East Street, in the east of Mizzenwood, has a ramshackle look to it. Some of the buildings have been unoccupied for over thirty years, and even some of the occupied ones look abandoned. Near the end of the street there�s a three-storey building, and on the ground floor is Edwards� grocery shop. To the left, there�s a single-storey building with an iron roof that slopes away from the shop. At the other side there�s a house that was abandoned over twenty years ago.

The shop is a family business that began in the 1920s when John R Edwards first sold hats. He got the idea for a hat shop from his cousin, Deirdre. She was always wearing hats, and her personality seemed to be different with each one.

She was wearing a red hat while she looked at herself in the mirror one day, but her mind was far away. She remembered looking at another hat in a mirror and saying, "Hm? Oh, dobermans. About twenty of them."

She couldn't remember why she had to say something about twenty dobermans. She tried on lots of different hats, in the hope that one of them would remind her of why she said it. Some of the hats made her sad and some made her happy. One of them made her talk to a potato, but none of them reminded her of the dobermans.

A man called Hughie saw her for the first time when she was running down a road. She was wearing a blue hat with a white flower in it. She was being chased by dobermans, about twenty of them. Hughie led her to safety and destroyed the hat. Deirdre saw him as a hero, and she fell in love with him when she wore her black hat.

She was wearing that hat when Hughie asked her to marry him, and she said yes, but when she took the hat off later, the idea of spending the rest of her life with Hughie seemed appalling, and she started to panic. But then she put the hat back on and she was fine again.

She did spend the rest of her life with Hughie, and it was a happy marriage. She just tried to wear that hat as often as possible. She once lost it when she was visiting her sister. After three hours without wearing it she said she was leaving Hughie and starting a new life in another country. She packed her bags, left the house and checked into a hotel. Her sister found the hat and took it to her at the hotel. Deirdre put it on again and said, �I better get home now if I�m going to have Hughie�s dinner ready.�

Disaster struck during a storm. The hat was blown away through the fields, and it was last seen in a river. Deirdre started packing her bags. Hughie didn�t seem overly-concerned, but Deirdre�s sister didn�t give up hope of saving the marriage. She tried to find another hat like the one that was lost in the storm, and a neighbour of John R�s mother had one just like it.

But this neighbour, Joan, didn't want to part with the hat. It had been in her family since she got it off a duck. She never liked that duck, and she was always proud of the fact that she managed to take the hat from him. But he was glad she took the hat because he could see where he was going without it. When the duck got away with her passport, she wore the hat to restore some pride. Not that it made any difference to the duck.

So she was reluctant to give it away. She could foresee future instances of being outwitted by the duck, and she needed the hat so she could say, "Ha! I got your hat."

Deirdre's sister offered to pay a small fortune for the hat, and Joan agreed to sell it after she imagined herself saying to the duck, "Ha! This is how much money I got for your hat."

The marriage was saved, and that made no difference to the duck either. It made a big difference to John R. He had been thinking of starting his own business, and the hat shop seemed like the perfect opportunity. Before this, he had no idea that people would pay so much for hats.

Anyone in their right mind would have realised that a hat shop in a small Irish town was a stupid idea, but John R was neither a man in his right mind nor a man for listening to advice, and there were very few people willing to advise him on anything. He was a tall man, and people found his height intimidating. Tall and proud. His pride wouldn�t have allowed him to give up on the hat shop even if his height would have allowed anyone to advise him.

If it weren�t for his wife, Sheila, the shop would never have survived to this day. She suggested selling traditional handcrafts in the shop along with the hats, things like Aran sweaters, pottery, homemade bread, butter, chocolate, newspapers, toothpaste, pens, Christmas cards, bleach, tea, coffee, or headache tablets. John R, as proud as he was tall, as he was willing to overlook the obvious, was willing to sell his wife�s handcrafts in his hat shop. It was a huge success.

John R died with his pride undiminished but two and a half feet smaller. The business was passed on to his eldest son, Paddy, who was taller than his father had been, even at the height of his height, and equally proud. Paddy ran the shop for over fifty years and for most of that time very little changed. Business remained at a constant, steady pace until fifteen years ago, when Rita Smith opened a supermarket in Mizzenwood, and the pace began to slow.

Initially, Paddy tried to compete with Rita. He had special offers, advertising, competitions, but no matter what he did, Rita always seemed to go one better than him, and everything he tried failed. He gave up trying to compete with her. Only a few regular customers passed through the door of the shop, but he was happy with that.

He enjoyed passing the time in conversations with the customers, or just thinking about things, and there was always plenty to think about. One day he was talking to a salesman who said, "I'm a person people. Or a people person. I think. The last time I checked there was only one of me."

Paddy spent a lot of time thinking about how many of himself there were. He often counted himself in his reflection on the window, and he thought about what it'd be like if there were two of him. The conclusion he came to was that it wouldn't be very different to just one of him.

Thoughts like these filled the hours he had once spent selling newspapers or stocking shelves. On some days the bell over the door would only ring when Paddy opened the door in the morning to bring in the day�s newspapers and to take down the shutters from the window, and again in the evening when he went out to replace the shutters.

Some of the other local shops went out of business. No one could compete with Rita�s supermarket. Paddy kept his shop going more out of habit than in any expectation of making money. When he became too old to do even the simple things, like taking down the shutters, he hired a local girl, Barbara, to help him. She was nineteen at the time.

