The Overnight (8 page)

Bezuhov, Rostov, Bolkonsky, Kuragin … They sound like consonants rasping together—like language groping for itself and failing to take hold. He knows it's his mind that's doing so, which is worse. When he returns to the opening paragraph the names seem to lose shape, filling his head like chunks of a substance too primitive to have meaning. Are they why he can't read more than a phrase at a time and takes so long over each one that its sense has sunk out of reach by the time he drags himself to the end of the sentence? The paragraph is less than eight lines long, yet he hasn't finished it when he scrapes the last forkful out of the plastic container. As his eyes labour back to the first words, Greg's voice appears above him, hushed yet enlarged. "Wilf call twelve, please. Wilf call twelve."

There isn't a phone in the staffroom. Connie gives him a blink that contains a trace of the look he received from her and Jill. As he fumbles with Ray's phone he almost knocks the Manchester United badge off the computer monitor. "What do you want, Greg?"

"Are you about on your way down? Angus is due for his break, but you know Angus. He doesn't want to trouble you himself."

"My time isn't up yet, is it?" Wilf asks Connie.

"I couldn't tell you without looking at the roster. It's up to you to keep an eye on yours."

He was only trying to make peace with her. He glances at his watch so as to tell Greg in her hearing that he's wrong, but he isn't. Wilf has spent the best part of an hour in struggling to read a single paragraph. He feels as if his brain has shrivelled to less than a child's inside his uselessly huge skull and is desperate to hide there without risking another word. "So what shall I say to Angus?" Greg insists.

"You can tell him to make his own calls in future, and here's what I think you should do to yourself." Wilf keeps all that and more inside him, instead blurting "I'll be down."

He's almost out of the office when Connie says "Have you had a chance to sort your section out, Wilf?"

"What sort of, I mean sort what?"

"It was looking neglected last time I found someone a book in it."

It isn't neglected at all. He tidied it last night and still had had time to help Mad tidy Toddlers. He throws his sushi container in the bin and his fork in the sink and runs downstairs. "Just a second," he tells Angus as he detours to check his books.

If they're out of order, he doesn't see how. The Bibles are all together, and the books about them follow them. Anything occult is in Occult, philosophies are in Philosophy, even if he can't fit his mind around the more protractedly abstruse titles just now. Are the books arranged by author within their subjects? As he realises he can't judge, he's overwhelmed by a chill so intense it freezes him where he stands. He's peering helplessly at the mass of books when Greg steps out from behind the counter. He leans towards Wilf like an athlete straining to start a race while Angus looks loath to be the reason. "Wilf …" Greg urges.

"Sorry, Angus. I was distracted." Wilf still is, all the more so when he discovers he can't read the spines of his books from behind the counter. That's the fault of the distance. It doesn't mean he's unable to read. He has no problems in serving customers—by now using the till is as instinctive as driving—which gives him back some confidence until he wonders if it makes him little more than an extension of the machine, no brain required. Just now he isn't anxious to test himself at the Information terminal, and he's glad nobody requires him to use it. By the time Jill takes over at the counter, he's yearning to go home to his own books, but won't his doubts follow him?

Pacing up and down his aisles shows him nothing he's certain of. The sodden trouser cuff plants a cold kiss on his ankle at every other step. Is he simply convincing himself the books are out of order by looking too hard, just as he couldn't put a sentence together when he tried to read? He's beginning to feel watched, though he can't see the watcher. Is he in danger of betraying his secret to the monitor in Woody's office? He can overcome his difficulty again if he has to—he's older and wiser now. He makes himself turn his back on his section. His shift ended fifteen minutes ago, and the books that fill his flat in Salford are waiting to welcome him home. Once he's there he can relax, and then he'll be able to read. He'll be able to read.

Sean brings the Passat to a gentle halt across three parking spaces outside Texts and lays his warm firm slightly pudgy hand on Jake's knee. Not much louder than the chugging of the engine he murmurs "Be good till tonight."

"What about then, Sean?"

He gives Jake the smile that's all the more of one for challenging him to prove it's there. "Be as bad as you like."

