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Shona's Look
In her excellent debut novella On the Doors, ELIZA GEARTY lifts the lid on what it's like being a charity fund-raiser in Glasgow. In this extract, she introduces the people its protagonist Emma works with — and those behind the doors she knocks on — in a telling account of life among the 'precariat'
Mission to explain: Eliza Gearty

SHONA was twenty-one going on forty. She looked even younger than she was, especially without makeup on — she could have been fifteen or sixteen. But she took teams of men twice her age onto trains that trundled out East and into what they called “low-dem” areas like an army major leading her troops.

They were always sending Shona and her team to these low-dem zones. Places where there seemed to be hardly anyone around, except kids on bikes — not riding them, just lounging about, like American teenagers do in films — and the odd, skinny woman hurrying by with plastic bags of food billowing from her wrists, a fag in her mouth, a phone cocked under her ear.

Michael, for all his hard-man fairytales of child/drug smuggling and juvenile spells, always got sent to the West End, where he drank cappuccinos with his team to boost “morale” and swindled students with false sob stories and a sweet, doe-eyed, guilt-trippy sincerity that made me want to throw up.

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