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  Azrah put down her baguette and studied him, her head on one side.

  For a long time. Robin began to wish he hadn’t asked. “Is it honestly that hard a question?”

  “Uh . . . You’re not bad looking, in a sort of twinkish way.”

  “I am not a twink! Twinks are . . . blonder. And musclier. And brainlesser.”

  “That’s twinkist, that is. And I’m almost certain only one of those is actually a word.”

  “They might be words. Or potential words. Shakespeare made stuff up all the time. I was asking about deeper things, anyway. My inner qualities.”

  “If they’re inner, how am I supposed to know about them?” She grinned. “Face it, it’s not like I’m ever getting inside you, is it?”

  “Ew.”

  “Yeah, well, likewise, I’m sure.” She took another bite of her baguette in what Robin felt was an unnecessarily pointed fashion. “You’re not boring, okay? You’re funny—when you’re not moping, at any rate—and you’re shit-hot on fashion. Like, to a fault, actually, Mr. I-can’t-go-out-in-a-belt-that-doesn’t-go-with-my-shoes.”

  “No, the issue was that it did go, too well. You can’t go around being all matchy-matchy. It shows a lack of imagination. I’d have looked like I’d been interior designed. And hang on, aren’t you supposed to be building me up here?”

  “Uh . . .” Azrah’s pause once again went on quite a bit longer than was flattering. “Um, you’re really focussed on your career?”

  “Thank you so much. When it comes to dating prospects, that’s just a sub-heading under boring.” And it wasn’t even true, not exactly. It was more that he didn’t want to spend his entire working life being told what to do, and you had to get ahead to, well, get ahead.

  Azrah sat up straight and all but bounced in her chair. “Ooh, I know one. A good one. You play three musical instruments. That’s not boring.”

  “My mum says ukulele doesn’t count.” She was a bit on the fence about the guitar too, to be honest.

  “Your mum says a lot of things.” Azrah’s tone was dark.

  “Has she been hassling you about Islam again?” The pep talk having contained a lot less pep than Robin had hoped for—in fact, it’d pretty much been a pep-zero talk—he was keen to change the subject. And Mum never seemed to get that although Azrah’s family were nominally Muslim, it didn’t mean they were the world authorities on Sharia law or even went to the mosque, like, ever. Which was ironic, considering Mum would proudly announce herself to be Church of England despite not having set foot in a church for as long as Robin had been alive, leaving aside the traditional ceremonies to mark hatching, matching, and dispatching.

  “Yeah. She came in for a new nonstick saucepan”—Azrah worked in the kitchenware department—“and to secretly check you’re not dead yet from living on your own for two weeks already, and she was going on at me about the rights of women and dress codes and all that. I mean, look at me. I wear Western clothes all the time, and have you ever seen me in a hijab? Seriously, the last time I wore a headscarf was when I was a shepherd in the primary school nativity play.” She snorted. “My dad had a right go at the school for that, I can tell you.”

  “Religious insensitivity?”

  “Nah, he’s just really anti people’s beliefs being shoved in kids’ faces. Anyway, I keep telling your mum, I’m not the person she should be asking about that stuff. But you know her. It’s like she listens, but she doesn’t hear you, right?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Why? She produced you, not the other way around. Mind you, she did say one other thing. Something about ungrateful sons who never visit, and how she was sure that never happened in Muslim families. Hey, do you think she’s planning to convert?”

  “Maybe we should warn the local imam. Got his number?”

  “I know one digit of it.” Azrah held up her middle finger and Robin grinned.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “why are we even talking about your mum? We’re supposed to be talking about me.”

  Robin put down his fork and leaned towards her with an earnest expression on his face. “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “Fuck you.” She shook her head. “Oh, what is there to say? It’s always the same bloody thing, isn’t it? Men. They’re all the same. Present company excepted, obvs.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment? Anyway, you’re wrong there. I met a bloke last night who was definitely different.”

  Azrah’s eyes lit up. “Tell me more.”

