Eleven Pounds of Nothing

The pencil turned out to be the easy part.

At one minute to nine Asha stood on the step of Oddie's Books & Bits with a pencil behind her ear and a spare in her sock, in case the first one broke. Wind came up Gull Street from the harbour and smelled of diesel and wet rope. The door was already open. It always was, she would learn.

Mrs Oddie was behind the counter, bent over a drawer that did not want to come out.

'Barnaby, you've eaten it,' she said to the till. 'I know you have.'

Something gave. She came up holding a thin book with a pale green cover gone soft at the corners, like a biscuit left out overnight. Across the front, in gold letters that had mostly worn away, it said PAYING-IN BOOK. Underneath, in blue ink, someone had written 1987.

'From the bank,' said Mrs Oddie. 'We had boxes of them. When the branch shut, nobody wanted them, so I did.'

'What's it for?'

'People used to write down the money they brought in, and we'd stamp it. Thump.' She brought her fist down on the counter. Dividend, asleep against the telescope, opened one eye and closed it again. 'Now it's yours. Every penny that comes in. Every penny that goes out. For one week.'

'I don't spend anything, though,' said Asha. 'Not really.'

Mrs Oddie looked at her over the lifeguard. She said nothing at all, which was worse than saying something.

Asha opened the book. The pages were printed with little boxes for Date and Amount and Cashier, and she ignored all of them. She licked the pencil, because that was what people did in old films, and wrote:

Sat 14 Sept: tin £23.40
Sat 14 Sept: pocket money £5.00 in

It looked very official. It looked like a fortune.

'Good,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Now check the orange tree for buds, and then the owl.'

There were no buds. Asha wrote that down too, at the bottom, very small.

On Monday the book went to school in her blazer pocket, pressed flat against the astronomy book, and she took it out at break to check it was still there. It was. It had nothing new in it.

At lunch she bought a packet of salt and vinegar crisps from the tuck shop, because everyone did. She wrote it down under the desk in Geography.

Mon 16 Sept: crisps £1.20 out

One packet. That was nothing. That was barely food.

On Tuesday she bought another, and wrote it down, and frowned slightly.

Tue 17 Sept: crisps £1.20 out

On Wednesday Kit came out of school with his face pressed to the window of Penny's Pocket on Harbour Lane, where the gacha machine stood glowing like a fruit machine for small people. He said there was a gold seagull in there. He said it was one in fifty. He said he had already spent his week's money on Monday and it wasn't fair, and his lip went the way it went, and Asha fed £3.50 into the slot. Out came a plastic capsule with a grey pigeon inside.

'That's practically a seagull,' said Kit. He loved it for nearly four minutes.

Wed 18 Sept: crisps £1.20 out
Wed 18 Sept: pigeon (Kit) £3.50 out

She pressed hard on the pencil for that one.

On Thursday nothing happened. She was almost sure of it. Then on Friday morning, putting her hand in her coat pocket for her bus pass, she found a cardboard sleeve from the Driftwood Café, soft with rain, and a receipt folded inside it. HOT CHOC + CREAM £2.70. Thursday, 4.12 p.m. She stood in the hall with one shoe on and tried to remember drinking it. She could remember Jonah talking about a spaniel called Biscuit. She could remember the steam on the window. The hot chocolate itself had vanished completely, as if somebody else had drunk it for her.

Thu 19 Sept: hot chocolate £2.70 out (I think)
Fri 20 Sept: crisps £1.20 out

By Friday night the page was crowded. Asha sat on her bed with the tin beside her and the book open on her knees, and she did not want to add it up.

She did it anyway, on the back of her hand first and then properly, in the book.

crisps 4 x £1.20 = £4.80
£4.80 + £3.50 + £2.70 = £11.00 out
£23.40 + £5.00 − £11.00 = £17.40

Eleven pounds. Exactly eleven, as if it had been planned. She checked it twice. It stayed eleven.

She went downstairs for a glass of water she didn't want, mostly to get away from the page.

The kitchen light was on and Mum was at the table in her blue nurse's tunic, still in her work socks, eating cold rice out of the pan with a teaspoon. The radio was talking about rain. On the fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like a lighthouse, was the budget. It had been there for as long as Asha could remember. She had never once read it. It was just a sheet of paper, the same as the dentist letter and Kit's drawing of a gull with teeth.

Tonight she read it.

It was in Mum's square handwriting, in columns. Mortgage. Council tax. Food. Bus passes. Phones. Then, halfway down:

Electric £128.00 (per month)

Asha looked at the kitchen light. She looked at the fridge, humming against her nose. She looked at the kettle, the toaster, the little red eye on the telly through the doorway, which stayed awake all night even when everybody else was asleep.

One hundred and twenty-eight pounds. That was more than twenty-five weeks of her pocket money. That was half a telescope, every single month, just for things to be switched on.

'Are you reading my fridge?' said Mum.

'Who pays for the light?'

'Me and your dad.' Mum scraped the last of the rice. 'And whoever leaves the landing on all night.'

Asha thought of the landing. She thought of her bedroom lamp, which was on right now, shining on an empty room and a book full of crisps.

Beside Electric, in pencil, Mum had written a smaller number and crossed it out, and then written it again.

'What's that one?' said Asha.

'What I'd like it to be.' Mum put the pan in the sink. 'It never is. Winter's coming.'

'Doesn't it make you feel bad? Writing it all down?'

Mum thought about this, which was one of the good things about Mum. She ran the tap.

'It used to,' she said. 'Then I stopped thinking of it as a telling-off. It's more like finding the holes in a bucket. No point pouring water in till you know where it's coming out.'

She kissed the top of Asha's head and went up to bed. Asha switched off the kitchen light behind her. On the way upstairs she switched off the landing as well, and stood for a moment in the dark, feeling about twelve pence richer.

In her room she found the red biro, the one she used for marking Kit's spellings when he made her. She drew a circle round the eleven pounds. Then she went round again, because one circle didn't seem enough.

The paying-in book had little dotted lines down the side of every page. Asha had wondered what they were for. She pulled, and the page came away clean and neat, the way it had been made to all those years ago at the bank.

She taped it to the wall beside her picture of Saturn, the one she'd cut from a magazine at the dentist's. The planet hung there, gold and tilted, in its rings. The crisps hung next to it in pencil.

Underneath, she wrote one more line.

Left to save: £240.00 − £17.40 = £222.60

Then she switched off her lamp.

The door creaked. A shape with a gap in its teeth stood on the landing in seagull pyjamas.

'Asha,' whispered Kit. 'Penny's Pocket has glow-in-the-dark slime now. It's only twelve pounds.'

In the dark, Saturn and the red circle glowed faintly, side by side.