The Poka Dot Shop

by Laurel Remington

  One of the cubicle doors bangs and Chloe walks out. The fashion police! I’ve been caught red-handed.

  ‘Hi, Andy,’ she says, eyeing my outfit.

  ‘Hi.’ I stare back at her, and realize that she’s wearing the skirt – the brown corduroy one with the patchwork spots from Asos that looked so cute online. She’s accessorized it with a mint-green top, a studded denim jacket, brown tights and slouchy suede boots with a little heel. The skin on the back of my neck begins to itch with envy.

  ‘I like your shoes,’ she says. ‘Converse are cool.’

  I stare at her, waiting for her to start laughing – like I’d actually believe she might pay me a compliment. She washes her hands at the sink and puts on lip gloss. When she doesn’t laugh, or say anything else, I decide to take a risk.

  ‘I like your skirt,’ I say. ‘From Asos, right?’

  ‘It was on sale,’ she says. ‘Only nineteen pounds.’

  ‘Cool.’

  She raises an eyebrow and leaves the loos. I exhale in relief. I’ve survived. I check my reflection again and take off the cardigan. The thing is, I’ve seen a few girls in Chloe’s crowd wearing similar jeans and the top actually isn’t that bad either. I also think about Ms Cartwright. She doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that whatever she buys at Mum’s shop isn’t new. Does it really matter so much? I swallow hard. To me, it does.

  At lunchtime, Stevie wheels up to me in the canteen. ‘You OK, Andy?’ she says. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I had a bit of a late night,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up reading.’

  ‘Oh? Anything good?’

  ‘Um, I don’t know. I fell asleep.’

  She peers at me like I’m not going to get off that easily. I wish I could tell her about Thomas but I know it’s best not to. Especially since he’s bound to hate me if he finds out about the really bad thing I’m doing—

  ‘Remember, I’m not around after school. I’m going for my introductory walking lesson.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ I say, hiding the fact that I had forgotten it was today. ‘You must be so excited.’

  She looks down at her hands folded in her lap. ‘Yeah,’ she says quietly. I’m startled to see tears in her eyes.

  ‘Stevie, what’s wrong?’ I put my hand on her shoulder but she pulls away.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she says. ‘It’s going to hurt – a lot. What if it hurts too much? What if I can’t do it? It’s one thing having no hope of ever walking again – or just wishing that some day I might be able to try. But actually doing it . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Hey!’ I kneel down and take her hand. ‘You will be able to do it. I just know it. You’re the smartest and bravest person I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Smart and brave don’t control leg muscles.’

  ‘No, but they control up here.’ I tap the side of my head. ‘That’s got to be a lot of it.’

  ‘Maybe you’re the one who’s smart, Andy.’

  ‘Me – no way.’

  ‘Well, you seem to know the right thing to say.’ She smiles and I smile back, glad to have helped a little.

  I stand up again. ‘Carrie and I will be wishing you luck. Mind to mind. Like telekinesis.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Beam me your energies at exactly half four this afternoon.’

  THE DARK SIDE

  In the late afternoon, I think of Stevie as promised. It would be so great if she could walk again, and I really hope that it all goes well. But by five o’clock, all I can think about is the fact that my auction is ending – I haven’t stopped it. I hang around the library and log in for the last seconds. The polka-dot dress sells for a whopping £485! I feel like a balloon has inflated in my stomach and I’m about to float off somewhere – probably to the nearest Westfield shopping centre. It would be brilliant – the best day of my life – if I could go shopping with £485 in my pocket. I could buy bags and bags of the nicest clothes from the sales and the new season. I could spend days just browsing and choosing: Topshop, Next, Zara, Gap, Debenhams. And the shoes; and the handbags, jewellery and hair slides . . . Everything would be brand-new, unworn – nothing ‘pre-owned’, or ‘pre-loved’. I feel like standing up, dancing around, flinging out my arms and giving a great big whoop.

  But it’s never going to happen.

  I click on the ‘send invoice to buyer’, and close down the website. What I did was wrong. I took the polka-dot dress without clearing it with Mum. The dress belongs to Thomas or his uncle. I sold it on without telling anyone. I don’t know for sure, but it sounds like there’s at least a few crimes in that.

