div-uh-ney-shuh-n (noun)

1. the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge by occult or supernatural means;

2. augury; prophecy;

3. perception by intuition; instinctive foresight.

Her real name is Lotte but they call her the Trolley Div. She knows it because she hears it said. The teenagers who drift into the supermarket after school for cans of pop. The skateboard kids who come at dusk. Even grownups who should know better. Big men with fat necks from the delivery trucks. Snarky young mums with pushchairs smoking fags. They have all said it, from time to time, within earshot. 54

‘Watch out for the Trolley Div.’

‘Trolley Div’s comin’.’

‘Pssst, check out the Trolley Div. Bloody hell. The face on her.’

Even the ones who don’t say it, the polite ones, the casual shoppers, the out-of-towners, they look like they’re thinking it. And if not Trolley Div, then whatever it is they call people who collect shopping trolleys in supermarket car parks.

Trolley Spod. Trolley Bod. Trolley Spaz. Trolley Tart. Trolley Troll.

Maybe they don’t have a special name for them. Only a sense that trolley attendants are somehow lesser beings. Stupid. Failed. Unqualified. Bottom of the pile. There to use and abuse, with no ears to hear, no heart to feel, no power at their fingertips with which they could exact their bloody revenge. And Lotte could, you know. She could get her own back on them, easily. When they least expect it, she could send a train of trolleys hurtling in the direction of their shiny cars, their weak flesh, their noisy babies, and crush their bones, burst their skins, ruin their precious paintwork.

But that’s not what she’s here to do. That’s not her destiny.

There’s more to this trolley game than shoppers think. More to her than they realise. More to this car park than they can see. But for now she’s keeping it close to her chest, hands gripped on the handle, the long chain of interlocked trolleys flexing before her, under control, yet only a microsecond away from chaos. All it takes is a slight change in velocity. One trolley too many at the end of the stack. A sudden shift in weight distribution. Then all hell could break loose, like planets spinning out of the solar system or snooker balls 55crashing into each other. This event might happen. Probably will happen, she suspects. But only when the time is right. At this moment, Lotte cannot see that far ahead.

What she does know is that something is coming. Lotte can tell because of a peculiar phenomenon in which she keeps finding trolleys abandoned in the same arrangement at the same time of day, around three p.m. It took her a while to notice, but she’s sure it is happening and she isn’t imagining it, not that she’d dare tell anyone at work. Most of the staff treat her like she’s mentally challenged. This would only make it worse. But she has eyes in her head and she can see what’s in front of her: a clear pattern that repeats itself every day.

There’s always a trolley out by the recycling area with bins for clothes, bottles and cans. Then there’s a sequence of two more trolleys interspersed between car clusters, leading to the zebra crossing by the entrance. There she finds one of those big, deep trolleys with plastic seats for kiddies. From this point, the pattern forks into two lines of four trolleys. Always four in each. At the end of one prong, there’s a trolley by the traffic island at the exit with the sign that says, ‘See you again!’ At the end of the other prong, two trolleys huddled by the hedgerow that separates the car park from the main road. There are always twelve trolleys in the arrangement, all pointing in the same direction, narrow ends angled towards the superstore doors, as if magnetically charged.

Lotte doesn’t know what exactly the pattern means but it suggests to her that there will be a time of reckoning, and soon.

This might be a good thing. After all, it was a day of reckoning that led to her getting this job two years ago. One 56of the friendlier till staff, a girl called Iga, told Lotte that her predecessor wasn’t properly trained. They didn’t tell him that he was not allowed to push a stack of more than eight trolleys. Ended up pushing ten one day when the stack began to waggle and swerve until he lost control and crunched into a van, shattering his shoulder. That was the end of that. Permanent damage to his tendons. He got lawyers involved and there was a big hoo-ha about it. A nasty fight that was still ongoing.

