Penny reflected on how caught up she was in Elsie’s and Craig’s lives. Soon she would be doing everything for them. It was so easy to get sucked into where other people were headed.
Already it was getting dark. Friday tea-time dark. This time last winter she used to go shopping for groceries with Andy. They would walk back this way, through the Burn, along a route that she would never dare take alone. It was sinister down here in the dark. A curious vegetable gloom which a couple of years ago she would have found mysterious and exciting. Now it was terrifying. Would Andy have been much help anyway, if someone had jumped out on them? Funny, it was only now that she thought of that. They had their own stolen shopping trolley from Red Spot and they wheeled it unsteadily up and down the icy hill, laughing and shouting in the dark as they followed Burn Lane by its dirty yellow streetlamps. Andy was probably depending on Penny’s help, should anything have happened.
This was one of the big changes to her life lately. She now had something she’d never had before. A man’s man. She smiled to herself. Craig was what you would call a man’s man, and you wouldn’t be saying it with an ironic smile, a wry lilt in your tone. You wouldn’t be making a sly jibe about his sexual preferences. You’d be saying quite plainly and honestly that he liked to go out with the lads. That his dealings with the outside world were all located in the world of men. And home was where the women were. Penny wondered if fag hags grew up. She wondered if she could think of Andy and Vince as...well, not childhood friends exactly, but people she’d played with on the way to growing up. And there was something in their adventures and their love affairs that seemed juvenile to her, once she thought about it. They were flippant about the whole thing. They laughed about all of it. They were so careless with each other, as if they’d never grow up. Because, now that she thought about it, they never had to grow up. They wouldn’t have a family life like others had. They could stay boys like that for ever. And that wasn’t something Penny could do. She had to find something of her own. These past few weeks Craig had been looking like an alternative. A man’s man, who knew how life and mechanical things worked.
She had reached the long road at the top of Burn Lane. Now the streets were flatter and safer all the way to town. Maybe this felt a little like betrayal. She had lost her interest in Andy’s life, in Vince’s. She was there if they needed her. And besides, Andy must know that she’d already moved on. She couldn’t hide it. Couldn’t pretend she hadn’t spent all her time with Craig. The other night, she’d been proud of Craig going out with his mates again. Actually proud he never came home till the early hours, stinking of lager. She’d been pleased that he was back in with his mates. He made them sound fearsome. Esteem meant a lot to them. There was a pecking order. She wondered if he would show her off to his gang.
Esteem. Penny stopped. She was in the middle of Faulkner Road, a street of pensioners’ bungalows. Was this all about her self-esteem? Here Craig was, apparently doting on her. Was she accepting this for the sake of her self-esteem? Was she changing everything she ever thought just to bask in the compliment of all his attention?
Crap. This was just the way it was. She was having fun and maybe some security, too. The sense of somebody being there for her. He lay against her at night and his body was hard all the way down her side.
Charlotte had taken it upon herself to shut up shop. Penny banged hard on the spastics door. When the old woman let her in, she looked pinched and red.
“What’s happened in here?” Penny gazed around the shop’s inside. It was like a bomb site.
“You tell me,” Charlotte snapped. She snatched up her dustpan and brush from where she had left it on the counter.
“Have you been burgled?”
“The till was open. I was stupid. I hadn’t emptied it last night. It’s not like we get a fortune coming through.” She sagged inside her clean pinny and had to sit down. Obviously she was blaming herself.
“Did they get away with much?”
“Oh no,” Charlotte said. “Look.”
Penny went to the till to look. All the paper money was still there, but shredded into tiny pieces. Green and orange confetti littered the floor all around. The coins were partly melted, fused into each other like a pocketful of chocolate buttons. Penny reached out to touch them, to see if they were warm.
“Who could do this?”
“Don’t touch them,” the old woman said, standing up again. “I haven’t had the police in yet.” She drifted over to the clothes racks. She had kept everything beautifully hung and colour-coded, almost so that you’d never know it was a second-hand shop. The blouses had been slashed with knives and they hung in tatters. They looked odd, still colour-graded like that.
“Has everything been ruined?” Penny asked. “How did they get in? Why would they do it?”
Charlotte shook her head. She had tears bubbling up. “All this shop does is raise money for them poor crippled bairns,” she said. Penny was shocked to see her cry. Charlotte seemed to work at keeping her feelings in. She acted hard on purpose, as if life had grieved her. Penny went to her and the old woman put out
