Angus stretches his eyes and mouth wide and hauls the comers of his lips so high they start to tremble. "Welcome to Texts," he says, but so much of it is caught by the smile that he feels like a ventriloquist's doll.
"Not too bad. Practice every chance you get. You can rehearse whenever you're not on the sales floor," Woody says not just to Angus. "Now who's going to try to top him?"
Angus wonders if he's expected to maintain the smile while everyone else competes. When nobody volunteers he lets it go, and feels his face shrink as Woody says "Hey, it won't mean we're any less of a team. Helping each other improve makes you more of one."
Jake stretches his arms wide as if he's about to embrace Woody. "Welcome to Texts," he says in a voice he might use to seduce or be seduced, and simpers enough for both.
"You may want to tone it down a shade, but it wasn't that funny, Gavin. Let's see yours."
Gavin doesn't alter his smirk as he says "Welcome to Texts" with no emotion at all. Before Woody can comment, Jill says it as if she's offering a child a treat and follows it with an expectant smile she turns on Ross. She must want to encourage him, but when he repeats the formula his smile looks not too far from tears; Angus suspects he's remembering Lorraine. "Okay, it all needs work, especially the smiles," Woody says. "And once you've got it you need to have that attitude every moment of your day to every customer."
He searches their faces for it or mutiny before adding "I need one of you to take leaflets to all the stores. Who'll be fastest?"
Gavin opens his mouth, but Woody mustn't like his speed. "You can do it, Angus. Go now before we start losing people."
He means to the funeral. As Angus picks up a heap of leaflets from Connie's desk, Woody says "Why don't you leave them on the cars out there too. Okay, your time starts now."
Angus grabs his coat and struggles to struggle into it without putting down the leaflets. A notion that the smile is threatening to resurface on Woody's face makes him clumsier still. He drops the leaflets and dresses himself and gathers them again before fleeing to the stairs. He's emerging onto the sales floor when Agnes says from the ceiling "Assistance to counter, please. Assistance to counter."
She's issuing a gift voucher to a large woman with a small head balanced on several chins above the ruff of a chunky sweater. A man whose grey ponytail sprawls over the fur collar of his shabby astrakhan overcoat is waiting at Information. As Angus dodges behind the counter the man swings his wrinkled face to him, fingering the dimple in his chin. "Don't blame you wearing a coat in here, or were you getting out while the going's good?"
"Is it?" Angus says without knowing why.
"Fog's lifted a bit. Don't expect it's for long. Before you run, I'm Bob Sole. You've got a book for me at last."
As Angus ducks to the Customer Orders shelf he's aware of having forgotten to smile at Mr Sole, let alone welcome him. None of the tags the half a dozen books are sprouting bears Mr Sole's name. "Sorry, what was the book called?"
"It's Commons and Canals of Cheshire. Feller by the name of Bottomley wrote it. Adrian, if that's a help."
It doesn't seem to be. "Did someone say it was here?"
"You sent me a card." Mr Sole pulls it and a scattering of tobacco out of his pocket. "You won't mind me asking, but are you having a joke? This is the second time I've ordered it, and your mate I asked for it last time seemed to think something was a laugh."
Angus remembers Gavin saying in the staffroom that they had a customer called R. Sole. At once he hopes he won't smile after all or unleash a sound to go with it. He hides as much of his face as he can by leaning over the card Mr Sole deals with a snap onto the counter. Seizing the phone lets Angus keep his face averted. He's about to summon help when Woody says in his ear "Not on your mission yet? What's the problem?"
"We're supposed to have an order but I can't find it." Angus is suddenly terrified of how he may react if he's asked for the customer's name, until Woody says "I'm guessing it's Commons and Canals of Cheshire."
"That's it, but how—"
"I have it here in my office. Tell the customer I'm bringing it right now."
Angus feels safe in hitching up his lips as he turns to Mr Sole. "The manager's on his way with it for you."
He has scarcely replaced the receiver when Woody darts out of the exit to the staffroom. Mr Sole swings around in the midst of a smell of stale astrakhan to peer at the thin drab book in Woody's hand. "Making sure it wouldn't stray this time, were you?"
