‘Stand there,’ she said, her fingers slowly grazing the coloured things, ‘and just chat to me.’
‘What about?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Whatever you like. No one’s listening to you.’
This was confusing. Chloe continued to twirl the stand and examine the beads. She weighed them in her hands and pretended to be deciding. There was a mirror built into the top of the rack. She adjusted it downwards like it was in a car, and smiled at herself.
A fat woman edged by us and poked me with the point on her closed umbrella. It snagged my ankle and I made a little noise, an involuntary gasp. The woman turned and frowned at me. I stared back at her until she tutted and walked away then I bent and pulled up the leg of my jeans. There was a graze on the sticking-out bone of my ankle, weeping clear fluid and not blood. I could see Chloe’s feet too, and the little squares of black cardboard that were dropping between them.
‘Talk then,’ Chloe said.
‘That woman just hit me with her umbrella!’ I looked for her grey head in the crowd. ‘She never even said sorry!’
‘Did she?’ Chloe said. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘It wrecked!’ I said, freshly outraged. ‘And then she looked at me as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. Fat bitch.’
The Christmas music and the bubble of people talking was loud, but Chloe was still nodding at me.
‘I don’t know why people think they can just walk about and do what they like,’ I went on. ‘Shall we go and find her? Tell her what’s what? I reckon we should. Chloe?’
‘Right,’ she said, ‘that’s enough now.’
I thought she was telling me to stop whining but she glanced upwards at a red light blinking in the swivelling black eye-socket of a camera, and then behind my shoulder. I saw a flick of movement in the corner of my eye, but didn’t turn to see what it was – I was more interested in what Chloe was doing.
‘Got to go,’ she said, and slipped away giggling. I could hear her laughing long after she’d gone.
The security guard put his hand on my shoulder and not hers. It had happened before, but still, I never saw it coming. She told me once that I got caught and not her because I stood there looking ashamed of myself. I had a guilty-looking face, apparently: a magnet for suspicious shop assistants and men with brown shirts and walkie-talkies.
I turned limply. You always had to go to an office or a staff room somewhere. He walked behind me and tried to hold onto my elbow.
‘I’m not going to run,’ I said, ‘but take your hands off me or I will go home and tell my dad you touched me.’
He recoiled because I said it like Chloe had told me to – the emphasis is on the word ‘touched’.
And then you leg it, she’d said, but I didn’t. I walked slightly in front of him, as if I was leading him. I only let him stand beside me when I was not sure which way I needed to go next. He tapped my shoulder but didn’t hold onto it.
This was the same winter the City was plagued by an anonymous pervert who was cornering young girls in parks and bus stations and exposing himself to them. The news coverage about it was feverish. There were more police in the public places, and talk about a curfew. No man wanted to hear the word touched said about him by a fourteen-year-old. Chloe knew this.
In the back room, I let him have my real name.
‘Where do you live?’
I shrugged. ‘You can’t ask me anything without my dad here,’ I said and emptied out my pockets. A cigarette lighter and a packet of Polos.
‘That it? What about your coat?’
‘I’ve nothing,’ I said. ‘You can’t keep me.’
I flicked open my jacket to show him there was nothing inside.
‘What about your friend? What’s her name?’ He had a notebook in front of him, but the pencil was on the desk, not in his hand. He looked hot and bored.
Even in the back room the sound of ‘White Christmas’ on pan pipes floated in. There was a cold cup of coffee and an out-of-date copy of the Mirror on the desk in front of him. He looked at the newspaper longingly.
I smiled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The blonde. The pretty one. You know who I mean. What’s her name?’
‘You really shouldn’t be conducting an interview with me without my parents here. Can I have your name? And what’s that number on your sleeve? That’d come in handy too, thanks.’
I wrote the number down on the notepad using his pencil, then tore off a strip of paper and tucked it into my back pocket. He sighed.
‘Laura Webb. I’ll remember you. You at the Valley School?’
I nodded. He must have seen the badge on my rucksack.
‘That means you must live round here. Walking distance. I’ll find out your address. Talk to your parents. They’ll tell me who your good-looking mate was.’
‘She never took anything,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got nothing either.’
I scooped up the mints and the lighter, and walked out. I sauntered home, waiting for Chloe to pop out from somewhere, her pockets rattling with jewellery. By the time I got there the security guard had gone through the phone book and called Barbara to tell her that I was banned from our Debenhams and all other Debenhams in the entire chain – for life.
I didn’t catch up with Chloe that afternoon. She’d seen me getting caught, I suppose, and bombed it home. It might seem heartless, but there was no point in both of us getting caught, and, as she’d probably say, it served me right for not being as observant as she was.
When I got back home Barbara was waiting for me. She opened the door before I’d even gone up the path. Sometimes she hovered in the hallway and yanked the door inwards when my key was in the lock, but that day she pulled it back and stared at me while I was still fumbling with the gate. Her fringe was stuck to her forehead and she was wearing an apron with a recipe for Scotch Broth written down the front of it. We had a matching tea-towel and set of soup dishes.
‘Get inside, you,’ she said, and looked past me into the street as if there was going to be a van full of policemen parked outside and a man in a white overall unrolling crime-scene tape between the cherry tree and the gatepost. I wasn’t quick enough: she grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the house.
That was twice I’d been manhandled. Three times if you count the woman with the umbrella, which I did count, because she hadn’t apologised. I was made to turn out my pockets again. I’d expected this, and I’d tucked the cigarette lighter into the waist of my jeans, so I was all right.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.
‘They telephoned me just for fun then, did they?’ Barbara said quickly. ‘Was it that Chloe?’
‘Chloe went home.’
Barbara sighed and leaned forward, her hands flat on the table.
‘What did you take? What is it that you need so much you’d steal it?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t take anything.’
‘I know we don’t have money, but—’
‘I didn’t take anything.’
She sighed. Picked her hands up from the table and put them into the front of her apron. Waited a while before speaking.
‘If I didn’t seriously think you’d spoil yet another Christmas for your father,’ she said, ‘I’d tell him about this.’
I didn’t say anything. By ‘yet another Christmas’ I think she meant the year before when I got the chickenpox. Because Donald and Barbara had never had it, I gave it to them too, and because Donald didn’t do much, his immune system was rubbish and he had to spend a week in bed and miss everything.
She confiscated the Polo mints.
Except for the sudden, unexpected freeze on Christmas Eve and a hailstorm during the night that settled and pretended to be snow, Christmas Day went as usual that year.