When Laura got home from the shop after its last day of business she was very tired. If she’d had to say, yes, it was very sad the shop’s closing, and no, she didn’t really have another job yet, but there was going to be this literature and music festival and would they like a flyer? one more time, she felt she’d have had a nasty turn. She’d done so much of it at the party, she hadn’t been prepared to do it for the rest of the week as well. And the bookshop had looked so forlorn with its depleted shelves and bare floorboards. Although she’d wanted to help, she was quite glad Henry had insisted he and Grant would do the final days of clearing and packing up. She wasn’t sure she could have borne seeing it as a completely empty shell.

She got up the stairs to her little flat, opened the door and put the kettle on, even before she’d shut the door.

She had just taken her first, perfect sip of tea when her phone went. She cursed inwardly. She could never drink tea and talk on the phone unless she knew the person well enough to explain that was what she was doing. Praying it was one of those, she found her phone and answered it. It was Mrs Ironside, her downstairs neighbour, who generally preferred to phone than walk all the way up the stairs to Laura’s flat ‘at her age’.

‘Laura?’ Mrs Ironside was an irritable person who didn’t have enough to do and so filled her time with the doings of others. ‘There are a great many parcels for you. I took them in when I saw the postman about to take them all away. Then you’d have had to go to the sorting office for them.’

‘Oh, thank you so much.’ Laura was truly grateful although she didn’t always get on with Mrs Ironside.

‘So will you come and collect them? There are so many of them. What on earth are they?’

‘I really don’t know. I’ll come down now.’

She took a gulp of tea, which was slightly too hot for gulping, and propping her door open, went downstairs. Her tea would be too cold before she got back to it, and she knew that if she made herself another cup, it would not be as nice. It was not her day.

There were fifteen large Jiffy bags piled neatly in Mrs Ironside’s hall. She had a much larger flat than Laura but they still took up a lot of space.

‘Oh my goodness,’ said Laura, wondering how many she could carry at once, and thinking longingly of her tea. If Mrs Ironside had been anyone else, she could have explained about the tea. ‘Right, I’ll take as many as I can and pop back down for the rest.’