The Overnight (19 page)

"We knew what we were offered when we signed up. We don't need a union to set people against one another and undermine the shop."

"Have you any idea what a prig you sound, Greg? Don't you realise it just makes people laugh at you?"

"I wonder which those might be. I'd think more might be laughing at how you pronounce yourself."

Greg is hardly conscious of his words by now. Only the flares of pain on the back of his hand keep him volleying retorts at her. He's concentrating on the shelves so hard he doesn't notice they have company until Woody speaks. "What's the situation here? I don't see any smiles."

Greg produces one and has to remind himself not to welcome Woody aloud. Agnes persists in most of the grimace with which she acknowledged Woody's presence and mutters "Don't see any customers either."

"I guess that ought to change now Angus has spread the word." Woody heightens his eyebrows to swell his eyes, exposing yet more red, and to turn his smile interrogative. "I still need to hear why you were arguing."

Agnes glares a challenge at Greg, which proves she's foolish not to know him better. "My colleague thinks we ought to join a union," he tells Woody.

"How's that going to help the store?"

"You want us smiling, don't you?" Agnes demands. "Maybe then we'd have more reason."

"Isn't working here enough? It is for me."

Woody's smile has grown wistful enough to be pleading. Greg is about to conclude that it has succeeded in quelling the rebellion when Agnes turns on him. "Finished snitching?"

"Since you bring it up, perhaps you should let Woody hear what I had to remind you about."

"I don't care who tells me but they better make it quick."

Greg is disappointed that Woody seems to be classing him with Agnes. "I'm afraid I had to point out you don't approve of personal phone calls to the shop."

"The store doesn't, sure enough."

Greg senses that any number of objections are competing to be first out of her mouth but doesn't anticipate hearing Agnes protest "What gives him the right to tell me? He's just one of the staff like me."

"Could be he'll be over you not too far into the future if he carries on the way he is. What was the call?"

Greg thinks her rage has silenced her, but she declares "My father."

"Was it urgent? Something that couldn't wait till you were home?"

"I don't suppose you'd think so."

"I'd appreciate you making sure it stays there from now on, then."

That strikes Greg as an amicable way of phrasing it, but Agnes confronts Woody with a wordless stare until he says "Are we killing time here or do you have more for me?"

"You're right, I oughtn't to be wasting time. You wouldn't want anyone from the shop to be late for the funeral, would you?"

She marches away without giving him a chance to answer. She's pushing her trolley towards the lift with more enthusiasm than she showed her books when Angus opens the door to the lobby. "Are you certain you don't want to say goodbye to Lorraine?" she asks, staring past him at Woody and Greg. "I'm sure management can hold the fort till we get back. It doesn't look as if there's going to be much for them to deal with."

"I think I'd better stay if you don't mind, just in case."

He hasn't finished speaking when she presents her back to him. "Time for everyone to go that's coming," she calls. "We don't want to rush in the fog."

Two men whose scalps appear to have engulfed most of their hair glance up from their armchairs and the children's book each is holding open in his lap. They seem to wonder if Agnes is including them. "I'm driving everyone," she informs Woody.

"Sounds like you are, sure enough."

Greg smiles to indicate he understands the quip. As Agnes disappears into the lobby he returns to his shelving. Woody approaches the seated men to ascertain what kinds of books they like, but has elicited only "Don't know" and "No" by the time Agnes leads her troop through the shop. "We'll be back as soon as we can," Jill assures Woody while Agnes remains defiantly mute.

Once Ross and the women nobody's allowed to call girls any longer have passed the window, Greg strains his ears to judge where Agnes is parked. He sees the same question has occurred to Woody, who darts out of the shop. Four car doors slam, muffled by the fog, and as he becomes part of the murk the vehicle outdistances him. A grey breath precedes him into the shop as though he's full of fog. "That wasn't in back," he announces, Greg assumes more to him than to Angus, to whom Woody then turns. "And you missed one."

