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freeze on Christmas Eve and a hailstorm during the night that settled and pretended to be snow, Christmas Day went as usual that year.
    I’d bought Donald a compendium of magic tricks. I’d got it months before from a remainder bookshop. I’d bought it too early. By Christmas he’d gone off magic and moved on to fish. Still, he pretended he liked it and sat with the box on his knees while we watched the Queen and waited for the turkey to be ready. I’d also saved up and bought Barbara a bottle of the perfume that Chloe’s mum always wore. She wouldn’t open the box and try it on and when Donald went to sleep she put it on top of the television.
    ‘That can stay up there until the shops open,’ she said.
    I stared at it and listened to Donald snoring from his chair. The box stared back. The lights on the Christmas tree were reflected in the silver foil writing on the box and the twinkling dragged my eye back to it no matter where in the room I looked. Barbara got tipsy.
    ‘You want me to swap it?’ I said. Hurt. Barbara shushed me. Pointed at Donald. ‘Charity shop,’ she said, slurring slightly. ‘I am,’ she poured another glass, ‘not comfortable receiving stolen goods.’
    ‘You can’t nick perfume,’ I whispered back. ‘They keep it locked up behind the counter. The boxes on the shelves are just for show.’
    ‘So you’ve been “scoping it out” then,’ Barbara said.
    ‘Everyone knows that,’ I said. ‘It’s like fags and razor blades. The dear, small things.’
    ‘Fags?’ she said, and changed the channel on the telly without asking. I couldn’t wait for it to be Boxing Day so I could go out on the park with Chloe and compare what we’d got.

Chapter 4
    There are Debenhams department stores all over the world. They’ve got them in Israel, in Russia, in Australia. Years later I told Emma the story about me being banned from them and she laughed, but when I told her that I’d never actually been in a Debenhams since, ever , she insisted we leave the park where we’d been sitting sharing a bottle of cider on a bench in the Japanese water garden, and go into town. The very same Debenhams, and although I don’t think it occurred to her, I kept expecting to see Chloe hovering somewhere, one eye on the security cameras. Blonde girls caught my eye and I stared at them sniffing their wrists at the perfume counters and holding dresses against themselves in front of long smudgeless mirrors. They were nothing like ghosts.
    Emma and I had a cup of coffee in the cafe at the top. It’s on a mezzanine, except everyone calls it the rotunda, and the chairs and tables are against glass panels so that you can look through and down at everyone inspecting the racks, picking things up and putting them down and queueing for changing rooms.
    Emma took the paper packets of sugar, tipped them into her saucer and slowly ate them, licking her finger and dabbing it at the grains until they were all gone.
    ‘Now it’s your turn,’ I said.
    ‘My turn for what?’
    ‘Tell me something about her that I don’t know. I told you about the shoplifting, didn’t I? You and her went out together. Without me. Tell me what you got up to.’
    Emma shook her head and told me I should take something. ‘Go down there and put something in your pocket. Some earrings. Sunglasses. Something little.’
    ‘No!’ I said. Louder than I’d meant to. ‘Tell me about Chloe. Do you really think she . . .’ I couldn’t look her in the eye. ‘. . . did what they said she did?’
    No one says suicide. It makes us all look bad. We say tragedy .
    ‘Go on,’ Emma said, and smiled into her cup. ‘Or are you too scared?’
    We’re grown up now and Chloe is still sitting with us, waiting to be impressed.
    ‘We’re too conspicuous to shoplift,’ I said.
    People were already staring. Two grown women acting like guilty schoolgirls. Laughing too loudly. Our coats were faded, stained, past their best. We might have smelled like