When he wasn’t working, which was most of the time, Stephen was on the Internet, under the pseudonym of GHOSTYX: ‘ghost’ plus ‘Styx’—the river of dead souls. He joined forces with PROTON SLUG and CHAOS OVERLORD, and together the three great warriors would slaughter legions and turn entire cities to dust. It was a good feeling, going into battle with friends by your side. It was a good feeling, having friends you’d never met. Stephen’s body was in his room, but his brain had logged on to an invisible world. He locked his door and put on headphones. If his sister came home, or his mother knocked, he would pretend not to hear them. He was lost with his cyber-friends inside a virtual labyrinth, fighting imaginary demons, surviving from one battle to the next. They were just women, doing whatever it was that women did.
Then, one fateful day, Stephen received an important e-mail.
Do you desire to meet the ICE MAIDEN?
Stephen knew about the dangers of downloading viruses, but he was intrigued.
He clicked on [Yes].
Are you pure of heart?
Stephen wasn’t, but he clicked on [Yes] anyway.
Do you wish to be skilled in the ways of elemental magic?
Stephen clicked on [Yes] and waited for the program to download.
Five hundred years ago in South America, it said, a teenage Incan girl was sacrificed to the Gods. She was taken by the priests high up into the mountains and left there to freeze to death. There was a storm that night and the mountain was covered in snow. The girl was buried alive and frozen in the ice. Centuries later, her body was discovered. She became known as the Ice Maiden.
Stephen looked at the picture of the girl’s mummified face and body. It sent a shiver down his spine.
He clicked on [More].
But the Ice Maiden was not what she appeared to be. By un-earthing her body, the men had unleashed the Wrath of the Gods. The Ice Maiden became a powerful enchantress, a cruel spirit who had come to torment mankind with mortal desire. Whenever men looked upon her, the Ice Maiden would ensnare them. With her perfect beauty, her mysterious arts and allurements, she would entice them into a shadow world, from which there was no escape.
Stephen looked at the picture of the Ice Maiden with her perfect, untouchable breasts. There was no doubt about it. She was totally hot.
Do you wish to know more?
Stephen clicked on [Yes].
Do you worship my perfect beauty?
[Yes].
Do you desire no other but me?
[Yes].
Do you surrender yourself completely?
[Yes].
Stephen’s life began to change. With the help of the Ice Maiden, he discovered new powers. She could turn his medieval warriors into lethal cyborgs who walked across water to destroy the pitiful enemy, hand to hand. Instead of spears and arrows, they fired laser beams and particle rays. Instead of burning oil, his catapults shot nuclear warheads. With the enchantress by his side, Stephen was invincible. He was more than a great emperor now. He was a god.
Stephen’s two-dimensional game-world had become more real than the three-dimensional world. (Or had the real world become unimaginably one-dimensional?) At work, he found it harder and harder to concentrate. Nothing seemed worth doing any more. It was all pointless, hopeless, useless. He felt trapped, condemned to spend the rest of his life in a freezer. He found himself staring at girls and the way their hips moved as they carried their shopping baskets or pushed their trolleys. There were good girls like Louisa and bad girls like Chloe. The good girls were perfect and the bad girls were dangerous. But when Louisa asked him to give her a hand with some boxes, what was that all about? And when Chloe called him a sleaze, was that just a part of the game?
Stephen didn’t know anything about girls, but with the Ice Maiden beside him, he didn’t need to.
He had noticed a change in his sister. Almost overnight, it seemed, Penny had turned into a hippy. There were pots of lentil stew on the stove, and garlic on the kitchen table. He noticed the smell of incense wafting through the house and in the laundry he found a moon chart and planting calendar. Now, when they passed in the hall, Penny smiled at him in that sad, hippy way. Her clothes were more colourful and she was always going out, to do whatever it was that hippies did. It really annoyed him.
