‘Which credit card would you like me to use?’ Leanne asks.
‘Take your pick,’ the man says again.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to choose one. I’m not authorised to . . .’
The man holds out his hand and Leanne gives him back his cards.
‘Forget it,’ he says. ‘Fucking sue me for the twelve quid. I can’t stand any more of this.’ He puts his cards back in his wallet and leaves the shop, his face red, looking like he might cry with frustration.
‘Nice customer service,’ Julie says.
‘Firm but fair,’ says Leanne.
‘Where’s Lloyd?’ Julie asks. ‘Don’t you have to ask him before you can cancel a membership?’
‘Strictly, yes. But he’s out buying bunting.’
‘Bunting?’
Leanne shrugs. ‘More promotions,’ she explains. ‘Lloyd’s promotion-mad.’
‘I’m surprised you’ve got any customers left to promote anything to,’ Chantel says. ‘Is this Lloyd as heavy-handed as you are?’
Leanne laughs. ‘Lloyd? He’s a pussycat. He would’ve wiped that fine and probably given the guy a free rental to make up for the “mistake”. But you can’t be too soft on these people. You get customers clocking up ridiculous fines, then they tell you that their mother died, or they left the tape in their car and it was stolen, or the car was stolen with the tape in it, or they accidentally put it in their wedding-video case and packed it in a suitcase and it went to Barbados or something – they’re really inventive sometimes but it’s all lies, and it’s all to get out of paying a fine. It’s just theft, and it has to be stamped out. We’re running a video shop here, not a charity.’
Julie and Chantel look at each other but say nothing.
‘Anyway, what’s this thing you’re sewing?’ Leanne asks.
‘It’s a . . .’ Chantel begins.
Julie nudges her. ‘We’ll tell you later,’ she says to Leanne.
‘I’ll need a pattern,’ Leanne says. ‘That’s if I decide to help.’
Chantel sighs. ‘I think we’re going to have to invent the pattern. It’s a bit unusual.’
‘I might not be able to do it without a pattern,’ Leanne says.
‘Didn’t you do fashion at college?’ Julie says.
‘Yes. You know I did. Until I left.’
‘Well surely you know how to design your own patterns?’
‘A bit. But they always went wrong. That’s why I left.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine at this,’ Julie says.
‘I don’t know.’ She sighs. ‘When does it have to be done by?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Leanne shakes her head. ‘No. I’m working tomorrow.’
‘We were planning to work on it tonight,’ Chantel says. ‘At Luke’s.’
‘Definitely not, then. I’m trying to avoid him. I think we need time apart at the moment. You know we definitely split up? I told him that . . .’
‘Come on, Leanne,’ Julie says. ‘We really need your help.’
‘You’re the only person we can ask,’ Chantel says. ‘Please?’
‘I don’t know. Have you got fabric?’
‘A lot of it’s going to be tin f –’ starts Chantel.
Julie cuts in. ‘No, not yet.’
‘You’ll need to buy the fabric.’
‘Of course,’ Julie says. ‘How much should we get?’
‘How am I supposed to know? You haven’t even told me what it’s for.’
‘It’s kind of a body-suit,’ Julie says.
‘Maybe a bit like a wetsuit,’ Chantel adds.
‘I can’t make a wetsuit. The fabric’s too thick to fit in the machine.’
‘Not with wetsuit fabric,’ Chantel says. ‘Just that shape.’
‘Just get loads, then.’
‘What’s loads?’
‘Ten metres? I dunno. Whatever you think.’
‘Is ten metres a lot?’
‘Yes. Probably too much, but we’ll need to leave room for error.’
‘Why?’
‘I might be a bit rusty,’ says Leanne. ‘And I’ve only ever made skirts.’
‘You’ve only ever made skirts?’ Julie says.
‘Yes. I could never work out how to do sleeves.’
‘Oh God,’ says Chantel.
‘That’s fine,’ Julie says quickly. ‘It’ll be fine. We’ll all help.’
‘Try to get some sort of pattern if you can,’ Leanne says as they leave. ‘And thread for the sewing machine, and pins – I’m almost out of pins – oh, and Julie, I need to speak to you as well, later. I need a favour in return for this.’
‘I felt really sorry for that guy,’ Chantel says in the car, on the way into town.
‘What, the Lolita guy?’
