Chapter 7

It was that same afternoon when I subtly glanced at my phone to see who was ringing. We weren’t supposed to use our phones during class, but I had mine on silent-mode in my pocket and it was vibrating madly.

It was Jim. He had my number, but strictly for emergencies. Nobody from the store had ever needed to call me before.

I got up and excused myself, Mr Davis, my maths teacher, too shocked to even ask where I was going. Nobody ever just got up in the middle of a lesson and left.

In the corridor, I picked up. Jim had hung on and on, waiting for me to answer. “Sam, you’ve gotta come in. Everything’s crashed.” He sounded really panicked.

Well, being tech support sucked. I’d always hated being asked by mum’s friends to set up and to fix their computer woes. And now, I had a proper business that I had to keep running. This sucked. I had no choice. “I’m on my way ASAP” I replied, and dived back into the classroom to recover my satchel. “Someone’s ill,” I lied as explanation, “I’ve gotta hurry, sorry.”

I didn’t have to wait long for a taxi to come whisk me to BigMarket. Jim was on the shop floor, frantically directing traffic as the staff tallied all the tills manually and wrote everything down for later entry.

After a while, I worked out that there were two problems. The first, simply, was that the power to the tills had tripped. It was just a normal circuit breaker, and an experimental flip of the switch turned everything back on. Jim went from thinking I was his downfall, to thinking I was his saviour. He couldn’t believe it was that simple when I explained that it wasn’t a problem with my system at all, but rather with his normal till system. And it was just a power outage.

The second problem was that my software really had crashed. When it couldn’t see the number of items in the till display, it failed on a divide-by-zero error. It took a hard restart to get the system back up, but now it had forgotten what everyone already had on their trolleys, so all the customers waiting for checkout were going to be flagged for fraud. I sat by the computer screen in the security room and tried to click an ‘okay’ button to dismiss the alarms before the sirens started as each affected customer went through the tills.

Tiff and Charlie arrived straight after school, just as I had finally got everything back on its feet.

“It could have been worse,” Charlie pointed out, “It could have been BigSaver. Your software is the tills, there.”

I nodded mutely.

“So, incident autopsy. What went wrong? How can we prevent it in the future?” Tiff was in business mode.

We agreed that I had to stop adding features and focus on destructive testing for a while, and that, really, we needed some local IT bod to be on call so I wouldn’t get dragged out of lessons again. The girls had heard on the grapevine how I’d just excused myself and how much trouble everyone thought I was going to be in, tomorrow. Oh, well.

“Mum, where’s my passport?”

“In the box behind the sink, why?”

“Oh, nothing.” I paused. That was dumb. I was going to have to tell her sooner rather than later. “I’m going on holiday at half term.”

“Oh? Where? Who? And when were you going to tell me? Am I invited?”

“Tenerife. Charlie and Tiff. I’m telling you now. No,” I listed back. Mum counted on her fingers, matching answers to questions.

“Just the three of you?”

“Yeah.”

“And just how do you propose to pay for this?”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to tell mum that she’d bought all those tins of things that she’d filled the larder with, from her own son. “Well, you know that security software I did for that school project for BigMarket? Well, they were so pleased with it, they’ve given us a holiday,” I lied.

“Well, they really should have spoken with the parents first.”

Oh damn, I was going to dig myself into a deep lie here.

“What do Tiff and Charlie’s parents say?” she finished up.

Shit. Tiff’s parents? Shit.

“Maybe I should talk to them,” mum carried on. “Do they know their daughters have a boyfriend? I can’t see them wanting you three to go on holiday together, not if they knew.”

Shit double shit.

“Oh, Mrs Eccles, what a pleasant surprise” Tiff exclaimed as she came into our kitchen.

“Call me Sarah, Tiffany, please” Sarah smiled.

“And call me Tiff,” the smile returned.

A surprisingly hesitant Charlie hovered behind Tiff. “It’s a really big deal, meeting your boyfriend’s parents for the first time” she’d told me just before we’d left school, earlier.

“Hi, Tiffany, Charlotte, sit down, please,” mum beamed, using their full forenames, despite Tiff telling everyone to call her Tiff just a second before. Mum took over and ushered my girlfriends to their places. Everyone sat down with them.

Tiff looked at the food happily. “Well, this looks delicious,” she smiled. It was weird how roles were reversed; at school, Charlie was the outgoing girl and Tiff was invisible. But now, every time we were with adults, everything was the other way around.

“Yes, Sam helped,” mum lied. I shot her a warning glance and she winked and smirked at me. Thanks, mum.

“Does Sam cook? He’s never cooked for us! It would sure beat pizza. We’ve had a lot of takeaways recently, haven’t we, Sam?”

Sarah smirked at me too. This was getting complicated, fast.

“Where’s Flo? I thought...” Tiff trailed off thoughtfully. She leaned conspiratorially towards Sarah but everyone could hear her clearly. “Are you two...” Tiff’s eyes darted obviously between mum and Sarah “well, you know?”