While Penny was in the house, Stephen stayed in his room. He waited until she went to her room before he came out to eat. But it was the stuff she left lying around that really bothered him. Everything Penny owned was either hand-made or organically grown. It was as if the twentieth century had never happened. And even when he found nothing, Stephen felt a kind of disturbance, just knowing Penny was in the house. Why couldn’t she move out? Wasn’t there a commune or farming collective that would have her?
Stephen was tired of sharing his house with a hippy. In fact, he was tired of sharing altogether. In his quest to appease the enchantress, he betrayed his Internet friends. After luring their armies into the Valley of the Shadow, he decimated PROTON SLUG and obliterated CHAOS OVERLORD. Finally, he was the supreme ruler!
But victory brought little glory for GHOSTYX. Like the taste of old chewing gum, it was grey and flavourless, something to be spat out or rolled up and stuck somewhere out of sight. After hours of sitting at the computer, with the bedroom door shut and curtains closed, his skin felt cold and his legs had begun to go numb. He could almost feel the ice dripping from the ceiling, like stalactites.
Stephen got up to go to the toilet. It was a sunny day outside. The sky was blue and the birds were singing. He rubbed his eyes as he looked out the window. In the back yard, Penny was digging in the vegetable garden. Stephen could hardly believe what he saw. He looked away, then he looked back again, just to be sure. His sister had on a hippy skirt that went down to her muddy boots, but that was it. From the waist up she was wearing nothing. Her breasts were tanned. She was topless!
Stephen felt he was going to be sick. He tried going to the toilet, but couldn’t. He hurried back to his bedroom and locked the door behind him. He sat at his computer, trying not to think about what he had just seen, trying to abort the major download that was going on inside his head. Instead of re-opening his current file, Stephen typed in his secret password and accessed the hard drive. As he scrolled through the countless Ice Maiden sites he had visited over the past months, he thought of his mother and what she would say if she found them.
Do you wish to erase entire history?
Stephen clicked on [Yes].
Are you sure?
[Yes]
Stephen clicked on [Exit] then he pushed [Control] +
[Escape] just to be certain.
Stephen took the frozen packets from the freezer and stacked them up, one by one. He removed his CD wallet from its hiding place at the bottom, brushed off the ice and hid it in his backpack. Invisible as a cold draught, Stephen left the supermarket and caught a bus into the city. From there, he rang his mother and left a message on her machine.
‘I’ve gone to stay at Dad’s.’
His mother waited a fortnight before finally calling her ex-husband to find out what was happening. She left a message on his machine, then he left a message on hers. By the time they actually spoke to each other, Stephen was living in another city. He was working in a morgue, part-time. He had a new computer and a new e-mail account under a different name. Only his pseudonym remained.
DELIVERY BAY
Adam arrived at work to find the supermarket in half-darkness. There had been a power failure in the night. The emergency lights were on at the front entrance and the registers were still working. Customers continued pushing trolleys and comparing prices as if nothing had happened, even though the rest of the store was in twilight.
Out the back, the storeroom was in chaos. There was no emergency lighting. The airconditioning had gone off. A sickly-sweet smell of rotting fruit, fermented vegetables and rancid butter filled the air. There were screams and flashing torches. Workers were scaring each other with spooky nois
es and glowing ghost faces. They were tearing open boxes and throwing food around. It wasn’t like a supermarket anymore. It was a jungle.
Pure anarchy, thought Adam. It was like a dream come true.
Until he saw Louisa.
She was there in the delivery bay with some of the night staff who had stayed on after their shift. The three boys were chasing a rat. It was huge and slow—either half-dead from rat-poison or else dying of high cholesterol. As it tried to escape, one of them caught its tail, but the rat wriggled free. Adam watched it shuffle off towards Louisa and disappear into the boxes. He noticed how Louisa was not afraid of the rat. She was also not afraid of the night boys.
‘Leave it alone,’ she told them. And they did.
Adam saw it happen and he understood: This wasn’t pure anarchy any more. It was the opposite. Finally, he knew what he had to do.