"Just glancing through it while we had it," Woody smiles.
"Much about this neck of the woods?"
"Nothing I'd call important," Woody says and turns so fast that Angus is uncertain whether his smile had already begun to vanish. "I'm handling this. You shouldn't still be here."
"Oh, right, that's right," Angus gabbles, which brings to an end the sympathetic look Agnes was considering on his behalf. He fumbles the leaflets off the counter and clutches them to his bosom as he dashes out of the shop.
The sun has made no headway against the fog. If anything, a sourceless dazzle aggravates the blindness that has erased most of the retail park. Vague folds of it waver on the tarmac like the skirts of a vast sluggish dancer. They must be why Angus feels he's being paced when he leaves Woody's stare through the window behind. As he dodges into Happy Holidays, a sodden grey veil is drawn over the far end of Texts.
Two girls in yellow sweaters with a large H on each breast are playing noughts and crosses behind the counter. Both raise their heads with eagerness that looks not unlike surprise, and the even blonder and slimmer girl says "Where can we fly you off to?"
"I'm not going anywhere just now. We wondered next door if you'd mind taking some of our leaflets."
"Don't bother wasting many." As he drops about a dozen on the counter she says "That's more customers than we've had all week."
Angus leaves the girls with a version of Woody's smile as he backs out, but it seems not to impress them much. The fog has beaten a mindlessly mocking retreat far enough to reveal an old Skoda out beyond the splintered tree-stump. He makes for the car in case Woody notices it hasn't been leafleted. He lifts one creaky windscreen wiper and plants a leaflet under it, and is retreating towards the fog that has descended on the pavement when a voice behind him calls "What's that you've stuck on my car?"
He skids around to glimpse a tall figure through the undamaged pair of trees. The figure blurs and almost vanishes on the way to tramping past the stretch of grass. The man is wearing white trainers, green trousers, a scraped leather jacket dangling several tatters, a black woollen hat from beneath which tufts of white hair are in the process of escaping. His small mottled face does its best to draw together around its swollen pockmarked nose as he bends his lanky form towards the car. "Oh, it's you," he says even more flatly than his Lancashire accent entails. "You were after me."
"Who was?"
"Your lot here. Texts. Doesn't look as if it would have been worth the effort."
"Why wouldn't it?" Angus is provoked into demanding.
The man peels off the leaflet and squeezes it into a dripping wad that he shies onto the grass, where it lands with a plop. "What's a readin group?"
"A …" A glance at the topmost leaflet in his hand shows Angus what the man has in mind. "It's, it's like a read-in. Where you read."
"Nice try, son, but too late. Carry on then, spread the mistake around. That's how the language we've spent all these centuries building gets pulled down."
Angus can't think of a retort or a defence. "Why did you say we were after you?"
"I've written a few books. Part of one's the story of this place. Maybe that's why you thought I was worth having."
The fog wavers, and Angus feels as if the world has. "I think we've just sold one of your books, if you're …"
"Adrian Bottomley, that's me, for all it signifies. Not what you expected, eh?"
Is his attitude why he refused Connie's invitation? "Why didn't you want to sign books for us?"
"Nothing against your shop in particular. It's this whole place I can do without."
"So why are you here now?"
"Maybe selling a book was such an event I thought I'd better be here," Bottomley says, then relents. "Didn't like what I heard happened."
"What was that?" Angus asks and feels worse than stupid. "Lorraine, you mean?"
"If she's the girl that was run over. Don't like to think of anyone dying here."
Angus stares about and sees nothing except two and a quarter trees in a strip of sodden grass surrounded by a walled-in patch of tarmac. "Why specially here?"
Bottomley lowers his head and butts the air in the direction of Angus's leaflets. "Aren't you supposed to be spreading the word?"
Angus considers taking them back to point out the error, but he doesn't want to make trouble for Connie. Since nobody else has noticed the omission of a letter, it seems best not to draw attention to it—can't they pretend it was intentional if they need to? "Will you come round with me while I do?" he asks Bottomley.