  As I walk home from school, I picture how awful it would be if I was working at Mum’s shop when the police came to arrest me. Mum will try to reason with the officers – offer them a cup of tea and a crumby biscuit – ‘let’s just all sit down and sort this out’. Jolanta will look smug as the policemen say ‘no thank you’ to the tea and ask me to hold out my wrists so they can cuff them. And when I’m dragged out of the shop to the waiting police car, Mr LeBoeff will stand in the doorway of the chippie looking shocked and disappointed. Worst of all, Thomas will come out of the back where he’s been frying chips and washing dishes, and he’ll know what I’ve done, and how I lied to him.

  Except it doesn’t have to be that way.

  I can stop all this right now. Give the bag back to Thomas with all the clothes inside, including the polka-dot dress. I’ll tell him I found all of it in the back of Mum’s shop buried under other bags – which is true. No one ever need know about the eBay thing. I’ll email the buyer and tell them that it was all a big mistake – the polka-dot dress turned out to be a fake, and I’m really sorry but I’m not going to be posting it. Could the buyer sue me or something if I did that? I have no idea . . .

  What a mess.

  I arrive at the shop and go inside. Mum and Jolanta are both there, putting some ‘new’ stock on a rack of jeans. Two of the pairs look like the stained ones I threw in the bin when I sorted through stuff in the back. I can’t believe Mum would possibly want to sell someone’s tatty old jeans, washed or not. Jolanta frowns at me. Mum stops what she’s doing and gives me a quick hug.

  ‘Hi,’ I say to both of them. ‘I’m here to do some more work. Maybe in the back – some more sorting?’ If the police do come, I might be able to dive underneath the pile of bin bags and hide out. Even the most dedicated officer might think twice before braving the back of Mum’s shop. Right now, it seems like the safest option.

  Mum looks at Jolanta. Jolanta stares at me smugly like a python that’s just eaten a whole monkey. ‘Um, Andy, can I talk to you for a second?’ Mum’s voice is strangely flat. ‘In private.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Something’s up. I follow Mum to the back of the shop. Immediately I notice something different. It looks cleaner. Like instead of a hurricane hitting yesterday, it hit a week ago, and people have been trying to tidy up the wreckage. The stack of black bin bags is still there, but it’s been moved to one side and piled even higher.

  ‘Andy – Jolanta and I think that someone might have broken into the shop.’

  ‘Broken in?’ My heart judders like a blown-out tyre.

  ‘We found some Coke cans in the recycling, and some bags that had been moved.’

  ‘Well, if you keep a key under the mat at the back, what do you expect?’ I blurt out.

  Mum’s jaw drops. ‘So it was you. I mean, I didn’t want to believe it.’

  My mind hurtles in a thousand directions. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to get Thomas in trouble. How could we have been so stupid as to leave those cans in the recycling?

  ‘You think I broke into the shop?’ I step forward, putting my hands on my hips. Getting mad seems the only way out. ‘Me, as in your own daughter?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mum steps back, clearly having doubts.

  ‘I mean, seriously, Mum. Why would I do that? Do you think I came to t
ake another pair of old jeans? A bra made out of coconuts and a dusty Hawaiian skirt? Some old wedding dress that reeks of mothballs?’ Now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop. ‘I mean, just so you know, Mum, I can’t stand most of the stuff in your shop. Especially the stuff you bring me to wear. So why did I break in – to steal the ten pounds I made for you? It’s completely ridiculous and totally insulting!’

  I storm out of the stockroom. As I suspected, Jolanta ‘happens’ to be hanging clothing on a rack right by the curtain to the back so she’s heard every word.

  ‘So that’s it then,’ I say. ‘You want to turn my own mum against me?’

  She stops what she’s doing and puts her hands on her hips. ‘There was a white bag in the back,’ she says. ‘It had some designer things in it that were left on the doorstep. I put it with the other bags – I was going to sort through it. Then you came in.’ She crosses her arms. ‘You threw away some perfectly good denim. And now the white bag is gone.’

