Authors: Ramsey Campbell
"Hey, why am I not seeing smiles round here? What is this, a wake?" When everyone but Agnes has been forced to placate him, Woody says "Okay, the good news. You just heard it. Your expressway's blocked."
Mad breaks the bewildered silence. "That's good?"
"Right now it is. Just this one time we can live without customers coming in the store and screwing up the order. I guess we may need till tomorrow to clear the stockroom. We had a big delivery this afternoon and we're short of a member of staff."
"You keep bringing that up," Agnes protests. "Don't you realise Ross—"
"Gee, I'm sorry. I didn't tell you yet. We had to get rid of Wilf."
"Wilf," Agnes says, not unlike a bark. "How do you mean get rid?"
"Let go. Can. Fire."
"How can that be? He said at the funeral, sorry, Ross, he'd be in today."
"He was here sure enough. That's why he isn't any longer."
"But you can't just dismiss someone like that. What was he supposed to have done?"
"Attacked a customer and did his best to choke him. I guess even you wouldn't hire a guy who did that."
"Who says Wilf did what you said?" Mad intervenes.
"I do. Everybody that was here for our author signing does. The security tapes will too."
"I'd like to see them," says Agnes.
"When you have some authority you can. That's if they aren't out of date by then."
Agnes opens her mouth, only for Angus to play the ventriloquist. "Manager call thirteen, please. Manager call thirteen."
"I've tidied the stock on the racks so you can get straight to it. Shelve your own books first and then we'll sort out who takes which of Wilf's," Woody says and sprints into his office.
Agnes plants her forearms on the table with a thump. "I don't know what he thinks he can expect of us after talking to us like that."
"I didn't think he said anything too bad to me," says Mad.
"Oh, are we only a team when it suits us?" Once she has glared so hard at everyone that nobody ventures to answer, Agnes says "I don't see why we should carry on working here if he can scrap whoever he feels like whenever he feels like it."
"It's not that simple, is it?" Ross says. "Sounds like he did have a reason."
"You ought to be the last person who'd want us to lose someone else. What do the rest of us say?"
Jill has to finish being shocked by what Agnes said to Ross before she can respond. "We're here now. You say we're a team. You don't want to let us down."
She has lowered her voice. At first she assumes she's trying to keep the discussion secret from Woody, but is he likely to hear while he's repeating "Who is it" to the phone? All at once she has the notion that the argument has attracted an eavesdropper in the stockroom; she even imagines she hears the side of someone's face rubbing against the door, except that the sound is so close to the floor that the listener would have to be on all fours. She starts when someone comes into the room, although it's Ray emerging from the office. "Jill's right," he murmurs. "Let's get this night done with and show the bosses how reliable we are, and then I'll talk to Woody about anything you want me to, I promise. If you want I'll have a word with them while they're here if I get the chance."
"That should do it, shouldn't it?" Mad says to Agnes, who stares at her as if Mad has no right to speak. Jill is about to agree with Mad, not least because she feels as if they're all stuck up to their necks in a morass of stagnant emotion, when Connie's voice produces itself out of the air. "Jill to window, please. Jill to window."
This reminds Jill that there are none in the upstairs walls. No wonder she feels close to suffocated. She's relieved to escape the room, even to join Connie, at least until she does. Connie is standing in front of the window, drumming her nails of one hand on the apex of the trolley in a childish rhythm blotted out by Vivaldi overhead. "I thought you'd be down by now," she says. "Better just stack these books on the floor at the end of a shelf for the moment. We're going to need every trolley in the place tonight."
"Pity you waited for me to do it, then." Jill's on the edge of saying something of the kind when Connie asks "Will you want these?"
She's pointing at the three versions of Brodie Oates with the toe of her expensive multicoloured trainer. "I'll let you decide where you ought to put them," Jill says with her sweetest smile.
For a moment she expects Woody's voice to appear in praise of her expression, and then she's distracted by a blemish on the outside of the window. Something has trailed along the glass at knee height, no doubt a child marking its territory with a greyish discolouration like the track of an overgrown slug. The irregular swath is punctuated with imprints that resemble kisses from a large wide sloppy mouth. She isn't about to direct Connie's attention to it—Connie might send her to clean it off. As Jill unloads the trolley at the end of the shelf for Oates, Connie peels the images of him off the carpet and takes visible pleasure in crumpling them before dropping them daintily into the bin behind the counter. She's rubbing her hands together, either wiping them or in some kind of triumph, when the phones ring throughout the shop.
