Looking for Jake Read Online Free PDF Page B

just tell them I worked for the store.
    It’s on the outskirts of town, a huge metal warehouse. Full of a hundred little fake rooms, with a single path running through them, and all the furniture we sell made up and laid out so you can see how it should look. Then the same products, disassembled, packed flat and stacked high in the warehouse for people to buy. They’re cheap.
    Mostly I know I’m just there for show. I wander around in my uniform, hands behind my back, making people feel safe, making the merchandise feel protected. It’s not really the kind of stuff you can shoplift. I almost never have to intervene.
    The last time I did was in the ball room.
    On weekends this place is just crazy. So full it’s hard to walk: all couples and young families. We try to make things easier for people. We have a cheap café and free parking, and most important of all we have a crèche. It’s at the top of the stairs when you first come in. And right next to it, opening out from it, is the ball room.
    The walls of the ball room are almost all glass, so people in the store can look inside. All the shoppers love watching the children: there are always people outside, staring in with big dumb smiles. I keep an eye on the ones that don’t look like parents.
    It’s not very big, the ball room. Just an annexe really. It’s been here for years. There’s a climbing frame all knotted up around itself, and a net made of rope to catch you, and a Wendy house, and pictures on the walls. And it’s full of colour. The whole room is two feet deep in shiny plastic balls.
    When the children fall, the balls cushion them. The balls come up to their waists, so they wade through the room like people in a flood. The children scoop up the balls and splash them all over each other. They’re about the size of tennis balls, hollow and light so they can’t hurt. They make little
pudda-thudda
noises bouncing off the walls and the kids’ heads, making them laugh.
    I don’t know why they laugh so hard. I don’t know what it is about the balls that makes it so much better than a normal playroom, but they
love
it in there. Only six of them are allowed at a time, and they queue up for ages to get in. They get twenty minutes inside. You can see they’d give anything to stay longer. Sometimes, when it’s time to go, they howl, and the friends they’ve made cry, too, at the sight of them leaving.
    I was on my break, reading, when I was called to the ball room.
    I could hear shouting and crying from around the corner, and as I turned it I saw a crowd of people outside the big window. A man was clutching his son and yelling at the childcare assistant and the store manager. The little boy was about five, only just old enough to go in. He was clinging to his dad’s trouser leg, sobbing.
    The assistant, Sandra, was trying not to cry. She’s only nineteen herself.
    The man was shouting that she couldn’t do her bloody job, that there were way too many kids in the place and they were completely out of control. He was very worked up and he was gesticulating exaggeratedly, like in a silent movie. If his son hadn’t anchored his leg he would have been pacing around.
    The manager was trying to hold her ground without being confrontational. I moved in behind her, in case it got nasty, but she was calming the man down. She’s good at her job.
    â€œSir, as I said, we emptied the room as soon as your son was hurt, and we’ve had words with the other children—”
    â€œYou don’t even know which one did it. If you’d been keeping an
eye
on them, which I imagine is your bloody
job,
then you might be a bit less . . .
sodding
ineffectual.”
    That seemed to bring him to a halt and he quieted down, finally, as did his son, who was looking up at him with a confused kind of respect.
    The manager told him how sorry she was, and offered his son an ice cream. Things were