The Cost of Living

by Rachel Ward

  Rachel Ward is a best-selling writer for young adults. Her first book, Numbers, was published in 2009 and shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. An avid reader of detective fiction, The Cost of Living is her first book for adults. Rachel is married, with two grown-up children, and lives in Bath.

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Rachel Ward 2017

  Editor: K.A. Farrell

  The moral right of Rachel Ward to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-910985-83-0

  ISBNe: 978-1-910985-84-7

  Cover design by David Wardle at Bold and Noble

  eBook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

  For Ozzy, Ali and Pete

  Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Acknowledgements

  1

  The bottle wobbled with every movement of the conveyor belt.

  ‘You’d be better off lying that down,’ Bea said at the exact moment that the wobble turned into a nosedive. The woman made a grab for it. Too late. It hit the floor, glass and brown sauce exploding horizontally over a surprisingly wide area. The little boy started crying. The girl in the trolley seat clapped her hands and crowed with delight.

  ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ The woman crouched down by her son. ‘Mason, are you hurt? Let me look at your legs.’

  There was sauce splattered on the thick fleece of his jogging bottoms, but nothing worse.

  ‘I’m so stupid.’

  ‘Is he all right?’ Bea asked.

  The woman was scrubbing at her son’s legs with a used tissue.

  ‘Yeah. Just in a mess. I can’t believe—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Bea soothed. ‘It’s just an accident.’ She pressed a button on her desk, lighting up the cube that identified her till. ‘It’s fine. Honestly. I’ll get it cleaned up.’

  ‘I can’t do anything right. I can’t do anything.’

  The deputy manager, Neville, walked briskly towards them along the back of the tills, clutching a clipboard. As soon as he saw what the trouble was he swivelled on his heel and retreated to the customer service console. His nasal voice rang out through the tannoy system.

  ‘Cleaner to checkout six. Cleaner to checkout six.’

  The woman stood up, settling her son onto her hip. The sauce on his joggers made brown smears on her cream-coloured mac as she hitched him up.

  ‘They’ll be here soon,’ said Bea. ‘I’ll get someone to fetch you a new bottle of sauce. Take the kids through. Sit down if you want. I’ll do your packing.’

  There were still a few items in the trolley. The woman’s hands were shaking as she loaded them onto the belt. Her little girl was still clapping. ‘Stop it, Tiffany. You’re doing my head in.’ She reached down to the bottom of the trolley for a tin of sweetcorn, squashing her son against the wire edge. His grizzling increased in volume. ‘I’m just so stupid,’ she said, her voice full of self-loathing. ‘It’s been that sort of day. Dave’s right. I can’t do anything.’

  ‘Everyone has that sort of day. Luckily not all at the same time,’ Bea said.

  ‘I lost my wedding ring yesterday,’ the woman confided. ‘Dave went mad.’

  She was gripping the handle of the trolley now, pushing it through to the packing area. Bea could see the pale line on her finger where her ring should have been.

  ‘It’ll turn up, I bet. By the sink? Or in it? Worth taking the trap apart.’

  ‘It had better. My wedding ring. Dave’s so upset. He thinks I’m . . . ’ The end of the sentence was lost as she dissolved into tears.

  A tall, lanky youth was shambling towards them along the adjacent aisle, pushing a little cart with a mop handle poking up and an array of cleaning sprays, wipes and buckets on board. His progress was glacially slow.

  Bea sighed. So this was the new recruit they’d been asked to ‘welcome to the team’ at the staff meeting. Ant Thompson. She remembered him from school. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been painting some railings in the park, wearing a hi-vis jacket with the words ‘Community Payback’ plastered across it. Big Gav had plumbed new depths with this one. Top management decision.

  Eventually Ant got to the end of the aisle and looked along the row of checkouts. Bea waved at him.

  ‘Here!’ she said. ‘Right in front of you.’

  She pointed to the mess, which looked like it could have been featured in a cartoon with the word SPLAT! in the middle.

  ‘Yeah. Got it.’

  He stood looking at it for a long time, rubbing his stubbly chin with his index finger, like a professor of maths facing an insoluble equation on a blackboard.

  ‘Brush the big stuff up first, then mop up the rest,’ Bea said.

  ‘All right. On it.’

  He started unpacking stuff from his trolley. Bea returned her attention to getting the shopping scanned and packed. There was a copy of the local paper, the Kingsleigh Bugle. The headline caught her eye. ‘Is There a Kingsleigh Stalker?’ Bea frowned. There had been rumours doing the rounds for a few weeks about women in the town being followed at night, but nothing concrete. She bleeped the barcode and moved on to the next item.

  ‘Ah,’ she said to the woman, who was now dabbing her face and taking some deep breaths. ‘The three for two on the four-pack of this is actually better value than the value pack.’ She held up a packet of toilet paper. ‘Ant will get it for you. And a new bottle of sauce. Won’t you, Ant?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’ll fetch three four-packs of loo roll and a brown sauce for this lady, won’t you?’

