The clown tires of the bus and saunters down the stairs. As they are not at an official stop, he hits the red button that opens the doors in an emergency and steps out as the driver swears at him from behind the safety glass. Across on the east side of the road, Jeanette Pirsig walks briskly into the charity shop next to the dental surgery above which Marcus Forster is slowly piecing together a lighthouse on the Frisian island of Wangerooge. Pirsig is cross, not that it’s the shop’s fault. Someone, and she’s not pointing any fingers, has mislaid, thrown away or hidden the two thirty pound tickets for tomorrow’s Jason Donovan concert at the Hammersmith Apollo that were attached to the fridge. She’s asked her five-year-old, Megan who assures her that neither she nor any of her friends saw, opened, drew on or cut up the envelope containing two printed and embossed tickets to the concert. And Megan wouldn’t lie, she’s a good girl. John is still at work and when she called him out of a meeting because it was urgent – how else was she going to get hold of him? It would take the house burning down or Fudge dying before he put her first during work hours, but sometimes it would be nice if he could prioritise her, or at least realise how frantic she is that it’s barely twenty four hours until Donovan will stride onto the Apollo stage wearing a pale linen suit and white Tshirt, and she still has NO IDEA WHERE THE TICKETS ARE – when she called John out of the meeting, he simply told her to search in all the places where she had already looked. All she can think, and if he bothered calling her, she would tell him, is that they were somehow still in the pocket of the jeans that she dumped here yesterday with everything else. But who knows what happens to donated items after you drop them off? If it’s anything like the Oxfam over the road, they ship it to some kind of central warehouse where they sort and distribute the good stuff to the shops a bit more evenly. The lady there told Pirsig this when she asked why none of the things she donates ever seem to make it into the shop, let alone the window, not that she’s suspicious, why should she be? People like that don’t steal the best items for themselves, or throw it in the trash, but the shoes were Russell and Bromley and it would have been nice to see them on display. The lady behind the till is chatting to an older black man who she appears to know and as time ticks, Pirsig instinctively hates them both. Finally the woman looks up. Jeanette Pirsig explaining that her feckless husband John might have left the tickets for Jason Donovan in the back pocket of some trousers which he hasn’t worn for months, and could she just have a quick look? The woman at the till disappearing through a door, returning a few moments later and inviting Pirsig to look for the bag herself in a giant stock room filled with boxes and piles, a handful of volunteers picking over the spoils. Pirsig seeing the bag and lunging at it, a sudden and dramatic move that makes the others look up, but she doesn’t care about them, only Jason Donovan crooning Ten Good Reasons, Donovan with his blond flick, wide eyed Donovan duetting Especially for You with a backing vocalist, of 1989, of being at Chesham High, reading Smash Hits and Seventeen with Tracey Pelham and Ruth Flitton and kissing Lee Marcus in Lowndes Park because he had cigarettes and rode a motorbike. Pirsig not caring about the eyes that are upon her, rummaging through work shirts and trainers and VHS videos until she finds the jeans and feels in the pockets. A receipt from Homebase, a parking voucher and a couple of plant markers.

“Fucking hell!”

She stares at the bag as the volunteers in the room look at her, then turn away to give her a moment. Several weeks ago, while she was playing with Siobhan from next door who never says please and actually ASKS for food and juice when it’s not even her house, Megan brushed against the fridge where Jeannette Pirsig had attached the tickets with a ceramic fridge magnet in the shape of a cupcake. The envelope fell to the floor along with a photograph of Megan’s cousin in Australia and a newssheet from her school. Pirsig’s sister Marie who was minding Megan at the time saw the papers on the floor and, not realising they had once been attached to the fridge, placed them on top of it, meaning to but forgetting to tell Jeannette Pirsig that they were there. Pirsig will not find the tickets until long after the show. She cannot call Ticketmaster because she bought them from a tout on eBay, and so she will make her way to the Apollo a few hours before the concert begins and pay eighty pounds to a man who looks like a car thief while John stays at home minding Megan. “At least we’ll save on babysitting and one of us will see the show.” And despite the brilliance of Donovan, she will remain cross, cross with John, cross that it had to be like this, that this always happens to them. Cross.