‘Yeah. I hate the way shop assistants speak to you – like you’re insane – just because you’ve got a fine on your video membership or something.’
‘I know,’ Julie says. ‘Leanne’s like Hitler dressed up as Dorothy. It’s disturbing.’
Chantel laughs. ‘She’s not the only one, though. One time, just after I won the Lottery, I’d been on this big shopping spree, mainly getting surprises for Mum, and a few bits for Michelle and Leanne, and some treats for Billy. Anyway, I stopped off at Tesco on the way home, because I was going to do a big shop for Mum – she always had to buy the economy brands, and never had any luxuries, so I thought I’d surprise her with strawberries and champagne and chocolates and bubble-bath and whatever. So I had my basket piled up with all this stuff, and I went through the checkout and put it all in bags – I remember I chose those recycled “bags for life” which are 10p each, because I thought they were such a good idea – and when it came to paying I just handed over my debit card that I’d been using all day and kind of daydreamed as the girl put it through the swiper. Anyway, I could hardly believe it when she asked me if I had another form of payment because the card was being rejected. I asked her to try it again – assuring her that I had plenty of money in my account – and I sort of laughed and made a joke about how I always used to worry about my card being rejected, because I was always so close to my overdraft limit, but that this time I wasn’t worried because I had loads of money in my account. So she tried it about three more times, and said it was still being rejected. She suggested that I should go and draw out cash from the cash-point machine, because I didn’t have any cash . . .’
‘Why didn’t you have any cash?’ Julie asks.
‘Oh, I’m scared of carrying cash. I’ve always been scared I’ll lose it. I think it’s because once when I was a kid we went shopping, and I had twenty quid that I’d been saving for about a year or something, and I lost it – it must have dropped out of my pocket or something – and Mum couldn’t afford to replace it and I had to start saving again. I think I spent that whole day crying, searching the pavements in Basildon and just crying, I suppose. If ever I do carry cash nowadays, I check every five minutes or so to see if it’s still there. It’s almost obsessive.’
Julie smiles. ‘Presumably you didn’t explain this to the Tesco girl?’
Chantel laughs. ‘No, I just said I didn’t have any. But I don’t have a cash-point number for my debit card – there’s no point, is there, because you can pay for everything by card, and get cash-back if you really need cash, and anyway, I can never remember those numbers – so I was totally screwed. I made another joke to the girl about how I’d just won the Lottery recently and how ridiculous this was, considering I had about two hundred thousand pounds in this particular account, but she just looked at me like I was mad and said there was nothing she could do. I asked if I could speak to the supervisor so she sort of sighed and called her over – and all the other people in the queue were getting so pissed off. The supervisor did that whole Leanne routine on me, not listening when I tried to explain anything, just repeating this phrase over and over: “I’m sorry, madam, but I’m afraid if you can’t find
another method of payment there’s nothing we can do. It’s not our problem, it’s the bank. If their computer says you don’t have the funds, we’re not authorised to override it . . .” Blah, blah, blah. I tried being nice to her – even though by this point I knew I was going to have to leave my shopping behind – because I was feeling so humiliated, and I just wanted her to sympathise with me, but every time I started saying something friendly, like, “Oh, well, I suppose this must happen all the time”, or, “Silly me, I should have brought more cards with me”, she just repeated the same phrase, as if I was trying to con her into letting me steal all this shopping.
‘It upset me so much, I just ended up leaving in tears. It was that brutal brick-wall attitude that got me. It completely spoilt my whole day. And the bank said there was no problem with my card, and that it was probably the Tesco machine that was at fault and that the girl could have just typed the number in instead, but she didn’t, she just kept trying to swipe it. When I rang up Tesco Customer Services to complain, they did explain that they get people trying to rip them off all the time, sometimes with real sob-stories, and that’s why they adopted the brick-wall strategy, but I told them I thought that was stupid. If that manager hadn’t been so blinkered and so into thinking I was just out to con them, maybe she’d have tried punching in the number. But she just didn’t bother. The Customer Services people were quite good about it, actually, but I haven’t been in Tesco since.’
Julie turns the windscreen wipers up a notch because it’s suddenly raining a lot harder. She’s got to find somewhere in town to park the car, then they’ve got to go and buy all this fabric.
There are no spaces to park on the High Street, so Julie drives around to the carpark behind The Rising Sun.
