The Overnight (3 page)

Stamping won't clear them, nor staring either. New books come with the job every day. She sets about loading the trolley so fast she doesn't understand why she's overcome by a shiver. Perhaps the air-conditioning is playing tricks—no, somebody behind her is. She twists around to find Woody watching her from the doorway to the staffroom at the far end of the aisle of metal shelves. The door must have let in a draught as quiet as he was. He fingers the squared-off tail of his flattened turfy hair as if it conceals a switch that raises his equally black eyebrows and the comers of his mouth. "Falling behind?" he calls.

"Only if my underwear's not tight enough." Whoever she might say that to, he certainly isn't among them. "Not for long," she tells him.

He pads past the Returns and Damaged racks and nods at her shelves without taking his gaze off them. He looks more patient than reproachful, but there's a hint of pinkishness about his long cheeks, and an extra furrow in his wide forehead. "The public can't buy what they don't see. Nothing should be up here longer than twenty-four hours."

"Just these have." Mad gropes for the books that today's delivery pushed into hiding. She keeps her back to him as he says "If you find you need help, talk to your shift manager."

She wouldn't need it if someone had tidied her section in her absence last night. She'd rather not tell tales about workmates—she can deal with the culprit herself. Woody leaves her to unload her shelves, but she's certain she senses him watching her. She has to laugh at herself, if a little nervously, when she turns and finds she's alone in the stockroom. She steps her pace up, though the books make so much noise on the trolley she wouldn't hear anyone behind her. At last she's able to trundle the books to the lift, where she pokes the Down button and dodges out. She can imagine feeling trapped by sluggishness if she rode the lift down.

She retrieves her trolley and hauls the door to the sales floor wide, then speeds her books through before thirty seconds can be up and trigger an alarm. By the time the metal elbow tugs the door shut she's in the Teenage bay, where armfuls of books have to be shifted to make room for newcomers. She hasn't quite stopped feeling watched, though Ross isn't watching; he's at a till, while Lorraine is behind the Information terminal. Woody can watch her on the screen in his office if he wants to, in which case he sees her shelve rather less than half her trolley load before six o'clock brings her dinner break.

She leaves the trolley by the delivery doors—trolleys are never to be left unattended on the sales floor in case children play with them and hurt themselves or someone else and Texts is sued, as happened in Cape Cod—and jogs upstairs. She fills her yellow Texts mug from the ivory percolator and sits down with her Frugo dinner. Soya prawn salad sounded tasty, but there's an underlying grittiness that reminds her of picnic food dropped on the ground. She can only persevere with eating out of the plastic carton while she borrows questions from books for her first children's quiz. When Jill clocks off at the end of her shift Mad asks her if the questions are too hard. "Bryony could answer most of those," Jill says with some pride.

"You should bring her. She might win."

"It's meant to be her father's day with her." Jill's large face is always a little too earnest for thirty, and now the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes don't look as if they have been left by smiles. She passes a hand over her decidedly red hair that's tamed by a cut just short of severe. "I'll see what she wants to do," she says.

Mad mentions that she and Ross are just friends now, and more of Jill's shift overhear. Gavin unleashes a yawn that hefts his heavy eyelids and stretches his long cheeks past his sharp raw nose towards his pointed stubbly chin, Agnes looks uncertain whether to be sad or brave or both on Mad's behalf. Everyone pretends not to be thinking about Ross as he sprints upstairs. Lorraine is close behind him, and breaks the uncomfortable silence. "Can I sling your books off the trolley downstairs, Madeleine?"

She sounds about to break into a chortle. Mad often thinks that, like Lorraine's laugh that goes with the horses she rides and her accent with ambitions to dissociate itself from anywhere near Manchester, her tone seems forced because her glossy pink lips are smaller than her face needs them to be. Lorraine raises her left eyebrow like the top of a question mark composed of golden fur, and Mad stands up to feed the last of her salad and its carton to the pedal bin. "I'm using it, Lorraine. I'll get back to it now."

"You've not had all your break yet, have you? You don't want to show the rest of us up."

"I don't, but I need to catch up on my shelving."

"Tell management to give you more time on it, then."

