The Sleep On It Shelf

'Twelve pounds,' said Kit, 'is basically ten.'

Dad did not look up. He was crouched beside a stranger's bicycle with a spanner in his teeth and his sleeves pushed past the elbow, tightening a brake cable that had gone floppy somewhere between the stranger's caravan and the Saturday market. The stranger, a tall man in a yellow sou'wester, stood holding a bag of kippers and watching as if it were surgery.

The market smelled of frying onions and wet tarpaulin. It was Saturday the twenty-first of September. The wind off the sea kept lifting the corner of Dad's sign, DEV'S BIKE DOCTOR, and slapping it down again.

'It isn't basically ten,' said Asha. 'It's twelve. That's why it says twelve.'

'It glows,' said Kit. 'In the dark. You could read under the covers with it.'

'You don't read under the covers.'

'I would if I had slime.'

Dad took the spanner out of his mouth. 'Kit, what did you get on Saturday?'

'Five pounds.'

'And where is it?'

Kit turned out his pockets. Out came a lolly stick, a rubber shark with one eye, a bus ticket from August and a single shiny two-pence piece, which he held up as though it might count for something.

'Ah,' said Dad, and went back to the cable.

The man in the sou'wester squeezed his brakes. They squealed, then held. He looked very pleased and gave Dad eight pounds, and Dad dropped them into the old biscuit box he used for a cash drawer. Asha watched the coins go in. Eight pounds for twenty minutes of kneeling on cold tarmac. She wondered how many minutes of kneeling a slime kit was. Forty-five, nearly.

'I'll pay you back,' said Kit. 'When I'm rich.'

'When will that be?'

Kit thought about it seriously, chewing his lip through the gap in his teeth.

'Tuesday,' he said.

By ten o'clock Kit had followed her across Gull Street and into Oddie's Books & Bits, still explaining about Tuesday. The shop smelled of old paper and furniture polish, with a damp note underneath from somebody's anorak drying on the radiator. Rain ticked on the window. Dividend was not beside the telescope.

Asha was supposed to be dusting the poetry. Instead she was holding a notebook. It had a dark blue cover with the constellations picked out in tiny silver dots: Orion with his belt, the Plough, and a little crooked W she was almost sure was Cassiopeia. Inside the front cover, in pencil, it said £6.

'Barnaby,' said Mrs Oddie to the till, 'we have two customers with the look.'

'What look?' said Kit.

'The look of somebody whose money is already halfway out of their pocket.' She lifted the lifeguard onto her nose and peered at them both. 'Come with me.'

At the back of the shop, between the cookery books and the door to the yard, was a narrow shelf painted the green of old railings. A card was pinned above it in careful capitals: SLEEP ON IT.

On the shelf sat a teapot shaped like a cat, its tail curled round to make the handle. Next to it lay a black umbrella with a luggage label tied to one spoke. Beside that stood a ship in a bottle, three tiny sails gone the colour of weak tea. Dividend had folded himself underneath it all. He did not open his eyes.

'Anyone who wants something very badly,' said Mrs Oddie, 'puts it here and goes home. If they still want it in the morning, they come back and buy it.'

'And if they don't?' said Asha.

'Then it stays.' Mrs Oddie tapped the umbrella's label. It said MR HARTLEY, MARCH 2016. 'He wanted this in a thunderstorm. It stopped raining before he got to the end of the street.'

Kit pressed his nose against the bottle. 'Who wanted the ship?'

'A lady from Leeds. She said it reminded her of her grandfather.' Mrs Oddie paused. 'Perhaps it reminded her a little too much.'

Asha looked down at the silver dots. 'I haven't even said I want it.'

'You've been holding it,' said Mrs Oddie, 'for eleven minutes.'

Mrs Oddie took a pencil from behind her ear and the pale green paying-in book from Asha's coat pocket, which Asha had not known she could see. She turned to a clean page at the back.

'Two columns,' she said. 'Things you need. Things you want. Write whatever comes into your head.'

Asha drew a line down the middle. Kit leaned so close she could smell his breakfast, which had been jam.

She wrote fast, before she could think too hard.

NEEDS: school shoes, bread, electricity (£128!), coat
WANTS: notebook, slime, gold seagull, hot chocolate

Then she stopped. The pencil hovered. She chewed the end of her plait, then wrote telescope on the needs side and underlined it twice.

'Interesting,' said Mrs Oddie.

'Astronomers need telescopes,' said Asha. 'They can't do their job without one. That makes it a need.'

'Are you an astronomer?'

'I'm going to be.'

'Then it may be a need one day.' Mrs Oddie tapped the page. 'Here's a test. If you didn't have it, what would happen?'

'I wouldn't see Saturn's rings.'

'And would you be cold? Hungry? Unwell? Unable to get to school?'

Asha opened her mouth. It stayed open. Outside, a gull landed on the windowsill, looked in at the three of them and left again.

'Saturn would still be there,' said Mrs Oddie, quite gently. 'It's been there a while.'

'That's not the point,' said Asha, though she was no longer sure what the point was.

Kit grabbed the pencil. In letters that sloped downhill he wrote SLIME in the needs column and drew a seagull next to it for emphasis.

'Kit.'

'I need it for reading under the covers.'

'You don't read under the covers.'

'Because I haven't got any slime.' He looked at Mrs Oddie for support. 'It's a circle.'

Mrs Oddie took the lifeguard off her nose and polished it on her cardigan for rather a long time. Asha suspected she was hiding her mouth.

Under the shelf, Dividend opened one eye and looked straight at the word telescope.

Kit woke at ten past six and announced through the bedroom wall that he still wanted it.

He said it again at breakfast, with toast in his mouth. He said it to Dad, to Mum, who was pulling on her blue tunic for an early shift, and to a seagull on the back fence. Then he went upstairs and came down with the birthday card from Nani, the one with a tiger on it, and shook it over the table. Out fell a ten-pound note and two pound coins.

'I forgot I had it,' he said. 'It was hiding.'

'It was in a card,' said Asha. 'Cards are where money goes.'

'Well, now it's coming out.'

Penny's Pocket opened at ten on Sundays. Kit was outside at five to, pressed against the glass on Harbour Lane, and by two minutes past he was walking home with a pot of green slime held in front of him like an egg in a spoon race. He took it straight into the cupboard under the stairs to see if it glowed. It did, faintly. He came out looking as if he had been to the moon.

Asha crossed Gull Street. The shop door was open, as it always was, and the rain had stopped. Everything smelled of wet pavement and seaweed.

The notebook was where she had left it, between the cat teapot and the ship in the bottle. The silver dots caught the light from the yard. Orion. The Plough. The crooked W.

She looked at it for a long moment.

It was still lovely. It just wasn't hers, and somehow she didn't mind. Her chest felt odd, as if she had put down a heavy bag without noticing she had been carrying it.

'No?' said Mrs Oddie from behind the counter.

'No,' said Asha.

'Barnaby,' said Mrs Oddie to the till, 'put that in your memory.'

That night Asha opened the paying-in book.

    Sun 15 Sept: notebook £0.00
    Tin £17.40. Still to save: £222.60

Then she looked at the next column, the empty one, where her next five pounds would go. On the kitchen windowsill below, three clean jam jars stood in a row, waiting for Mum's marmalade.