The last store on earth

The plan was simple, which should have been my first warning. Plans that fit on one index card are either brilliant or the kind of thing that ends with you sitting in a car park holding a dead plant. I had doubts on the drive over, but honestly the drive was where the doubts started doing push-ups.

Here's the scheme, laid out the way I'd laid it out to myself about forty times between my flat and the fire hall. Vincent left me two years ago because I was, and I quote, "too intense." He then opened a bookstore with a woman named Wanda, which is the most smugly peaceful thing a person can do. Tonight was the store's last night. Closing party. Everything must go. And I, Imogen, twenty-nine years old, yoga teacher, owner of one dead houseplant I'd brought as a sort of emotional support prop, was going to attend that party and make sure it went badly enough that Vincent would look at Wanda and see failure, and think, somewhere deep in his smug heart, this is what happens when you leave an intense woman.

I realize now how that sounds. At the time it sounded like justice.

The dead plant rode in my passenger seat, shedding soil onto the floor mats with every corner. It had died in March, from neglect, and I'd kept it anyway because throwing it out felt like admitting something. Now it was coming to a party, which I had decided was funny. It had a pen-and-ink sign taped to its pot that said EVERYTHING MUST GO, because I'd spent an hour on that sign the night before instead of sleeping, and that's the level of commitment I was bringing to this revenge.

The Cotswolds at night are very dark and very quiet, which gives you a lot of time to rehearse dialogue with nobody to hear it. I practiced my innocent volunteer voice. "Oh, I'd love to help, I just love books." Then my wounded bystander voice, for later, when things collapsed. "Gosh, is everything okay?" Then my leaving voice, which was just the innocent voice with a smirk stapled to it.

The fire hall was brightly illuminated when I pulled in. Harsh fluorescent light through big windows, folding tables visible inside, stacks of books on every surface. Somebody had already hung a banner. There were maybe a dozen cars. This was not going to be a packed house, which was fine, because you don't need a packed house to ruin a party. You need one fuse box.

I grabbed the plant, because carrying it made me look like a guest with a gift, which is a better cover story than most, and walked in.

The hall smelled of varnish and old paper, and it was warm in the way rural halls are warm, badly insulated and full of trapped heat from whatever heater they'd dug out. Books everywhere. A checkout counter with a till and a hand-lettered sign. A woman behind it, early thirties, cardigan, the general look of someone who has loved a thing all the way to its funeral.

"That's a lovely plant," she said, which was my opening and also a lie so generous I almost felt bad.

"It's dead," I said. "I thought it fit the occasion."

She laughed. Genuinely. I had not planned for the target to be likable, and I want to note that I clocked this as a tactical problem immediately and not as anything else.

"You must be the volunteer," she said. "Vincent mentioned someone from the village might come help. We're desperate, honestly. I'm Wanda."

Right. Vincent's girlfriend. The woman whose doomed bookstore I was here to doom. She stuck out her hand and I shook it and her grip was firm and her nails were painted the color of old library carpet, and I thought, this is going to be easier than I deserved.

"I'm Imogen. I'm good with, um, carrying things and knowing where plugs go, and in rural Oxfordshire that apparently qualifies you for anything."

Within twenty minutes I'd been handed a lanyard, a roll of tape, and the run of the place. I stacked books. I moved a table. I smiled at a man who asked if I'd read a novel about a lighthouse, and I said the thing you say, which is "not yet," and he looked so pleased I felt like a fraud in a whole new way.

But the real work was electrical. I'd looked it up. The fire hall had an old fuse system, the kind with actual wires you can pull, and the plan, my whole plan, was that at the peak of the speeches I would find a way to cut the lights and let the evening sit in the dark with its unsold books. Not dangerous. Not destructive. Just deeply, publicly embarrassing. Vincent standing in the black, holding a speech nobody could hear, while the woman he chose watched her dream flicker out.

To do that I needed access to the breaker box, which was down a corridor by the kitchens, behind a door marked STAFF, and to get access I needed either keys or a distraction. I went for keys. There was a pegboard near the kitchen with a few labeled hooks, one of which said ELECTRICAL, and while everyone was arguing about where the wine table went, I borrowed the key off it and put it in my coat pocket. I told a passing man I was "just organizing the electrical," which he accepted with a nod, because apparently if a woman says something about logistics, men just believe her.