Mad washes her mug over the sink heaped with them and plates and utensils. She wipes the mug on a Texts towel and stands it in the cupboard above the sink, and turns to find Lorraine still gazing at her. "I wouldn't need so much time," Mad says, "if somebody had tidied it last night and a few other nights when I wasn't here as well."

Lorraine tilts her gaze up as though she's praying silently or observing her eyebrows, a gesture that provokes Mad to demand "Who was supposed to last night? Was it you, Lorraine?"

The subject of the question widens her eyes but otherwise leaves them how they are until Gavin says "I think it was, Lorraine, was it?"

"It may have been," she says, then glares at him. "Remind us all what it's got to do with you, Gavin."

His yawn may be his answer. It's Ross who comments "Weren't you saying staff should stick together, Lorraine?"

"Gracious me," Lorraine says and follows her blank gaze out of the door. "If the boys are going to gang up I think the ladies had better leave them to it."

Nobody wants to appear to be trailing after her, but Mad makes for the route through the stockroom. She's limbering up to be the swiftest she's ever been as she wheels the trolley onto the sales floor and into the Teenage alcove, only to halt as if she's been caught by the neck. Half a dozen books, no, more have been turned with their spines to the backs of the lowest shelves since she went for her break.

Did someone think it would be fun to give her more work? She stalks along the alcoves in search of the villain, but there's nobody. As she retraces her steps more slowly, daring any more books to be out of place, Ray ambles over from Information. His generously jowly pinkish face has adopted the paternal expression it wears whenever he heads a shift meeting. "Lost something?" he enquires.

"My mind if I have to put up with much more of this."

He runs his hand over his reddish neck-length hair, rendering it even more variously curly. "Of what's that when it's playing for the league, Mad?"

She knows football is second only to his family but doesn't see the relevance just now. "Look what someone did while I was upstairs."

He tramps after her into Teenage and peers where she's pointing. Once he has finished sucking his mouth small and wry he says "Well, I didn't see anyone. Did you, Lorraine? You were over here before."

Lorraine is wandering up and down the aisles. She puts on no speed at all to detour into Mad's section. After a pause for raising her eyebrows without widening her eyes she says "There was nobody."

"Don't leave yourself out," says Mad.

"I wouldn't touch your books," Lorraine says as though she feels superior to them or Mad or both.

"Like you didn't last night, you mean."

"Ladies," Ray murmurs. "Can we do our best to get on? We don't want anybody thinking us Mancunians can't sing the same tune."

No doubt he has football chants in mind. Lorraine's fleeting frown shows how she resents being associated with the game and with Manchester, which would amuse Mad more if she didn't have to ask "So why were you in my section?"

"I was looking for a trolley, as you know. Have you finished with it yet?"

"Try putting your head inside the lift."

"Is that all settled, then?" Ray hopes. "I expect you must have overlooked those books before, Mad. It'll only take a moment to fix, won't it?"

They take quite a few, not least because they turn out to be from the opposite shelf. Before she has finished the transfer Mad's fingers start to feel grubby, though she can't see why. Lorraine has strolled away to the lift, but Ray moves the last misplaced book. "You carry on shelving till you've absolutely done," he says. "I'm sure that's what the boss will want."

She would appreciate the proposition more if it didn't make her feel convicted of letting her shelving accumulate. She shuffles the contents of the trolley into order and dumps books in front of the shelves they belong to, then she returns the trolley to the lobby and sets herself a challenge: before the shop shuts, all her books will be where they should be. There are so few customers tonight that soon everyone else is shelving too—Ray, Lorraine, stocky ginger-bearded Greg—and she no longer feels singled out, not least because Woody has gone home. In less than ninety minutes she sends a trolley up and rescues it from the lift, and shortly it's back in there, almost more than full of the last of her books.

Mad is dancing from foot to foot to keep off the chill of the delivery lobby when she hears a series of thumps beyond the metal doors. She can't help thinking of an ape determined to batter its way out of its cage, which is why the words of the lift sound like a warning. She wishes she weren't alone in the lobby—at least, she does until the lift labours open. She must have overloaded the trolley. Half a dozen books are on the floor.