  Robin gazed at the wall, lost in memory. “He was a bit like one of the old Doctor Whos. You know, the blokes.”

  “Yeah, which one, though? Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant? Either one of them would do for me, but I’m not sold on the rest of them.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I mean, he didn’t look like one of the actors. He just dressed a bit eccentrically and spouted strange science-y stuff at me. And then he ran off.”

  “So did you follow him? Ooh, is this going to turn into an alien-abduction story?” Azrah cackled. “Did he get out his probes?”

  Robin couldn’t help picturing the thick copper wire with silver . . . things on the ends the strange man had been so excited about. “Well, he said it was a thermocouple.”

  Her eyes widened to roughly the size of Robin’s plate. “Do I even want to hear the rest of this story? And in case you’re wondering, the answer is yes, yes, I do.”

  “Nothing happened! But he was definitely different.”

  “So are you seeing him again?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of meeting.” Robin slumped. “I suppose I might bump into him again. If he’s local.”

  “Local to Hitchworth, or local to that council estate no-go area where you live?” Azrah glanced around as if hoping a hot Doctor might saunter past at any moment.

  Robin glared at her. “It’s still Hitchworth, you know. There’s some quite nice streets nearby. And there’s nothing wrong with council estates.”

  “Or no-go areas?”

  “Shut up. You’re just a snob. Anyway, I met him on my street, but he might only have been there for the fridge.”

  “The . . . Tell you what, don’t explain it. Leave it part of Mystery Bloke’s essential mysteriosity.”

  “You mean ‘mystique’?”

  “You know, I always wondered why you spent three years at uni. It was so you could flounce around being all superior and correcting people’s grammar, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh, I think you mean vocabulary.”

  “I think I mean fuck you. So what did he look like, your mystery man?”

  Robin couldn’t have held back the eye roll if his life had depended on it. “I thought you wanted to keep him mysterious? Fine. Tall, dark, and fit.”

  “Marathon runner fit or”—her voice went all low and husky—“hundred meters?”

  “Sort of somewhere in between.”

  “Okay, that works. Dark skin or dark hair?”

  “Hair. And, uh, beard.” Robin shied away from mentioning the curly moustache. He had an instinct she might not treat it with the dignity it deserved.

  “Hmm . . . beards can look good, but if I wanted to floss my teeth it’s not his face I’d be kissing.”

  “Do you talk like that in front of your mum and dad?”

  “Hah. What do you think? Just cos they’re not into religion doesn’t mean they’re totally untraditional.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re not as bad as your mum and dad, mind. Your mum still thinks good girls should cover up like nuns and save themselves for marriage. Last time I bumped into her on date night she was going on at me how I ought to be careful about how I dress, in case the bloke thinks I’m up for a shag.”

  “She did not say ‘up for a shag.’” Robin might not have been there, but he knew his mum.

  “Well, she might have used the words, ‘Offering something you’re not ready to give.’ But she definitely meant shagging.”

  “She’s never said anything like that to me.�
��

  “Yeah, but that’s cos you dress with taste and style. Not to look slutty.” She shrugged. “What? Sometimes a girl just wants to let her inner slut out to play. You should try it sometime.”

  Robin sighed. “That’s pretty much what Ethan used to say.”

  After his shift ended, when he ought to have been heading home, free at long, long last to do stuff he wanted to—like, say, hang around the streets in case a certain moustachioed alien fridge-fiddler turned up—Robin had to stay behind for a staff meeting.

  Everyone crowded into Gail’s little office. There was only one chair for visitors, which by longstanding agreement belonged to Mary-from-Haberdashery on account of her varicose veins, so the rest of them had to stand around after being on their feet all day. Gail, of course, sat behind her desk like a queen receiving her courtiers.

  “Now, as you know, we’re holding a Black Friday sale this year to compete with online retailers. Profits this quarter . . .”

  With the best will in the world, Robin couldn’t stop his tired brain from zoning out as she recited a list of numbers in excruciating detail. He started to nod off on his feet, waking up with a jerk when Gail slapped a file down on her desk.

  “Any questions?”

