The Bank That Pays You Rent

The first hiding place was the sock drawer.

It seemed clever at half past nine. By ten, Asha had remembered that the sock drawer was the first place burglars looked in films, straight after the freezer, and she was out of bed in the dark with the SAVE jar hugged against her pyjamas.

The jar was heavy now. It held forty-one pounds and sixty pence, nearly all of it in coins, because bookmarks were paid for in coins and so was pocket money once Mrs Oddie had changed the note. When Asha tilted it, it made a sound like a wave going back out over shingle. A rich sound. A sound a burglar would hear from the street.

The second place was her left wellington boot, at the back of the wardrobe, behind the dressing gown with bear ears on the hood that she had not worn since Year 4. Nobody looked in a boot. She got back into bed and lay there feeling pleased with herself for nearly four minutes.

Then she thought about Kit.

Kit borrowed her wellies to go crabbing without asking. Kit would push his foot straight in and say 'Ow,' and then, a second later, 'Ooh.'

Out again. The floorboard by the radiator creaked. Across the landing, Kit mumbled something about herring gulls in his sleep, and Asha stood on one foot until he stopped.

The third place was the bottom of her school bag, under the borrowed astronomy book and a PE top that needed washing. It was the worst hiding place of the three. She knew that. But it meant the jar sat right beside the bed, where she could hang her hand down in the dark and feel the cold glass and the weight of it.

She did, twice.

Across Gull Street, the shop window was dark except where the streetlamp caught the brass telescope. Asha switched on her torch and opened the paying-in book on her pillow.

Sat 2 Nov: SAVE jar £41.60
Left to save: £240.00 − £41.60 = £198.40

Underneath, at ten to one in the morning, she wrote very small: Burglars?

The Hollins Bay & District Building Society sat on the seafront between the amusement arcade and a shop that sold only fudge. On the next Saturday it smelled of new carpet and, faintly, of fudge.

Mum came on her day off, still yawning, with her driving licence in her coat pocket. Mrs Oddie came in her best cardigan, the one with no patches on the elbows.

'Children can't open accounts on their own,' Mrs Oddie had said. 'A grown-up has to sign. The bank wants to know who to blame.'

The woman behind the desk had a name badge that said KERRY. She slid a form across. It wanted Asha's full name and her date of birth. It wanted Mum's address, though it was the same as Asha's, and Mum's signature twice, once in a box so small that Mum had to write her surname sideways.

'In my day,' Mrs Oddie said, watching, 'this was three forms and a cup of tea.'

'We've stopped doing the tea,' said Kerry.

'Pity.'

Asha had brought the SAVE jar in her school bag. Kerry tipped it into a grey machine that clattered and whirred like a tumble dryer full of keys. A number came up on a little screen.

£41.60.

Exactly right. Asha let out a breath she had been holding since Thursday.

There was no paying-in book any more, not a real one. Instead Kerry helped Mum put an app on her phone, and when it opened there was a line of type that looked almost like a page from Mrs Oddie's green books:

9 Nov: Deposit £41.60
Balance: £41.60

'There,' said Mum, and showed her. 'You can look whenever you like. Within reason.'

Mrs Oddie peered at the phone through the lifeguard. 'It's very small,' she said. 'Where do they stamp it?'

On the desk was a pot of blue pens with a white anchor printed on the side. Kerry pushed one towards Asha. 'Keep it,' she said.

Asha did. She still has it. The ink ran out in March, and she keeps it anyway.

Asha put the pen in her pocket and turned to the machine, which had gone quiet. Somewhere inside it was her money. She felt she ought to say goodbye.

'Where does it go now?' she said. 'Is there a box with my name on?'

Mrs Oddie made a small noise, the noise of someone who has been waiting for exactly that question.

'There was a man called Mr Lumb,' she said. 'He mended lobster pots down by the harbour wall. Every Christmas Eve, at twenty past three, he came into our branch with a bucket of pennies.'

'A whole bucket?'

'A seaside bucket. Red. With a crab on it.' Mrs Oddie held her hands apart to show the size. 'He'd been dropping his coppers in it all year. In 1984 it came to thirty-one pounds and seventeen pence. That's three thousand, one hundred and seventeen pennies, and I counted every one of them by hand, because I was the junior and the juniors got Mr Lumb.'

Asha did the sum in her head. It came out right. That was quite a lot of pennies to count on Christmas Eve.

'And you put them in a box with his name on,' she said.

'We did not.' Mrs Oddie looked delighted. 'By the middle of January, Mr Lumb's pennies were a new boiler for the Kemps on Harbour Lane. And a bit of the chip shop's new fryer, I shouldn't wonder.'

Asha stared at her. 'You gave his money away?'

'Lent it.'

'Without asking him?'

'He knew. Everyone knows, mostly, they just don't think about it.' Mrs Oddie nodded at the grey machine. 'A bank doesn't sit on your money like a hen on an egg. It lends it to somebody who needs it now, and they pay it back, a bit at a time, with extra on top.'

'That sounds like stealing with paperwork.'

'It would be,' said Mrs Oddie, 'if they didn't pay Mr Lumb for the trouble.'

Behind them, Kerry's printer began to hum. Asha looked down at the empty jam jar in her lap, and for the first time it seemed very light.

Kerry came back with a printed sheet. 'Four per cent a year,' she said, tapping a box. 'Paid monthly.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means rent,' said Mrs Oddie. 'You're letting the bank borrow your money, the way Mrs Tremayne lets out her top flat. So the bank pays you rent. A little bit every month, for as long as it's in there.'

Asha liked the idea of being a landlady. She liked it until Mrs Oddie took a pencil and wrote on the back of the sheet.

£100 × 4 ÷ 100 = £4.00 a year

'Four pounds?' Asha said. 'For a whole year?'

'For a whole year.'

'I make more than that selling bookmarks. If I sell six.'

'You do.'

'Then what's the point?'

Mrs Oddie put the pencil down. She folded her hands on her handbag and looked out through the glass door, at the grey sea and a gull standing on one leg on the railings. She looked like someone at the start of a very long story.

'Wait,' she said.

That was all. She would not say anything else, not on the walk home past the fudge shop, not at the door of Oddie's Books & Bits, where Dividend lay stretched against the brass legs of the telescope. 'Next Saturday,' she said. 'Bring the pencil.'

That night Asha did her own sum, on a clean page of the green book.

£41.60 × 4 ÷ 100 = £1.664 a year
£1.664 ÷ 12 = 13.86p a month

The bank, Kerry had said, kept the bits of pennies. So the first rent would be thirteen pence. Thirteen pence would not buy a packet of crisps. It would not buy a tenth of a packet of crisps. It was barely a coin.

But nobody had to walk a spaniel for it. Nobody had to press a single piece of seaweed. It would simply turn up, all by itself, while she was asleep.

She wrote it in capitals anyway.

Dec: RENT FROM BANK: 13p!!!

Across Gull Street, in the dark window, the orange tree stood beside the telescope, with not one bud on it.