The hammer rang once. A spark jumped off the anvil and did not go out. It waited. They followed.

It was the last Saturday before the holidays, and the high street had its lights up. They were strung between the lamp posts in long loops of white and gold, and they came on at four o'clock whether or not it was dark yet. Somebody was playing a trumpet badly outside the bank. The bakery had a queue round the corner.

Tara had finished her shift at one. She had flour on her sleeve and forty pounds in an envelope.

The envelope had PRESENTS written on it in marker pen, in Marcus's square capitals. Back in October, at the bakery, Marcus had helped her build a budget on the back of a paper bag. Every pound had a job. Half of each month's Saturday money went to the rent deposit for her first term away. The rest covered her phone, her bus pass, climbing, and small things. In November he had made her an envelope for each one, because he said money in an envelope behaves better than money in a phone.

The presents envelope was the one she had been looking forward to all term.

It had been a hard term. There had been the payslip in October, and the laptop in November. She had spent most of it saying no to things. Today she wanted to say yes.

She had a list on her phone.

Mum: the green scarf from the market stall.

Danya: the space book he keeps reading in the shop.

Gran: a jigsaw. A big one. With a lighthouse if possible.

She had been thinking about Gran's face when she opened it for about a month.

The bookshop on the corner was warm and smelled of paper and coffee. Mr Fenwick, who owned it, had put a little tree in the window and hung paper stars from the shelves. In the window, in big red letters on a white card, was a sign:

SPEND £50, GET £10 OFF

Tara stood in front of it for a moment and felt a small, happy fizz.

Ten pounds off. That was a quarter of the envelope. That was another present.

Marcus was in the bookshop already. He was buying a cookery book for his dad and arguing with himself about which one. Danya was with him, because Danya had attached himself to the older students at the café that autumn and nobody had the heart to send him home.

Tara found the jigsaw first. It was on the table by the till, a thousand pieces, with a lighthouse on the lid and a stormy sea. It had a yellow sticker on it that said WAS £25, NOW £15. She held it up like a trophy.

Then she found Danya's book, the big one about planets with the fold-out pages, for nine pounds. She tucked it under the jigsaw so that he would not see it, which fooled nobody, least of all Danya, who looked very hard at the ceiling.

She did the sum in her head. Twenty-four pounds in here. Then the scarf at the market.

Then she looked at the sign in the window again.

"I'm going to get it up to fifty," she said. "For the ten off. It'd be silly to miss it."

She was already looking along the shelves for something else. There was a diary she liked, with a dark blue cover. There was a book of poems her mum might like as well as the scarf. It felt generous and clever at once, which is a very good feeling.

Marcus put down both cookery books.

"What's the money for?" said Marcus.

"Presents."

"How much do you actually need for them?" said Marcus. "Not how much is in the envelope. How much do the presents on your list cost?"

Tara stopped with her hand on the blue diary.

"I don't know exactly," she said. "Under forty."

"Then let's write the plan before the money goes," said Marcus. "Envelopes first, spending second. That's the whole trick. You can still fill the basket afterwards, if you want to."

They sat on the little bench by the children's section, under a paper star. Marcus had a pen. Marcus always had a pen.

"The list," he said.

Tara read it out, and Marcus wrote the prices next to each one on the back of a bookmark.

"Hm. The scarf is fourteen, I asked last week," said Tara.

"Fourteen," Marcus wrote. "The space book?"

"Nine."

"And the lighthouse jigsaw is fifteen. So it's fourteen, nine and fifteen." He added them up. "Thirty-eight."

"Who checked that?" said Danya, leaning over. "Fourteen and nine is twenty-three. Twenty-three and fifteen is thirty-eight. Yes."

"Give every pound a job, and look, every pound has one," said Marcus. "Thirty-eight out of forty. Two pounds spare. Every present on the list."

Tara looked at the bookmark. It was a good plan. It had been a good plan for a month.

"And in here," said Marcus, "you were going to spend the book and the jigsaw. Nine and fifteen."

"Twenty-four," said Danya.

