After stuffing himself with pasta and home-made chocolate trifle, Robin followed Marion up the escalator to the mezzanine floor.
‘Your aunt won’t mind me using her den?’ he asked, as they stepped through a sliding door, into a space built from grooved shelving panels stripped out of a neighbouring store.
‘Aunt Lucy’s chilled,’ Marion said. ‘Her boyfriend works in Nottingham. She only bounces back here when they get in a fight.’
The LED lantern on the ceiling didn’t work until Marion fiddled with the socket. With the light on, Robin saw a comfortable space with lots of rugs, a big mattress on the floor and a cooking area centred around a two-ring gas burner with more than a hundred varieties of chilli sauce along the wall.
‘Someone likes spicy food,’ he said, picking up a skull-shaped bottle labelled Jalapeno Fire Blast – Turbo Strength.
‘Aunt Lucy brings a bottle down and smears it on everything when she eats with us,’ Marion said fondly, as she opened a repurposed file cabinet and took out a lightweight blanket. ‘That duvet on the bed is for winter, so this is better.’
Marion showed Robin a pair of electrical sockets by the bed. ‘You’ll get enough juice to charge a phone or run a laptop, but you’ll fuse the system if you plug in anything powerful, like a heater or kettle.’
She flicked on a fan, because it felt stuffy, and started rolling up the thick duvet.
‘I can do it,’ Robin said.
Marion shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. There’s nothing else to do. I often sneak up here and read, or watch a show on my laptop. If you think dinner was mad, you should see the terrible trio’s nightly bedtime performance …’
As Marion spoke, Robin laid his bow on a dining table close to the light and began inspecting it. He was gutted that his most prized possession had got scuffed when he tumbled down the ravine. But he slotted an arrow, and all felt fine when he tensioned the cable.
‘You any good with that?’ Marion asked.
‘Not bad,’ Robin said, acting modest but thrilled that Marion had taken an interest in his skills. ‘I might fire a few shots in the space outside, to check it’s OK.’
The sport store’s mezzanine was only half the size of the floor below, but Aunt Lucy’s den took up less than a fifth of the space and Robin had seen a potential shooting gallery the second he walked off the escalator.
‘I need targets,’ he said, as he stepped out with his bow and quiver and eyed nothing but dusty shelf units and a scattering of toys that Marion’s brothers wouldn’t appreciate him filling with arrow holes.
‘Are ping-pong balls too small?’ Marion asked. ‘We have a trillion …’
‘Anything big enough to see,’ Robin said, before following Marion to a musty stock room at the back of the open space. Its barren wire shelves went back more than twenty metres.
‘All the good stuff like shoes and tracksuits got taken away when the stores closed,’ Marion explained, as she grabbed a huge wheeled plastic container. ‘But they left these behind.’
There was a rattling sound as she tilted the container. Inside were several hundred trios of ping-pong balls in clear plastic sleeves. Each sleeve had one white ball, one pink and one glow-in-the-dark yellow.
‘These are ace,’ Robin said, reaching into the container and grabbing a few packets.
‘We found so many, my brothers got sick of squashing them,’ Marion explained. ‘Shall I line them up or something?’
Robin shook his head as he backed up to the escalators. ‘Throw one up in the air, as high as you can get it.’
‘Seriously?’ Marion said.
She tore open a pack of three balls and tucked two in her hoodie pocket. Then she served a ball and batted it high in the air with the back of her free hand.
Robin waited until the ball neared the top of its trajectory where it would be moving slowest, releasing his arrow an instant before it started back to the ground. Marion scrambled backwards, then gasped as the arrow thudded into the store’s back wall, with the squashed pink ball skewered on the tip.
‘What the heck!’ Marion said, then shook her head and mocked Robin’s tone from minutes earlier. ‘Sure, yeah, I’m not baaaaad …’
Robin tried to be cool, but couldn’t help cracking an enormous grin.
‘If you put the other two in the air at the same time, I’ll try and shoot both.’
Marion followed orders and Robin hit the first ball easily. But by the time he’d reloaded the second ball was low and his arrow missed by a centimetre before scraping the concrete floor all the way to the back wall.
Robin jogged after the arrow, worried the hard floor had damaged the tip. But there was no major harm and he wiped it on his trouser leg before slotting it back in his quiver.
‘OK, new best buddy!’ Marion said, smirking cheekily and giving Robin a friendly shoulder punch. ‘Gimme the bow. You have to show me how to do this!’