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Chapter Ten
Jo rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. Something hard dug into her forehead. She wriggled onto her back again but the light burned through her eyelids. Her feet were cold.
Gradually, consciousness took hold. She realised why her hip was jutting into something cold, why her mouth tasted stale and why her head felt as though it had been placed in a pressure cooker. She was fully clothed, surrounded by moulding, hairy blankets and coats. The teashop blinds were set at exactly the right angle to allow the sunlight to stream into her eyes.
Jo hauled herself into a sitting position and craned her neck to look up at the clock. Strange. There appeared to be only one hand. She squinted up at it for a couple of seconds, then worked it out. The hands were diametrically opposite. It was six o’clock, she deduced.
Suddenly, a long, protracted whining noise made her jump. Jo looked up at the clock again. A wave of panic rose up inside her. It wasn’t six o’clock, it was five past seven. The noise was Trevor’s singing.
She leaped up and kicked the makeshift bed to one side. She would have to somehow get everything back into the store cupboard without him noticing. Her head was pounding so hard it felt as though the capillaries were about to burst. She couldn’t think. Her throat was crying out for water but she knew there were things that needed to be done before sorting herself out. She just couldn’t work out what.
‘Morning!’ Trevor emerged from the back of the teashop with his customary swagger.
‘Hi!’ Jo managed with more than the usual level of cheer. Oof. Her head was about to explode.
‘Late again?’ he said, approaching to embark on his opening-up ritual. Thankfully he wasn’t the type to notice details like crusty eyes or scarecrow hair.
‘No, I was…wiping the tables.’ Jo stepped backwards as he rifled through the drawer, looking for the awning key. Her foot landed on the pile of blankets.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, following Jo’s anxious downward glance.
‘What?’
Trevor bent down, brow furrowed. ‘It looks like a sock.’
Incredibly, he hadn’t actually noticed the giant mound of linen next to the bin; he was more interested in the sock that must have worked its way off her foot during the night.
‘Oh, that.’ Her brain wasn’t working quickly enough. ‘Yes, it does look like a sock.’
She swooped down to pick it up whilst yanking her trouser leg down to conceal her bare foot, thankful that she’d had the drunken foresight to sleep in her uniform.
‘What on earth…?’
‘Oh, I remember,’ she said, finally thinking of something. ‘It belongs to a customer. He took it off the other day.’
Trevor’s frown intensified. ‘A customer took his sock off? Why?’
Jo blinked back at him, wondering what had possessed her to say that. ‘Oh, you know…He was just…showing me something. Er, on his foot.’
Her boss’s suspicions seemed to intensify. ‘My question is: why is it still there? You’re supposed to sweep the floor at the end of your shift.’
Jo bent down to pick up the offending item. ‘Sorry. Must’ve missed it. Careless.’
‘Hmm.’ Trevor shook his head despairingly and marched out of the shop. Jo breathed a small sigh of relief.
She waited until he was part-way through his opening-up ceremony before gathering her bedding and carrying it back to the store cupboard. Her head was pulsating. It felt as though her brain had come away from her skull and was getting more bruised with every footstep.
‘Jo? Are you there? Jo?’
Trevor’s voice sounded quite insistent. Jo stuffed the bedding into the cupboard and hurried out to where he was standing, shoving her feet into her shoes on the way. She would sort it out properly later–once she’d splashed some water on her face and done something about her hair and the onion-like stench on her breath.
‘Look at this!’ Trevor was standing outside beneath the newly erected awning, pointing at the little bench he called table ten.
She followed his finger and stared at the cheap white surface. She couldn’t see what she was supposed to be looking at.
‘Look!’ he said again. ‘You said you’d wiped the tables!’
Jo frowned at him. The bright light was hurting her eyes. ‘What?’
He stared incredulously at her. ‘There are coffee cup marks all over it–and bits of food! We’ll get rats. And think of the impression we’re giving. This isn’t some cheap fast-food outlet, is it?’
No, thought Jo. It’s an over-priced fast-coffee outlet. She could just about make out a faint ring-mark on the table and a couple of microscopic crumbs. ‘Sorry Think the detergent ran out.’
‘I pay you good money,’ he said angrily. This was a slight inaccuracy, thought Jo, given that she was earning just thirty pounds a day and he hadn’t actually paid her for this week’s work yet. She was rather hoping that payday would be today, but now didn’t seem like a very good time to ask.
She mumbled something apologetic and referred again to the detergent–which, by happy coincidence, had nearly run out. Trevor seemed excessively grumpy this morning.
‘Well, I’ll show you where the new ones are and you can do the tables again,’ he said patronisingly. ‘Properly, this time.’
Jo rolled her eyes and followed her boss back inside. It was only as he threw out his hand to open the store cupboard that she realised what was about to happen. Sure enough, agonisingly slowly, the blankets and coats tumbled onto Trevor’s feet and unravelled all over the floor.
‘What…?’
‘Oh, those old things,’ said Jo, feeling inspired. ‘I found them the other day. I thought they could probably do with going to the charity shop.’
Trevor poked around in the pile with his stubby foot. ‘Did you indeed? And where did you get them?’
‘The back of the cupboard,’ Jo said casually. She couldn’t actually remember where she’d found them. Last night her mind had been preoccupied and addled.
‘Oh, right.’ Trevor extracted a beige full-length coat from the muddle. ‘So you took it upon yourself to consign my coat, along with other items you found whilst poking around in my cupboard, to the charity shop?’
‘Er, no, well…’
Trevor looked furious. ‘I don’t like being lied to, Jo.’
She stammered some more but the inspiration had run dry.
‘I should warn you that I’m seriously considering your position in this teashop. You’ve already demonstrated
