A Bit of Earth by Rebecca Smith Page A

going past the same antique shops(closed) and clothes shops where she couldn’t have afforded anything, the same cafes, and the same bars. She always ended up in the proper shopping centre, looking at the same things she had looked at in the same shops (but nearer home) the weekend before. Sometimes she bought an ice cream and ate it in the garden of the Brighton Pavilion (she was doing the Regency for A level). What she needed was more money. Then she could really buy stuff.
    The next time she had a day off she just got the train as far as Gatwick. Loads of people at college worked there. There were signs in almost every window. She could have her pick of jobs. She would never do anything fast food. She quite fancied Lush but maybe the smell would get to her after a while. A few years ago she’d imagined that every branch of Lush had people out the back making all the scrubs and soaps and stuff. She would have loved doing that, she really liked cooking. No, if she worked at Lush it might put her off nice things.
    How about Accessorize? She really liked Accessorize. Her mum would love it if she had a staff discount there. But there had been that time in the Croydon branch. She’d been about to put a pair of earrings up her sleeve when Raquel Palmer had been caught putting some gloves into her bag. They’d taken all of their names, and they probably had a database. She didn’t want to work anywhere that sold shortbread and Union Jack stuff. What she should really do was go round and see where they paid the most. She went into BagelExpress to think about it over a Danish. There were only two other people in there, and the guy behind the counter who looked like Dr Kovac, her favourite doctor in
ER
.
    This one might be all right.
    Dr Kovac gave her an application form, and she filled it out there and then. The manager was on his break.
    The manager had rung her on her mobile before she even got home. Yes, she could do Saturdays and some Sundays, even some evenings. She could do bank holidays and school holidays. Would she go for an interview on Saturday and maybe start then too if it all went well?
    When she went on the Saturday she thought it must be Dr Kovac’s day off. It turned out that he’d left. Her shifts seemed to coincide with those of two Dutch students. They were quite nice, but they kept lapsing into their private language. She and the Dutch girls were very clean, but she kept wondering about all the stages before them, and all the stages before any food anywhere reached anybody. Imagine all the processes, the ingredients, the production, refrigeration, the transport. Too many people involved; and yet the customers ate up every scrap.
    Then she got bored. She kept accidentally going shopping in her breaks and spending almost as much as she was earning. Sometimes she hardly had anything left for shopping with her friends. Her mum said that she shouldn’t be working so many shifts, and that she should be saving up, anyway. She kept saying that Madeleine would earn much more in the long term if she went to university. And she’d meet some really nice people. And somebody special.
    Madeleine Jones’s application was very average, but ‘Visiting the Brighton Pavilion’ was listed as an interest, and eventhough it came after ‘jazz dance’ and ‘baking’, Professor Lovage put it on the ‘Offers’ pile.
    It was around this time that somebody on the Estates and Grounds Sub-Committee thought of the botanical garden. Funding had been identified and sponsorship was in the process of being secured for the new sports science facilities; facilities that would include a 400-station gym and a sports injuries treatment centre. There was nobody from the department of Botany on the committee, nobody on the committee who even knew of the department of Botany’s interest in the garden; so when the garden was suggested as a potential development site, there was