It was an old department store, lined with cream wallpaper that had faded brown in places, but still glittering with gaudy, drooping chandeliers. They passed glass cabinets filled with bottles of perfume and jewellery that glowed yellow. The countertops were trimmed with strips of gold.
‘Keep up, come on,’ Dettie said. ‘We don’t have all day.’
She found the children’s section—girls and boys—and began snatching up a few items. Shirts, shorts, some packets of children’s underwear. Katie ran over to a stand of bright skirts and flicked through them, the sound of each plastic hanger snapping against the next as she went.
Before long the two of them were bickering over a pair of shorts, so Sam sat down on a cushioned vinyl bench beside the fitting rooms, holding whatever new clothes Dettie handed to him, feeling his skin pulse. Around him stiff pink mannequins stared dead-eyed beneath coarse black wigs, and he joined them, peering straight ahead at the maroon carpet, hearing soft electronic piano music drift from somewhere, and realising, with a curiously detached calm, that he had absolutely no idea what town he was in.
Half an hour later a bubbly young shop assistant was ringing up their purchases, folding them into a plastic bag as she chewed a piece of bright green gum in the corner of her smile. The summer dress printed with flowers that Katie and Dettie had finally agreed upon. The ugly skateboarding T-shirt Dettie had picked for Sam that he was too sore and exhausted to argue against. Socks, underwear, thongs. The register sputtered out a receipt.
‘And will you be paying by cheque or—?’
‘Cash,’ Dettie said swiftly, drawing a note from the thick bundle in her purse and pressing it into the woman’s hand, waving away a receipt.