In the meantime, the supermarket needed someone to collect trolleys from the bays and gather the abandoned ones from the nether regions of the car park. Someone had to keep the stacks by the door replenished for shoppers on their way in. So the marketing people put an advert in the paper and Lotte applied, at the suggestion of her Nana, with encouragement from the social worker who checked on them from time to time, because Nana was harder to care for as she got older and the bad people in the government were cutting everything that helped – snip! snip! snip!

They desperately needed money but Lotte had problems with the whole getting money thing. Nothing big. But she’d not worked since she left school at sixteen and wasn’t exactly cut out for one of those offices with all those people in suits.

It’s not that she’s dumb. Lotte knows all the constellations. The names of galaxies. The distances between planets. She can sense the tilt of the Earth. Smell the onset of seasons. Feel instinctively what the weather will be like this week. She knows the names of every plant in the park, of all the muscles in her body and the bones they connect. But she has trouble with reading and maths, and with talking to non-Nana people or understanding what they mean. In turn, 57non-Nana people find Lotte odd with her stooped back and heavy brow, a touch of something doctors call ‘frontal bossing’.

Problems, problems. Nothing major, nothing that need stop you, Nana says, just you have to work harder that is all. You have a bigger mountain to climb. But you have abilities, Nana says, a way of seeing, only people don’t know it yet. They haven’t caught up with you. In that way, it is they who have special needs.

When Lotte got the trolley attendant job, it was something of a surprise. They celebrated with chocolate cake and a mushroom brew. Then they did some loud chanting and rune casting like the old days before the social services told them to stop it for the sake of Lotte’s future.

‘You have found your role at last,’ Nana said, raising her chipped mug of hallucinogenic tea, ‘your magical quest begins here.’

Alan, her manager at the supermarket, has made a bit more effort with training Lotte than he did with her predecessor. He follows the new handbook distributed nationwide to make sure no more trolley attendants get smashed up. But he’s a lazy guy. He’s been to university and it seems like he doesn’t really want to be a supermarket trainee manager. He’s in a band. Writing a novel. Car parks and car park attendants are a bit beneath a man of his talents. Alan hasn’t checked on Lotte much since her probation period ended, when her pay went up from £8 an hour to £8.50. Not bad for a twenty-one-year-old Trolley Div. If all goes well she might get promoted to car park porter, a much more important job, helping shoppers with bags, directing cars to empty lots at busy times and showing folk to specialist 58trolleys and electric scooters. It means dealing with strangers, which gives her butterflies, but it pays £9 per hour.

It’s this promise of more money that first encouraged her to add another trolley to the eight-trolley limit. It wasn’t too hard once she got used to the increased swerve and thrust. Nobody really noticed or cared. And with each additional trolley Lotte has become more efficient at her job. Long stacks of nine, ten, even eleven. She can guide them to the store entrance, rain or shine. It’s no longer the lure of a promotion or extra income that motivates her to test the limits of the trolleys in this way. It’s a feeling. Like an urge, or something she is supposed to do.

A calling.

Besides, there is little else for her to think about at work, other than the propulsion of the trolley train and its relationship to the many hazards: parked cars, pedestrians and incoming traffic. Her job may look easy to those shoppers who push past her with grunts and harrumphs, but there are multiple complex factors of which she must be constantly aware. The swivel of wheels. The undulations of tarmac. The placements of speed bumps and rain gutters. The welts of road markings. Lotte has learned the delicate dance of velocity, direction and momentum. She can sense the shifts of the trolley train in the tug of finger muscles and the pressure on that bit of her hand where the handle fits into the curve between thumb and forefinger, known as the ‘thenar space’. At first these muscles ached with strain but gradually they’ve become attuned. Now the thenar space is her ultimate sensor, a way of reading the world in motion. She could probably do her job blindfolded if it ever comes down to it. If a crazed villain leapt from a car and stabbed 59out her eyes with a Bic biro, she could still negotiate the twists and turns of the car park, using only her memory and the instincts in her thenar space.