She's closer to one than Jill is. Jill interests herself in arranging books until Connie answers it. When she says "Sorry?" and repeats it after a pause, Jill glances up to meet her eyes. Something like amusement surfaces in them, and she holds out the receiver. "Is this for you, I wonder, Jill?"
If it is, Jill resents her having got in its way. She doesn't quite snatch the phone, but she waits until Connie is bound for the stockroom before speaking. "Hello?"
At first she can't hear anyone. She's about to return the phone to its stand when a voice seems to form out of the emission of static. Is it attempting to tell her what it wants or saying that somebody or something was little once? As Jill strains to distinguish the sluggish mutter she feels as though it is rising towards her. If it's repeating a phrase like a chant, even once her ears start to ache with effort she's uncertain what the message is supposed to be. "Little ones" or "Little one" perhaps? The voice sounds like a recording blurred by age and close to slowing to a halt. It must be a prank, but aimed at whom by whom? She grows furious with herself for being held there by it, focusing the whole of herself on it as though it means anything at all. "Hello?" she demands. "Who's really there?"
The chant seems to be disintegrating, sinking back into the ooze of static. The words sound softened, half digested by the whitish noise. "If I don't hear something else right now I'm putting down this phone," she says as if she's addressing a child, maybe less than a child. When her threat has no audible effect she waves the receiver at Angus to bring him along the counter. "What can you hear?"
"I don't know." Having listened for a few more seconds, he offers "Nothing much."
She takes back the receiver to find nothing but a hiss that could only pass for a voice if the mouth it belonged to was liquefying. "I wish you'd try to be a bit more definite now and then," she tells Angus as she silences the phone with its stand.
He isn't the one she should be angry with. She hurries upstairs to catch Connie wheeling the trolley into the stockroom; the lift must have taken its time. "Why did you give me that call?" Jill is determined to learn.
"Ross, you grab this trolley while it's free." Once he has, Connie turns to her. "I thought it was about some child."
"I'm not the only person here with one of those."
"No need to look at me."
"I wouldn't dream of it. You still aren't giving me a reason why you passed the call to me."
"Some child was supposed to have done something wrong, wasn't that it? Doesn't yours ever? What an angel."
"Of course she does sometimes. Don't we all, Connie? That doesn't mean the call had anything to do with her. You'd no right to assume it did."
"All right then, maybe it was about those kids we had trouble with over the quiz. You won't say you weren't mixed up in that."
"Mad was too, and Wilf."
"They weren't around. You were. Couldn't you deal with the caller? I didn't realise I needed to stay in case you couldn't handle it."
"There wasn't anything to deal with by the time you gave up. I don't believe there ever was. It was just a stupid pointless joke."
Does that sound as though she's accusing Connie? She's simply trying to convince herself. Either the call or Connie's interpretation, if not both, has made Jill anxious about Bryony, all the more so for being unable to define why. As she wonders how to move away from the argument, she hears the lift begin to talk. It sounds lower than the bottom of the shaft—so distant that the words rising at her back seem too close to the phrase she heard over the phone. It's a childish idea, and hasn't the squabble been childish too? "Shall we both stop?" she suggests. "We're acting like kids in a playground."
Connie's lips grow straight and thin before she speaks. "I'll behave like a manager by all means. Maybe you can remember how that means you should behave."
The lift announces that it's opening and then lives up to its words, revealing an empty trolley. "Load all the books you can and leave them by the shelves they're for and let someone else have the trolley," Connie says and marches away to the office.
Jill seizes the trolley as the lift begins to creep shut. As she races into the stockroom she fancies running Connie down in what would after all be an accident, but the room is deserted. A book topples off a pile out of sight on a rack, and then the silence holds itself still and thick. It must have been a book, though it sounded oddly soft as well as large. No wonder her nerves are distorting her impressions when she's worried about Bryony. She flings armfuls of novels onto the trolley until it's full and plods behind it to the lift, which opens as soon as it has raised its crumbling voice. She shoves the trolley in and thumbs the button, then dodges out and runs downstairs to the phone by the Teenage alcove. For a moment—God, longer—there's only a featureless patch in her mind where Geoff's number should be, and then she dredges it up to dial.
