Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (39 page)

‘How recent?’ I was aware of the Spican’s eyes on my back.

The salesman called out, ‘Half a unit ago—while you were in there talking to what’sisname.’

‘Why wasn’t I informed?’ I said.

‘The, uhmm, information was broadcast, sir, over the speakers.’ He pointed out the objects in question. I nodded.

‘My CFW is on my ship. I’ll go and get...’

The guard said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you go to your ship without an exit visa...’

I turned to the Alterian clerk. ‘And I can’t get a visa without a CFW.’

Oily smile. ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

I made a last, desperate bid. ‘You realise that I’m a Spican by marriage— and this is Spican soil we’re standing on.’

Now the guard was amused.

‘Only in here—in this building.
Once you step outside, you’re on Alterian soil.’

‘And this is an Alterian regulation?’ The guard nodded.

‘I see,’ I said.

The distance between
me and my ship
was about half a klick. I turned to look at the Spican, and both of us knew what I was going to do. The Alterian guards were short and clumsy and did not carry weapons. There was really only one person who stood between
me and my wife,
and that was the Spican, the Apollo of outer space. I saw him brace those magnificent leg muscles and give me an arrogant stare.

‘Okay, pal,’ I said softly. ‘Let’s see if you’re the real stuff, or just a showy beach boy...’ It was the old story: love against authority, love versus tradition, love takes on the world.

This time, love was going to win. I hit the tunnel entrance going like a pro. The Spican was right behind me.

Started off with the parody title and developed from there.

No one really knows how the conflict started. The store was closed for business, it being the morning before the Turn of the Century Sale. The doors were to be opened precisely at noon, 1st January 2000.

Some of the customers had been there since the previous evening, braving the night air, the street frosts, armed only with vacuum flasks full of coffee and nips of brandy, and thick sleeping bags. Time takes on a different meaning in such circumstances. They made the remarkable discovery that the night is not all darkness, but the twilight lingers long and comes again early. The globe actually turns quite slowly. It is people who move fast. They had entered a world of idle hours. Around them the streets were almost silent, the night winds turning scraps of paper into live creatures on strange urgent business elsewhere. Philosophies were formed, accepted, discarded. Old grudges shrank to insignificance and promises of reconciliation were born.

They found they had time to reflect on their lives, to make decisions on a change of direction, on marriage, on divorce, on leaving their job at the insurance office or bank and hitting the road. In the early hours of the morning, lifelong friendships were formed with people behind them in the queue. There were even affairs begun, and some ended. They found you could live more in a single night than in many years of ordinary time.

Then, as the noonday opening came within sight at last, they remembered why they were there.

There were always bargains to be had at Maccine’s sales: washing machines for a fraction of the retail price, just-out-of-style dresses and suits, sports gear that had last year’s colour on its motifs.

Within the building, all was not well however.

Animosity had been building up between floor and department managers at Maccine’s, the world’s largest store, for as long as people could remember. The company fostered rivalry between the managers, and consequently, the departments. Substantial prizes were given each year for the highest takings at the till. Maccine’s believed in the reward system. They boasted jokingly that no employee had been flayed or hanged for close on a century.

Competition was fierce and bloody. Staff had, in the past, been known to sabotage rival departments. Some recalled when
the sprinkler system had been tampered with then deliberately activated one morning by persons unknown
. It was at a time when there was a difference of opinion between Men’s Tailoring and Hardware regarding the entitlement to sell workmen’s coveralls. Men’s Tailoring suffered terribly when hydrochloric acid instead of water sprayed their stock and staff.

Then there was the incident when tiny needles tipped with neurotoxic poison were found fixed to the telephone earpieces of a new little corner department known as Ribbons and Bows, whom Haberdashery called the ‘upstarts’. Three people spent seven months in hospital, seriously ill with nervous system disorders.

Managers had been known to have fistfights in restaurants, when they came across deadly rivals unexpectedly while out with their wives. Junior staff formed departmental gangs outside the workplace and wore silk
wind-cheaters
with purple lettering such as Bedroom Furniture Dragons or Lions of Curtains and Draperies emblazoned on the back. These gangs fought pitched battles in the street, their members often getting arrested for carrying concealed weapons.

The inter-departmental messengers carried, in the main, sacks of hate mail between managers. Ex-Viet Cong immigrants were recruited and a booby trap called the ‘bamboo bed’ began to appear in dark corridors. This fiendish device was a spring-loaded trellis covered in spikes, which flew up from the floor when triggered by a foot. There was one famous booby trap, where a young woman from Clocks and Watches put a dozen assorted poisonous sea snakes, each just over twelve inches long, into the cistern of the Garden Equipment manager’s toilet. A banded yellow-black bit him on the left cheek as he was in the middle of his morning ablutions.

Although people were reprimanded, no one actually lost their job in any of these incidents, and truth to tell the company actually encouraged interdepartmental conflict. They felt it showed keenness. Inefficiency was not tolerated. For incompetence of any nature you could be out on your ear within the hour. However, nobody ever actually got the sack for unruly behaviour in the cause of patriotism for one’s department.