But life is not always so easily predicable. Lotte knows this too well. Things can happen outside your control.

Pushing a wobbly line of trolleys through a busy car park leaves her exposed to ‘random’ factors, as she calls them, but always in her mind with inverted commas, like when you say something you don’t necessarily mean, or that other people say but you don’t necessarily believe. As Nana says, nothing is truly random.

A ‘random’ describes anything not factored into her calculations that might disrupt the flow of motion. A crushed Coke can, discarded, trapped beneath a wheel, might cause the trolley train to skid. That’s an example of a ‘random’. After all, who could predict the decision of a person to purchase a Coke, the speedy guzzling of the drink and the decision to toss the can away? You’d have to predict the power and angle of the toss to work out the landing place. Then a passing teenager might kick the can, sending it skittering into the path of Lotte’s trolleys as she approached. That would entail a load of ‘randoms’ happening faster than the human brain could process.

There are more examples, too. A patch of ice in winter. A stray cardboard box, blown by the wind. A freshly formed crack in the concrete. Perhaps one of those big SUVs, parked badly, could scupper Lotte’s calculations of the turning angle so that her trolleys go into the back of a Porsche or right up an old lady’s bottom. Worse, a toddler might run out from behind a car and end Lotte’s career. The child would die, crushed beneath her wheels, and Lotte would 60hide behind a tree in the cemetery, watching the funeral, murmuring ‘sorry’ over and over, before the police led her back to the car and took her to prison for the rest of her life.

Every day Lotte lives with these possibilities. Every moment has violent potential. Each millisecond life can go in a million different directions. And sometimes, just sometimes, a person gets to be the guiding hand. This is something a man in a suit doing wordy, numbery gubbins on a computer will never understand. The weight of responsibility. The understanding that anyone can be an agent of the universe. Even a Trolley Div.

At primary school, long before she became Trolley Div, they called her ‘Not-A-Lotte’ and ‘Toi-Lotte’ and ‘Fat Botty’. She was the awkward kid, the freak, the slowcoach. It didn’t matter how many times Nana complained to teachers or lingered at the gates, taking swipes at her classmates’ heads as they left school, Lotte was excluded from their games. Then one day they played ‘trains’. A child would run around the playground with another child holding onto their coat tail. Then another child would latch on, then another, then another. On and on this went until there were ten, twelve, maybe fifteen kids in a weaving line. It didn’t matter who joined the train, only that it kept getting longer. It was a case of the more the merrier. So Lotte seized her chance. She grasped onto the last child’s coat and ran, pulled faster by the train as it weaved and twisted, at a speed she could never achieve under her own steam. Wind in her face, she laughed with a momentary joy, moving as part of a greater whole. Then the leading child changed directions sharply and the line whip-cracked. Lotte lost her grip and flew out, tripping headfirst onto the concrete. 61

Her schoolmates laughed as she got back on her feet, weeping with pain and spitting out tiny white flecks of enamel. Her front teeth were chipped. It was something she never got fixed, for Nana doesn’t trust the medical establishment, dentists included. Whenever Lotte’s teeth hurt, Nana would give her a gluey mixture of cloves and garlic to chew. These days a few of her teeth are missing. A few more are rotten. But her chipped incisors are still there, bucked, prominent and rough to the tongue. A legacy of that unfortunate event.

Only now Lotte understands that it was no random incident but a valuable lesson that has finally come to fruition. For today she controls her own train. Except this one is not made up of children. This one is made from plastic and steel and she, Lotte Dugmore, has sole influence over its direction, with full responsibility for what might happen because of it, and to whom. Thanks to that childhood experience of whiplash, she knows there are three phases to its motion. First, a sudden reversal in direction, which takes only a small jerk of her hands on the trolley handle. Next, a wave of momentum runs through the chain, bending in the middle, becoming a bigger bend towards the end and – finally – a whiplash strikes with force.

All this power unleashed by a twitch of her thenar space.

