Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (40 page)

Rage is not a good companion in war. Unfortunately their blind anger had not allowed them sufficient time to plan their escape. One needs a cool head when forming strategy on the battlefield. Though it had not been their original intention to forfeit their lives, it was in the end a suicide mission. The women of Lingerie wrested the weapons from the hands of these border raiders and then carried out some unspeakable tortures on the poor individuals. There was no such thing as rules of war in Maccine’s: you took no prisoners. The girls simply screeched, ‘No quarter!’ and
proceeded
to do inventive things with pins and clips on male skin. Once the blood began splashing the designer foundations, they ceased their cruelty and put the raiders out of their misery. The bodies were piled into the goods elevator and sent hurtling down to Packing with labels that read, ‘
To
be dispatched to the Dead Centre of the City. (Joke!)
’.

In the meantime, Sporting Goods, (or Jock’s, as they liked to call themselves), were incensed at the audacious theft of their items by the crew from ‘Shreddies’. Being gentlemen, they sent someone to Men’s Underwear to complain.

The body came back wrapped in several, quite separate, thermal undershirts.

The Jocks armed themselves, but first they intended to pay back Shreddies on a one-for-one basis. Ronnie (the Jocks were on first names) rang down to Men’s Underwear, using the outside phone, and pretended to be the Fire Officer. In thick accents Ronnie asked the callee to look out of his nearest window, to see if he could detect smoke from the lower floors. The poor shmuck did as he was asked and was almost decapitated by a medicine ball dropped from Sporting Goods. It certainly broke his neck and he flopped out of sight to a cheer from the Jocks.

One of the Four Horsemen was now in full gallop.

At fifteen minutes past ten, alliances were made. Sporting Goods phoned Lingerie and proposed that they join forces to wipe out Men’s Underwear. The two departments had always been on reasonable terms due to the fact that Lingerie employed airhead females who were attracted to the kind of dim but muscled males in Sporting Goods.

Unknown to these two allies, Men’s Underwear had contracted Kitchen Improvements and Bathroom Appliances. Now armed with bread knives and clubs fashioned from faucets, they waited to repel the onslaught expected from above.

Amazons from Lingerie used the fire escape and entered Men’s Underwear from the windows screaming like banshees. The Jocks used the large service elevator, knowing their front rank would be cut down, but hoping the rear troops could use their bodies as a shield.

The ensuing battle was swift and vicious and blood flowed in rivulets down the glass showcases; splattered on the display figures (Men’s Underwear called them ‘manikins’) wearing Hawaiian shorts and the new undershirts with the Macho ‘drop armholes’; sprayed the counter busts of male midsections wearing men’s knickerbriefs. Lingerie and Sporting Goods finally retreated, having failed to take Men’s Underwear by storm. They left many dead behind them, most of them wearing black silk underwear bearing designer labels.

All the departments in this battle regrouped afterwards and counted their losses. All declared they were by no means beaten, that they had a lot of fight left in them yet, by golly. Banners were fashioned. Pennants were raised. Soon they were ready to do battle again, and set about contacting other departments throughout the huge complex, to gain support for their causes.

At precisely eleven o’clock, the General Manager arrived at the store to find that practically every department in the building was either under attack, or in the process of an aggressive act. Only one solitary department had not yet joined the conflict, and this particular section held itself aloof from what was now a store war. The worst area was the roof, where a terrible carnage was still taking place.

Once in his office the General Manager became aware of bodies falling past his window. His secretary had been waiting for him to arrive for the last quarter of an hour. She said she was terrified and wanted to leave the battle zone, but had at the same time this inexplicable though undeniable urge to have sex with him.

War, he told her, did that to some people.

When they had finished, she said sadly as she buttoned her dress that they might never see one another again, but the General Manager made light of the situation, saying it would be over before next Christmas. Seriously, he told her, there will be peace before the twelve o’clock onslaught of customers. I hope so, she replied, throwing her laddered tights into the wastepaper basket, I sincerely hope so.

The General Manager then set about trying to restore order. He called in some of the Members of the Board of Directors to assist him in settling differences. The Unions too, were contacted, and sent representatives to form with the Directors a kind of
peace-keeping
force. This amalgamated group called themselves the Unprincipled Negotiators, or UN.

The UN risked their lives journeying through corridors, up and down elevators, along passageways, into rest rooms, looking for the leaders of the various factions. They carried a huge
banner which
read GENERAL MANAGEMENT AND UNION OFFICIALS to deter ambushers whose bloodlust blinded them to the fact that there were non-combatants still in the building.

At first the UN believed they were in search of department and floor managers, but the war had gone beyond that stage. New generals had arisen, popular leaders not chosen from the official hierarchy, but whose charismatic personalities made them prominent amongst their kind. The supreme leaders, one would have to call them Field Marshals at this point in the war, were—on one side—Hardware’s strategist warrior queen, the iron lady of Pots and Pans, Bo Driscoll—and on the other—the cunning intellectual from Magazines and Periodicals, Fletcher J. Jnr, whose left pinkie knew more about tactics than Julius Caesar and Napoleon put together.

The UN finally got these two sitting at a table together, the tall willowy figure of Bo Driscoll and the short but feisty Fletcher J., who glared at each other with such hatred the General Manager foresaw that the exercise would turn out to be a useless one. Indeed, both parties swore that the conflict had reached a stage where they could no longer control their armies, that the fighting would go on until the last counter assistant stood amongst the bodies of the enemy and planted a victory banner.

