Chapter 8: The Deal That Wasn’t

Saturday morning. Shift’s finished. Three hours of shelf-stacking and I smell like cardboard and floor cleaner and I want two things: school shoes and a laptop.

Eid was last weekend. Nani cooked for about forty people and Mum bought Yus new trainers she couldn’t really afford and the whole flat smelled like biryani for three days. I got thirty-five quid in Eidi from the aunties. It’s already in the building society. Yus spent his on a game before the Eid salah was even finished.

The shoes are urgent. Mine have got a crack across the sole that lets water in on the left side, and I’ve been putting a carrier bag over my sock on rainy days like some kind of budget foot condom. It’s Bradford. It rains most days. My foot’s been damp since Tuesday.

The laptop’s less urgent but more important. My coursework is due in six weeks and I’m still doing it on Mum’s phone. My English teacher has started giving me that look — the one that’s half sympathy, half you need to sort this out, Maya. I know. I know I do.

I’m on the bus home, scrolling my phone, and an ad loads in between two reels. It’s for a laptop. Refurbished. £189. And underneath the price there’s a little badge that says:

Klarna — Pay in 3. Interest-free.

I tap it. Not to buy it. Just to look.

£63 now. £63 in thirty days. £63 in sixty days.

Sixty-three quid. That’s about ten hours at work. I can do ten hours. Probably. If my shifts don’t get cut again. If they schedule me enough next month. Which is a lot of ifs.

But also — sixty-three quid is less than a hundred and eighty-nine quid. That’s just arithmetic. And the arithmetic says I can afford this if I spread it out.

I screenshot the page. I don’t send it to anyone. I just look at it. The laptop’s got a 14-inch screen and 8GB RAM and I don’t fully know what 8GB RAM means but I know it’s enough because the coursework is Word documents, not space missions.

I sit with it. The questions come without me calling them — like they’ve been installed somewhere in the back of my head since Mr Okafor’s lesson.

Who profits? Klarna. Obviously. They’re not splitting my payments out of kindness. They’re a company. Companies don’t do things for free. Even if they say it’s free.

But how? No interest. No fees. So I Google it on the bus.

how does klarna make money if no interest

The first result is a financial blog with words like “merchant discount rate” and “interchange fees” and I close it after two sentences. The second one’s better — plain English, mostly.

Turns out: Klarna charges the shop. The shop pays Klarna a cut of every sale — like, 3 to 6 percent. So the laptop’s £189, but the shop only gets about £178. Klarna takes the rest. The shop eats the cost because Klarna drives sales. People buy things they would not have bought — or would have waited to buy — because “pay in 3” makes it feel smaller.

Accha. So the question isn’t just who profits from me. It’s who profits from me buying now instead of later. And the answer is: everyone except me.

Opportunity cost? If I spend £63 now, that’s my Life pot emptied. No bus fare if my pass runs out. No Nando’s if Sienna asks. And the payments come on fixed dates — the 15th, every month. Klarna doesn’t know when I get paid. Klarna doesn’t care that I’m on a zero-hour contract and some weeks I work twelve hours and some weeks I work four. The dates are their dates, not mine.

Theek hai. I can wait. Yeah, I can.

I scroll down to the terms and conditions. The bit nobody reads. I read it.

And then I hit a wall. Not a financial wall. An age wall.

You must be 18 or over to use this service.

I stare at it.

I’m sixteen.

I can’t use Klarna. I can’t use Clearpay. I can’t use any of them. None of the pay-later services will let me in because I’m not old enough.

Which means the whole thing — the calculation, the instalment plan, the careful maths I’ve been doing for the last ten minutes on this bus — was for something I was never eligible for in the first place.

I put the phone down.

Credit isn’t designed for me yet. It’s designed for adults. And there’s a reason for that, even if I can’t see the full shape of it.

But also — and this is what sits with me as the bus turns onto Manningham Lane — I nearly didn’t check. I nearly just went ahead. I nearly tried to use Mum’s card, or asked someone older, or found a way around it. And the only reason I didn’t is because I slowed down.

Sunday lunch. Nani’s made aloo gosht and the flat smells like cumin and slow-cooked everything. Yus is doing something on his phone that involves a lot of tapping and occasional shouting.

When I came out of my room this morning, Mum was wiping down the kitchen counter. Not a quick wipe — the proper scrubbing kind, with the yellow cloth and the spray, going at a stain that’s been there since we moved in. Mum doesn’t scrub on Sundays. Sundays she sits with her tea and stares at the wall until her body remembers how to be a person. But today she’d cleaned the counter and the hob and the windowsill, and when I said morning she said morning back without looking up.

Now she’s sitting at the kitchen table, folding the same tea towel for the third time, scrolling her phone, and she’s got that face. Jaw still. Eyes flat. Reading something that isn’t good news.

I wait.

Nani puts a plate in front of me. ‘Khana kha lo,’ she says. Eat your food.

I eat. The aloo gosht is perfect, the way it always is. Nani’s food doesn’t have off days.

Yus looks up from his phone. ‘Can I have more rice?’