"Don't you want to be out here on your own? Can't say I'm surprised after everything that's gone on."
"I was hoping you'd tell me."
"Someone ought to know," Bottomley admits, and abruptly heads for the pavement. "Come to think," he mutters, "someone has to."
His tone leaves Angus unsure how to take that or even whether it was addressed to him. Bottomley says nothing more on the way to TVid, where a bloated woman and a thin unshaven man with blistered arms are screaming at each other in a turned-down murmur on a therapy show. As the audience jeers and boos, one of the pair of staff who are laughing at the spectacle glances at Angus, who asks "Can I put some of these on your counter?"
"Do what you like with them," he says as he sees where they've come from. "Did you sort out your hooligan tape?"
"Which was that?"
"Some mob fighting on a video that was meant to be music. Your manager looked like he could kill whoever messed it up."
Angus is dropping a handful of leaflets on the counter when Bottomley enquires "Don't you want to read what he's leaving in your shop?"
The assistant who seems to do all the talking grabs one and examines it for a few seconds before slapping it back on the heap. "Looks all right to me."
"Will it have to do, then?" Bottomley might as well not have said. As he tramps out and Angus follows him the televisions raise a derisive cheer, a blurred inarticulate voice emerging from more than a dozen mindless orifices. Outside he turns on Angus. "So what do you know about this place?"
"Not really anything except my job."
Angus adds the latter half in the hope that will give Bottomley less reason to scowl, but the author's expression doesn't soften as he says "You didn't get anything out of my book."
"I never had a chance to read it."
"You and the world, son." Without relinquishing his bitterness he says "Only you might think you'd want to know where you're giving so much of your life to. Do you know why it's called what it's called at least?"
"I don't."
The apologetic answer fails to win him over. Angus doesn't understand why he brought up the name of the shop, but Bottomley finds nothing else to say as they continue their trek. In Teenstuff a manager is overseeing two assistants as they change displays around. In Baby Bunting the mob of dolls with identical sketches of faces in the window have begun to look dusty, and the two visible members of staff are playing My First Computer Game, while next door in Stay in Touch the workers seem to be having difficulty using mobile phones. Bottomley rests an increasingly dissatisfied stare on Angus whenever he repeats "Can I put some of these on your counter?" He must think changing the words of his formula makes him more literate and superior to Angus—"Aren't you going to see what they say?" and "I'd check what he's giving you" and "Have a read first"—though the variety seems to afford him little pleasure. As they emerge yet again into the fog, which appears to have gained more substance from the energy it's sucking down from the unseen sun, he strides at it as though he's bent on confronting it or driving it off. He reminds Angus of a grandfather trying to chase a bad child. After several paces he stumbles to a halt and gasps "Keeping the gangs away now, is it?"
"I expect one did this." Angus points at the graffiti that have grown like deformed ivy over the unoccupied shopfronts. "And we've had children messing up the shop. Maybe it was one who stole the car and did what you heard about."
"Not the same." Bottomley's impatience leaves sympathy behind. "I'm talking about gangs that used to meet here for a fight till the buildings went up. You'd wonder what brought them here from miles round, wouldn't you? Or maybe you wouldn't, not being from round here."
"I can't say I'm as local as you," Angus retorts.
"You might have learned a bit of history at school, all the same. Do you know how many battles there've been here, not just fights?" When Angus shakes his head in what feels like an unsuccessful attempt to stir his brain, Bottomley wags two fingers at him. "Civil War and before that with the Romans," he says and returns the fingers to a fist he continues to brandish. "And between them there were villages here, in the Middle Ages and a couple of centuries later they had another go. Make you wonder anything?"
Angus feels shut into his dullness by the interrogation and the walls on both sides of him, crawling with moisture and graffiti to his right, quivering sky-high on his left. "Such as …" he says in case that hides his ignorance.
"Fair dos, maybe you're not wondering. Maybe you've worked out what happened to the villages."
"Fog like this?" Angus suggests as if he's a child desperate to please a teacher.
"Keep going. We were speaking about it before."