A similar twitch might have afflicted her father’s hand fifteen years ago on the M6 motorway. If not, then what else could have caused the accident? Why else would he lose control in the blink of an eye? There must have been a sudden involuntary spasm where her father’s thumb and forefinger met the steering wheel, which sent the family car veering from its lane into the barrier – BANG! – then 62spinning, spinning, with all those vehicles crunching after, so much smoke and noise, and she a child in the back seat among the carnage, the only thing alive in their Renault at the end of it all. Six people dead, including her parents. All because of thenar space.

Lotte now has that same power which her dead father once possessed. When the time comes, she will use it for good, or perhaps evil, or something in between. She doesn’t know. But whatever it is, it must have a connection to the strange alignment of trolleys she finds in her mid-afternoon collection. Always twelve in a distinct pattern that she draws with a pencil onto a piece of paper to show her Nana that evening. Nana who knows about these things and who never disappoints.

At the sight of Lotte’s little diagram, Nana’s eyes widen. ‘I know that shape,’ she says, ‘and so do you, Lotte, my dear. For it is the constellation of Perseus.’

Nana gets out a book and shows her: 63

She’s right as well. Almost trolley for trolley, the pattern is the same. Lotte notices that the big star near the middle is that bit at the zebra crossing, which leads shoppers to the entrance from the central pedestrian strip with its pretty saplings. That is where she always finds the deep trolley with the kiddie seats. Nana tells her this star is Algol, the Demon Star, a harbinger of bad fortune. She says that the word ‘disaster’ literally means ‘bad star’.

Dis-aster.

Well, that seals it. Something is coming, Lotte is sure of it, but still she doesn’t know what, or when. That is until she spots two receipts in adjacent trolleys by the hedgerow one morning. Usually when Lotte sees a receipt she has a little nosey at what people have bought. But this time it’s not the list of items that catches her eye. It’s the price at the bottom. The first receipt is for £234. The second receipt is for £23.40.

Isn’t that an odd coincidence?

If nothing is random, and she’s sure that it isn’t, then there is meaning in these numbers 2, 3 and 4.

Or 2 and 34.

Or 23 and 4.

It puzzles her for a while before it hits her: 23/4. The 23rd of April. That’s it! And it’s only a week from now. If something is coming, then it is coming on the 23rd of April. It makes sense. And the only place this future event could happen is Algol, the Demon Star at the centre of the Perseus constellation, located on the zebra crossing at the supermarket entrance. Lotte draws a red cross over Algol on her diagram, circles it, then draws the date 23rd April in big letters. That night she sleeps with the piece of paper beneath her pillow. 64

Despite her fear of talking to people at work, Lotte is too excited to keep her secret, so she confides in Iga, the nice checkout girl who finds time to speak to her among the hustle and bustle of backroom tea breaks, where Lotte never feels welcome. Lotte doesn’t mention the trolley pattern, which Iga might find too weird. Only that she thinks that at three p.m. on the 23rd they should look out for trouble near the entrance, because the stars are never wrong.

Iga smiles and nods. ‘You must keep watch, Lotte, it’s important. Don’t let people down.’

And Lotte won’t, she swears she won’t. She swears this under her breath every night as she lies in bed in their living room with the diagram safe beneath her head, Nana snoring beyond the flimsy partition. They’ve always slept this way because the flat has only one bedroom, which is where Nana keeps her books on witchcraft, tarot and astrology, stacked so high and deep you can barely get through the door. It used to annoy Lotte, at times, when she was a teenager. Seemed unfair.

Not any more.

