Three Jars

Marmalade, Mum said, could wait until the Seville oranges came in January, and by then she would find some other jars. So the three on the kitchen windowsill were Asha's.

She washed them on Saturday morning before breakfast. Two had held strawberry jam and one had held lemon curd, and the lemon curd jar kept its smell no matter how hard she scrubbed. The labels came off in soggy white strips. One stubborn corner stayed stuck to the strawberry jar, so she left it. It looked like a small flag.

Then she dried them with the tea towel that had a map of Cornwall on it and carried them upstairs.

Mum had given her a roll of masking tape and the thick black pen from the drawer by the cooker, the one that was only meant for freezer bags. Asha tore off three pieces of tape and smoothed them flat with her thumbnail. She wrote on each one in capitals.

SPEND.

SAVE.

GIVE.

The S on SAVE came out wobbly, so she went over it twice. That made it look more serious. She decided she liked that.

Kit appeared in the doorway in his seagull pyjamas, holding the pot of slime against his chest.

'Why've you put words on jam?'

'They're not jam. They're jars.'

'They're jam jars,' said Kit. 'So they're jam.'

Asha did not answer. She lined the jars up on her bedroom windowsill, SPEND on the left and GIVE on the right, with SAVE in the middle where it could keep an eye on the other two. Her window looked straight across Gull Street. The sky was pale and windy. A gull stood on the bakery roof as if it owned it.

Opposite, in the window of Oddie's Books & Bits, the brass telescope caught the morning light. Dividend was curled against its legs, a ginger loaf.

The jars were empty. All three of them. Asha turned the SAVE jar a little, so that its label faced the shop.

At nine o'clock she carried it across the road, held in both hands like something that might spill.

The shop smelled of furniture polish and damp paper, as it always did on Saturdays. Mrs Oddie was behind the counter with the lifeguard perched on her nose, rubbing Barnaby's brass keys with a yellow duster.

'She's brought a jar, Barnaby,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Look at that. A jar with ambitions.'

Asha set it on the counter. 'It's for saving. There's two more at home. Spend and Give.'

'And what's in it?'

'Nothing yet. I haven't decided how much goes where.'

Mrs Oddie put down the duster. She took off the lifeguard and let it swing on its chain, which Asha was beginning to learn meant a story was coming.

'My first wage packet,' said Mrs Oddie, 'was a little brown envelope, in March 1961. I was eighteen. I worked in the tearoom at the end of the pier, carrying scones to people who complained the scones were cold. Three pounds and ten shillings a week.'

'What's a shilling?'

'Five pence, more or less. There were twenty in a pound.' She held up a finger. 'And before I bought a single thing, before I even got off the pier, I took out a half-crown and put it in my coat pocket. A half-crown was two shillings and sixpence. Twelve and a half pence, in your money.'

'That's not very much.'

'No.'

'So why bother?'

'Because it came out first.' Mrs Oddie tapped the counter. 'If I'd waited to see what was left on Friday, there wouldn't have been anything left on Friday. There never is. Friday is a hungry sort of day.'

Asha chewed the end of her plait. 'What did you do with the half-crowns?'

Mrs Oddie opened her mouth and then closed it again. She looked towards the window, where the orange tree stood in its blue pot with Dividend asleep underneath.

'Ah,' she said. 'Now that is another story.'

The bell over the door did not ring, because the door was always open. Ravi came in anyway as if it had, one earbud in and one dangling, his phone lit up in his hand. He was fifteen and had grown since the summer. Mostly his legs.

'Auntie Nisha said you'd be in here,' he said. 'She wants to know if you took the Cornwall tea towel.'

'I put it back.'

'Cool.' He did not leave. He leaned over the counter and looked at the jar. 'What's that?'

'It's for saving,' said Asha.

Ravi read the label. Then he laughed, not unkindly, but long enough that Asha felt her ears go hot.

'Asha. It's a jam jar.'

'That's what I said,' said a small voice from the doorway. Kit had followed him across, still in his seagull pyjamas, with a coat over the top.

Ravi turned his phone round so they could see. A man in sunglasses stood beside a white sports car with the sea behind him, and the words underneath said HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION AT 19.

'He started with nothing,' said Ravi. 'Nothing. He says saving is for people who don't know how to make money properly. You put a pound in a jar, you've got a pound. Forever. That's it. You've got to make it work.'

'Work how?'

'Get in early. On stuff before everyone else finds out.' He tapped the screen, and the man in sunglasses began talking very fast. 'I'm going to be minted before I'm twenty. Before Dylan, anyway.'

Asha looked at the SAVE jar. It was very empty. In the window the man in the video was waving at his car, and behind Ravi's shoulder the brass telescope stood in its own patch of sun, exactly where it had been all week.

Mrs Oddie had put the lifeguard back on.

'Barnaby,' she said, to the till, 'do you remember Mr Fairbrother?'

Barnaby said nothing. Barnaby never did.

'Mr Fairbrother,' said Mrs Oddie, to the till and not to Ravi, 'came into the branch every Monday for nine years. Lovely shoes. Every Monday he had a new way to get rich by Friday. Ostriches, once. Then a gold mine in Wales.' She polished a key that was already shiny. 'He used to say saving was for mice.'

Ravi lowered his phone a little. 'Did he get rich?'

'He got very good at Mondays,' said Mrs Oddie.

She did not say anything else. Asha waited for the end of the story, but there wasn't one, or Mrs Oddie had wandered off from it, the way she did. Ravi's phone buzzed. He looked at it, grinned, and pushed his earbud back in.

'Whatever. Tell Auntie Nisha about the tea towel.' He went out onto Gull Street with his long new legs. Kit trailed after him, asking if the man in sunglasses had a seagull.

The shop went quiet. Dividend yawned under the orange tree.

Asha felt in her coat pocket for this morning's pocket money: a five-pound note, folded in four. She held it out.

'Barnaby will change that,' said Mrs Oddie. 'Won't you, Barnaby.'

The drawer sprang open with a ring like a bicycle bell. Out came five pound coins, warm from the till. Asha stacked them on the counter. Two for spending. One for giving. Two for saving.

She thought about Friday, and how hungry it was.

Then she picked up the two coins for saving first, before the others, and dropped them into the jar. They hit the bottom with a clink so loud that Dividend opened one eye. Beside them, already in the jar, sat everything from her shortbread tin, which she had tipped in at the kitchen table that morning and counted twice.

She opened the paying-in book and wrote, pressing hard.

Sat 28 Sept: tin £25.40 → SAVE jar
Pocket money £5.00: save £2.00, spend £2.00, give £1.00
SAVE jar: £25.40 + £2.00 = £27.40
To go: £240.00 − £27.40 = £212.60

It looked good. It looked like a plan.

Then, because she could not help it, she did one more sum on the back of her hand.

£212.60 ÷ £2.00 = 106.3

One hundred and seven Saturdays.

Asha looked at the telescope, and then at Saturn's little circle on her hand, and chewed her plait very hard indeed.