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, and Barbara flinched, and opened her purse, and the assistant asked it 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 talk away, to shout at someone – probably 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 count was laborious and 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, starting with a 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 at the same time as 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 new hat 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.

4

  

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