Margaret Snipe, a.k.a. Snippy, watched Elmer Grant pick up the staple gun and run a row of staples into the frame. He put his arms around the naked woman and pulled the gauze tight. It looked almost ritualistic, like someone binding feet or some obscure fetish. There was sweat under his arm, colouring the dark green darker. It was hardly surprising, confined as they were in the small window, sun slanting in fiercely, she was sweating herself, but there was something odd about this sweat – she couldn’t smell it, or to be more accurate, she could, but it wasn’t sweat. It smelt like perfume. But it didn’t – not sweet enough. Or like animals – but not sour enough. Or like fresh air, only not fresh enough – and it was coming from him. At first she’d thought it was one of the fabrics in the heat, then the dried fruit they were using, so she’d surreptitiously eliminated them one by one until all she was left with was him; he seemed to be turning out the odd smell.
He stopped now and moved back a little to admire his handiwork. She looked at it with him. It was grotesque. Who would have thought a lifeless shop dummy, a product of conventional consumer fantasy, could be made to look so warped? Well he’d just blown it. When Dizzy Dalziel saw this he’d do a fairy flip. He was legend for his apocryphal, “If you have to err darling, err on the side of safety.” Safe this was not; it looked barely legal. It might do in trendy downtown Manhattan, but in Regent Street, with Princess Di likely to gaze in any day, it was serious miscasting. Well, the job may yet be hers.
“What do you think?”
She jumped, colouring up guiltily. He was looking at her. She noticed that he tilted his head when he looked at you, so that he was querying you with his blind eye. She wondered again if medical hadn’t got that goss’ wrong, it looked like a seeing eye to her.
She swallowed. “It’s very… er…… unusual,” she finished lamely.
He smiled. “You don’t like it.”
“No, no, not at all. It’s just… well, this is an old firm, they still give us vouchers for Bach’s Flower Remedies at Christmas. I mean, I don’t think a woman transfixed in silver webby fabric onto a black satin wall with what appears to be a giant fruit spider heading up between her legs is it… for them, I mean.”
“What does the fabric say to you then?” he asked, still smiling that soft smile, empty eye still on her face. His voice was dangerously soft, in the sense that if you were hard of hearing you would have to say ‘What?’ You always felt you heard everything he said by pure luck.
She looked at him blankly then said, “Say to me?”
“Mm.” He nodded just barely.
“It’s just…. fabric.”
She realised as soon as she said it, it was a fairly appalling answer for Assistant Head of Retail Floor Layout, but he’d turned away saying, “Well it’s done now.” And he was out the door, leaving it a swinging void, somehow filled with shoppers and colours and yet a curious dumb silence.
Like the birds had stopped singing.
“You ever seen him eat?”
“What?” Doris looked up.
“You ever seen him eat?” Laura said again, she was staring across intently at him, making Doris feel uncomfortable.
“Laura,” she hissed, “stop it.”
Laura looked back at her. “Well, have you?”
“Course I have. He’s eating now.”
“Fruit,” Laura said contemptuously.
“What’s wrong with fruit?”
“It’s not food, is it?”
“Course it is.”
Percy leaned across the table suddenly, seeing his opportunity. “Fruit for a fruit, what?”
Laura looked at him, eyes narrowing. “What d’you mean?”
Percy leaned further forward, until his chubby rear, straining against his grey Terylene trousers (“Where does he get them?” Laura would say) resembled an over full sawdust beanbag. “He’s a man-eater.” He leaned back again, saving his pants from potential disaster. “If you get my drift.”
“You mean he’s queer?” Laura exclaimed loudly, eyes on Grant.
“Laura….” Doris hissed, cringing.
Percy folded his arms, nodding sagely.
“My arse,” Laura said succinctly.
Doris looked at her. “How d’you know?”
Laura sat back, folding her arms almost aggressively, mirroring Percy. “You can tell. Now old Dalziel, there’s a fairy queen if ever there was one.”
“Everybody knows that,” Doris pointed out.
“Exactly, that’s my point. You can tell.”
“He’s a man-eater, I’m telling you,” Percy reiterated.
“In your dreams, fatty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Percy was already colouring up.
“Who was it got picked up at Heaven then?”
“I did not.”
Laura laughed. “Bet if you’d been on your own you’d have gone off with him.”
“I would not. Don’t be disgusting.”
“Percy has his Percy sucked.” She laughed loudly.
Percy pushed up out his chair noisily and strode off, leaving the girls behind him.
Jon Dalziel looked at the window from the street. Jaclyn was standing beside him.
“It’s not exactly W&S is it?”
Jaclyn shook her head a little nervously. “No, but then it is only the small window, isn’t it?”
Jon nodded almost absently then said, “Well that should put the wind up a few long skirts this summer.” And smiled.
Jaclyn let out a long sigh and let her shoulders drop.
Wayne Cartwright was assembling materials for the Display Department. It was often said that Wayne was sent to the stock room because he was called Wayne, the name was simply too modern and inappropriate for The Floor. Whatever the reason, Wayne was glad of it, he didn’t have to wear the uniform, or put up with Kensington wheaties buying plain muslin at twenty pounds a yard. He liked the stock department, it was quiet and methodical and he could indulge his secret passion for fabrics. And masturbation.
Ever since he’d been tiny, Wayne had loved fabrics. His mother had panicked when he’d turned eight and showed no sign of exchanging a love of clothes (always women’s, since men’s clothes were still primarily constructed from testosterone rather than inspiration) for tanks and war games. There was absolutely nothing effeminate about Wayne, there never had been, but a working class mother in full gender trauma is an awesome thing and she brought her full weight to bear. She sneered, she ridiculed, she humiliated. In a lesser child she may well have reared a psychopath who strangled mother figures with lengths of figured silk, but not this boy, he just learned to keep quiet about it and stoically went on being who he was.
His passion for masturbation had taken a little longer to surface. At twelve he’d discovered he liked it almost as much as fabrics, two or three times a day, in fact. No pornography, no fantasies, just him and his left hand.
The stock department provided excellent cover and scope for both his passions and he indulged them fully. He was indeed a man happy in his work.
He was thinking now about Elmer Grant. It was funny, none of the others had spotted how like his name was to Elmer Gantry. In fact, some of them didn’t even know who Elmer Gantry was, he bet. Films were another great passion of Wayne’s.
Not that Grant looked anything like Burt Lancaster, more….. well, actually, no one he could think of. He was right queer looking – not queer as in queer, just odd. Tall and slim with that funny eye, and all sort of hunched to one side, and those two little black moles on the left side of his neck like vampire bites. That’s what he was a bit like, a vampire. Kind of dark and spooky, but fascinating with it. Let’s face it he was a weirdo.
He smiled to himself, lifted another bale, and surreptitiously pressed it to his face.
Doris actually bumped into him on the stairs that afternoon. She’d received permission to leave The Floor to go to the toilet and was on her way back down. She had turned a corner and walked slap bang into him. He had caught her by the upper arms and held her there like that, staring into her eyes like a Mills and Boon hero. It had been a queer moment, and thinking back on it now, as she made her way back down onto The Floor, was giving her shivery goose bumps. She never confessed to anyone that she read Mills and Boons and harboured a secret passion for those dominating heroes, so unlike her own father or brother, both of whom were short and balding, with soft hands and bad habits that included farting and picking their nose while watching TV. This odd, rather intimidating man with his cruel mouth and his dark sardonic expression seemed to open up whole new avenues of possibility. She felt a little ashamed of the uncharacteristic excitement she felt towards him. She must make sure Laura didn’t find out.
She went back onto The Floor and started unpacking the chamois gloves.
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