"Battles, you mean."
"If you want to call them that," says Bottomley, but Angus has somehow forfeited his patience. "There was plenty of violence, that's for definite."
"Let's hope we've seen the end of it."
"Hopeful type, are you? You look around the world and see us all getting on with one another."
"I thought we were talking about here."
"You're not telling me your lot don't have any differences. You can't believe there's no tribes any more."
"That doesn't mean there's violence."
"Said you weren't from round here," Bottomley declares and surges forward as though he can't bear him any longer. Angus has to follow him past the guards' hut, where a radio voice that sounds blurred beyond words is shouting through the sightless window, and into Frugo. As Angus makes for the nearest checkout girl, Bottomley lurches into the liquor aisle. "Can I put some of these on your counter, well, everyone's?" Angus asks.
"Never drink on an empty stomach," Bottomley seems to be advising anybody within earshot, and waves a finger at her. "Don't you want a look at those first?"
"What are you trying to give us?" She's halfway through peering at the topmost leaflet before her suspicion fades into indifference. "It's about some bookshop," she informs her colleagues. "Writers and reading and that kind of stuff."
"Put them with the papers," the adjacent girl suggests. "People read them."
From the supermarket entrance Bottomley takes time to include Angus in a despairing stare as the girl takes half his leaflets. Angus trails him to the last occupied property, Stack o'Steak. He's already seated at a table red as a plastic toy, and greets Angus with a cry of "Hey up, here comes literacy."
Neither of the staff outside the kitchen, both of whom sport orange T-shirts with So'S printed across their chests, appear to welcome this any more than Angus does, or Bottomley's question. "Can he put some of those on your counter?"
By now it has become such a ritual that Angus feels bound to produce the response. "Do you want to look them over first?"
The man he asked lowers his cropped skull so close to them that Angus is reminded of a feeding animal. "Don't see why not," he eventually tells Angus in a tone that also contains the opposite.
Angus isn't sure whom Bottoml
ey's applause is meant for until the author asks him "Got the point at last?"
"I don't think so."
Bottomley gives up and turns to the second waiter, who is hairy only by the standards of the job. "How much do I need to eat to get a bottle of your house?"
"He can just have the bottle, can't he?" the man says in a voice like a shrug rendered vocal.
The author squints at a plastic menu half the size of the table he lets it drop on. "Tell you what, I'll have the white and a plate of Chunks o'Chicken."
Angus grows aware of being watched. No doubt the diner staff wonder why he's lingering. He can't leave until he has at least begun to understand. He hurries to the table and sits opposite Bottomley. "What point?" he pleads.
"Any chance of the bottle while I'm waiting? Just one glass." Having called that, he says nothing to Angus in the interim. He scowls at the glassful of wine he's brought and downs half of it before grumbling "A bottle and one glass, I meant." When he mutters after the waiter "Too many apostrophes round here" Angus takes the chance to respond. "Not only mine this time."
Bottomley peers at him. "Do they expect you to have any qualifications where you work?"
That sounds so insulting that Angus raises his voice to be heard by the staff of the diner. "I did three years at university."
"Well, bring on the trumpets. Three more than me then, son, and you still don't get the point. Go away and think about it. I mean go right away. Maybe that'll help."
Angus feels his spine pressing against the chair to push it back. He struggles not to give in to somebody for once. "You keep refusing to tell me things," he protests. "You said someone had to know."
"That's right, and they will. Whoever bought my book from you." With even more weary indifference he adds "That's if they can be bothered to read that far."
Angus watches him sink into his bitterness and imagines him pulling it over his head like a stale blanket. He can see no point in talking further to the author. He leaves him to the bottle the waiter has brought and hurries out. Swapping all the colours for the monochrome of fog and tarmac feels like starting to go blind. As he hurries back along the pavement, the window displays past the graffiti look faded by the murk. Nobody seems aware of him, yet he feels observed, a sensation at least as oppressive as the fog. He must be nervous of encountering Woody, he thinks as Woody emerges from the shop to say "Did you have enough for all the cars?"
The Overnight Page 13