Sofia worked as a lawyer in Edinburgh, a hundred miles away from their dying industrial west-coast Scottish town, and was doing very nicely, thank you, with her handsome international lawyer husband and babies and Range Rovers, blah blah blah. Carmen still worked in the department store she’d had a Saturday job in when she’d been at school. The store was shabby and getting worse all the time. Literally nobody in the family ever brought this up, which made it worse.

As if sensing her thoughts, her mother’s voice lowered. “And how is Dounston’s doing?”

Carmen understood, although she hated the tone. “Well . . . we’ll be doing better by Christmas,” she said, and both of them desperately tried to believe it.

CARMEN HUNG UP without satisfactorily settling the question of Christmas—or rather, by refusing to commit, knowing full well her mother would go ahead and count her in anyway. And of course nothing else would come up and she would indeed be back there again, either at Sofia’s new place—whatever it was like, for sure she would have the worst bed in the place—or under her old Spice Girls duvet on the twenty-fourth, which made her feel lower than ever. She looked around the staff room.

Her best mate at the shop, Idra, had just come in and was eyeing up the floral mug that belonged to their supervisor, Mrs. Marsh, and was never to be used on pain of death.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Carmen.

“I am going to pee in it,” said Idra, incandescent. “She’s putting me back on fricking hats.”

Carmen groaned sympathetically. Hats were next to the door, the idea being that when you tumbled in out of the freezing cold from the rapidly emptying high street, the very first thing you would need was a hat.

Unfortunately for whoever was manning the till there, it meant gushing blasts of freezing air alternating with the blistering ferocity of the air heater above making you sweat through whatever you wore. Although these days, that door was opening less and less.

Carmen measured her days in books. She kept a paperback under the desk for quiet periods, when she had remade as many window displays as one could usefully do in one day and dusted, polished, straightened, and checked the samples. When she had first started working at Dounston’s, they had always been so busy, and she’d kept her reading for the bus and lunchtime. Now, she could get through a novel every three days, and it kept getting faster. It was very, very worrying.