Plan A was awful. Plan B was bad. Plan C was crucial. What was the best way to impress an Employee of the Month? Adam decided, then and there, to become the perfect worker. He would be punctual and well-dressed. His shoes would be polished, his clothes would be ironed. He would always wear clean, matching socks. He would improve his personal hygiene. He would cut his fingernails. He would shave every morning and put on aftershave. He would comb his hair, clean his teeth and floss daily. He would hold his head up and look people in the eye. He would stop saying ‘Yeah’, ‘Nah’, ‘Um’ and ‘What?’ He would never swear or pick his nose. He would show initiative. He would give one hundred per cent. He would be a team player. He would be honest, but respectful. He would listen to instructions, follow procedures, keep to deadlines. He would never make excuses, never complain. He would be aware of safety issues. He would learn where all the stock was kept. He would be polite to customers and listen to their complaints. He would get along with his co-workers and be kind to rats. Everyone would be very impressed, especially Louisa. Until, finally, when he was least expecting it, she would tell him how impressed she was, and he would casually reply, ‘Do you know who my inspiration is?’
The rest, he imagined, would be history.
From out of the gloom at the far end of the storeroom, the door to the meat room opened and a dim light appeared. At first Adam could not make it out, as the glowing shape moved slowly towards him.
Someone screamed.
‘What is that?’ said Louisa.
Mounted on a stake, tied to a trolley pushed by Jared and Dylan, was a pig’s head with a torch in its mouth. The torchlight illuminated the animal’s pink flesh and shone from its snout, giving it a laughing smile. Its eyes were hollow shadows and its skin was eerily human. It almost looked alive.
‘Behold! And fear for your souls!’
‘The Lord of the Shelves has returned!’
AISLE
ten
SOUP/RICE/NOODLES
Wyn was in Aisle 10, checking the stock. She waved ‘the Max’ across the item barcode and the hand-held computer gizmo displayed the name ‘Thick ’n Chunky Hot Pot’, its price, weight and the amount of stock remaining. Wyn’s fingers flashed across the keys as she entered the four-digit item code and re-ordered new stock from the warehouse, to be delivered the following day.
When she looked up, a lady customer was watching her.
‘I was looking for Japanese miso soup,’ she said.
‘They told me to ask you. They said you’d know where it was.’
Wyn nodded and the woman followed her along the aisle.
‘We sell the paste,’ she said, taking a packet from the shelf and giving it to her.
The woman read the label. ‘Are you sure this is it?’
‘Just add boiling water,’ said Wyn.
‘That’s all?’
‘Then spring onions, tofu, mushrooms, whatever you like.’
‘Are you Japanese?’ the woman asked.
‘No,’ said Wyn.
‘Then how do you know?’
‘I read the packet.’
‘Do you read all the packets?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes,’ said Wyn.
No one in the store knew as much as Wyn. Her coworkers called her ‘the Max’ because, like the gizmo, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of the items on the shelves. Wyn knew where everything was and what it was used for. She knew the difference between pickles and chutneys, fine-grade and choice-grade mince, arabica and robusta coffee beans, barn-laid and free-range eggs. She knew what toilet paper was bleach-free, which sausages were gluten-free, which tuna was dolphin-friendly and what tomato juice contained no added salt. Wyn knew which birdseed contained shell grit, which shampoo contained henna, which dim sims had no MSG and which tea had no tannic acid. She knew what percentage of which drinks was real fruit juice and what amount of eucalyptus oil could kill you. She knew where the avocadoes had come from and whether they were ripe yet.
It wasn’t just the shelves that she knew about. Wyn had an almost miraculous ability to see into the lives of other people. Alcoholics, chocoholics, workaholics, shopaholics. Wyn was not psychic, but by taking note of what people bought, she was able to deduce the most intimate and personal facts about them.
‘Happy anniversary! I hope your husband remembers this year!’
‘You’re looking much better since you gave up smoking.’
‘That new hair colour suits you, I think.’
‘How is Rex? Has he stopped chewing the furniture yet?’