  ‘Well, it’s nothing to do with me,’ I say, my heart hammering in my chest. ‘And if anyone left anything half-decent on the doorstep, then it was probably a mistake. I mean, why would they?’ I stand up a little straighter so that I’m a good three inches taller than Jolanta.

  ‘Girls, girls.’ Mum comes in from the back. ‘Look, we have to stop this now. We’re a team. We have to be on the same side.’

  ‘Do we?’ I say to Mum. ‘Because it seems that you two are on the same side. And you can have the shop all to yourselves. I’m leaving.’

  I storm out of the shop, shaking all over. As I stand outside on the pavement, rain drips through a hole in the awning down on to my head. The cold water is like a slap in the face. I did something wrong and now I’ve been caught out. I know I should just go back in and confess. And if Jolanta hadn’t been there, then maybe that’s what I would have done. Maybe . . .

  Instead, I walk home. I find a posting bag in Mum’s things in the kitchen and some tissue paper in a gift wrap box. The white bag is in my room at the bottom of the wardrobe. Mum can sort through the stuff I left in the back of the shop and find the other designer items that I didn’t take. But I’ve sold the polka-dot dress and now I’m going to send it to the buyer and collect my £485. (Because I’m a new seller, the money won’t be released from eBay to my bank account until the buyer receives the item.)

  I pull the dress from the bag and give it a good shaking out. Once again I feel a little pang – the dress really is beautiful, and somewhere inside, that older, wiser part of me wishes that I could keep it for ‘some day’. But the now part of me – the me that wears second-hand knickers and gets teased in the loos – knows that I have to do this. I fold the dress up and wrap the tissue paper around it. I’ve got some old Disney stickers in my desk drawer from when I was into that stuff, so I stick them on the tissue paper to keep it in place. Cinderella in her blue dress, and Belle in her yellow one. Tinkerbell waving her wand. Then I stick the package in the mailing envelope and print the address of the buyer in black pen on the front. Now it looks like any old package, my guilt tidily wrapped up in layers of paper and plastic. I’ll post it tomorrow on my way to school.

  I lie down on my bed, hands behind my head, elbows splayed out, staring at a brown water stain on the ceiling. On Saturday, I’ll make up some excuse to Mum and get the bus into the town centre. I’ll spend my £485, and it will be done. After that, I’ll never do anything wrong again, I swear. I close my eyes and think about all of the things I’ll buy – new jeans, a little skirt, sunglasses, T-shirts, underwear. Maybe I’ll even buy a dress. Or perhaps I’ll just try everything on and wait and go back a few weekends in a row, carefully making my decisions. If I ‘go straight’, this is all the money I’m ever going to have and I should make it last. Or maybe I’ll go to a really expensive designer shop and spend the whole thing in one go. That would feel amazing, surely . . .

  Because right now, when I think about my shopping trip, I feel a big gaping hole in my stomach. I don’t even want to go at all. But then it would all have been for nothing. I get out of bed and put the package into the white bag, and put the bag back in the wardrobe. Do hardened criminals feel this kind of conflict and guilt?

  I crawl back under the covers, wishing – more than anything – that I’d never laid eyes on the white bag and the polka-dot dress, and started down the path to the Dark Side.

  JUDGE AND JURY

  When Mum comes home, she tries to have a ‘little chat’, but I keep my door shut and locked. She talks through the door, saying how she would never accuse me of anything, and of course she didn’t think I took anything. She was just trying to figure out if there really was a bag of nice things and, if so, what happened to it . . . I cover my ears. Finally, she goes away.

  I stay in my room all evening. On her way to bed, Mum has another go, and I can tell from the strain in her voice that she’s upset. I know I should open the door – I hate the way things are between us right now, and I feel really bad about what I’ve done, and how I’ve lied about it. But I’m too scared to tell her, and besides, I know what I have to do.

  When Mum’s door is finally closed, I get up and take the white bag out of the wardrobe with the package inside. I tiptoe downstairs to the kitchen and find Mum’s spare key – even she’s probably now removed the one from under the mat behind the shop. Silently, I leave the house.