“No,” Sarah laughed, “we’re not. I thought you’d have better gaydar, dear. Flo’s at home with my man. I’m just here tonight for the show. I wouldn’t miss this for the world!” See turned to examine me, theatrically, “Don’t you think Sam’s gone a delectable shade of puce?”

The girls, all four of them, laughed hysterically. Why had I thought it a good idea to invite my girlfriends to meet my mum? And why had mum let Sarah come, too?

The four quickly bonded and soon were chatting happily.

“So, what’s it like, you know, the three of you?” Sarah probed. Mum was content to let Sarah ask all the embarrassing questions that she, too, was tickled to hear the answers to.

Tiff smiled like a crocodile, “Quick. But we’re working on his stamina.”

Mum and Sarah split their sides.

“You know, it wouldn’t be so funny if it were daughters we were discussing,” Tiff reflected, suddenly firm. Mum and Sarah stiffened, realisation hitting them.

“Yes, hmm, do your parents know?” mum deflected artfully. That stopped Tiff dead. She’d walked into that one. “Only Sam always avoids talking about them.”

Tiff glanced at Charlie but Charlie silently stared into space. Charlie hadn’t said much all evening. Tiff swallowed hard. “I’m estranged from my parents. And Charlie, her parents are really laid back, but they don’t know.”

“Oh, Tiff, everything okay?” Sarah was suddenly concerned, sounding motherly.

“Yes, it’s really all okay. We have our own flat and everything,” Tiff replied bravely. The number of people knowing about everything was growing steadily.

“Wait, your own flat? Is that where Sam keeps spending the night?” mum checked. Tiff just nodded and smiled weakly.

Mum didn’t want to dig deeper. “So, tell us about this holiday,” she changed the subject.

“It’s a gift. From BigMarket, for the school project,” I blurted out. Charlie and Tiff looked up at me sharply, and I tried to give them a meaningful ‘ask me later’ look.

And then Charlie became more vocal and started talking about the holiday. One week in Tenerife. Charlie knew all about it, and was keen to tell. She wasn’t even shy to say we were all sharing a room.

“We’ve had enquiries from Lichester’s BigMarket about opening a BigSaver there, too,” Jim beamed. “Apparently, they’ve heard some really good things from Mr Matson.”

That was excellent news. A third store! The way we’d worked it out with Mr Matson was that we were paying a premium on wholesaler prices, which kept him very sweet. We’d only been open a couple of weeks and already we guessed we were his biggest individual customer. We’d never offered him a stake in the BigSaver company itself. This wasn’t franchising.

Charlie went through the financials. Mr Matson’s BigSaver hadn’t even been open a month, but it was already larger than our first BigSaver. It’s in a more economically depressed area, Charlie explained, and that made BigSaver’s savings even more attractive to consumers. And we’d heavily discounted some brands of nappies, even though we still made a killing on them, and that really brought in young families. Tiff had been able to spin that as marketing strategy.

Charlie started trying to explain a proposal she had carefully prepared with our accountant about dividends. I couldn’t really follow as she went through the various tax considerations and advantages for Jim and Ms Duncan. Tiff kept saying she didn’t want her own bank account.

The three girls and I now each had a twenty percent share in a company set to have a turnover in the tens of millions and a profit in the millions by this time next year! We were extremely rich. And that was even if we didn’t open any more stores!

I sat back and looked around the room. Jim was sitting on forty percent, and we’d given him a five percent commission on the security cameras for Mr Matson’s BigMarket. Hmm, oh yeah, I hadn’t even counted our security camera business. T C S Enterprises was a little bit bigger than just BigSaver. It wasn’t much, in the bigger scheme of things, but it was definitely something. Talk about rich!

That just left Ms Duncan. She wasn’t a shareholder. I wasn’t even sure we were paying her anything to be on our board. I’d have to ask Charlie and Tiff about that at some point. It felt like we owed her, too. She’d even gone with Tiff to the passport agency office.

I was brought back to reality by Tiff saying “Sam, you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying, have you?” What a weird way to start a conversation!

I sat up straight and tried to work out what they’d been talking about. Tiff and Charlie just smiled at me adoringly. Ms Duncan sighed. Only Jim looked vexed. “Sam, have you found an IT guy to back you up?” he asked pointedly.

Nope. Oops. I confessed.

Charlie rummaged around in her laptop case and pulled out a sheet of paper. “I propose that we hire in this company.” She passed the sheet around. “They provide IT support to lots of local businesses, both here and in Lichester. We’d have to find another local company near other stores, of course. But I think local companies will offer better service than a larger company, even if we have a higher overhead coordinating them all. Anyway, this company is very cheap – just a couple of thousand pounds per month retainer, and a hundred pounds per hour call-out fee, double that outside office hours. So far, Sam’s only been called out once, so hopefully, that’s actually a steal.”