  He held his arms out wide, a brush in one hand and a dustpan in the other. ‘What do you want from me? I’m not a chuffing personal shopper.’

  ‘Please? Just to be nice?’

  Bea creased her face into her smarmiest, sarkiest smile and batted her false eyelashes at him. He looked a bit confused for a second or two, then broke into a grin.

  ‘Okay, but you’ll have to tell me where to go. I haven’t the foggiest.’

  ‘Aisle three for the toilet tissue, aisle eleven for the sauce. Thanks, babe.’

  His grin got wider. He dropped the brush and dustpan on the floor and set off.

  ‘You’ll get in trouble for that,’ said a deep voice from the next till. ‘You can’t call people babe, babe, he’ll have you for sexual harassment.’ There was a volley of husky laughter.

  Without looking over her shoulder, Bea called back, ‘He should be so lucky. Anyway, you just did it to me. You flirting?’

  This time she did turn around, and caught her neighbour’s eye.

  Dot, late fifties and beautifully quaffed and manicured, winked. ‘You should be so lucky.’

  By the time the shopping was packed and loaded back into the
trolley, there was still no sign of Wonder Boy.

  ‘He won’t be a minute,’ said Bea. Her customer was fumbling in her purse. She drew out a little wad of notes, ready to pay, but kept her purse open. Like a lot of people she had a photo in the plastic window where you can keep cards, a family snap – her, Mason, Tiffany and a smart-looking man in an open-necked shirt. A library card was peeking out of the other side of her purse, bearing the name ‘Julie Ronson’.

  At the other end of the checkout, shoppers kept approaching and then moving on, pulling faces at the mess on the floor.

  Ant lumbered round the end of a shelf and headed back. Bea was relieved to see he’d managed to pick up the right stuff.

  ‘At last! Thanks, b—’ She stopped herself just in time. ‘Thanks, Ant.’

  She ran the items through the till and took the cash, while Ant started cleaning up.

  ‘There we are,’ she said, handing Julie her change. ‘No harm done.’ Bea smiled and Julie managed a watery smile back.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She put Mason down again and made him hold on to the trolley and they set off for the exit. Bea watched her go, then turned her attention to Ant, who was slopping soapy water around the floor with the mop. After a minute he ground to a halt, holding the mop with both hands and leaning his chin on top.

  ‘You need to put your triangle out now,’ said Bea. ‘The wet floor one.’

  ‘Okay. On it.’ But he didn’t move. ‘I’m knackered,’ he said. ‘Don’t know if I can hack this.’

  ‘Shh, not in front of the customers. Go and empty that bucket in the drain outside.’

  ‘Yeah. Right,’ he said. He found the yellow warning cone and shambled off, leaving a good-sized puddle on the floor behind him.

  When he’d gone, Bea clasped her hands together then turned them inside out, stretched and cracked her knuckles. ‘Don’t reckon he’ll make it to Friday,’ she said to Dot.

  ‘Ah, don’t be harsh. It’s his first day. Remember yours?’

  It felt to Bea that she’d always been there, although it was only five years since she started as a Saturday girl. She’d been full-time since she left school just after her A-levels, a couple of years ago.

  ‘True enough,’ she said. ‘First days suck. If it’s okay, I’ll take my break now – it’s only five minutes early – and no one’s going to come near Lake Geneva for a while.’

  ‘All right, doll.’

  ‘You can’t smoke out here.’

  Ant was in the service yard, leaning against a wall, head back, blowing smoke into the drizzly air.

  He grinned when he saw Bea. He knew there’d been a spark between them. She was a good-looking girl, too, with curves in all the right places. With her coat draped over her shoulders and that scraped-back ponytail, there was something about her, some old-school style.

  ‘Can’t leave me alone, can you? Can’t keep away.’

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded towards the ‘No Smoking’ sign directly above his head.

  ‘I’m on my break. I wanted some fresh air,’ she said pointedly. ‘Not a lungful of second-hand smoke.’

  He took another long drag, then dropped the cigarette end onto the concrete and ground it out with his shoe.

  ‘Sorry.’

  They stood side by side for a while, in silence, then Ant said, ‘How did you do that thing with the bog roll?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did you know what was better value?’

  She shrugged. ‘Simple maths. You either divide the totals by the units to get a unit price, or multiply the costs up until you’ve got the same number of units. I usually do both ways, just to check I’m right.’

  ‘In your head?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He pulled a downward smile and nodded. ‘Impressed.’

  ‘I’m not just a pretty face, you know.’

  He snorted.

  ‘What?’ she said, ready to start a fight.

  ‘Nothing.’

  They lapsed into silence again. Ant sighed and closed his eyes.

  ‘I meant it about not hacking it. I dunno if I can do another three hours of this.’

  It was Bea’s turn to snort. ‘That’s what I said to Dot. Reckon you’re a quitter.’

  His eyes shot open. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Well, what else are you if you can’t hack seven hours work for one day?’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s dead boring.’

