Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection by Rosie Thomas

Author:Rosie Thomas [Rosie Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.