Thanks to this deep knowledge which Nana has gathered over the years, Lotte can finally do something special in her life and become a respected car park porter, worth £9 per hour. If that’s her reward for sleeping beneath a sideboard, so be it. Not that she hasn’t enhanced her cramped space with personal touches. A large, colourful chart of the human body, showing the tissues, veins and bones. A mobile hung from the ceiling with the planets of the solar system spinning around a yellow sun. A doll’s house in which Lotte likes to arrange effigies of her parents. Sometimes they’re sat at the kitchen table. Sometimes lain in bed. Sometimes they’re 65screaming in terror from the top window because of a chip pan fire that’s filled the house with smoke (Lotte uses Nana’s incense sticks for effect). Other times they stand at the front door, waving proudly as Lotte heads off to work.

Her mother and father have never been so proud as on the 23rd of April when Lotte leaves the flat, nerves jangling. Throughout the morning she’s too excited to concentrate on the job, which is tough because it’s a busy day. Lots of customers leaving their trolleys willy-nilly instead of in the bays where they are supposed to. There’s hustle and bustle by the entrance because a bald man is handing out leaflets about the AA and Cub Scouts are collecting for charity. The customers try to avoid them by cramming through the left-hand sliding door instead of using both exits, causing a right nuisance as Lotte tries to keep the trolleys stacked up neatly.

Honestly!

After lunch, Alan the manager sends Lotte out back to the delivery area to help clean up a spill after a forklift driver drops a pallet of milk. It takes ages and the men make her go and get them tea from the machine while they smoke and tell rude jokes. This jeopardises the timings. Tick, tock, tick, tock. It’s nearly three p.m. by the time she hurries around the side of the store, past the staff smoking area and into the car park. Almost instantly, she hears a cry of ‘Help!’

It’s happening, it’s happening.

Heart in her mouth, Lotte runs towards the zebra crossing. But there’s something amiss. She feels utterly useless without a trolley train at her command. What can she actually do? She has nothing with which to unleash hell on whatever she’s about to encounter. This is not how she envisioned it. Closer to the store entrance, she’s even 66more uncertain. There’s only a woman with a handbag approaching from the avenue of saplings while an old man hobbles through the automatic doors. The crossing is empty, except for something small and brown on the ground. She picks it up. It’s a teddy bear with a bandage on its head. A cocktail stick protrudes from its chest, dripping with tomato ketchup.

Lotte hears giggles. She turns to see Iga and a few of the checkout staff stood by the doors, pointing at her.

‘You have saved the day,’ says Iga. ‘The bear will live!’

It’s a mean, nasty laugh, not a friendly one. Lotte realises that Iga put the bear there as a joke. It’s not nice at all. But worse still, it means that the trolleys were wrong, the stars were wrong, and Nana was wrong. Everything was wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

What was she thinking?

She is, after all, just a Trolley Div.

A stupid, stupid Trolley Div.

* * *

Lotte doesn’t eat for a week. Not much, anyway. A bit of Nana’s stew. Some turnip soup. A spoon of raw honey here and there. At work she talks to nobody, and certainly not Iga. Sometimes Alan asks her if she is okay but he only does this because he’s the manager and wants to look good for the human resources people.

He doesn’t care.

Nobody cares except for Nana, who says, ‘Don’t let them get you down. You must trust your second sight, Lotte, not everyone has it. Like anything important in life, you won’t 67get it right from the get-go. Maybe you see pieces of a puzzle but not how they fit together.’

Lotte lies awake at night beneath the dangling cardboard planets as Nana snores, imagining what her parents would say to make her feel better, had her dad not driven them to their deaths.

Did he really lose control, just like that?

She wonders how come she, Lotte Dugmore, can manoeuvre up to twenty trolleys around a car park full of people and traffic and kids and pigeons and Coke cans and never crash once. Not even once!

Lotte leans from her bed and peers into the bedroom of the doll’s house, where her mum sits alone on the bed.