  Azrah raised her hand. “Yeah, I got one. Why are we even having a Black Friday sale? It’s an American thing—nothing to do with us.”

  Gail gave her a look like she’d just announced that she had ideological objections to selling stuff. “Coca-Cola is an American thing, Azrah, but you didn’t seem to have any problem with keeping a can behind the counter in blatant violation of store policy. Don’t think I didn’t see you drinking from it when you were supposed to be working.”

  Oops. Robin would have let the ground swallow him up at that point, but it was illicit fizzy drinks off a duck’s back for Azrah. “Yeah, but it’s all to do with Thanksgiving over there. It’s a public holiday, innit? Day one, enforced turkey dinner with the family. Like Christmas, but with no presents to open. Day two, they get let out to go shopping. Like Boxing Day, but with no presents to take back to the shops and change for what you really wanted. Here, it’s just another day in November.”

  Gail’s expression became, if anything, even more sour. “And how are we supposed to compete with online retailers if we don’t discount our goods like they do?”

  “That’s like arguments for foot-binding, that is.”

  Every pair of eyes in the room turned to stare at Azrah from beneath identical baffled frowns.

  She tutted. “They said, like, men won’t want to marry a girl if her feet are bigger than other girls’. So everyone bound their feet and then they were back in the same position they were before. Only in pain and crippled.”

  The frowns deepened.

  “I fail to see what this has to do with the retail industry.” Gail’s voice could have been used to build a snowman.

  “If everyone discounts, everyone has to discount. If nobody discounted, though, then we could all sell at full price up until Christmas, and have our sales after that like God intended.”

  Robin, who unlike Azrah had been sent to Sunday School as a lad and therefore didn’t totally reject the possibility of there being a God, wasn’t sure this was what He originally had in mind for the celebration of the Saviour’s birth.

  Heath, the tall gangly redhead who worked in the electronics department and occasionally tagged along on trips to the pub, cackled. “And lo, an angel of the Lord appeared and said, ‘Rejoice, for I bring glad tidings of great joy. Unto us a Sale is given.’”

  “Thank you, Heath,” Gail snapped.

  “‘The heavenly deals ye there shall find—’”

  “Thank you.”

  Heath’s voice dropped to a low mutter. In a room that size, he might as well have been shouting. “‘Lying in a bargain bin—’”

  “Heath!” Gail looked dangerously close to rupturing something. Possibly something Heath would find extremely painful.

  There was an ominous silence. Gail let it settle for a moment before carrying on severely. “We all need to pull together on this. The Black Friday sale is an important boost to our turnover this quarter, and a kick-starter for Christmas shoppers. We can’t afford to miss any opportunity to persuade shoppers to shut down their computers and come out to shop in a real store. I don’t like to mention the word ‘redundancies’ in the run-up to Christmas, but . . .”

  But she had. Robin’s mood slumped, along with the shoulders of a number of his colleagues. Most of them were probably already calculating which of them was last in and therefore potentially first out. Robin had been working for the store practically since uni, so he ought to be okay—unless Gail was really peed off about the rude gesture this morning? He swallowed and crossed the offending finger over its neighbour. Anyway, what about Azrah? She was a lot newer. She’d been working in one of the local discount stores until that closed down, and Robin had put in a good word for her at Willoughbys. And Gail didn’t like her much.

  “Black Friday needs to be An Event this year.” You could almost smell the capitalisation as Gail went on. “Hitchworth’s Biggest Christmas Shopping Event. We don’t want people idling in to see what we’ve got on offer.”

  “We don’t?” Robin blurted. Wasn’t that what it was all about?

  “No! We want US-style scenes of people sleeping on the street so they don’t lose their place in the queue. We want people booking time off work specifically to come to our Event from miles around. We want—”

  “Fisticuffs in the furniture department, and wholesale riots in Haberdashery?” Heath had the gleam of the fanatic in his eye.

  “Well, I hope not!” Mary-from-Haberdashery shifted in her chair, which squeaked in protest. “It’s bad enough when we sell out of black embroidery thread. I blame people panic-buying and stockpiling the stuff.”

