Lou ran the barcode of a frozen chicken tikka pizza over the scanner and handed it to a harassed young woman struggling to pack her shopping while keeping a toddler strapped into its pushchair.

‘Seventeen fifty-eight, please,’ Lou said.

‘Shanelle, how many times! Sit down or I’ll text Santa and tell him you’ve been bad again.’ The young woman emptied the contents of her purse on to the conveyer belt and loaded her bags on to the handles of the pushchair.

Lou counted out the collection of coins and crumpled notes. ‘You’re sixty pence short,’ she said flatly.

The woman rifled through her shopping and plucked out a packet of chocolate buttons. The child began to wail, stretching out her hands like two pink starfish.

Making sure the supervisor wasn’t watching, Lou shoved the sweets back into the carrier bag. If her till was down, they’d deduct the sixty pence from her wages. So what. The young woman smiled, said nothing. She beat a hasty retreat and was followed closely by a teenage girl who didn’t stop at the counter to pay for the packet of biscuits shoved up her sleeve. She gave Lou a sidewise glance as she pulled up her hood, hiding her impressive mane of auburn hair. Lou had worked at Iceworld long enough to suffer the training session on identifying a shoplifter multiple times. At least this girl wasn’t stupid enough to wear her hood in the shop. She cared enough about not getting caught to make an effort.

When the supervisor pulled the shutters down at the end of the day, Lou slipped quietly away, saving her colleagues the embarrassment of having to ask whether she would be joining them at the Christmas party. All day she had faced the awkward stares and pitying looks from the other checkout girls. After the initial hugs and the well-meaning flood of, ‘You all right? You sure you haven’t come back too soon?’ they had kept their distance, whether out of tact or embarrassment, Lou wasn’t sure.

On her way through the loading bay, she glimpsed the girls crowded around the mirror in the staff room, applying lip gloss in a cloud of hairspray and laughing at the mistletoe headbands Mel had bought them all from the pound shop.

Lou pulled her parka over her gingham tabard and stepped out into the snow that had finally arrived. Tying her scarf tighter around her neck and pulling up her hood, she crossed the yard and walked the short distance to the bus stop. From beneath her damp fringe, she watched the headlights of cars, their tyres churning the newly fallen snow into slush, until the bus pulled up to the kerb.

With the driver battling against the heavy snow, the bus took twice as long as normal to wind its way across town. Lou rubbed a hole in the condensation and watched the world pass by. The further they travelled from the centre of town, the greyer the buildings grew. Finally, they arrived at the sprawling estate on the outskirts. Each street radiating from the central spine of the main road was the same mix of shabby, grey houses and maisonettes with a narrow stretch of grass halfway down – the greens. Once upon a time, the residents of Hill House Estate had tended their gardens and planted hanging baskets. Children – including Lou, her brothers and Katie – had played tag on the greens. A few of the older residents still planted daffodil bulbs each year, but it was a long time since the greens had been used as anything other than toilets for dogs and a place for the estate kids to congregate and intimidate any passer-by who dared to look at them.