‘Oh, Lotte, we both loved you so much and we worked hard to get you things you needed. Pretty things to wear. Delicious things to eat. A roof to keep the rain away. Warm radiators in winter. They all cost money, such a lot of money. Your dad worked nights and sometimes when he came home he drank beer to switch off, to settle down, to get some sleep. Each morning he’d drink for a bit longer, and longer, and longer, until it became a habit. A bad habit, I know. But the stress, Lotte, the stress. Don’t blame him. It’s hard being a grownup. All we wanted was the best for you. Then we got a call one morning to say that your Nana had fallen over. She was in hospital. She really needed us. So your dad and I put you in the back seat and we all drove up the motorway, full of worry, even though your dad had not slept, even though he’d drunk a few beers after work, as usual. Maybe it was more than a few, but it was a habit, so he didn’t think much about it. He lost control out of love. Out of love for Nana. Out of love for you. Daddy made a mistake at the 68wheel and we lost control. But you can get it back, Lotte, I know it. You have found your calling at last. The car park is a place where you can shine like a star. We even named you Lotte, as in car lot. Don’t you see? Can you understand now? It’s your destiny!’

Her mother’s words inspire Lotte. They lift her spirits. She returns to work full of hope, back to her old self again, with her eyes wide open and that train of trolleys stretching out before her, like a flash forward to the near future.

Almost immediately, the car park offers up its mysteries once more. On an otherwise uneventful day in early June, Lotte is delighted to find the trolleys laid out in the very same stellar pattern as before. There’s one left by the recycling bins, then that familiar sequence of trolleys which splits by the zebra crossing into two prongs, just like the constellation of Perseus. Twelve trolleys, yet again.

This cannot be the work of sneaky Iga, for Lotte never told her about the trolley pattern. Besides, Iga might be smart and popular but there’s no way she knows about constellations, and definitely not Perseus.

Lotte tries to keep her emotions in check this time, but it’s hard to contain herself when, only a day after the astronomical manifestation returns, she finds a receipt in a basket left near the cash machines. It’s for £2.34. Again, the numbers 2, 3 and 4. This cannot be a coincidence. It simply cannot be chance. But if it’s not the 23rd of April she should look out for, then when?

Like Nana says, it’s a puzzle. The pieces are there but she can’t get them to fit.

Lotte is still wondering about this on Nana’s favourite day of the year, the summer solstice, on the 21st of June. In the 691960s Nana used to go to a place called Stonehenge where our ancestors prayed to the Sun on the longest day of the year. Nana would dance around the stones with her friends, eating magic mushrooms and chanting, like she still does these days, except in the flat, because she can’t walk any more, and no dancing either, just the mushrooms and chanting. Instead of giant stones there are only Nana’s beloved crystals, laid out on the coffee table. As they eat breakfast, even though she’s heard it before, Lotte asks Nana to tell her about the solstice, like when she was little, using pictures torn from old books.

Nana duly gets out a crumpled diagram of the solar system, the Earth and the Sun.

‘The Earth goes around the Sun to make a year, and tilts to make the seasons,’ Nana intones, ‘which is what makes things die and grow and change throughout the years. Think about that Lotte, our lives dependent on a little tilt of the Earth, this way and that, bringing heat and cold, light and dark, life and death.’

As Nana speaks, Lotte gasps at the sight of some numbers on the picture. Why didn’t she think of this before? The angle of the Earth’s tilt today is 23.4 degrees. That’s always the angle of the Earth on the day of the summer solstice, which is today, the 21st of June.

All at once, the pieces of the puzzle spin into place.

Lotte’s age is twenty-one. The number 21 is 12 backwards. Twelve trolleys. Twelve stars in the constellation of Perseus. Receipts with the numbers 2, 3 and 4. The tilt of the Earth on the 21st of June is 23.4 degrees.

Bingo.

Lotte leaps to her feet, kisses Nana, and is out the door and on the way to work within minutes, gnawing her 70fingernails with excitement. The receipts for £234, £23.40 and £2.34 never signified the 23rd of April. It was the 21st of June all along. She can see it now, as clear as she can see the roof of the superstore gleam in the sun and the lampposts, tall as trees, above the first parked cars of the day. All she needs to do is stay vigilant, keep the trolley train well-stacked, and let her thenar space guide its locomotion.