Tara looked at the bookmark for a while. Then she told them about the lighthouse.

Gran had grown up by the sea, in a town with a lighthouse on the end of a long stone pier. When Tara was small, Gran used to draw it for her on the backs of envelopes, always the same, with a little round window at the top and a beam of light going out across the water in two straight lines. Gran's hands shook now, and she did not draw any more. But she still did jigsaws at the kitchen table every evening, slowly, edges first, with the radio on.

"I've been looking for a lighthouse one since October," Tara said. "This is the first one I've found. That's why the jigsaw matters. It's not just a present. It's that one."

"Then that's what the money is for," said Marcus. "That's exactly what a plan is. You knew what the money was for a month before you had it."

"How do we know Gran will like it?" said Danya, and then, seeing Tara's face, "No, I mean, she will. I'm just checking."

"She'll like it," said Tara.

She thought about the space book, too. Danya had read it in the shop four Saturdays in a row, standing up by the window, until Mr Fenwick had given him a stool. He never asked for it. He just put it back on the shelf very carefully each time, exactly where it had been, as if he were looking after it for somebody.

And the scarf was the green one her mum had stopped to touch twice at the market in November, and then walked on.

That was the list. Three things, chosen slowly, for three people. Thirty-eight pounds.

"Envelopes first, spending second: twenty-four in the bookshop," said Marcus. "That's the plan. Now let's look at the offer."

Yusuf came in out of the cold, blowing on his hands. He had been at the library next door, as he was every Saturday, and had seen them through the window.

Yusuf had helped Tara read her payslip in October and her finance leaflet in November. Since then he had not been able to walk past a sign without reading the small print, and he said so cheerfully, as if it were a mild illness.

"There's always a line under the big letters," Yusuf said. He went to look at the card in the window.

He came back a minute later.

"Read every line in between," said Yusuf. "It says, under the ten pounds off, in small print, excludes items already reduced."

Tara looked at the jigsaw in her lap. The yellow sticker. WAS £25, NOW £15.

"That's reduced," she said.

"That's reduced," Yusuf agreed. "So it doesn't count towards the fifty. Only the space book counts. Do the sum yourself."

Tara did it. "Fifty take away nine," she said slowly. "Forty-one."

"Says who? Show me the source," said Danya, and went to read the card himself, and came back looking crushed. "It does say that. Forty-one."

"I think we missed something," said Tara. "To get ten pounds off, I'd have to buy forty-one pounds of other books. Full price."

"Which line took that?" said Yusuf, which was what he always said about payslips, and nobody quite knew what it meant here, but it made Tara laugh anyway.

The fizz from the window had gone flat.

"It's not a trick," she said. "It's written on the card."

"Do the sum yourself and read every line, and it's not a trick," said Yusuf. "It's just written small."

Devon arrived last. Devon worked at the bakery with Tara and had a habit of answering every offer with a question about Sundays. In October, when Tara had been offered extra shifts, it was Devon who had asked her what the Sundays would cost her before she said yes.

He sat on the end of the bench and Marcus showed him the bookmark.

"What does it cost you?" said Devon. "If you take the offer. Not the ten pounds. All of it."

They worked it out together, Marcus writing and Danya checking.

To get the offer, the books that counted had to come to fifty pounds. That was the space book and forty-one pounds of new books she had not planned. Ten pounds came off the fifty, so that was forty. Then the jigsaw, which did not count, was fifteen on top.

"Write the plan for the offer too: fifty, take away ten, add fifteen," said Marcus. "Fifty-five."

"Who checked that? Instead of twenty-four," said Danya. "That's thirty-one more. I checked it."

"What's the money for, though? The scarf at the market is still fourteen," said Marcus. "So the presents would come to fifty-five and fourteen. Sixty-nine."

"What does that cost you, out of an envelope of forty?" said Devon.

"Twenty-nine over," said Tara quietly.

"Every yes is a no to something," said Devon. "Say what you'd be swapping. Where does the twenty-nine come from?"

Tara knew where. The only envelope with that much in it was the deposit.

"The deposit," she said.