Wyn was friendly with everyone, and everyone was friendly with Wyn. Her conversations were always light and chatty, but with her Sherlock Holmes-like powers of observation, Wyn was able to know more about a person than they might have wished. She knew that Graham’s ‘business lunches’ were actually golf games with his mates, that Amanda was having an affair with Shane the racist storeroom manager, that Gavin the night manager had irritable bowel syndrome and that Brian the meat manager took tablets for high cholesterol. She knew that Cameron the produce manager and Scott the trainee manager had slept with Chloe on the same night, and that Nicola the dairy manager had been so upset she had taken a week off to get over it. Wyn knew that Rahel went to the movies even though she was not allowed. She knew that Jared was selling drugs, Dylan was seeing a therapist, Emma had ratted on Tessa, and Abdi was wasting his money on ‘scratch ’n win’ lottery tickets. She knew about Adam and Louisa.
But Wyn was not a gossip. What she knew, she never spoke of.
In the supermarket, when a register was full, the money was counted and put in a plastic bag. The bag was sealed and placed in a chute where it got sucked up a pipe, along the ceiling to the accounts office. The accounts office was a small room with a service window and a locked door. The woman who worked there counted the money and prepared the pay slips. Her name was Bev, and every day she wore new clothes, even though she only ever left the office to get a sandwich.
Wyn knocked on the accounts office door and Bev unlocked it.
‘Quyen?’
‘It’s pronounced “Wyn”,’ said Wyn, politely.
‘I’m sorry, sweetie,’ said Bev.
‘You asked to see me?’ said Wyn.
Bev offered her a chair. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’
Wyn sat down on the edge of her chair.
‘Would you like a cuppa, sweetie?’
‘No.’
‘A glass of water?’
‘No.’
‘So,’ Bev smiled warmly. ‘You’re finishing school soon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you planning on going to university?’
‘I want to be a librarian,’ said Wyn.
Bev nodded thoughtfully. ‘Are you happy here, sweetie?’
‘Yes.’
‘I imagine you can guess why I wanted to see you?’
‘To offer me a job?’
‘Not just a job,’ said Bev. ‘There’s a vacancy for a full-time, permanent position! I wondered if you were interested?’
Wyn smiled politely. ‘Is it to work in this office?’
&nb
sp; ‘Initially,’ Bev nodded. ‘But, as you know, in a big company like this, there are excellent opportunities.’
The phone rang and Bev picked it up. Her voice changed as she said the name of the company, the store location, her own name and How may I help you? in a single flawless sentence. Bev listened briefly, then with the same perfect delivery, she advised the caller that the store was open twenty-four hours, seven days a week.
Then she thanked the caller for phoning and hung up.
‘I’ve checked with management,’ she said, as if the phone call had never happened. ‘The job’s yours, sweetie, if you want it.’
‘But I haven’t found out about my course yet.’
‘You could always defer.’
‘I like books,’ said Wyn quietly.
‘I love books,’ said Bev. ‘But the question is, where do you see yourself being, ten years from now?’
‘I need time to think about it,’ said Wyn.
Bev got up and unlocked the door for her.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Think it over and let me know.’
For Chinese New Year, Wyn’s family celebrated with a special feast. There were spring rolls and honey prawns, seaweed and whole baked fish, bean pies and stir-fried noodles, sticky rice and moon cakes. Everyone in Wyn’s family was there. At the head of the table, her grandmother sat on two cushions, giving out red envelopes containing money to the children.
‘What is the matter, Quyen?’ the old woman asked. ‘You are gloomy.’
Wyn tried to smile. She knew it was important to be happy, in order to be happy for the rest of the new year.
‘Quyen was offered a promotion,’ said her mother. ‘She has to decide between working in a library and working in a shop.’
‘It’s a supermarket chain,’ said her father.
‘It’s still a shop,’ said her mother.
‘What’s the money like?’ asked her uncle.
‘She’s not sure,’ said her mother.
Shelf Life Page 8