He snatches a handful of leaflets from the counter and hurries out once more. Greg takes himself to be left in charge and does his best to stay aware of his surroundings while he works. Is one of the seated men muttering, or are both of them making a surreptitious noise? As well as the thin wintry chatter of Vivaldi overhead Greg is convinced he hears an underlying motif, voices that keep collapsing into a single voice and then parting while they struggle to speak or chant or produce some other sound. He would ask the men to be quiet if there were any other customers, though Angus seems unaware of what they're doing and of a good deal else. He has abandoned the counter to tidy his shelves, and Greg is about to remind him that the tills always have to be manned during opening hours when the phone saves Angus. He sets out for the counter, but Greg is faster to the extension by Teenage. "Welcome to Texts at Fenny Meadows. Greg speaking. How—"

"Is the boss about?"

Greg doesn't know if it's ruder of the man to interrupt or to imply that Greg sounds nothing like a manager. "May I ask—"

"It's his landlord."

That does rather change the situation. "Angus, can you see Woody?" Greg calls.

Angus sidles to the end of the window display and leans towards the glass, to be met by a grey swelling wider than his head—his breath. The seated men swivel their dull eyes as if they think Greg spoke to them, and Frank goes as far as peering out of the entrance. "No," Angus admits, echoed by the guard.

"Do you think you might consider going a bit further, Frank?" When the guard takes him literally, if he even does that, Greg manages to contain his frustration. "He doesn't seem to be available at the moment," he tells the phone. "May I take a message?"

"I'd just love to be able to find him in."

"He should be here for hours once he gets back."

"In the house he's meant to be renting from me."

Greg hesitates for only a second; it's surely his duty to ask. "Is there some problem with payment?"

"None of that. His bank's not let me down. I like to see my tenants are comfy, that's all."

"Shall I ask him to ring you?"

"That'd be a start."

Presumably the landlord has no further comment to make before static that sounds like an uprush of water sweeps away his voice. When the static sinks into the dialling tone Greg reverts to shelving. He repatriates a pair of stray books—a guide to sketching, with a scribble on the cover for a face, a watercolour manual that falls open at daubs hardly more than graffiti—and tries to make up the time they cost. At least now he hears only the pinched twittering of violins, and he won't let Angus distract him by keeping a watch on the fog. Is he looking out for customers or Woody? The rest of the staff will have gone straight to the funeral. Greg falls to speculating which of them the shop could manage without: Connie and her brittle insistence on treating everything lightly, Nigel and his faint grin that seems to invite every situation to amuse him, Ray with his football emblems that have no place in the shop, Madeleine acting as if her section is the only one that matters … Greg has unloaded one side of the trolley by the time Woody reappears. "Was I long?" he says with a smile that hopes not.

"I shouldn't think so," Angus says.

Perhaps Woody senses as Greg does that Angus is too eager to please. "I guess more cars must have shown up since you were out."

"That'll be it," Angus says quicker still.

Greg waits until Woody turns his smile aside from Angus. "There was a call for you."

"Nothing like feeling wanted, huh? What do I need to do?"

Greg assumes he'd prefer Angus and the men not to hear about his business. "Should we talk privately?"

"Do you think? Okay, sure." Woody's smile seems to urge them both towards the delivery lobby, and grows wider and fiercer as he has to slap the plaque on the wall twice with his badge. When the exit defers to him he mutters "It wasn't her again, was it?"

"It wasn't a lady."

"I wouldn't call her that any longer." He jabs a fist at the door to help it shut and faces Greg. "So who's after me?"

"Your landlord."

"Is that right?" For a moment his smile appears uncertain of its own meaning. "What did he say to you?"

"Just that he's kept missing you at your house. He only wants to check you've got everything you'd like."

"That isn't much. I believe I have, sure enough. I must have been here when he came visiting."

Greg's aware that Woody works longer hours than anyone else at the shop. He's wondering if it would be presumptuous of him to say so when a question leaves his mouth instead. "Has someone come back?"

There's movement in the stockroom; it sounds as if books are being fumbled off the shelves. "Somebody's upstairs," he hisses.

"Think so? We'll soon see," Woody says and shoves past him to dash up the stairs. Greg is so thrown by his rudeness that he doesn't know whether to follow, and then he sees that if anyone has sneaked in, his job is to head off their escape. He sprints out of the lobby and past the children's section to the door up to the staffroom. He releases it with his badge and closes it even more softly before tiptoeing upstairs.