‘Genocide!’ cried one.

‘Genocide!’ repeated the other.

The General Manager saw only one path left to him. He telephoned the President of the company, who was on a business trip to the capital.

‘We need your voice,’ said the General Manager. ‘We’ve done a hook-up to the speakers system throughout the building. You have to make a speech, plead with the two armies, get them stop before they destroy all our stock...’

‘Plead with them?’ boomed the President. ‘Never!’

Instead he made a dreadful mistake: a telephone call to the one department that had so far remained neutral, the department of which Mr Vandyne, the white-haired little man encountered by the Men’s Underwear commando unit in the elevator, was proud to call himself a member.

The reason GUNS & RODS had not participated in the war so far was not because they were pacifists or anything wimpish like that. They had kept out of it because there was nothing in it for them. They were the ultimate department, in terms of force. Their firepower was unequalled, devastating.
They
were
an utterly cold and ruthless breed,
with contempt for all other mortals. The Department Manager would not recruit anyone whose medical report did not bear the words ‘sociopathic tendencies’ or ‘history of psychopathic disturbances’. Their greatest pleasure was in firing weapons on the indoor range. Their second greatest pleasure was in stripping down the guns afterwards, oiling them, and putting them back together again. Shooting things was their raison d’etre, big game fishing their only hobby. When a customer came in and asked for anything smaller than a 12 gauge shotgun, a .45 handgun or said they wanted to fish for trout, the counter clerk would curl his top lip and openly sneer. Middle-aged
grandmothers
who had found themselves in the department by accident when looking for Babies’ Clothes, had walked out with make-my-day magnums rather than continue to face the disdain of the staff.

The deadly beauty of the goods they sold, with their shiny blue gunmetal barrels and hardwood butts, was so superior to anything else the store had on offer that the counter clerks (who called themselves ‘weapon salesmen’ or ‘gunsmiths’ in the bars outside the store) looked with dreadful scorn on the rest of the company staff. The latter were as cockroaches to them.

The President’s telephone call unleashed these hounds of hell, who came whooping and yelling from their cages, wearing baseball caps which said: ‘Born to Decimate ’. They brandished pump-action over-and-under 12gauge shotguns, and waved vicious-looking hunting knives with blood-grooves on the blades. The poor misguided President of the company knew not what he had done in loosing these dogs of war.

Until this point, although there had been some damage to the goods, much of the stock was still in a saleable condition. Then GUNS & RODS began blasting their way through counters and doors, laying about them with wanton carelessness, peppering washing machines with bullets and shot, shattering televisions, puncturing pots and pans. GUNS & RODS had their berserkers who, at the first sniff of a fired cartridge, leapt on counters in
a frenzy
and used their hunting knives to tear suits and dresses to shreds. They came in firing indiscriminately and went out blasting with abandon.

Not the least terrible amongst them was the maniacal figure of Mr Thornton Vandyne, the pupils of his eyes like tiny mad mosquitoes, as he emptied two .45 automatics at anything that resembled a human shape.

When Bert Wilkins, the Chief Security Officer, crawled mortally wounded to the main doors at noon and opened them as the clock struck twelve precisely, the waiting hordes trampled him underfoot. New
friendships which had formed amongst the waiting customers
now disintegrated. Fresh loyalties were crushed without hesitation or remorse. It was every man, woman and child for themselves.

The waves of customers kept coming until the store was full of people. At first they ran around with wild eyes, their minds tuned to bargains. Then gradually their feet slowed to a stop, their thoughts became more regulated. Slowly, slowly the idea came into their heads that all was not right with Maccine’s. It settled like fine dust upon their feverish brains.

A kind of universal daze came over the crowd, as they stared about them at the smoking ruins, the soles of their shoes crunching fragments of crystal into the carpet. There was nothing left to buy. Nothing worth having, that is. All that remained, amongst the corpses, was the useless shards of a former shoppers’ paradise. The devastation had been total.

It was the end of all cheap goods.

My father used to have a recurring nightmare about an owl that perched on his bedpost while he slept, this bird having the face of an old woman.

Tim Sully was dressed in all black, with a luminous green skeleton painted on his front. His face was a grinning skull behind which his worried eyes flicked to and fro as he hurried past the wild thickets that separated the houses. It was Halloween and he had been out trick-or-treating with friends. His pockets were full of sweets and he had eaten more cakes and biscuits than was good for him.

Tim walked the lane that led to his house. It was only a short distance, not more than two hundred metres, but it was overshadowed by trees on both sides and very dark. Every so often he passed a house, set back from the lane in the trees. The lights from their rooms gave him a little comfort. Listening to his heartbeat, which seemed louder than the wind in the trees, he suddenly came in sight of his own house.

Tim felt a sense of relief. They had been scaring so many people that night that he had finally worked himself up to a pitch of excitement from which it was hard to descend. At thirteen he believed himself to be too grown up to get scared on Halloween, but once his friends had left him at the turning to his own lane, taking their high chattering voices with them and leaving him with the silence and darkness of the October night, it had been a different story.

When
he
was
twenty metres from the house,
Tim suddenly stopped dead, the skin on the back of his neck prickling in fear. Something was moving in the unkempt hedgerows. Slowly he turned and stared at the spot from which the noise was coming. It was a kind of rustling, skittering sound and he told himself it must be a bird.