the day when her hearing would eventually dim. The little black kitten, Reflux, had the irritating habit of bringing up half of his dinner ten minutes after eating, examining it intently, and then re-ingesting the concoction. And the tabby, Mange, well her complaint was self-explanatory.

Each had been a stray, and each had adopted Mrs. Merkle as their owner even though she had little interest in them. She wasn’t a doting pet owner. She didn’t put down saucers of warm milk or stroke her companions until they purred. If they didn’t like dry biscuits and water then there were plenty of other homeowners on the estate who could take them in.

Mrs. Merkle was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of person. She started each morning by tying her straggly hair up into a firm bun, watching the work of her knobbly, age-speckled hands in the age-speckled bathroom mirror. She would change from her moth-eaten flannel nightgown into a plain, brown calico dress which swished and swayed about her like a potato sack. She liked potato sacks. Sturdy things they were. No nonsense about them.

Then she would wander into the cold cottage kitchen, her thick hand-knitted socks not making a sound on the chipped terracotta tiles, and stoke the fire within the old, heavy, cast iron stove, feeding it with a new log to encourage it back to a flame.

Then she’d wander past the ancient dark wood table and chairs patiently waiting for their role in the morning, shove her feet into her beaten up wellington boots and head out into the fresh air of her overgrown garden to collect the eggs.

Mrs. Merkle didn’t believe in garden fences, or pretty flower borders, or neatly trimmed hedges. Too fussy. No, nature made its way where it wished and who was she to tell it otherwise? In her garden tomato bushes leaned against blueberry bushes which generously made way for the odd carrot here and there. Cabbages ran wild among strawberry plants, providing plenty of food for the little animal visitors welcome in her garden, but never any for her own table. Ivy and bougainvillea laid claim to the whitewashed stones of the two-story cottage, and a friendly apple tree shaded the sitting room window from the few hot days that may or may not announce the height of the English summer each year.

The only exception Mrs. Merkle made to her rule about garden fences was the chicken pen. With three cats roaming the grounds, she couldn’t afford to allow the felines and poultry to mingle. Reflux may have been too young to know what to do with a chicken, and Tinnitus couldn’t sneak up on anyone, but Mange had a savage side when it came to birds and small animals. So Mrs. Merkle had nagged Mr. Merkle into building a pen with chicken wire and pieces of wood she had salvaged from a garden shed their neighbour was discarding.

Mrs. Merkle admired chickens. She liked the way they strode about with purpose, even though they had nothing more to do with their time than scratch the ground, eat, and lay eggs. She liked the way they clucked, sometimes energetically and sometimes meditatively. But most of all she liked the way they provided a good breakfast.

She loved the taste of eggs. Scrambled, poached, or fried. She did not care. Give her an egg, a piece of toast, and a hot cup of tea and she would be a contented woman. Contented, that is, if it hadn’t been for her husband.

Mr. Merkle was not a morning person, and he did not abide alarm clocks, though goodness knows Mrs. Merkle had tried. She woke with the birds, to the muted sound of the chickens in their pen and the singing of larks on the roof drifting through the closed windows, when the dark sky was turning the faintest hint of blue. Mr. Merkle woke to the smell of bacon and the whistle of the kettle, and to nothing else.

Mrs. Merkle often wondered what would happen if she didn’t cook his breakfast, if she ate her egg and toast alone and forewent her cup of hot tea—if the bacon never crackled and the kettle never whistled. Would he continue sleeping through the whole day? Would she have an entire day to herself—just her and her three cats?

In forty-seven years of marriage she had never tried it.

Until today.

Mrs. Merkle didn’t know what made today different. Was it that she’d found Tinnitus curled up in the crook of her arm when she’d woken to the clucking of the hens? He had never been an overly affectionate cat and she had certainly never encouraged him. He usually slept on a lumpy knitted cushion in the sitting room, but this morning he met her bleary stare with his big blue eyes and greeted her with a purr. That had been pleasant, but surely not enough to change an entire day.

Or was it hearing Mr. Merkle reciting the betting odds for yesterday’s race as he rubbed his fat, stubbly chin in his sleep? He had snorted through his bulbous, pock-marked nose as a line of dribble slid down the side of his mouth. Then he snuggled himself back into his oil-stained pillow and smiled the serene smile of one who has completely forgotten how much he lost to the bookies not twelve hours earlier. But that had been no different to many other mornings, it certainly didn’t explain why today was different.

Was it because she had stared a little longer at the bags under her eyes and the lines on her face when tying up her hair that morning? Usually she found the brown spots on the mirror comforting, as if she and it were growing old together. But today it seemed her age spots were multiplying quicker than the mirror’s.

Was today different because she had found Reflux curled up next to the kitchen stove, looking cute as only sleeping animals could? He woke and stretched and meowed at her, even catching the edge of her calico skirt with his baby claws as if asking for a moment of attention. She had to admit, the little fellow could be almost personable with an empty stomach.