‘Get it yourself,’ I say.

‘You’re closer to the pot.’

‘And?’

He makes a face. Gets up. Serves himself rice and sits back down and goes straight back to his phone. The whole thing takes about eight seconds.

Mum puts her phone down. Picks it up. Puts it down again.

‘Mum.’

‘Hm?’

‘You all right?’

‘Fine. Eat.’

I eat. But I watch her. And later, when Yus is in his room and Nani’s watching Pointless and it’s just me and Mum in the kitchen doing the washing up, she tells me.

‘I applied for a flat.’

My stomach does something. Not a drop. More like a tilt.

‘A flat? We’re moving?’

‘I was looking at one. Two bedrooms. Proper two bedrooms, not a box room and a bedroom. Near your school. Better than this.’

She says “better than this” like she’s apologising for where we live now, and I want to tell her she doesn’t need to, but she’s not done.

‘They turned me down.’

‘The landlord?’

‘The letting agent. They did a credit check.’ She scrubs a pot that’s already clean. ‘My credit score’s too low, apparently. So we can’t have it.’

I pick up a plate. Dry it. Put it on the rack. Pick up another one.

‘What — what even is a credit score?’

‘It’s a number,’ she says. ‘It says whether you’re reliable with money.’

‘Are you reliable with money?’

She stops scrubbing. Looks at me. Her face does something I can’t read.

‘I’ve never missed rent,’ she says. Quiet. ‘Twelve years. Not a bill, not a payment, nothing. Every shift they’ve asked — five in the morning, Eid, whatever.’ She puts the pot down. ‘And a number on a screen says I’m not reliable. So.’

So.

That word sits in the kitchen for a long time.

Monday. School. Double maths first thing, which I normally survive by doing the sums in my head before the teacher finishes writing them on the board. Today I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about the number. Mum’s number. The one she doesn’t know and has never checked.

At break, Kai shows me his phone — a chart, green line going up like a cliff turned sideways. Some coin he put fifty quid into three weeks ago, now worth seventy. ‘That’s investing,’ he says. ‘Proper investing.’ I ask him how it’s different from the betting. His face does the twitch. He pockets the phone. A week later the coin’s down sixty percent and Kai doesn’t mention it. Not at school, not in the group chat, not anywhere. It’s never just fifty quid.

Tuesday. After school. I’m at the kitchen table before anyone else gets home. The flat’s empty and I’ve got about forty minutes before Yus is back from his mate’s.

I get my phone out and type:

clearscore free

It’s a thing I read about. ClearScore. Free app. Shows you your credit score and your credit report — all the stuff that lenders see when they decide if you’re worth the risk.

I download it. But I don’t open it for myself. I’m sixteen. I don’t have a credit file. I’m invisible to the system, which is — weird. Like I don’t exist yet, financially. And I can’t tell if that’s good or bad.

I wait for Mum to get home. She comes in at half six, kicks her shoes off, puts the kettle on. I wait until she’s sat down.

‘Mum?’

‘Hm?’

‘Can I — I want to show you something.’

She looks at me. She looks tired in the way that goes deeper than one early shift.

‘What is it, beta?’

‘Your credit score. I want to check it. With you.’

She’s quiet for a long time. Long enough that I think she’s going to say no. Long enough that I can hear Nani’s drama through two walls, some woman crying about something, the music swelling.

‘Okay,’ she says.

She gets her phone. We sit at the kitchen table. She’s still got her lanyard on.

It feels like we’re about to do something that can’t be undone. Like opening a letter you’ve been scared of.

ClearScore asks for her details. Name. Date of birth. Address. The address of the old flat. Her National Insurance number, which she has to find in a drawer full of letters she’s been meaning to sort since we moved.

I watch her hands as she types. She’s careful. Slow. Each letter deliberate, like the phone might bite her if she makes a mistake.

The report loads.

Her score is 287 out of 1,000.

She doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. We just look at it. 287. I don’t know what a good score is, but I know 287 out of a thousand isn’t it. That’s twenty-eight percent. If that was a test at school, you’d fail. And Mum’s never failed anything in her life that was actually in her control.

‘Scroll down,’ I say. My voice comes out quieter than I mean it to.

We scroll. And the credit report opens up like a medical record for money. Every account. Every payment. Every mark. Mum’s financial life, laid out in rows and colours. Green for on time. Red where they say she missed. And grey — closed, I think. Or just old.

There’s her phone contract. Paid on time. Every month. All green. Proper green, every single one.

‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘That’s all green.’

She nods. But she’s not looking at the green. She’s already looking further down.

There’s a utility bill from the old flat. Paid. Closed. Fine.

Then — and this is where it stops making sense — an old mobile phone contract from an address we haven’t lived at in three years. Marked as unpaid. Outstanding balance: £87.

‘That’s not right,’ Mum says. Gets an edge in her voice.

‘You paid that?’

‘I paid that before we moved. I called them. I cancelled. They said it was sorted.’

‘But it’s on here as unpaid.’

