A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

against the wall in the empty flat. It drew her back, as if they needed one another’s protection.

      ‘You’ve done more than half already. Call me.’

      Jane stood in the circle of light from her porch to watch her go.

      The streets were empty as Harriet reversed her zigzag journey. The gangs of youths had filtered away and even the few cars that swept past her seemed to travel without human intervention. It was as if she was alone in the world. It was pleasant to be warm and safe and isolated in the darkness. Harriet smiled. She wasn’t thinking about Charlie Thimbell reaching up to touch her breast, or about the man in the blue shirt. She was thinking about friendship, and the evening’s confirmation of it. She hummed as she drove.

       Six

      The shop was empty, at the end of a rainy Monday afternoon, except for two girls trying on leotards in the mirrored cubicles at the far end. Harriet knew that they might end up buying headbands, or leg-warmers at the very most, most probably nothing at all, but she left them in peace because that was the shop’s policy. They would come back, perhaps, when they did have money to spend. Besides that, she liked the look of them. They were young and skinny, with their hair done up in asymmetric tufts like plumes on the tops of their heads. They admired the diminishing perspectives of their own back views in the mirrors, then collapsed into choking giggles.

      One of them emerged from behind the curtains in a shimmering tube of bright pink Lycra. She made a few stiff movements at the barre that ran around the shop, the plume of hair nodding in a dozen mirrored reflections.

      ‘Makes me look like a horrible ice-cream,’ she sniffed.

      ‘The leopardskin one would be better,’ Harriet encouraged her. ‘Go on, try it on.’ It was the first time she had spoken to them, and at once they looked startled and guilty. Harriet went to the rack where the folds of leopardskin print lay and shook one out.

      ‘Go on,’ she repeated. ‘I’d like to see you in it.’

      The girl was thin. Her spine was a chain of knobs, and her hipbones jutted out. When she put the leopardskin on and sidled out between the curtains, she was transformed into a cat. A small, hungry but confident cat. The girl pirouetted and her friend whistled between her teeth. Harriet tried to remember what it felt like, to be just their age, not a woman nor quite a girl any longer. It seemed a long time ago.

      ‘It suits you, she told her.

      Without making any more suggestions, Harriet went back to her place behind the counter. She looked out of the tall shopwindow at the rain. The street lights were just coming on, and the light refracted off the raindrops on the 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,