Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Barbara coughed. ‘Excuse me, miss?’

The woman turned then hopped, heavily, down from the ladder, staring at Donald and tweaking the hem of her skirt downwards. I wanted to say, ‘He’s not like that ,’ loud, and in a tone like Barbara’s – but Barbara spoke first.

‘My daughter,’ she said, with such clear dignity I could tell she had rehearsed it, and imagined her standing barefoot on the linoleum in her bedroom, straightening the rosebud cover on her single bed and muttering it like a prayer, ‘wants to return an item she removed from this counter without paying.’

I watched the shop assistant’s face change. I tried to imagine what we looked like to her. The three of us: Barbara in her shabby, aggressively clean houndstooth coat and cracked leather gloves; Donald, rocking slightly and smiling as if he was about to be given a present; and me – jeans at high-water mark, school shoes and the Christmas-Present-School-Coat, shoulders speckled with fine grains of snow that to an unsympathetic eye could have looked like dandruff. And all of us lined up in order of size, staring back at her and her abandoned packet of paper hearts.

Barbara retrieved the white and blue and silver perfume box from her bag. She closed the clasp with a snap (the noise it made was as satisfied as she was) and placed the perfume carefully on the counter.

‘Here it is,’ she said, and gestured towards it. She didn’t look at me – her neck was rigid with fright. ‘She’d like to make up for her actions in some way. What do you suggest?’

The shop assistant glanced at me. I looked at the red hearts and said nothing.

‘Wouldn’t you, Lola?’ Barbara prompted. As if she was getting ready for a fight, she pulled off her gloves and laid them over the pursed mouth of her handbag.

‘Are you sure?’ the shop assistant said. She gestured behind her without looking, like a weathergirl. ‘These are display boxes. We aren’t missing anything.’

‘It’s Valentine’s Day soon!’ Donald announced, and put his hand on the counter. ‘Have you got a boyfriend, young lady?’ The assistant moved her eyes from Barbara to Donald, who had opened his wallet and was proffering an expired credit card, and then back to Barbara again. The credit card was green and white and orange – clearly an antique and the sort of object that would turn up as a curiosity in a jumble sale, and get snapped up by someone collecting props for a retro television programme.

‘Whatever’s number one,’ Donald said, ‘whatever you’d want your man to buy you. That’s what I’ll have, for my Barbie. And something light and flowery for my little girl. Cost no object.’ He raised his arm, dropped it around Barbara’s shoulders, clutched her, shook her a little. ‘She’s young at heart, isn’t she?’ He actually winked – ‘Isn’t she just!’ and waved the card at the assistant. She didn’t take it. Barbara said nothing and the assistant looked at us as if we were all mental.

‘My mother thinks—’ I began, trying for that tone of injured dignity Barbara had managed so well.

‘Maybe,’ Barbara interrupted me, ‘we can come to an arrangement. Will you take the perfume back into stock? Can you do that for us, at least?’

The assistant glanced at the box and shook her head.

‘There are health and safety—’

‘I see. Of course. I should have – Donald,’ she turned, ‘put your wallet away.’

There was a moment when nobody spoke. The tinkling music in the shop seemed louder, but I could still hear Donald’s polyester trousers rustling as he tucked his wallet away.

‘Maybe,’ Barbara said, and I knew in that instant that she wouldn’t be defeated, ‘Lola could work here for a few Saturdays. To earn the money back.’

I opened my mouth – this was Chloe’s ideal job – we already knew you had to be sixteen to work on the perfume counter and if I got this job some underhand way, she’d kill me – but Barbara held up her hand, her fingers poised delicately. Her nails were painted neatly but the skin on the back of her hand was slack.

‘Miss,’ she said, as if it was the assistant who had started to protest, and not me, ‘my daughter did something wrong. Of which she is ashamed. Deeply. As a family, we are ashamed. Deeply. We are not destitute. Not enough to steal something. So she can work for you, to pay off the debt and make it right.’

‘There are all sorts of considerations to take into account,’ the assistant said. ‘There’s an induction. A training programme. We have to interview her properly. Equality and Diversity. I’m afraid it doesn’t really work like…’

Barbara was sagging. The handles on her handbag flopped forward.

‘How much was it then?’ she asked, her mouth tight.

The assistant scanned the barcode and looked at the numbers on the till.

‘Nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence,’ she said brightly. Barbara flinched and opened her purse, and the assistant asked if we wanted it gift-wrapped, and I said, ‘I only paid twelve for it. Eleven ninety-nine. Was there a sale?’ and Barbara told me to shut up, and the shop assistant said, ‘You paid already?’

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to walk away, to shout at someone – Barbara, if I had the nerve, but Barbara was fumbling out a worn, carefully folded tenner and counting the coins onto the counter. She didn’t say anything, but her posture was loud enough: this is our food money , and watching her labouriously count was painful.

‘We’ll settle this with your company now,’ Barbara said, ‘and deal with the matter at home. Lola will apologise,’ she finished counting and pushed the heap of money across the glass with a flourish, ‘in writing.’

There was some further talk about the address of head office, the correct title of the CEO, and a scrap of paper was scrawled on and passed over the counter. Barbara asked for assurances that the matter was closed now, that the police wouldn’t be involved in the light of my confession. The assistant muttered something in return but by this point I wasn’t listening.

At some point during Barbara’s counting – between the click of the coins on the glass counter and Barbara’s snuffly, startinga-cold breathing – I had become aware of a difference in the quality of the air beside me. Nothing more than that. I looked, and Donald was gone. Barbara noticed just after I did and she left the coins scattered on the counter, looped the handbag over her elbow, and we ran.

It wasn’t the first time Donald had disappeared. He used to vanish from the house once every few months – like a cat. Sometimes he came back after a few hours, bright and cheerful with a new magazine tucked under his arm – just like anyone else’s father. One time, he strolled through the front gate after a nine-hour absence with a Homer Simpson cap and a tin of Cherry Coke. Another time a neighbour called us at five in the morning to ask us if we knew that Donald had climbed over the bolted gates of the Gas Board car park and was now unable to get out. That was the thing. His vanishings were probably nothing, but they could have been anything – Donald brought with him the constant reminder that bad things could happen.

Barbara and I left Boots and hurried through the shopping centre, looking through windows, checking behind displays of cut-price advent calendars and Christmas cards.

Usually I enjoyed the symmetry and regularity of the way the building is designed: the smooth shine of the fake marble floors, the smoky glass of the lifts and doors, and the faintly chlorinated smell of the warm, recycled air. The architects, I think, wanted people to drift from floor to floor with no conception of the light or the weather outside, no worry about moving too far away from a public convenience, litter bin or water fountain. It made searching the place a slow, frustrating business though – full of false starts and back-tracking. The centre is built like a wheel on two floors – with a round central area that encircles an indoor fountain, artificial plants and a cafe. The shops are ranked along the spokes of the wheel and we tried to work through them methodically: John Lewis, Sweeten’s, Menzies, Bon Marché.