Someone must have decided they owed more loyalty to the shop than to the funeral, because Greg can hear a shuffling of books. How did the person manage to return unobserved by him or Woody? By the time he gives up stealth and hurries into the stockroom nobody is to be seen, not even Woody. A rack jangles faintly and settles down, but Greg isn't about to imagine that anybody has squeezed into hiding behind the books. He's tiptoeing again while he strains to identify a noise, a repetitious mutter—a voice chanting somewhere ahead. It isn't in the empty staffroom, nor the office Ray and Nigel and Connie share. It's in Woody's room.

As Greg crosses the shared office he ignores the sight of himself shrinking into the blank screens, a manikin multiplied by three and sucked down into murk. Woody's door is carelessly ajar, and he's sitting with his back to it. All four quarters of the security monitor appear to be occupied by the same image, a close-up of part of a face, unless the face is so large that just a fraction of its loose swollen-lipped grey-toothed grin fills the screen in fragments. It must be a reflection of the fluorescent tube overhead, because as soon as Greg steps into the office the image resolves into four views of the sales floor. One shows Angus gazing morosely across the shop at the seated men, and at last Greg hears what Woody's muttering. "Keep smiling," he repeats. "Keep smiling."

"Shall I tell him when I go down?"

"You bet," Woody says, and his smile twirls to face Greg as his chair swings round. "You're the man to remind him."

"I couldn't find anyone in the stockroom."

"You and me both. Just some books fell down."

Very occasionally, such as now, Greg might feel Woody's smile is inappropriate. "Not shelved properly, you mean?" he feels he should emphasise.

"Couldn't have been."

"Do we know whose fault it was?"

"Couldn't say."

"So long as they weren't damaged."

"You're my kind of guy, Greg. You make me feel I'm doing it the way it should be done. Don't worry, everything's going to be perfectly fine once we're all shut in for the night tomorrow."

He sends his smile after Greg and then pivots to watch the monitor. Greg wishes he could think of more to say, but perhaps Woody meant to assure him that he has said enough. He feels as if he has been favoured with a hint of the pressure Woody's under, which is tantamount to a mute appeal for support. Woody doesn't need to ask aloud. As Greg heads back to his shelving and to remind Angus how to look, he needn't remember to keep smiling, because he already is. That comes from being clear in his own mind. He won't allow Agnes or anything else to muddy his motives, and he'll be keeping what he's learned about Woody to himself. He's here for Woody and the shop.

As the earliest bus out of Manchester for Liverpool drags the last of its glow across Gavin, the night gathers on him like ice. There's no sign of civilisation around the bus shelter in the lay-by except a mile of road in three directions. The one he needs is the winding lane boxed in by hedges behind the shelter. He has tramped less than a hundred yards when the spiky twigs close around the illuminated refuge, and he's alone with the charcoal dusk before dawn.

He's coming down from E, and the speed it must have been cut with hasn't quite worn off. It's lending him energy and toying with the possibility that his mind and everything around him are about to flicker into a different state. Nobody is hammering a lump of metal; that's the sound of his feet in the lane. He isn't hemmed in by tangles of grey ice, they're hedges creaking like it on either side of him. Is he really glimpsing a muted twinkle of frost on the road? The chittering mixed with a shrill clatter is a bird flying out of undergrowth. The stale cold breaths that keep finding his face aren't emerging from a mouth that's waiting to swallow the sun, they're winds impregnated with fog. It, more than his progress, is delaying the bloodshot dawn ahead, which is one reason why he knows he's approaching Fenny Meadows. He might tell someone if there was anyone he thought he could that the fog tastes different around the retail park, not just stagnant and faintly decaying but with an indefinable underlying flavour so sly as to be virtually imperceptible. In that case, how can he be sure it's there? All he knows is that it seems a fraction more apparent every day he comes to work and that it puts him in mind of an extra drug in a tab that's supposed to be pure. He doesn't even know which drug, if any that he has ever sampled. Perhaps it's mostly the stubborn fog that makes his exposed skin grow clammy and begin to crawl as he comes in sight of the entrance to the retail park.