glass in tiny, optimistic sparkles.
‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ Harriet thought. ‘This time.’
There were dozens of boxes of soft leather dance shoes waiting to be unpacked and checked in the stockroom, as well as a delivery of new Italian body creams and oils. Harriet knew that the cosmetics would sell well, and she was looking forward to displaying them. But on Mondays she was alone in the shop, without one of her three part-time sales assistants. She couldn’t leave the till, and there was nothing that needed doing within reach of it. The clothes lay in colourful folds in their pigeon-holes or hung tidily on the chrome rails. The boxes and bottles and packets of the other stock were neatly arranged; the whole shop was a warm, shining cavern of mirrors.
At the far end, the girls were whispering together. Harriet reached under the counter, and took out the new game.
One of her tasks in the last four hard months had been to seek out a manufacturer who would do what she wanted. At length, not very many miles from where Simon lived, she had found a small plastics factory. By travelling up to work alongside the owner, Mr Jepson, cajoling him and chivvying him and making promises that she had no certainty of being able to keep, she had encouraged him enough to produce a prototype that very nearly satisfied her.
It was smaller than Simon’s original, made in heavy, glossy black plastic that looked almost like lacquered wood. The gates were Y-shapes in glistening white plastic, and how bitterly Mr Jepson had complained about the difficulties of getting those just right. The four balls and their matching discs were brilliant blobs of colour against the stark black and white.
Harriet dropped the discs at random into the slots, and fed the balls into their groove, ready to roll. She made a quick calculation and flipped the gates.
Because the board was smaller, the balls didn’t make quite the same musical cadence as they dropped. Harriet frowned, listening and watching. The bright spots of colour zigzagged down the path she had chosen for them, and fell one by one to their predestined places. Automatically Harriet scooped them up, and scattered the counters again.
‘Excuse me.’
The two girls were standing at the counter. They were clutching the scrap of leopardskin fabric between them, offering it to her.
‘Can we take this, please?’
‘Of course you can.’
Harriet took it and wrapped it in tissue, and put it in one of the silver Stepping carrier bags. The girls’ heads were bent over their purses. Harriet saw that they were coloured plastic ones, reminding her of the kind Lisa had hoarded in Kath’s old handbags, playing shopping. They were pooling their resources. After counting and recounting the money, most of it coins, they pushed it across the counter to Harriet. She found that it was right to the penny.
‘Have you left yourselves enough to get home?’ Harriet asked.
‘Yeah, it’s expensive, isn’t it? But we had to get it, once we’d seen it on, didn’t we? We’re going to take it in turns wearing it.’
Harriet felt the glow of pleasure that selling always gave her. There was a positive satisfaction in fitting customer and merchandise together, as she had just done, and the recognition that the girls could hardly afford their purchase increased rather than diminished it. She knew from her own experience that she always loved most the things that she didn’t really have the money for, and she imagined the girls taking turns to appear at parties with the leotard swathed under a black skirt, their hair in ever more exotic dressings. They would get their money’s worth from it.
Earlier in the day she had sold the same leotard in the biggest size to a fat woman who could clearly afford to buy it fifty times over. The only pleasure she had derived from that had been in an efficient transaction.
‘Enjoy wearing it,’ Harriet said.
‘What’s this, then?’
One of the girls ran her fingers over the inclined tracks of the game. She picked out the gates, like white bones, and jiggled them. She dropped one, and it slid across the polished floor.
‘Sarufy!’ her less confident friend remonstrated.
‘It’s all right,’ Harriet said, as the little wishbone was retrieved, ‘it’s mine, it doesn’t belong to the shop. Have a try.’
Harriet showed them. Sandy rattled the counters in her fist as if they were dice, kissed her knuckles as she must have seen in the films, and cast the discs into the slots. The two of them hung over the shiny board, contradicting each other and pushing one another’s hands out of the way.
‘You’re daft, Nicky.’
‘Daft yourself. If you open this one it’ll only go like this, see?’
Harriet watched their faces. The spring was released and the musical rattle came again.
The girls’ eyes and mouths were fascinated circles as they watched the balls follow their paths. They dropped, with finality, into the wrong slots.
‘Bugger.’
‘Give us another go. That was your fault.’
There was more jostling, more contradicting.
Good, Harriet thought. She had tried the game on everyone she knew, but she was always afraid that the responses reflected an urge to be kind and encouraging, or to play devil’s advocate for her own good. She liked it best when strangers became instantly engrossed, as Sandy and Nicky had done. Their bony shoulders were hunched over it, and the plumes of hair sparred with a life of their own. There was a yodel of triumph as their second attempt was successful.
‘But your score’s too high,’ Harriet said. There was another outcry, and then they set to work again. The reaction was beginning to be familiar.
Harriet had done her research. She had spent two entire Sundays riding on the top deck of a 73 bus, north to south London and back again, through the dim streets at either end of the route and along the great channel of Oxford Street in the middle. Sunday was a good day for the buses. They weren’t too crowded, the passengers were bored by the slow journey and glad to be distracted. They only bothered to climb up to the top deck, Harriet discovered, if they were travelling some distance. She attracted their attention with the rattle and plop of the balls.
It took some courage, at first, to approach people and ask if they wanted to play. But they almost always agreed. Soon she had developed a professional patter. I’m doing some informal market research. Do you mind if …? Harriet enjoyed her encounters on the isolated, swaying top deck. She played with gangs of teenage boys, with pairs of old ladies, mothers and children and solitary middle-aged men. Once, on the last leg of her last journey on an empty bus, she played with the West Indian bus conductor. She thought that in a fairer world he would have been a professor of logic. He set the paths unhesitatingly, even for the hardest of all the permutations.
‘It’s good,’ he told her. ‘It’s fun. My children would like this.’
‘Would you buy it?’ Harriet asked, as she always did.
‘Maybe.’ He patted his ticket machine on its worn leather strap. ‘We’ve all got a path to follow, haven’t we?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harriet
