Free Wonder Women by Rosie Fiore Page B

be furious when he sees what I’ve done to his dinosaurs.’
    â€˜You haven’t painted over them. You’ve incorporated them. It’s wonderful, darling.’
    Betty wasn’t one for fake or unearned praise, and Lee stepped back to look; it was kind of wonderful, a mad, colourful Garden of Eden craziness, with sea creatures in the mountains and elephants frolicking in the waves. Amazing what you could do with finger paints and a few potatoes.
    â€˜Can I keep it, Mum? Jo might like to see it for ideas for her shop.’
    â€˜Now, tell me about this shop,’ said Betty. ‘I know she’s gone on this business course, but you’ve both been pretty cagey about what sort of shop it is.’
    Lee described it, with the rails of kids’ clothing high on the walls and the play area down below. Betty listened seriously without interrupting.
    â€˜It would need to be tremendously safe, that goes without saying.’
    â€˜I’m sure Jo will be getting advice on that.’
    â€˜And there might be potential to extend it … perhaps add a little coffee-and-cake area where mums could sit down for a cuppa after shopping? Maybe a bookshop corner?’
    â€˜Great ideas, Mum. Maybe for stage two, but great ideas.’
    â€˜But if anyone can make it happen, Jo can. She’s a go-getter, that girl.’
    *
    Jo, sitting opposite a health-and-safety expert in the hotel in Kingston, was inclined to feel that her get-up-and-go had got up and left. Between them, the experts she had met withhad sucked all the joy out of her idea. The financial expert had been gloomy at best, saying that considering the current financial crisis, it was a terrible time to start a luxury store. Jo protested and said that she wasn’t planning on selling premium-priced goods, but he raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t believe her and kept punching numbers into his calculator and shaking his head. The insurance woman told her she would end up paying a king’s ransom in publicliability insurance, and the health-and-safety man’s endless list of problems and potential hitches was making her lose the will to live. Did it have to be this hard? she wondered, but then she glanced around the room, and every one of the potential business owners had a face full of doom and gloom. At least she wasn’t alone.
    At the coffee break, she found herself next to Daniel and Chris, the two teenage guys. ‘Maybe we should just go home,’ Daniel was saying. ‘This is bloody useless.’
    â€˜My mum paid for us to come,’ said Chris. ‘We can’t bail out now. And anyway, what do these guys know about starting an online business? They’re all like a hundred and three.’
    â€˜What kind of business?’ Jo found herself saying. Damn. Louise had told them not to discuss their actual intended business. She didn’t want the boys to think she was trying to poach their ideas.
    They didn’t seem bothered though. ‘T-shirts,’ said Daniel. ‘I design them; Chris screen-prints them. We’ve built a pretty good following through friends, but it’s time to take it to the next level.’
    Jo didn’t know what to say. She was probably as old asboth of them put together, and they already had a successful small business.
    â€˜Here’s our card,’ said Chris. ‘My dad made us get cards, even though they’re archaic. Still, Dan did a pretty good job on the design, and they’re fun to give out.’
    The card was bright orange and cut in the shape of a old-fashioned TV screen with rounded corners, and there was a brilliantly wobbly cartoon face peering in from the edge, pointing impishly at their company name: ‘Outtake’. Their names were on the back of the card, with their email address, website, Skype details and Facebook page. Now Jo felt doubly depressed. They were so far ahead of her she didn’t even know where to