She wedges the doors of the lift with the trolley and grabs the fallen books. Someone has recently tracked mud into the lift. By the time she makes her escape her hands need wiping on her handkerchief, which she also uses to clean a splotch off the cover of a school story, a mark that resembles a magnified fingerprint with wrinkles instead of whorls. None of the books is damaged, at any rate. The lift boasts of closing as she rushes the trolley onto the sales floor and starts arranging the contents at once.

She heaps books on the moss-green carpet and finds spaces for them on the shelves, and that's Mad for over an hour. If she thought about it she might be surprised how satisfying the task is, but its proximity to mindlessness is part of the appeal—an odd quality when it concerns books. All that's important is to live up to her own challenge, and she has only a handful of volumes to shelve when Ray picks up a phone to broadcast his voice. "Texts will be closing in ten minutes. Please take any purchases to the counter."

Two girls grab three romances each, and a pair of wilfully bald men leave the books they were leafing through in armchairs. Connie has hardly called five minutes when Mad shelves her last book with a sigh of triumph. She's ready to help search the shop while Ray stands guard at the exit. She feels absurd for checking her section twice, darting into each alcove as though she expects to catch somebody disarranging the bottom shelves. Of course nobody is hunched in a corner or crawling on the floor. She's the last to call "Clear," and feels sillier still.

Ray types the code to lock the doors as Connie uses a phone to say "Tidying time" as if she's announcing a treat. She loads a trolley with the jingling trays out of the till drawers to ferry them up to the office, and Ray wanders over to Mad. "Anything to be done still?" he wonders.

"Only the rest of the shop," she's proud to assure him.

That's scattered with vagrant books. The bald men in the armchairs had collections of cartoons about a talking penis; no doubt their grunts must have been of laughter. Three horror films about giant insects have emerged from their plastic chrysalids and crawled unnoticed into Science, and it takes Mad some time to locate their cases. Once the obvious wanderers have been escorted home the mass of books has to be tidied, and Mad wishes she didn't keep feeling compelled to glance towards her own. She doesn't know how often she has given in to the urge when Lorraine says "Aren't we supposed to have done by now?"

"By gum, she's right, you know," says Ray. "Eleven's struck."

As Mad consults her little thin gold watch her parents bought for her twenty-first last year, Greg says "No harm in a few extra minutes if they're what the shop needs."

"Tell you what, Gregory," Lorraine says, "you can give it mine too."

Ray brandishes his badge at the plaque by the door up to the staffroom. Everyone is through before thirty seconds elapse, even Greg. Ray is standing aside to let Mad and Lorraine clock off first when Connie calls from the office "Sorry I forgot to call time. The computer doesn't seem to want me to put in the figures."

Perhaps Ray resents the implication that sending the staff home was her job. "I expect we can fix it together," he tells her, and precedes everyone else down to the exit. "Drive safely," he advises as he lets them out, because Fenny Meadows has built a wall of fog less than two hundred yards from the shop.

The deserted tarmac painted with bony oblongs glistens like mud. The outer surface of the display windows is turning grey as ice. The air is laden with the thick milky glare of the floodlights. The farther away the lights are, the fatter and more blurred they grow; outside Stack o' Steak and Frugo they could be moons invisibly tethered to the pavement, the kind of fuzzy moon that always looks capable to Mad of hatching out a horde of spiders. She hurries shivering after Lorraine around the building to the staff car park.

Her little green Mazda is blanched by the spotlight above the giant X of TEXTS. Shadows make the five cars appear to be standing on or next to wet patches that have seeped up through the tarmac. Lorraine leaps into her Shogun before Mad has even unlocked her door. Greg stays his Austin and taps his horn as though he's giving his colleagues permission to leave. Mad lets her engine pant for a few seconds so that it won't stall. A blotch of light slithers across the wall and appears to vanish into the concrete—it must belong to Lorraine's retreating headlamps.

As Mad drives past the front of Texts she glimpses a blurred shape wandering among the shelves—Ray, presumably. No doubt he's checking they're tidy for a while. She can't help wondering until she stops herself how long hers will remain that way. She drives up out of the fog that lies in the retail park and sees clear tail-lights flying like sparks along the motorway. She oughtn't to feel as if she's dredging herself and her mind out of the murk. Now it's home to St Helens and her first little flat on her own, and her bed her parents bought her to take to university, and if she's lucky nine glorious hours of not having to think about work.