And then there was Mange waiting for her in the patch of wild-sown flowers just outside the back door. An independent soul, Mange never came inside and Mrs. Merkle was glad of it, but she did make an appearance at least once a day to remind Mrs. Merkle of her obligation to provide cat biscuits and water on the dusty sill outside the kitchen window.

Finally there were the chickens, who seemed extra chipper this morning, with bright clucks and festive flapping of their wings. She thought at first they were simply enjoying the morning’s stiff breeze ruffling their feathers. It was only once she’d raided their nests that she understood why. In the night, one of the hens had laid two extra large eggs.

It was as she placed these two extra large eggs into a pot of water that she decided. She wrapped the bacon back up in its white paper wrapping and returned the package to her small refrigerator. Then she took the kettle off the stove top and sat down on the faithful dark wood chair to wait for her eggs.

Her mind wandered back to when she was a girl, seventeen, and had seen Mr. Merkle for the first time. He was young Master Albert Merkle back then, and she Miss Mildred Summers. How she had loved her surname. To be reminded of warmth and sunshine and green grass and cloudless days every time someone spoke your name was a privilege. And she had traded it for Merkle, a dank, gloomy sounding name, though it had sounded well enough the day she had said Mrs. Mildred Merkle for the first time.

He hadn’t been pudgy back then. He’d been broad and weathered, like a farmer’s son should be. He had windswept black hair and cheeks turned red from the cold winds that buffeted them during lambing season. And he’d said the most wonderful things to her. Told her she was beautiful. Said he’d love her till the day he died. Promised to always be faithful. What more could a girl have asked for? Even brave knights on white horses got old eventually.

The two eggs clattered in the pot amid the disturbed water. Mrs. Merkle looked up at the old clock hanging above the low doorway, the doorway that lead to the stairs which lead to the bedroom where Mr. Merkle wasn’t being woken to the smell of bacon and the whistle of the kettle. She held her breath for a moment, listening for the clump of his feet hitting the wooden floorboards and the yawning bellow that announced his waking stretch. No such noise came. Instead the eggs continued boiling and Reflux mewed his request for breakfast.

Mrs. Merkle almost considered frying the bacon and giving it to the cats if Mr. Merkle didn’t awake, before she reminded herself that the smell would rouse him. Instead she got up and padded across the floor to the walk-in pantry. As she opened the door, she ran her eye lovingly over the bottles of preserves and jams she had made with the produce of the summer. The deep purplish blue of the blueberry jam, the warm yellow and orange of the marmalade, the rich browns and reds of the chutney—all waiting to nurse her through the winter. She bent down and found the gaudy pink and lime green box of the dry cat biscuits. Reflux nuzzled her leg as if encouraging her to try the next shelf up where Mr. Merkle’s tins of spam rested.

Why not? she thought to herself.

The pantry door creaked in concern as she closed it behind her, but she didn’t listen. Instead, she picked up the dented metal bowls that belonged to Tinnitus and Reflux and placed them on the stained wooden kitchen bench. She opened the tin and heard the excited murmurs of both cats by her legs. Even Mange seemed to have received the news, and jumped up onto the kitchen windowsill to peer in at proceedings.

As she mixed a third of the meat with Reflux’s biscuits, Mrs. Merkle found herself smiling. She couldn’t decide why she was doing so, it seemed a natural reaction to the unexpected day. It felt good, like she was stretching the muscles and skin that had wrinkled and sagged into the frown of old age.

Mrs. Walker, who was the Merkle’s most effusive neighbour and insisted on calling in at least once a week to see if Mrs. Merkle needed any assistance or if Mrs. Merkle had heard any news worth passing on to others, was enamoured of the phrase, You’re only as old as you feel. As Mrs. Walker had only just made it into her fifties, and still insisted she had not a single gray hair in her auburn waves, Mrs. Merkle paid little attention to her platitudes.

In Mrs. Merkle’s experience, she generally felt as old as she was. It wasn’t that she was defeatist in any way, or that she had not eyed the advancing years with the disgust of one who isn’t yet ready to part with the perks of youth, as every human being does. It was that she respected the fact that nature moved inexorably towards these things and it was pointless for her to argue with it.

Mrs. Walker seemed to delight in arguing with nature—from her strict hedges and regular pesticide spraying, to her weekly ex-foliating facial scrubs which she swore kept back the onslaught of years but only seemed to encourage the red blotches around her cheeks and forehead. Mrs. Merkle worried for Mrs. Walker. In her experience, when you argued with nature, nature generally got its own back.

The clattering of the eggs reminded her to remove them from the heat. Then she put the bowl of spam and biscuits down on the tiles, watching the little black kitten pounce on it like a lion in the wild. Tinnitus crowded in for a look, and Mrs. Merkle put her leg out protectively to keep the two apart until she’d prepared the second dish.

As she listened to the tinkle of dry biscuits hitting the bowl, she thought of how much it reminded her of rain. Not just any rain. The heavy rain that could only be caused by a thunderstorm. The rain that had begun tinkling on the glass roof panels of the conservatory on the day young Master Albert Merkle had come to call.

He’d been damp, the raindrops bringing out the smell of hay and a faint