  The night is dark and cloudy as I walk the ten minutes to the high street. Everything is dark, even the chippie. But when I stand in front of the old theatre and look closely, I can see the light leaking through the boards.

  I go around to the alleyway and let myself into Mum’s shop. I risk turning on the light so that I can dig around the pile of bin bags until I find the designer clothing I hid there. (I was worried that Mum and Jolanta might have found it already, but I guess they were looking for a white bag.) When I’ve found the clothing, I put it back in the white bag. I carry the bag out of the shop and lock up.

  Next to the shop, the back door of the old theatre is ajar and I can hear a radio playing. Butterflies circle in my stomach as I go inside. When I reach the end of the corridor, I knock hard on the wall and call out, ‘Hello?’ There’s no response, so I go through the curtain to the theatre.

  Thomas is up on the ladder, his back to me. He’s wearing old jeans and a T-shirt, both splattered with white paint. His arms are tanned and muscular. I stand and watch him for a minute as he paints a wide rectangle of wall with a roller. The music is louder in here. I call out again: ‘Hey – Thomas’.

  He turns around to face me. ‘Hi, Andy,’ he says. Then his eyes move down to the Galeries Lafayette bag in my hand. ‘You found it!’

  For a second, a way out flashes in my mind. I could just tell him I found it tonight in the shop – it got mixed in with some other things – and as far as I know, everything’s there. But the lying feels like a heavy stone that I’m carrying around with me, and I can’t keep doing it any longer.

  ‘I took it,’ I blurt out. I want to turn away – to avoid the frown, the accusation on his face. But I force myself not to.

  He climbs down the ladder, then goes over to the radio and switches off the music. The fact he’s not saying anything is even worse than if he told me off.

  ‘I found it in the back of Mum’s shop,’ I say. ‘It was buried under some other bags. I found your aunt’s beautiful clothes. I’m totally not into vintage stuff, but I thought that they were pretty amazing.’

  He doesn’t speak so I blather on.

  ‘Mum said I could have something in payment for some work I did at the shop. She thought I was taking a pair of old jeans, but really I took the polka-dot dress from the bag and hid the rest.’ I sigh. Now that I’ve started, I know I’ve got to tell him the whole story. ‘The thing is,’ I continue, ‘I really hate the fact that I have to wear somebody’s old clothes all the time, and people mock me at school. I hardly ever have anything new, unless it’s something my Aunt Linda sends me. I know it s
ounds totally lame and selfish. I was planning to go to a real shopping centre and buy some new clothes. So I took your aunt’s dress and sold it on eBay.’

  The words echo accusingly around the vast empty space.

  ‘The buyer paid for it and everything. I’m supposed to post it off tomorrow.’ My eyes fill with tears. ‘But it’s not too late to cancel the sale. I can do it first thing tomorrow. I brought the dress back too – it’s in the bag.’

  Thomas turns away and climbs back up the ladder. I wish he would just say something: tell me to get lost, or that he’s going to call the police – anything. But he acts like I’m not even there. A minute or two goes by, and I set the bag on the floor. I should leave now. I’ve lost everything – the money, the nice clothes, the sale on eBay, Mum’s trust, being friends with Thomas. I feel like there’s nowhere I can go, no way to make things right. I look around me at the theatre. It’s a beautiful place, but so run-down and shabby – just like the shop. I’ve ruined my chance to help out with the shop, but maybe . . .

  I take off my jacket and drape it on top of the white bag. I walk over to where Thomas has his tools, pour some white paint into a spare tray, and grab a paint roller. I pick a spot about three metres away from Thomas’s ladder and start painting.

  I can sense him stopping his own work and watching me. I don’t look at him or say anything. I’ve never painted a wall before, and though I try to be neat, within the first minute I manage to get flecks of white paint all over my face and top. But there’s something relaxing about it. The tears in my eyes dry up. I stop thinking about what I’ve done. I stop thinking about Mum and Thomas. In fact, I stop thinking at all. The rectangle of paint gets larger, the wet sheen catching the light. Everything in front of me is white; the whole world is white—