Free The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith Page B

she did the display stuff up at the ceiling level which is always covered in bits of food and small dead insects and fluff and grit, it’s through the air-conditioning that it gets up there, she still likes to clean it, it is very satisfying and that’s how she got promoted, she got his job, one of the first females to manage a night shift for the company, she is a test case, maybe she will get an even better job like him after this though there’s no way anyone on the company’s going to know about this, she’s telling no one, and there’s absolutely no way anyway that she’d move down there, no way on earth, it’d have to be an important job up here.
    Leave him alone, Kimberley McKinlay roared at the one with the shears when she came flying out of the stores to see what was going on out the front, apparently she was roaring like a lion in a rage as she came, she can hardly remember, that boy Dallas told her later she was shouting how the blades were filthy and he’d to get them away from the food area, and if he harmed the paintwork there’d be her to answer to, and how he could be giving Michael Cardie tetanus if he cut him with rusty blades. Imagine herself like that, roaring like a lion. Kimberley remembers the lions at the circus at Bught Park when she was a child, going round swiping at each other with their paws in a seethrough tube that ran round the ring by the feet of the audience. She drives the long straight route back into the town with both the visors down, shielding her eyes with her left hand and feeling the serious frown on her face; she is young, she is driving as fast as her car will go, she is ready for anything and she is a person capable of serious anger. She wonders, when cars come towards her and pass her and she can see the strangers in them for the moment it takes two cars to flash past each other on a road, so fast that all you catch is a glimpse of face, what the people in those cars would think if they knew, and there is a kind of a pleasure all the same in knowing that they never will.
    In they came to rob the place and she apparently stood square in front of the tills with her arms folded (she can’t remember that). They wanted the money. You’re getting no takings from here, she said, all you’ll get from here is something off the menu and you’ll pay for it before you get it too, and I’m only telling you one more time, get those gardening things out of here, they could be covered in e.coli and there’s no gardening tools allowed in this restaurant, if you’re wanting anything to eat you’ll have to leave them outside the door.
    They had the woolly hats with eyeholes in them pulled over their faces so nobody would know who they were but when one of them heard her say that it made him laugh inside the wool like he couldn’t help it, it was the one with the saw, and when his arm went down to his side she noticed his other arm, that it had a false hand on the end of it, a hand that wasn’t real, that’s when she recognized him, it was Jason Robertson from Kinmylies who lost his arm in that motorbike accident and he scarred up his face too, she knew him from five years ago from when they were at school, everybody knew who he was after that happened. Are you not Jason Robertson? she said, and the one with the shears swore and the other one waiting at the door with the leafblower threw the leafblower down and said I told you to put your fucking jacket over it. So one of these boys would be Rich Riach, since him and Jason Robertson were always hanging about together, and there was something familiar about the one with the shears, she was right, it was him under that hat with the holes in it, but she still has no idea who the other one at the door was, they called him Kevin, or maybe it was Gavin. Rich she remembers wasn’t really called Rich, really he was Gordon Riach from the houses over the other side of the canal. He was good at football back then. He was still holding