“She hates me the most,” said Carmen on the topic of Mrs. Marsh, as she looked at the next week’s schedule. She had the most inconvenient possible combination of shifts—an early followed by a late followed by an early and a late on the same day—that somehow still left her short of full-time hours and therefore not enough money to get through the month without squeezing everything and everyone and having absolutely no fun at all and taking home all her mum’s leftovers on a Sunday night.

“She told me I looked like a tramp,” said Idra.

“What were you wearing?”

“I literally took off my cardigan. For, like, ten seconds.”

Carmen laughed, then fell silent as the person they were talking about glided noiselessly into the room. Decades of working on shop floors had taught Mrs. Marsh to glide, despite being a heavy woman; she was constantly on the lookout for miscreants, pilferers, time-wasters, malingerers, and basically anyone who looked like she might actually be enjoying herself shopping in a department store.

She was silent on her tiny feet—always clad in smart black pumps, however much they must pinch and contribute to the varicose veins spreading up her legs year on year like slow-growing ivy, just visible through the American Tan tights. Her midriff was solid, and her large bosom was trussed into something from the Larger Madam section of the lingerie department that rather made her look like she had only one very wide breast that could also function as a shelf in a shop emergency.

Carmen and Idra agreed that Mrs. Marsh’s idea of perfection was a completely empty, perfectly clean, and tidy store with absolutely no customers in it messing things up, letting their kids knock over glassware, dirtying the polished floors with their muddy shoes, or disrespecting lift etiquette (Mrs. Marsh remembered when the lifts had an attendant and mentioned it often). Having nobody in the shop was just about the way Mrs. Marsh liked it.

The awful thing was, as they had seen for the last few years, it looked like Mrs. Marsh was finally getting her wish.

One by one, the other shops had moved away from their unimportant regional satellite town; BHS, Next, Marks and Spencer, and WHSmith had all fallen like ninepins.

Dounston’s, where generations of local brides had made their gift lists and chosen the material for their wedding dresses, where mothers-to-be had bought their strollers, where families had bought their china and sofas, their fabric, their appliances; Dounston’s, which stocked school uniforms in August and fancy perfume at Christmas, and toys in the wonderful toy department that made children gasp every year as they came to queue for a photo and a small present from Santa in the grotto: Dounston’s was widely predicted to be next on the high-street casualty list.