  “The situation could get ugly,” Heath went on with enthusiasm while Robin was still trying to get his head around the idea of panic-buying needlecraft supplies. “I can see the headlines now: ‘Shopper stabbed with knitting needle in dispute over discount yarn’; ‘Bargain hunter bludgeoned with bolt of broderie anglaise’—”

  “Heath!” Gail practically had smoke coming out of her nostrils. She cleared her throat. “I expect all of you to come up with initiatives to make this happen. We may be a small, independent department store, but we need to show Hitchworth—and the whole of Hertfordshire, for that matter—that we can punch well above our weight. Robin?”

  Robin started, having only been half listening. “Yes?”

  “I’m expecting great things from you.”

  She was? Why?

  “As our only university-educated member of staff—”

  “Hey, I did physics at Brighton,” Heath interrupted.

  Azrah snorted. “Yeah, for like two weeks.”

  “They were a very intensive two weeks. I learned a lot.”

  “Yeah, like where the bar was, and who sold the best weed.”

  Gail banged on her desk, probably because it was in easier reach than either Heath’s or Azrah’s head. “As I was saying, as our only graduate member of staff, I’m sure Robin will be keen to be involved in the planning process for our Event.”

  Everyone looked at Robin. He had an uneasy feeling he was blushing as red as his namesake. “Er, you do know my degree’s in music, right?”

  “Music and mathematics are supposed to be very close, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it,” put in Mary-from-Haberdashery.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Gail spoke up again briskly. “It doesn’t matter what your degree’s in, Robin. It’s more that you’ve learned to think. I’m expecting you to come up with publicity initiatives that are relatable both to our core customer base, and more importantly, to those who don’t currently shop here. Perhaps with a touch of humour—after all, you seemed to be using that to extremely good effect with your customers this morning.”

  Oops. Robin had been hoping she’d for
gotten about the rude-gestures incident, seeing as she hadn’t hauled him over the coals about it already. Apparently she’d been saving it up to guilt him into other stuff.

  “Er, yeah. I’ll get right on it.”

  She gave a tight smile. “Good. You should be asking yourself: How do we attract new customers to the store?”

  “Free drinks!”

  “Thank you, Heath.”

  “No, seriously. Mulled wine and mince pies. Everyone loves that stuff when they’re Christmas shopping. Waitrose did it last year and I stopped going to Tesco altogether while it lasted.”

  Everyone goggled at Heath, probably as surprised as Robin was to hear what wasn’t actually a bad idea coming from his lips. But then again . . . “No,” Robin found himself saying. He frowned at his shoes. “I mean, yes, it’s a nice idea, but can you imagine it in a Black Friday sale situation? If we get a crowd of new customers in, the kitchens would be overwhelmed. And there’d be crumbs and spilled wine all over the stock. That sort of thing’s better for, say, a special Christmas shopping evening for loyalty card holders.”

  Robin glanced up to see everyone staring at him again, Gail in particular with a worryingly misty look in her eye. “That’s perfect! I knew I could rely on you, Robin. Everyone, I’ll expect you to give Robin your fullest cooperation as he’s organising our Loyal Customers’ Christmas Shopping Evening.”

  Robin groaned inwardly. The Christmas Shopping Evening had achieved audible capitalisation. There was no way he’d be able to get out of it now.

  By the time they were finally let go for the night, Robin was desperately in need of alcohol. It was probably too early to bump into Fridge Bloke, anyway. “Quick drink down the Millstone? It’s Friday night.”

  Azrah made a face. “Aren’t you working tomorrow? Cos I know I am.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like you’re going to have a hangover.” She didn’t drink. Robin put it down less to her Muslim heritage than the fact that her mum and dad’s house was the place to go if you wanted a lecture on how alcohol fucked up your life choices while giving you wrinkles. They seemed to have a knack of timing it for when you were terminally hungover and wanted to die quietly, but maybe that was just Robin. “I’ll buy you some chips.”