Paddy died five years later. He never married, and he didn�t have any children to leave the shop to. So he left it to two of his nephews, Harry and Roy. Both are smaller than either John R or Paddy, but what they lack in terms of height, pride, intelligence, ambition, foresight, hindsight, or self-awareness, they make up for with a heroic willingness to persevere in the face of certain failure. Every moment of their lives has been a demonstration of this will. It was this quality and lack of other qualities that, in Paddy�s mind, made them the perfect candidates to take over the shop.

Harry is thirty-five now, and Roy is nearly thirty. When the opportunity to run the shop came along, they were willing to have a go. They inherited the whole building and they decided to move in. They had spent the previous four years travelling around the world, mostly in Donegal, and after all that travel, the thought of settling down in their hometown appealed to them. This was their new business and their new home.

�I haven�t been in here in ages,� Harry said to Roy as they looked around the shop for the first time as the new owners.

�Neither have I. It�s changed since I was last here.� The place seemed slightly darker than the shop in their memories, the shelves slightly barer.

�I wonder why he left it to us. We haven�t seen him a whole lot over the past few years.�

�Yeah. I suppose he just didn�t have anyone else to leave it to.�

They walked next to the shelves along the wall in the darker side of the shop (the side that very few of the few customers ever entered), past the washing-up liquid, the disinfectant, an overflowing ashtray, an alarm clock, the phonebook. There was an old hardcover book beneath the phonebook. It nearly fell apart when Harry opened it. The title was �The memoirs of John R Edwards.� Harry started reading from the preface: �I have written this book to finally end speculation concerning some of the unanswered questions in my life, such as, my affair with Marlene Dietrich: who invented that story? Or how I ended up playing tennis with the Lord Mayor when the Lord Mayor only has zero legs.�

The bell above the door rang and a woman walked in. �Hi, I�m Barbara,� she said. �I used to work here for your uncle.�

�Ah yes, I think we met a few years ago,� Harry said. �Good to see you again.�

�I�m sorry to hear about your uncle�s death. He was a nice man.�

�You probably knew him better than we did. To be honest, we were a bit surprised he left the shop to us. We were just saying, he didn�t really have anyone else to leave it to.�

�Yeah. I remember him saying once that the two of ye would be perfectly suited to the demands of this shop� So will ye be running the shop yourselves or are ye going to sell it?�

�We�ll keep it on alright,� Harry said. �And there�s still a job here for you, if you want it. We need someone with a bit of experience. We don�t know anything about running a shop.�

�Great. I�d love to stay on.�

Barbara explained some of the everyday workings of the business to Harry and Roy. She showed them around the rest of the building too. Most of the rooms had remained unchanged for decades, and many things needed to be fixed, like cracks in the ceiling or creaks in the stairs. Harry and Roy had no intention of fixing these things. They liked the place the way it was. The house was ready for living in and the shop was ready for business. They agreed with Barbara to open the shop on the following Monday.

On their first night in the house it rained heavily, and neither Harry nor Roy could sleep because of the noise of the rain on the iron roof next door. All the neighbours slept soundly � they were used to sleeping through the noise. Harry and Roy would eventually become used to all the sounds around them too.

On the following, morning Harry sat on a seat in front of the shop. The seat had been there for decades and was once a white garden seat, and it's still a seat, but the white has been almost completely engulfed by rust, and it has long ago given up hope of seeing a garden. He noticed the wet moss on the concrete beneath the seat. He saw a speck of white paint in the corner of the window sill, the grass in the chutes of all the buildings on the street, the rust on the iron roofs, the moss-filled cracks in the pavement, the sound of trees in a light breeze, but he couldn�t figure out where the trees were. He sat there taking in his new surroundings, and looking forward to the opening on Monday.

�Quarter to eleven on a Monday morning and just two customers so far,� Harry said. �We�ve been open for a week now and we�ve only had two customers.�

One of those customers bought mustard, not noticing that it was slightly out of date, but only slightly. Another bought a newspaper despite the fact that it was slightly out of date too.

Barbara told Harry about how Rita Smith had put most of the local grocery shops out of business. Her success was mainly due to her eye for publicity. Barbara showed Harry an example from the front page of a newspaper. �It says in this article that she caught a fish the size of an elbow, and she donated the fish to charity, and the minister for foreign affairs is too media-savvy to ask for his elbow back from a charity.�

�You can�t believe everything you read in the papers,� Harry said.

�Maybe not, but Rita got her picture on the front of the paper with the children in the hospital.� Barbara showed the photo to Harry. �And she manages to mention her shop a few times too. That�s the type of publicity she uses to attract customers, and that�s why most people shop there. That�s where I do all my shopping.�

�Yeah, me too,� Harry said.

Harry arranged a meeting with their accountant to discuss their precarious financial situation. Roy got used to the lack of customers very quickly, just as he got used to the rain on the iron roof. He slept through hailstone, and he stopped noticing the creaking of the house at night. Harry acquired the ability to ignore these things too. He stopped noticing all of the sights and sounds around him, but he was unable to equal Roy�s lack of interest in the lack of customers. Not that this problem was constantly on his mind, but occasionally he thought about it and tried to find a solution and gave up before he came anywhere near a solution.

One afternoon, with the morning�s work and worrying done, Harry sat on the garden seat in front of the shop and watched the world pass by. Nothing actually passed by in this world. It was a slow, quiet world, but on that afternoon it was exactly the type of place Harry wanted to live in. He listened, and heard the sound of leaves in a slight breeze again, but he still couldn�t figure out where the trees were.

After two hours listening, someone finally did pass by. It was Martin, whose family have always been friends with Harry�s family. He owns a hardware shop in the town. He came to see how business was going and to sell Harry a ticket for a dinner-dance in the hotel to raise money for the local soccer club.