The Telescope in the Window

Asha Mistry kept her fortune in a shortbread tin, and on the first Saturday of September her fortune came to twenty-three pounds and forty pence.

She counted it on her duvet. Then she counted it again, because the first time a twenty-pence piece had rolled under her knee and she had nearly missed it, and twenty pence was not nothing. The tin still smelled of butter. It always would.

Through her bedroom window, across Gull Street, the telescope stood in the window of Oddie's Books & Bits. It was brass, and it was tall, and it pointed at the ceiling as if the ceiling had done something interesting. A paper tag hung from its middle on a loop of string. Asha knew what the tag said. She had read it on Monday, and Tuesday, and every day since.

£240.

She uncapped a biro and did the sum on the back of her left hand, where Mum would not see it until teatime.

£240.00

− £23.40
= £216.60

Then, underneath, smaller, because her knuckles were getting in the way:

£5 a week … 44 Saturdays

Forty-four Saturdays was most of a year. Asha had looked it up in the astronomy book from the school library, the one she had renewed three times. By next summer Saturn would have slid down behind the sea. You could not see a planet's rings if the planet had gone.

The door banged open. Kit came in sideways, still in his pyjamas, holding a jam doughnut with one bite out of it.

'You're doing the face,' he said.

'I'm not doing a face.'

'You're doing the telescope face.' He climbed onto the end of the bed and looked out of the window with her. 'You should stare at it really hard. Then they'll make it cheaper.'

'That's not how prices work.'

Kit licked jam off his thumb and considered this.

'It works on seagulls,' he said. 'If you stare at a seagull long enough, it goes away and leaves your chips.'

Asha looked at the telescope. The telescope did not look back.

The shop bell was not really a bell. It was a brass seahorse on a spring, and when Asha pushed the door it gave a sort of hiccup instead of a ring.

Inside, it smelled of old paper and furniture polish. The shop was narrow, like a corridor that had decided to become a shop halfway through. Books leaned on each other along both walls. There were teapots on top of the books, and a stuffed owl on top of one teapot. The owl had lost an eye. Nobody had replaced it.

Mrs Oddie sat behind the counter on a high stool, writing in a notebook with a fountain pen. She was small and very straight, and her reading glasses hung on a chain round her neck. She did not look up.

'Good morning,' she said. 'Mind the owl.'

Asha minded the owl. She stood at the counter and said what she had practised on the way across the road, which was only eleven steps and not really enough time to practise anything.

'Please could you keep the telescope for me? I've got twenty-three pounds forty, and I'm saving the rest, and I'll pay you back every Saturday until it's done.'

Mrs Oddie put the lid on her pen. Then she put on her glasses and looked at Asha properly, the way the dentist looked at teeth.

'No,' she said.

'I could pay a deposit.'

'Still no. If I put a ribbon round everything a child wanted, I'd have a shop full of ribbons and nothing in the till.' She folded her hands. 'Why do you want it?'

Asha had not practised this part.

'Saturn,' she said. 'It's up in the evenings right now, low over the sea, after it gets dark. You can see it with just your eyes, but it's only a yellow dot. With a proper telescope you can see the rings.' She heard her own voice speeding up and couldn't stop it. 'They're made of ice. Bits of ice and rock, going round and round, and some of the bits are as small as sand and some are as big as houses. And it's leaving. By summer it'll be behind the sun and I'll have missed it.'

Mrs Oddie said nothing for a moment.

'Houses,' she said at last.

'Some of them.'

Mrs Oddie let her glasses drop onto their chain. Then she reached across the counter and patted the till.

It was an enormous brass thing with round keys like buttons on an old coat. It had curly writing on the front and a dent in one corner.

'Barnaby,' said Mrs Oddie, 'this young lady wants two hundred and forty pounds' worth of ice and rock.'

She pressed a key. The drawer shot out with a ding, and in the window, beside the telescope, a large ginger cat opened one eye. He did not open the other. Asha had not even noticed him there.

'Tell me what's in Barnaby,' said Mrs Oddie.

'Money.'

'Mackerel,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Or near enough. Picture a fisherman, right here in Hollins Bay, before there were any shops. He's got a bucket of mackerel and holes in his boots. So off he goes to the bootmaker.'

'And swaps the fish for boots.'

'The bootmaker doesn't want fish. He's had fish all week. He wants a hat.'

Asha chewed the end of her plait. 'So the fisherman swaps the fish for a hat first, and then the hat for the boots.'

'The hatmaker hates fish. Makes her sneeze.' Mrs Oddie looked pleased with this. 'By teatime the mackerel's gone off and he's still got wet feet.'

'He should just pay with coins.'

'Why would the bootmaker want a coin? You can't eat it. You can't wear it.'

Asha thought. It was harder than it sounded.

'Because the baker will take it from him,' she said slowly. 'For bread.'

'And the baker takes it because the miller will take it from her, and so on, all the way round. Everybody trusts everybody else to trust it.' Mrs Oddie tapped the drawer. 'That fisherman's cold morning at sea goes into a coin. Then it keeps. Mackerel don't keep.'

Asha looked at the coins lying in their little wooden trays. Pound coins. Fifty-pence pieces. A lone, worn-out two pence.

'So these are all somebody's mornings,' she said.

'Mornings, afternoons. Once, a whole winter.' Mrs Oddie's eyes went far away. 'There was a man at the bank, Mr Pengelly, who paid in a bucket every Christmas, and the bucket smelled of...'

She stopped. She frowned at Barnaby, as if he had interrupted.

'Where was I?'

'Mackerel,' said Asha. 'And mornings.'

'So I was.' Mrs Oddie looked at her for a long moment, then at the window, then at the dust. There was a great deal of dust. It lay on the teapots like icing sugar. It lay on the owl's one good eye.

'I won't keep the telescope,' she said. 'But I'll make you an offer. I spent thirty-eight years in a bank counting other people's mornings, and nobody ever told me how any of it worked until I was far too old to do much about it. So I'll tell you. Every Saturday. One thing at a time.'

Asha waited. Grown-ups always had a second half.

Mrs Oddie reached under the counter and brought out a feather duster. It was purple. Several of the feathers were bent, as if it had been in a fight.

'And in return, you dust. Shelves, teapots, owl. Gently with the owl.'

'Do I get paid?'

'You get taught. That's worth more, though you won't believe me till about February.' She held out the duster.

Asha took it. It was lighter than it looked. Mrs Oddie shook her hand over the top of it, firmly, the way people shook hands on the news.

'Barnaby,' said Mrs Oddie, 'we have an arrangement.' She shut the drawer, and the till went ding again, which Asha decided to count as a yes.

By the end of the counter stood a small tree in a chipped blue pot. Its leaves were dark and shiny. There was no fruit on it at all. Mrs Oddie leaned over and inspected it branch by branch through her glasses, the way Mum checked Kit's hair for nits.

'Orange,' she said. 'Planted it in 1971. Not one orange yet.'

'Then why do you keep it?'

'Stubbornness,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Mine and its.'

In the window, the ginger cat stood up. He stretched until he was twice as long as before, turned round three times, and lay down again with his back pressed against the brass legs of the telescope. He looked at Asha. He looked at the duster. Then he shut his eye.

'That's Dividend,' said Mrs Oddie. 'He'll mind it for you.'

'Why is he called Dividend?'

'Next Saturday,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Nine o'clock. Bring a pencil.'