Chapter 29
By seven o’clock, Luke’s room is covered in pins, bits of fabric and tissue paper but no one actually knows what they’re doing yet. Leanne’s still getting over her shock at being told the plan.
‘I still can’t believe you’re doing this,’ she keeps saying. ‘Jean’s going to go mental.’
‘I wonder how Julie and Charlotte are getting on,’ Chantel says.
Julie and Charlotte are out buying a camper van with some cash Chantel got out of the bank in town. She’s already explained to Luke about Blockbuster, and her shopping trip with Julie afterwards, and how there was no such thing as a sewing pattern for a body-suit (apart from for babies), and about how they had no idea about what fabric to get, or really how much, and how Julie kept worrying about where David was and how much of a nightmare Leanne was going to be. Chantel decided in the end that she’d be better off at Luke’s helping with the space-suit while Julie and Charlotte got the van, and Luke was grateful because he had no idea what had already gone on today. Also, he didn’t really like the idea of being stranded on his own with Leanne.
Since then, David’s turned up with fifty rolls of tin foil, a motorcycle helmet and a strange don’t-ask-what-happened expression, and Leanne’s emerged with her sewing machine and a bit of an attitude that Luke can’t work out, but seems to be something to do with the fact that she was the last person to be told what’s going on, and that she’s only been included because she can sew.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t get any sort of pattern,’ Leanne complains.
‘They only had ones for babies. I told you that,’ Chantel says.
‘You should have got one of those, then. We could have scaled it up.’
‘Yes, I know. You already said that.’
‘Right,’ says David. ‘I reckon Luke should lie on the floor on the fabric, and we can just draw around him. Then we just cut out the pieces and sew them up. Sorted.’
‘What about zippers and stuff?’ Leanne says. ‘You know, a way in and out?’
The others are all sitting on the floor, looking at the fabric with puzzled expressions. Luke’s sitting at his computer, looking up space-suit designs on the Internet. He’s feeling more excited then he’s ever felt before, and this is making him cheerful. The more cheerful he gets, the more pissed off Leanne seems to become.
‘Hey, look at this,’ he says. ‘SpaceProps.com. We could have hired a space-suit from them. Well, if we’d known we were doing this about a month in advance, we could have.’
‘Shut up, Luke,’ Leanne says.
‘I’m only joking,’ he says. ‘They’re replicas. They wouldn’t work, would they?’
‘Let’s have a look,’ says Chantel. She stands up and looks over Luke’s shoulder at the picture on the screen. ‘Wow, that looks well complicated.’
David has a look too. ‘It doesn’t have to look like that, though, does it?’ he says. ‘It just has to perform a function. All we have to do is make a body-suit then stick all the tin foil on it so it reflects the sun.’
‘Just find me a pattern,’ Leanne says.
That’s what Luke’s supposed to be doing on the Internet. He searches again, for the phrase ‘making a space-suit’, and is directed to the NASA site, which has several interesting space-suit-making projects intended for schools, involving balloons, hacksaws, sewer-pipe and gloves. ‘Gloves,’ he says suddenly, looking at the screen. ‘We’ll need gloves, won’t we? You know, to connect to the sleeves. Unless you can make them.’
‘I’m not making gloves as well,’ Leanne says.
‘I’ll ring Julie on the mobile,’ Chantel says. ‘I’ll tell her to pick some up.’
‘Where will she get gloves at this time of night?’ David says.
‘Supermarket? I don’t know.’
‘There’s other stuff on here,’ Luke says. ‘But I don’t know what any of it is.’
David has a look. ‘Oh, I see,’ he says. ‘Look, that tubing stuff is for flexibility. They should get some of that. And Duct tape as well, to join those bits together . . . Shit, where’re they going to get all this stuff? We should have thought about this earlier.’
‘What about one of those DIY shops on the retail park?’ Chantel suggests, dialling Julie’s number. ‘Hi,’ she says into the phone. ‘How’s it going? Oh, cool. Well, we’ve got a bit of a shopping list developing here – yeah, I know.’ She laughs. ‘Yeah, she is, a bit. Anyway, shall I just read this stuff out to you? Sorry? Oh, a DIY shop. One on the retail park? I know, sorry. Oh, OK. Speak to you then.’ She flips her phone shut.
‘Aren’t they getting it?’ David asks.
‘Yeah, they are, but they don’t have any paper or a pen, so they’re going to ring me back when they get to the shop.’