"Hi there. Geoff here or maybe not, which is why you're listening to a tape. Whatever I'm doing I hope you're having as good a time as I am. Talk to me about anything you like and don't forget to say who you are at least and where I can get in touch."
"It's Jill. It's mummy, Bryony, if you're listening," Jill adds, which brings her no answer either. "I thought you two might be there by now. I expect you've gone somewhere for dinner, have you? Don't bother telling me I'm silly for asking when you can't answer. I just wanted to say I'm here at work and I'm fine, Bryony, so you make sure you sleep all night for me. If you feel like saying good night you can always ring this number," she's desperate enough to suggest, and reads it off the plastic stand. "You ought to put your mobile number on the machine, Geoff, and then I could speak to her right now."
This isn't just for him to hear. Connie has trundled a load of books onto the sales floor and is waiting with monolithic patience to be noticed. When Jill turns to her, having finished with the phone, Connie unfolds a fist towards the trolley. "I found this in the lift. Are you already calling it a day?"
"Of course not. I was coming back for my books. I was only trying to have a little word with my daughter. I didn't manage, maybe you heard."
"I don't know what you think I can do about that."
She knows perfectly well, which is why she's saying the opposite. Nothing but anxiety for Bryony could force Jill to ask "You'll have Geoff's mobile number, will you? I would have but he's changed it recently."
"It's possible I've got it somewhere."
"Then could you let me have it?"
"I don't believe so."
Jill's appeal sounds as puerile as she finds Connie's behaviour. "Why not?"
"You should know why."
"Because you're enjoying keeping it from me."
"No, Jill," she says so stiffly that Jill is almost convinced she's telling the truth. "Because nobody's allowed to make personal calls except in an emergency, and it doesn't sound to me as if we've got one of those, not to mention how much it costs to call a mobile. I'm surprised you need telling, but you wouldn't expect me not to, would you? Just a few minutes ago you were wanting me to act like a manager."
"I wouldn't think you'd take what I want into account."
"That's right, it should be what the shop wants, and I hope that's what we all do."
Before Jill can think of a retort or withhold it so as to renew her plea in whatever way she has to that will reach Connie, Woody's voice descends on them. "Hey, let's see some smiles. No reason why we can't have fun tonight."
"Are you going to tell him different?" Connie says, exhibiting a smile Jill's sure is manufactured for the cameras. "Just put your daughter out of your mind for a while. As you said before, she's being looked after."
She inches the trolley at Jill and pushes herself away from it. Words crowd into Jill's mouth, but she's just able to restrain herself from shouting that perhaps one day Connie will know how it feels to have a child. Instead she trudges with the trolley to her shelves.
The books might as well be cartons full of nothing she can use, unless they're simply empty. That's how little they seem to mean, both while she's putting them in order and once she has stacked them in front of the appropriate shelves. How can she feel like this when she loves books and came to work at Texts because she did? Perhaps the Brodie Oates novel has turned her against reading, except that she doesn't seem to have done much of it since she started at the bookshop; in fact, she can't recall any of her colleagues reading much. Just now that's an oddity she hasn't time for, because she knows what's intervening between her and all the books: her misgivings about Bryony. As she returns from parking the trolley by the lift she sees the fog under the floodlights is heavy as rotten velvet, a giant discoloured greyish curtain that sways sluggishly back from the window at her approach. Suppose there were an emergency? How long would it take her to drive through the murk to wherever Bryony is? She has to believe that Bryony is safe, that she has no reason to think otherwise. She shelves books and moves books along shelves and from shelf to shelf to shelve more books with thuds that seem as dull and repetitive as her thoughts. Woody has unloaded a trolley in Wilf's section and is filing books with rapid terse precise flat impacts that she can't help taking as an apparently endless series of criticisms of her pace. Bryony must be home soon—at Geoff's, rather—and when they hear Jill's message, surely they'll call. Nevertheless when a car coasts out of the fog and halts outside the entrance she hopes it has brought them.