"Every pound in that envelope already has a job, a hundred and twenty-seven fifty a month," said Marcus. "That's about thirty-one pounds eighty-eight a week. Twenty-nine is nearly a week of it."

"Say what you'd be swapping, then: the ten pounds off," said Devon, "costs you twenty-nine pounds and nearly a week of the deposit. Not in money only. In weeks."

Nobody said anything for a bit. The trumpet outside the bank started again on a different tune and got the high note wrong.

Tara felt clear, and a little sad, both at once. She had wanted so much to say yes to something.

"Hm. The books would be nice, though," she said. "That's the annoying part. I'd read the diary. Mum would like the poems. They're not rubbish books."

"That's allowed," said Devon. "Wanting them isn't the mistake. Not knowing what they cost would be. You know now."

"I was going to say," said Tara, "that it isn't really ten pounds off, is it? Not for me. It's ten pounds off books I wasn't going to buy."

"How do we know it's cheaper, then?" said Danya. Everyone looked at him. "If you got the diary anyway, in January, it'd be the same price. So it's only cheaper if you were going to get it."

"That," said Marcus, "is the whole thing."

Mr Fenwick came out from behind the counter. He was old and kind and had run the shop for thirty years, and he had heard every word, because it was a very small shop.

"I want to say something about that offer," he said, not crossly. "December is the month that keeps this shop open. The big shops online sell the same books cheaper than I can. The offer is how I get people to buy two books from me instead of one. And they're good books. People really do give them. Half the town stocks up on presents in here every December, and they're glad to."

Tara believed him. It was the strongest version of the argument, and he meant it. She did not want the bookshop to close either.

Her phone buzzed. It was her mum, who knew she was shopping.

Don't count every penny, love. It's Christmas. You've worked so hard. Treat yourself and everyone else. I'll help with the deposit if it comes to it.

Tara read it twice. Her mum meant that too. She always meant it.

And Danya, who had been looking at a book about volcanoes for ten minutes, said, honestly and without hope, "I'd love that one as well. Just so you know."

She looked at the bookmark in Marcus's hand. On one side was the plan, thirty-eight pounds and two to spare. On the other was the offer, sixty-nine pounds and twenty-nine over. Underneath, in Yusuf's tidy writing, it said jigsaw = reduced = doesn't count. And at the bottom, in Danya's untidy capitals, there was a little drawing of a week with a bite out of it.

The bookshop was warm. The jigsaw had a lighthouse on it. Her mum's message was kind. Mr Fenwick's shop was real, and so were his December bills.

None of it was a trick. That was what made it hard.

Tara carried the space book and the jigsaw to the till. Mr Fenwick rang them up. Twenty-four pounds.

He smiled at her over his glasses.

"You're only nine pounds into the offer," he said kindly. "Do you want to pick another forty-one pounds' worth, and get your ten off? Lots of people do."

Tara looked at the bookmark one more time.

 

 

(Write what Tara says to Mr Fenwick.)

 

The spark dimmed to a warm dot and settled back on the anvil. The Green was just the Green again.

Back on the Green

That week the corner shop by the Green had a sign that said 3 for £1 on the sweets, which were forty pence each.

Lan, who was seven, only wanted one. Danya stood with her at the counter and worked it out out loud: one was forty pence, three were a pound, so the third one was only twenty pence, which sounded like a bargain.

Lan said she still only wanted one. Danya thought about it for a long time and said that, actually, she had just done the whole thing in one sentence, and bought her one.

Afterword. The idea in this case is the conditional discount. An offer like "spend £50, get £10 off" or "three for the price of two" is a real saving on things you were going to buy anyway. On things you were not going to buy, it is extra spending with a smaller price tag. The small print decides what counts towards the threshold: here, an item already reduced did not count, which changed the sum completely. A good way to judge an offer is to make your plan first, give every pound a job, then work out the total with the offer and without it, and say what the difference would be taken from. Shops are not wicked for running offers, and a bookshop may need December to stay open. None of this decides for you. It only makes the choice visible. You can practise budgeting and comparing offers in LedgerQuest.