Jake thinks moments like these are why they're still together. He's happy to linger in it while the exhaust fumes play with the fog that dances around the car, but Sean lifts his hand to the steering wheel. "I'll collect you at seven, then. Better be moving before your man in uniform comes and shouts."

The new guard stands like a bouncer in the entrance, emitting smoky dragon breaths. Jake hopes Sean is feeling guilty only about his parking. He plants a hand on Sean's cheek, which is rough with obstinate stubble, and eases Sean's face into position for a kiss that tastes of sweetish pipe tobacco. Beyond him Jake sees the guard stick out his upper lip as if he's trying to catch a moustache to add to his disapproval. He's one reason why Jake pulls his partner closer, but Sean parts them before Jake has had enough. "Will you do something for me if you have the chance?"

"Anything," Jake says, wishing the guard could hear.

"Just see if you've any books I can use next term and buy them if you have."

"I wouldn't be sure which."

"Now, Jake, I thought you were listening at dinner." He's become the playfully severe lecturer Jake fell in love with halfway through Sean's evening class on gay Hollywood, and Jake feels half his age, though they're both thirty. "I told you I'll be teaching fifties melodrama," says Sean.

"Honestly, I'd rather you looked yourself. You aren't lecturing for an hour."

"I do want to see where you work," Sean admits, and swerves the car backwards.

Jake loves his abrupt impulses, but this manoeuvre could be dangerous in the fog that seems heavier in Fenny Meadows with each shrinking day of winter. It lurches to follow them as Sean parks precisely in a space with a single deft twirl of the wheel. He slips out of the car as Jake does, and is striding towards Texts when he grabs his hipbones as if to mime how suddenly he has stopped. "What am I looking at?"

Three faces with as little colour to them as the fog are staring out of the display window—three of the same round smug hairless face lined up as if awaiting wigs. They're too large for their bodies by half. One body cut out of a magazine wears a man's suit, the middle one exhibits hairy knees beneath a kilt, while the right-hand body sports a dress. Each is perched on a heap of copies of
Dressing Up, Dressing Down
, by Brodie Oates. Beside them a sign says WHAT DOES HE MEAN? FIND OUT ON FRIDAY. "Shall we?" says Sean.

He's only proposing they should enter the shop. As they reach the doorway the guard moves into their path. "I hope you're going to behave yourselves in here," he says so low he mightn't want them to be able to prove he spoke.

Jake has faced down bouncers more butch than him. "We couldn't behave anyone else, could we?" he says sweetly and takes Sean's hand.

Sean doesn't try to keep it to himself, but he doesn't quite hold Jake's either. Sometimes he's shy outside the gay patch of Manchester. Jake can feel him growing hot, perhaps with embarrassment or fury at the guard for saying "That's what I mean. We don't need that in here."

"Who's we?" Jake asks more sweetly still.

Sean grips his hand and tells the guard "He's one of you."

The guard's face turns so red it reminds Jake of a traffic light. "He's bloody not. I'm not having that."

"You can't," Sean says, deciding to enjoy himself. "I am."

Jake is wondering how long they're going to test how red the guard's face can become when Lorraine trots past in baggy corduroys. Her ponytail wags and then lifts as she swings around on the READ ON! mat. "He works here," she says.

The guard grimaces as the tip of her hair brushes his flaming cheek. "Who?"

"I wouldn't mind either, but it's this one. Are you coming upstairs, Jake?"

"I ought to." Jake leads Sean past the mat before relinquishing his hand. "Will you be here when I come down?" he hopes aloud.

A jewel of fog trembles on Sean's eyelashes until Sean flicks it away with a fingertip. "I'll make sure I am."

Angus is behind the counter and not quite watching them, but muffled embarrassment seems to be his natural state. Mad's could be tidying the children's section, and as she heads back to it from finding a car-repair manual for a customer, she flashes Jake and Sean a smile. Otherwise the only people to be seen are two men in the armchairs by Erotica, their heads so nearly bald they might almost be monks meditating on how little of the world they've time for. Lorraine slaps the plaque by the door up to the staffroom with her badge and then takes enough time on the stairs for Jake to feel dragged down by the chill the bare walls have trapped. There are voices beyond the door at the top, and Ray is at the head of the staffroom table. "Morning, both," he says as Lorraine opens the door. "Now my team's complete."

