Her best mate at the shop, Idra, had just come in and was eyeing up the floral mug which belonged to their supervisor, Mrs Marsh, that was never to be used on pain of death.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Carmen.
‘I am going to pee in it,’ said Idra, incandescent. ‘She’s putting me back on fricking hats.’
Carmen groaned sympathetically. Hats were next to the door, the idea being that when you tumbled in out of the freezing cold from the rapidly emptying high street, the very first thing you would need was a hat.
Unfortunately for whoever was manning the till there, it meant gushing blasts of freezing air mixed with the petrifying ferocity of the air heater above making you sweat whatever you wore. Although these days, that door was opening less and less.
Carmen measured her days in books. She kept a paperback under the desk for quiet periods, when she had remade as many window displays as one could usefully do in one day, and dusted, polished, straightened and checked the samples. When she had first started working at Dounston’s, they had always been so busy, and she’d kept her reading for the bus and lunchtime. Now, she could get through a novel every three days, and it kept getting faster. It was very, very worrying.
‘She hates me the most,’ said Carmen on the topic of Mrs Marsh, as she looked at the next week’s rota. She had the most inconvenient possible combination of shifts – an early followed by a late followed by an early and a late on the same day – that somehow still left her short of full-time hours and therefore enough money to get through the month without squeezing everything and everyone and having absolutely no fun at all and taking home all her mum’s leftovers on a Sunday night.
‘She told me I looked like a tramp,’ said Idra.
‘What were you wearing?’
‘I literally took off my cardigan. For, like, ten seconds.’
Carmen laughed, then fell silent as the person they were talking about glided noiselessly into the room. Decades of working on shop floors had taught Mrs Marsh to glide despite being a heavy woman, constantly on the lookout for miscreants, pilferers, time-wasters, malingerers and basically anyone who looked like they might actually be enjoying themselves shopping in a department store.
She was silent on her tiny feet – always clad in smart black court shoes, however much they must pinch and contribute to the varicose veins spreading up her legs year on year like slow-growing ivy, just visible through the American Tan tights. Her midriff was solid and her large bosom was trussed into something from the Larger Madam section of the lingerie department which rather made her look like she only had one very wide breast which could also function as a shelf in a shop emergency.
Carmen and Idra agreed that Mrs Marsh’s idea of perfection was a completely empty, perfectly clean and tidy store with absolutely no customers in it messing things up, letting their kids knock over glassware, dirtying the polished floors with their muddy shoes or disrespecting lift etiquette （Mrs Marsh remembered the days when the lifts had an attendant, and mentioned it often）。 Having nobody in the shop was just about the way Mrs Marsh liked it.
The awful thing was, as they had seen for the last few years, it looked like Mrs Marsh was finally getting her wish.
One by one, the other shops had moved away from their unimportant regional satellite town – BHS, Next, Marks and Spencer, WH Smith – and had all fallen like ninepins.
Dounston’s, where generations of local brides had made their gift lists and chosen material for their wedding dresses, where mothers-to-be had bought their prams, where families had bought their china and sofas, their material, their white goods; Dounston’s, which stocked school uniforms in August and fancy perfume at Christmas, and toys in the wonderful toy department that made children gasp every year as they came to queue for a photo and a small present from Santa in the grotto: Dounston’s was widely predicted to be next on the high street casualty list.