So there I was, key in pocket, plant parked by the door, sabotage budgeted for 8:40 p.m. I strolled down the corridor like a person with every right to be there, found the STAFF door, and was reaching for the handle when a voice behind me said, "Oh thank God, are you the electrician?"

I turned around. The man in the corridor was tall, built like someone whose job is literally being built, in a t-shirt that said the name of a gym and then, smaller, the name of a fire service. He was carrying a toolbox. He had the open, uncomplicated face of a golden retriever that had been given a job to do.

"I'm Stu," he said. "Wanda called me about the fuses. Are you from the firm?"

Now. At this point a good person says no. A careful person says no. I said, "I'm helping with the electrical," which is technically a sentence.

"Thank God," he said again, and held up the toolbox like it was evidence. "Look, can I get your opinion on something? Because this place is a death trap and nobody believes me."

This, to be clear reading it back, was not a plan. But my mouth had already voted without me.

He opened the STAFF door and there was the breaker box, and next to it, god help me, an actual old-style fuse board with ceramic fuses in a row, the kind you see in museums about electricity. He tapped it with one finger.

"See this? This is original. Probably nineteen fifties. The whole hall runs off this and one extension lead that Wanda's mum brought." He crouched down and pointed at a junction box near the floor. "And that's been taped over twice that I can see. If you ran the kettle and the till at the same time I genuinely think we'd all die at a bookstore party, which would be a hell of an epitaph."

I crouched next to him, mostly because crouching was in my skill set, and looked at the wiring with what I hoped was an electrician's gravity. "Mm," I said. "Very outdated."

"Right? So what would you do, proper like? Because I keep saying we should get it rewired and they keep saying the hall's closing in a week, why bother, and I keep saying that's exactly when things catch fire, when everyone's stopped caring."

The terrible thing was that he was right. The wiring was a genuine hazard and the hall was genuinely closing and this man genuinely cared about it, and I was standing there with a stolen key in my pocket planning to make everything worse on purpose. My plan had assumed I'd be fighting smugness. It had not budgeted for a volunteer firefighter asking me sincere questions about junction boxes at a quarter past seven.

"So," he said, straightening up. "The fuses. Walk me through what you'd replace them with. Sorry, I know you're probably dying to get to the party and here I am bending your ear about ceramic fuses."

Here's where I should tell you I made an excuse and left. What I actually said was, "I'd start with the junction box," because apparently I would rather commit fraud than leave a conversation.

"The taped one? See, I knew it." He beamed at me. He actually beamed. "You're the first person all week who's taken this seriously. Can I get you a drink? There's a box of wine and it's already slightly warm."

The key sat in my pocket like a small hot coal. I had one hour to get free of this man and throw the switch and ruin everything, and instead I heard myself say, "Warm is fine."

He grinned and led me back toward the party, and somewhere behind us the dead plant stood by the door with its sign, and I realized I'd left my entire index-card plan in the corridor, in the sense that I had no idea anymore what I was doing or why.

I need to say one thing about Stu, and I need to say it fairly. The man could talk about fuse ratings the way other people talk about football, and I could not make myself leave. Every time I started to drift toward the corridor, he'd circle back. "And the earth wire, sorry, one more thing about the earth wire," he'd say, and off we'd go again, and my sabotage window would shrink another ten minutes.

By half seven I had made a tactical decision. If I could not escape the man, I would distract him. People in films distract men like Stu all the time. You laugh at things they say, you touch their arm, you ask questions about themselves, and at some point their eyes glaze over and you slip away. I had practiced three voices the night before in my car. I had not practiced flirting. I was about to attempt it live, with a man holding a hose reel.

Because here is where things went. He walked me back into the main hall to show me the fire truck, which he apparently does to everyone, and which I could have done without, and which I loved. The truck is red the way only fire trucks are red, and it sits in the corner of the hall like it's aware it's the most interesting thing in any room it will ever be in. Stu put his drink down on a folding table, patted the truck's flank, and started on the hose reel.

"This is the bit nobody notices," he said. "Look at the winding handle. Original. They don't make them like this anymore, because they don't make anything like this anymore, because everything's rubbish now."

"Mm," I said, and touched his forearm. Lightly. The way a flirty person might. "So. Do you often show strange women your hose reel?"

The sentence came out wrong. I knew it came out wrong before it finished leaving my mouth, and Stu knew it too, because he went slightly pink and said, "That sounded better in your head, didn't it," and I said, "So much better," and then