She stares at the screen. I watch her face and I can see it landing — something’s been wrong on this file for years, saying stuff about her that isn’t true, and nobody told her.

‘Three years,’ she says.

‘Maybe longer. It says the default was recorded in 2023.’

‘That’s before we even moved here.’

We keep scrolling. My stomach is tight and I don’t fully know why until I see the next thing and then I know exactly why.

An address she’s never lived at. 14B Thornton Road. Her name, linked to it. Listed under “Address History” as if she lived there.

‘That’s not — I’ve never lived on Thornton Road,’ Mum says.

I keep scrolling while she’s staring at the address. Further down there’s a section I haven’t seen before — “Financial Associations.” A name I don’t recognise. Someone called D. Khaliq, linked to Mum’s file. And next to it, a defaulted account: £4,200.

I scroll back up before Mum sees it. She’s had enough for one night.

I stare at it. My phone’s already in my other hand and I’m typing:

wrong address on credit report uk

The first result is some solicitor’s website full of paragraphs about “data controllers” and “Section 159 of the Consumer Credit Act” and I can feel my eyes glazing. I try another one. Then another. The third one actually explains it in words I can follow. It says: mixed file. That’s what it’s called when someone else’s data — someone with a similar name, or someone who lived at an address before you — gets merged with your file.

‘I think it’s someone else’s stuff,’ I say. ‘Mixed up with yours. Someone with a similar name, maybe, or someone who lived at our old address? It says here it might be called a mixed file. I think it happens quite a lot, but I’m not sure.’

Mum takes the phone from me. Reads the screen herself. I watch her eyes move across the words. She reads slowly, carefully.

Then she puts both phones down. Hers and mine. She places them on the bedside table, one on top of the other, precisely, like she’s stacking plates.

‘Nobody told me,’ she says.

I wait.

‘Three years. And nobody said a word.’

My phone buzzes. Sienna. A screenshot of some reality TV contestant’s outfit with three crying-laughing emojis and WHAT IS SHE WEARING. I lock the screen.

The room is very quiet. The fridge humming through the wall. And this kind of silence that isn’t really silence — it’s everyone else sleeping and us awake.

‘I think you can dispute it,’ I say. ‘The wrong stuff. The phone contract, the address. I read something about raising a dispute through the app — I think they have to look into it within a certain number of days. I’m not sure exactly how it works.’

Mum’s quiet for a moment. Then she straightens up.

‘We’ll sort it,’ she says. ‘I’ll ring them. The phone company. And whoever handles this report. If it’s wrong, they need to fix it.’

‘And then your score goes up?’

‘Maybe. Probably. At least it’ll say the truth about me instead of — whatever this is.’

She’s quiet. Her hands are in her lap. She’s looking at them, not at me, and I realise she’s doing the thing she always does when she’s trying not to cry — staring at something fixed, something solid, anchoring herself.

‘You shouldn’t have to know this stuff,’ she says. ‘You’re sixteen.’

‘Someone has to —’

‘That’s my job, Maya.’

Neither of us says anything for a second. She’s not looking at the phone any more. She’s looking at the wall behind me.

‘I should have checked. Years ago. I should have known there was a file.’ She shakes her head. ‘Your nani never had a file. She kept her money in tins and she knew where every paisa went. Nobody told her she wasn’t reliable. Nobody gave her a number.’

‘Nani’s outside the system.’

‘And look — she’s fine. She’s been fine for forty years.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But you needed a flat. And the system’s the one saying no.’

She looks at me then. Really looks at me. And her face does something I’ve never seen before.

‘Beta,’ she says. ‘You know more about this than I do. And I’m the grown-up.’

‘That’s not —’

‘It is, though. Nobody told me. My mum doesn’t do banks. Never has. And I just — paid the bills and hoped it was enough. I didn’t know there was a file. A score. I didn’t know someone was keeping track.’

And then she laughs. Tired. A laugh that sounds like it’s been waiting years to come out, sitting behind the “it’s fine”s and the “don’t worry about it”s.

‘I’ll help,’ I say. ‘If you want. With the dispute. Tomorrow. Yeah?’

She reaches over and pushes my hair back from my face. She hasn’t done that in years. Not since I was Yus’s age.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow.’

I get up to go. At the door, she says my name.

‘Maya.’

I turn.

‘That’s more than I had at your age.’

I don’t know what she means. I don’t ask.

I go back to the sofa bed. I don’t sleep for a while.

The Klarna thing keeps circling. A laptop I can’t buy on credit because I’m sixteen. And Mum’s credit score — the number that can decide where you live and nobody tells you it exists until it’s too late.

And Nani in her room with her tins. No file. No score. Nobody tracking her. She never let them in, and she’s been fine for forty years, and part of me wonders if she got it right all along.

But then I think — knowing all this doesn’t change the number. Mum did everything right and a file she didn’t know about kept score anyway.

I need to check if my school jumper’s dry for tomorrow. I lean over and feel the sleeve where I left it on the radiator. Still damp. Whatever.

At least you can see it now. For whatever that’s worth.