The hours pass. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock.

Lotte eats her egg sandwich on the park bench outside the entrance of the superstore, watching traffic crawl through the high street, while pigeons peck at her feet in the brilliant sunshine of the longest day of the year.

Back to the car park and there’s a lot of trolleys to collect in the early afternoon. Remnants of the lunchtime rush. People who squeeze in a quick shop during working hours. Or those who try to get it done before they pick up their kids from school. These types are too busy to put their trolleys in the bays but Lotte doesn’t mind. She’s glad of it. Gives her plenty of trolleys to keep her barrel loaded. She keeps going around and around the car park, never straying too far from the entrance.

At three p.m. she’s alert and fully primed. Then three p.m. passes. It becomes 3.05, 3.10, 3.11. Tick, tock, tick, tock. She begins to feel twinges of despair when she notices two cars moving slowly, one after the other, towards the zebra crossing. Much too slowly for her liking. It’s as if the first car is deliberately impeding the one behind. Meanwhile, a young lady with a trolley, grinning toddler in the seat, kicking his little legs, exits through the automatic doors. 71

Lotte can see what’s about to happen, as clearly as if it has already happened. She turns her train of eighteen trolleys in an elegant arc, expertly avoiding the bollards by the taxi rank, and moves at pace towards the crossing where the first car has stopped, engine rumbling with menace. She’s close enough to read the number plate: CP18 DIV.

Car park. Eighteen trolleys. A Trolley Div.

This is it.

This is it.

Lotte accelerates as the leading car door opens and a burly man with cropped black hair and a white T-shirt gets out. He turns to the car behind, pulling something from the back seat that looks like a weapon – a rifle, shotgun, something like that, she doesn’t know much about weapons. Then a man from the car behind gets out and he too reaches for something, probably a gun. This happens in the very moment that the young lady with the toddler steps onto the crossing. She’s going to get in the way of whatever is about to happen. They’re going to get hurt unless Lotte does something.

Now.

Lotte doesn’t need to think. Two years of muscle memory take over as she jerks the handle of the trolley in precisely the right way to whiplash the stack and send the end trolley whizzing along the road, ripples of energy wobbling the air as it tears a rift in space–time. It glances off the young lady’s shopping trolley, forcing her to pull back from the crossing with a yelp, safely out of harm’s way, then it ricochets into the gunman’s backside, spinning him round to face Lotte.

Next, she gives the whole trolley train a hard shove and lets momentum do the rest. The stack rattles sideways 72like a snake, hitting the man full on, sweeping him from the road. He slams into a brick pillar and crumples beneath a tangle of steel.

The young lady with the toddler screams, ‘Bloody maniac!’ and Lotte assumes that she is addressing the gunman, even though she’s looking right at Lotte. As Lotte gets closer, she sees the man from the second car, stood by the open door, mouth wide open in surprise, holding his wallet.

People rush from the store to see what’s going on. Some stop between cars with their shopping bags, heads above the roofs, watching like meercats as Lotte approaches her stricken victim, groaning with pain beneath the trolley stack. It’s curious. She cannot see his weapon. No weapon at all. Only a clutch of reusable shopping bags in one of his hands.

He must have dropped the shotgun somewhere. Thrown it away somehow. Blood trickles down his face. His eyes are wild with loathing.

‘What the hell!’ he yells at her. ‘You stupid mong! You crazy fucking bitch!’

The man keeps going on like that, ranting and raving. All kinds of nasty stuff coming out of his mouth as the crowd of onlookers thickens around them. Lotte beams down at him in triumph. Let him yell. Sticks and stones may break her bones but words won’t hurt her any more. She’s been called worse.

It’s of no matter anyway. She has taken control and saved the day. Mum and Dad would burst with pride if they could see her now. She cannot wait to tell Nana when she gets home. And when Alan the manager finds out about this, he’s going to be absolutely delighted.