There were vast spy networks. People who had transferred from one department to another, but who still retained old loyalties, were constantly passing secret messages back and forth. One member of Glassware ‘fell’ in front of a train while on her way home from work and the store detectives, the only impartial group in the building, were convinced she was pushed. Glassware had apparently discovered she was an undercover agent for Porcelain and Pottery, having left the company and rejoined for the express purpose of feeding information to her old department.

There were religious differences it was true. Perfumeries, Electrical Goods and Hardware were
one-hundred
percent Catholic, and Protestants were in the high majority in Lingerie and Sporting Goods, but there were many other departments where the mix was thorough and the two Christian groups amicable. The Restaurant, Groceries, and the Coffee Shop on the 101st Floor had a strong Islamic element, while Pharmaceuticals and the Dispensary were almost entirely Hindu. There were occasional
problems which
might have been traced to extreme religious prejudice, but the only real fundamentalists were in the packing department, way down in the basement, and in no strategic position to assist an escalation of the fighting.

Much the same could be said about any racial disharmony: there was little evidence to suggest that people of different races at the store persecuted each other. Those who were discriminated against were minority departments like Men’s Socks and Ties and Ladies’ Fripperies. The
staff in these small departments were
bullied and hounded by all, and only rarely was there a token member of such sections invited on a quiz panel, or to form part of any sports team. They were of course continually campaigning for their ‘rights’ and occasionally, when a strong leader arose amongst them, there would be an assassination, usually carried out by some redneck from Sporting Goods.

Naturally every member of each department considered his or her floor to be superior to all others. The battles at the till were fierce and customers searching for an item which was not to be found in the department where they were enquiring after it would be quietly directed to a rival store further down the street, rather than to the floor in Maccine’s that stocked the object. The majority of the counter staff
were
young and hot-blooded, and they carried their grievances on their shoulders. They might hate their department manager, but at least he or she was one of them, and not a stupid Nail bender (Hardware Department Assistant) or a dirty Glue-sniffer (Stationary Department Counter Clerk).

Feelings were running high on the day of the sale. There were big prizes to be won and only the night before DVDs had encountered Video Tapes at a seasonal dance. There was supposed to be a truce on, over the sale period, and both sides avoided contact for most of the evening. However, Miss Rona of Video Tapes, and Mr Blake, of DVDs,
were
caught canoodling behind a pillar.

Mr Smith of Video Tapes asked them quietly who the hell they thought they were, Miss Montague and Mr Capulet
?,
thereby showing that though he had a passing familiarity with Shakespeare, his had not been a completely thorough education. There was nothing wrong with his boxing technique however, and he let Mr Blake have it on the chin, at the same time bestowing a curse on his house.

The fight escalated, until broken bottles, can openers and furniture were employed, and the dance floor was littered with wounded warriors. Individuals from other departments were drawn into the
rumpus,
some never went home that night. One or two never went home again. The casualty departments of the hospitals worked overtime.

The following morning the first sign of really serious trouble came just after the ten o’clock coffee break, when a young man new to Men’s Underwear accidentally got out of the elevator on the wrong floor. His own department first saw him again a few minutes later when the elevator doors opened and his lifeless body dropped at the feet of their sensitive Mr Williams, who screamed energetically until Mr Jones slapped his face. The corpse was wearing nothing but a sequinned G-string, wound tightly around its throat.

‘Lingerie!’ cried the department manager, and despite the fact that Mr Williams said it could be a frame-up, that just because an item of ladies’ undies was
used
as a weapon did not necessarily mean that Lingerie was responsible, the manager dispatched a commando team to raid the guilty department. ‘Shut your face, Williams,’ cried the department manager, ‘or you’ll find yourself demoted from floor supervisor before you can say kiss my ass. I know your boyfriend works in Knickers and Bras, so don’t give me that crap about how it might be somebody else! You’re just trying to protect your Mr Simpson.’

This was true enough.

The commando team was led by a man who was a sergeant in the National Guard, their Mr Ackroyde, a high-flyer and rising star in Men’s Underwear
. His sales figures were magnificent and his fervour in promoting his department during coffee breaks was unequalled. There were four ex-marines with him, older men who had seen service in Afghanistan. Their first stop was Sporting Goods, where they rushed from the elevator into the room, grabbed some weapons, and back into the elevator before the doors closed. Each of them had snatched a golf club, or a climbing ax, and Mr Ackroyde himself had managed to grasp a crossbow with two bolts.

En route to the battle the elevator stopped to let on a white-haired bespectacled little man with the demeanour of a Swiss toy-maker. A ripple of fear went through the five-man attack force as they quickly made space for Mr Vandyne, a counter clerk from the most elite department in the building. He looked at their weapons and then into each of their faces with an expression of contempt. They coughed quietly and shuffled around staring at their feet until Mr Vandyne got out. Only then did they break into loud animated discussion again.

They came out of the elevator into Lingerie in true heroic style; yelling their famous battle cry of, ‘Briefs and buggery!’ they laid about them with their deadly tools. Mr Ackroyde pinned a Miss Feversham to the wall with one of his bolts, but unfortunately missed his target with his second shot. His
team mates
felled at least eleven counter staff before they were overpowered.