That comes with a grin as untidy as his reddish neck-length variously curly hair, but Lorraine won't be charmed. "We aren't on for two minutes."

"No harm in getting started as soon as we can, is there?" When she removes her card from the Out rack but only holds it, Ray sucks his mouth small and wry while he twitches his eyebrows up and down before the vaguely amiable expression returns to his jowly pinkish face. "I hope we all saw the match at the weekend," he says.

"Which was that?" says Wilf.

"Only one it could be, isn't there?" Ray practically shouts, perhaps not realising that Wilf is more polite than interested. "Manchester United giving Liverpool the boot two-nil."

Wilf, Jill and Agnes deliver a muted dutiful cheer, and Ross counters with a boo faint enough to be comical. "Now, now, let's be sporting," Nigel calls from his desk in the office while Greg contents himself with a reproving blink at Gavin's latest yawn. "Aren't you two taking sides?" Ray asks the newcomers.

"Not between men," says Lorraine and slides her card under the clock. "I don't see much difference, I'm afraid."

Jake waits until he's clocking on to say "Why would I want to watch a lot of boys with bare thighs chasing one another?"

Nearly everyone laughs, though he isn't sure how many feel forced into it. Lorraine takes the seat Ross kept for her, and Greg slides his behind slightly away from Jake, who sits between him and Wilf as Ray passes out the Woody's Wheedles sheets. "Looks as if the boss has been putting the old brain to work," Ray comments.

"That's what it's for," Woody says as he strides out of his office. "Okay, let me do the talking. Faster that way."

"Want my seat?"

"I'll stand. Want to hear the bad news first?"

"You're in charge," says Ray.

"There is no good news. First month's sales, the worst for any branch of Texts."

"That'll be because people are still finding out we're here, do you think?"

"Swung on and missed, Ray. Worst sales for anybody's opening month."

"Christmas has to help, won't it?"

"Pre-Christmas sales growth, worst for any store. Figures for last weekend, guess what? The worst." His narrowed eyes might be searching for culprits until he says "Okay, that's what we have to fix. Who has ideas?"

Ray has had enough of playing straight man, and nobody else wants the job. Woody tilts his gaze up as if searching for ideas beneath the flattened black turf of his hair and rubs his face almost expressionless. "Anyone. Anything," he says. "Make me feel we're a team."

To Jake it feels more like being back at school—like being asked a question nobody wants to be the first to answer, especially since Ray seems to think he's entitled to wait on Woody's behalf. At last Lorraine says "Could it be where we are?"

"You need to give me more than that."

"Fenny Meadows. Would anybody want to come here if they didn't work here?"

Several mouths are opening when Woody says "You'll tell me why not."

"Maybe they don't see it till it's too late."

"You're making me do a whole lot of work. Too late for what?"

"I mean, maybe they don't see the signs. When I drove here just now I nearly missed the junction for the fog."

"That'll be what kept you, then," says Ray.

Ross comes to her aid. "It's only if you work round here you know you're close when you hit the fog."

"It wouldn't make much sense for anyone to build here if it was like this all the time, would it?" Woody protests. "I spoke to head office, and there wasn't any fog when they were checking out the site last winter. Yes, come in, don't just listen."

He's staring at the stockroom door behind Jake, who feels a chill like a breath on the back of his neck and turns to find the door is open just enough for someone to peer through. Greg is rising dutifully from his chair when Woody hurries to lean into the stockroom. "Must have been a draught," he mutters, rubbing his upper arms once he has slammed the door. He looks as if he hopes that has wakened everyone as he says "Okay, does anybody think Lorraine identified a problem?"

"Not enough people realise we're here."

"You got it, Ray. So have you all been telling everyone you know?"

The murmur of response is mostly the sound of people trying not to single themselves out. "Come on, team," Woody urges. "You're making me think you don't want to win. Who's going to get us pepped up?"

He's performing such a parody of an American that Jake for one doesn't know where to look. Eventually Jill says "The parents I meet and my little girl's teachers know where I work."

"That's a start. And your friends?"

"They are my friends."

"Sure, and we are too, aren't we? I want us all to be friends here. How about we don't just tell our friends about the store, we tell everyone we even slightly know."