  ‘It’s not that bad. It’s what you make it, like most things.’

  ‘So you’re not bored?’

  ‘Yeah. No. I mean, I try not to be. I try to be nice to my customers, save them a bit of money, have a bit of banter. It makes a difference. I like it. And there’s staff discount on everything.’

  ‘I don’t get the discount. Not till I’ve done my probation.’

  ‘There you go. Another reason to stick at it. Saves an eff-ton of money for me and Queenie.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mum.’

  ‘Queenie! What do you call her that for?’

  ‘Revenge. She called me Beatrice after the princess. Minging name. So I call her Queenie. Trouble is, she likes it.’

  ‘Ha! Mine’s just as bad. With her it was Tony Blair.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m Anthony, after Tony Blair. Things could only get better in 1997. Apparently.’

  Bea started to laugh. ‘Parents. What are they like?’

  ‘Saddos with no imagination?’ Ant was laughing now too. ‘Anthony and Beatrice,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell.’

  He held his hand up and, rather to her surprise, Bea found herself high-fiving him.

  The door behind them blasted open.

  ‘Anthony! What are you doing out here?’

  A man stood in the doorway, almost filling it – the boss himself, Gavin. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up. One of his buttons had come undone revealing a swell of pale hairy flesh between the bottom of his tie and the top of his belt.

  ‘We’ve been looking for you. You’re needed inside. Eileen’s going to show you how to stock the freezers.’

  Ant looked at Bea and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m needed,’ he said. ‘Hate to tear myself away.’

  ‘Come on! Chop, chop! I’m giving you a chance here. First day. A new start. Don’t mess it up.’

  Ant peeled himself from the wall and disappeared inside. Bea stayed in the yard for a few minutes more then went up to the staffroom. The rest of her shift dragged a little. There was the usual lull after lunch. Things picked up a bit around the end of the school day, with parents popping in to pick up some things for tea and kids doing their sweet and crisp run. At five o’clock, she handed over to Marcus gratefully. He was student at the university nearby and, like several others, he did three or four evening and weekend shifts to supplement his student loan.

  ‘All right?’ he said, as she logged out of the till.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  He sat down and started getting comfortable. His glasses slipped down his nose when he bent sideways to adjust the chair.

  ‘Did you see the paper today?’ he said, pushing his glasses up again.

  ‘Something or nothing, I reckon,’ said Bea.

  ‘I dunno, I know one of the girls that got followed. You take care, okay?’

  ‘I’m okay. I can look after myself,’ said Bea. ‘But thanks.’

  She headed towards the back of the store. She’d pick up tea for her and Queenie on the way out, after she’d got changed. Wednesday today, so it was chicken and vegetable rice. Queenie liked routine. She fetched her handbag and coat from the ladies’ locker room and went into the staffroom. Ginny, another checkout worker about Bea’s age, was on her way out.

  ‘New boy’s in there,’ she said to Bea. She rolled her eyes. ‘He’s in a bit of a mood.’

  ‘Ha! First day blues,’ said Bea. ‘I think he’s all right really.’

  Ant was standing near the kitchen area, strip
ping off his branded polo shirt.

  ‘Oi!’ said Bea. ‘Not in here. Go in the men’s.’

  ‘I don’t want to be in this thing another minute,’ he said. ‘I hate chuffing uniforms.’ He balled up the shirt and threw it into a corner. His body was so skinny Bea could see each one of his ribs. If I ran my fingernail up and down, he’d make a noise like a xylophone, she thought, although she had no desire to actually touch him. He caught her looking, though, and the grin was back. She did her coat up. Now he was perched on the edge of the one of the old beaten-up armchairs, watching her as he rummaged around in his pocket, apparently readjusting his groin.

  ‘God! Stop it. There’s ladies present, you know.’

  He grinned. ‘Unexpected item in bagging area.’

  Bea gave him a withering look. ‘Nobody’s interested in your bagging area. Nobody.’

  His grin remained.

  ‘They’re queuing up, girl. Join the back, if you want. I reckon that Ginny girl’s interested for starters.’

  Bea opened her mouth and stuck her fingers in making a retching noise. ‘In your dreams,’ she said. ‘Seriously, take your hands out of your pocket or I’ll report you.’

  Ant sighed and reluctantly complied. As he brought his hand out, something fell onto the hard floor with a light, tinkling sound.

  ‘What’s that?’ Bea asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ He moved his foot quickly, trapping something underneath.

  ‘What’s under your foot?’

  She walked nearer to him.

  ‘Nothing.’ He tried to look at her, brazen it out, but couldn’t meet her steely gaze.

  ‘So move it.’

  ‘Nah.’

  She folded her arms across her ample chest. She could easily take him in a fight, or at least barge him away from whatever he was guarding, but then she’d have to actually make contact with him and, well, you didn’t know where he’d been. No, she’d wait it out.

  ‘Are you just going to stand there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’