Rosemary’s Dress Shop

Chapter 1

The number 73 arrived with its usual sigh of brakes and the faint smell of damp upholstery drifting from the folding doors as they opened. Allan stepped aboard quickly, head lowered, one hand already reaching into his pocket for the fare before the driver had a chance to look at him properly.

“Return to Ashton, please,” he said quietly.

The driver issued the ticket without interest.

Outside, the rain had settled into that familiar northern drizzle that never seemed heavy enough to justify an umbrella yet managed somehow to soak everything all the same. He tucked the ticket into his wallet and moved upstairs, past rows of empty patterned seats and fogged windows streaked silver with rainwater.

He sat in the front seat out of habit. From there he could watch the road unwind ahead of him and keep an eye on anyone getting on at the stops further along the route. It was ridiculous, really. Nobody cared where he was going. Nobody was watching him. Yet every journey began with the same nervous calculation, the same irrational fear that someone from town might appear suddenly, an old neighbour, someone from school, his mother’s friend from the post office.

Someone who would ask simple, harmless questions.

“What are you doing over here then?”

That was the danger of small towns. Lives overlapped too easily. People noticed things. Not because they were cruel, but because there was so little else to notice.

The bus pulled away from the estate and rolled slowly through streets Allan knew too well; rows of pebble-dashed semis, shuttered corner shops, gardens shining wet beneath the rain. A woman climbed aboard near the Tesco carrying shopping bags full of groceries. Two teenage boys got on further down, loud with the confidence he had always envied in other people. They took the back seats upstairs and spent the journey laughing at something on a phone screen.

Allan unfolded the newspaper he had bought from the shop on the corner, though he didn’t read a word of it. He never did. The newspaper was part disguise, part ritual. It gave his hands something to do. Respectable men travelled with newspapers. Respectable men did not spend Saturday afternoons taking buses to neighbouring towns so they could stand outside women’s clothing shops rehearsing conversations they would never have.

He glanced out of the window as the town gave way to the bypass. Rain blurred the industrial estates and petrol stations into smudges of grey and orange light. He knew the route so well now he could measure the journey without looking at the clock. The boarded-up pub meant ten minutes gone. The tyre garage another five. Then the long bend downhill towards Ashton itself.

As soon as the bus reached Market Street, Allan felt the familiar tightening in his stomach.

Rosemary’s appeared halfway down the row of shops, narrow and warm beneath its cream-painted sign. The window display had changed again since his last trip. One mannequin wore a pale blue dress scattered with tiny white flowers; another stood beside it in a cream skirt and green cardigan that looked impossibly soft even through rain-speckled glass.

A handwritten sign leaned in the corner of the display.

‘SUMMER SALE’

The owner was inside rearranging a rail near the window. Allan watched her only briefly before looking away again. She seemed to belong perfectly to the little shop; practical, calm, moving with the confidence of someone entirely at ease in herself.

The bus crawled forward through traffic and Allan twisted slightly in his seat, trying not to stare while still catching one last glimpse of the dresses before the shop disappeared behind a delivery van.

Then it was gone. He let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

For months now, perhaps longer, Rosemary’s had occupied a strange corner of his imagination. He thought about it far more often than he cared to admit. Not simply the clothes themselves, though that was part of it. It was what the shop represented: a doorway into something he could barely name aloud, even privately to himself.

At home those feelings existed only in fragments. Moments stolen carefully around locked bedroom doors and empty afternoons. A blouse once bought from a charity shop three towns away and hidden beneath old school folders at the back of his wardrobe. The dangerous thrill of fabrics against his skin. The unbearable disappointment afterwards when everything had to be folded away again before anyone came home.

But here, in Ashton, the feelings seemed somehow larger and more possible.

Also more frightening.