‘Print that out,’ David says to Luke. ‘And we’ll see what else we can find, before they ring back.’
‘Can someone at least measure Luke?’ Leanne says. ‘We’re wasting so much time.’
‘Why don’t you do it?’ David says.
‘I’m not touching him,’ she says. ‘He might get excited.’
‘I’ll do it,’ says Chantel, sighing, and picking up the tape-measure.
Luke gets up. ‘I haven’t been measured for ages,’ he says.
‘Oh, look,’ David says, sitting down at Luke’s computer. ‘They’ve got a list of average measurements here. Well, biggest and smallest. We could use measurements in between those. Luke’s seems like average build.’
‘It has to fit properly,’ Chantel says.
‘Yeah, but there are over a hundred measurements to be taken.’
Chantel looks over his shoulder. ‘Blah, blah . . . Elbow-to-elbow distance, blah, blah . . . Foot width, foot length . . . Shit! What are we going to put on his feet?’
‘Moon boots?’ Leanne suggests sarcastically.
‘Wellies,’ says Chantel. ‘It’ll have to be. We’ll have to attach them to the fabric the same way as the gloves, then wrap them in loads of foil.’
‘You’re pretty good at this,’ David says.
‘Cheers, mate.’
They smile at each other, then go back to looking at the screen.
‘Glue!’ says Chantel suddenly.
Her phone ri
ngs. She puts down the tape-measure, which she’s been waving around, and picks up the phone. ‘Oh, hi,’ she says into it. ‘It’s Julie and Charlotte,’ she says to the others. ‘They’re in Homebase.’ She puts her finger in her ear. ‘What? Oh, cool, have you got a pen now? Good. All right. We need a pair of wellies . . . Shut up! You can’t laugh, or we’ll never get this done. A pair of wellies, loads of Duct tape, a ten-foot length of sewer-pipe. No, I don’t know what it is, really. Hang on . . .’ Chantel looks at the computer screen. David scrolls to the picture. ‘Oh, OK. It’s like, um . . .’
‘It’s like the thing you have on vacuum cleaners,’ David says. ‘Those – fuck it, what are they called? – the, fuck it . . . the hose. Yeah, like the hose bit on a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Chantel says to Julie. ‘Like the long hose bit on a vacuum cleaner. But you don’t actually want a vacuum-cleaner hose, you want a sewer-pipe. That’s what it says here, yeah. Like, I dunno, just like a long, bendy pipe with corrugated bits. Yeah? Cool. OK, we also need strong glue. No, not Super Glue, I can see us having an accident with that. Oh – David says they wouldn’t sell it to you anyway because you look like a pair of glue-sniffers and – what?’
David’s laughing too much to say anything else.
‘They do have all the tell-tale signs,’ Leanne says seriously. ‘I used to work in Homebase and we couldn’t sell solvents to anyone who looked dodgy in any way. We had training.’
‘Bloody hell,’ says Chantel. ‘Did you hear that? Hitler-Dorothy used to be Homebase-Hitler and refuse to sell solvents to anyone who looked dodgy. Can you imagine that?’ She’s laughing, but Leanne gives her a look, so she stops. ‘OK, sorry, Leanne. Anyway, gloves. I don’t know. What sort of gloves?’ she asks David.
‘Rubber?’ he suggests. ‘I don’t know what kind of gloves you can get at Homebase.’
‘Gardening gloves,’ says Leanne.
‘I reckon rubber,’ says David. ‘They shouldn’t be breathable in any way.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Chantel says into the phone. ‘Good. Right, we also need . . . Oh, it says here now that we do need vacuum-cleaner hose. David got it wrong.’ She smiles, and David pretends to hit her and she ducks. ‘Turns out the reason it looks so much like vacuum-cleaner hose is because it is sodding vacuum-cleaner hose. Yeah, I know. David, do we need the sewer-pipe as well? Oh, he says we do, but I don’t know why. No, I don’t know what it looks like now; I thought the vacuum-cleaner hose was a sewer-pipe, so . . . Just ask one of the assistants. But the hose is the important thing. We also need hacksaws, sandpaper, scissors. Oh, hang on. No, we’ve got scissors. Oh, but hang on again . . . Leanne says we can only use her scissors for fabric, so you’d better get some others for the tape and stuff. You got all that? Great. I think so. Yeah, I’ll call back if there’s anything else. OK. See ya.’
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