A Smaller Hell

by A. J. Reid

  He was standing at my side, impeccably dressed, as earnest as ever and pretending to survey the department, checking for stock irregularities or untidiness. I turned to look at Robinson, but he told me turn back around and get the stock book out to keep looking busy.

  ‘Someone’s going to get hurt,’ he said. ‘Or disappear like her husband … And that girl’s father.’

  ‘How do I know that you aren’t part of whatever game she’s playing?’

  ‘She hasn't even begun yet,’ Robinson said. ‘You have no idea what you're dealing with, do you?’

  I forgot about the stock book and turned to look him in the eye. Robinson made an attempt to look busy, flicking through the pages impatiently, as if searching for something I was unable to find.

  ‘Just run,’ he said.

  I glanced up from the book to see Rachel sat on a stool being smeared with foundation by one minion, while the other teased her hair.

  ‘And take her with you.’

  Robinson adjusted his wedding ring and pointed in the direction of the stock room, ordering me to fetch a box of D batteries. I glanced back at Rachel to catch her looking at me whilst she was being harassed by the make-up ghouls.

  The stock room was cold and lonely, away from the warmth of the store's air conditioning and the giddy bustle of the Christmas shoppers. The soundtrack to the chaos disappeared when the security door closed behind me, but still I found myself humming Let it Snow in the cavernous ambience. The old mahogany shelves stretched on into darkness in the low light and the heels of my brogues echoed off the high ceiling.

  The corn for popping verse was interrupted by a scraping sound coming from three or four aisles away. My brogues clopped and stuttered on the concrete floor, while the scraping sounded like someone carving a piece of wood. As I turned the corner, I saw an oil lantern flickering at the far end of the aisle, illuminating a handyman at work.

  ‘And if you've no place to go ...’

  The voice was familiar, deep and tuneless.

  I walked closer with smaller steps, the lantern now lighting the concrete beneath my feet, making my shoes look shinier than they were. I stopped and waited for my companion to finish the chorus. He didn't.

  ‘Don't you know the words?’ came the voice from beyond the lantern.

  Taken aback, I sang the words quietly. ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow?’

  Enthusiastic applause filled the air. It sounded like a number of people instead of just the one crouched before me in the darkness. Suddenly the figure grabbed the lantern and stood up, striding towards me.

  ‘A singer in our midst.’

  The Captain's face looked grotesque in the flickering golden light of the lantern, but I was glad to see him all the same.

  ‘What are you so happy about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I take the odd job from time to time, when I’m needed,’ the Captain said, opening up a big old handyman’s tool chest that looked more like it should contain buried treasure. ‘Had your lunch?’

  The Captain handed me a soft parcel tied with brown paper and string. I unwrapped it to find a huge sandwich of soft, grainy bread, thick planks of hot roast beef, mustard and onions. I puzzled over how he managed to keep it warm in this fridge of a stock room, but I was too busy cramming it into my head to ask. It tasted as good as it looked. I nodded at the Captain when he asked me if it was alright.

  ‘What you give that copper ... That was a five-knuckle butty.’

  I began choking on the sandwich. ‘How do you know about that?’

  The Captain smiled beneath his hefty white beard, his eyes crinkling. Despite the scars, the weathered, jaundiced skin, the white hair and a bad back, his eyes sparkled with dreams that still lived. ‘You really clocked him one, lad.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

  ‘Don't worry. He deserved it.’

  ‘He was just doing his job,’ I said, wrapping up the sandwich.

  ‘If I had a ha'penny for every time I've heard that ...’ the Captain said and stood up, his bones creaking like the deck of an old wooden ship. He picked up his lantern and his treasure chest and started walking away into the farthest recesses of the stock room, gesturing towards the area where he'd been carving.

  ‘I almost forgot: I left a little something for you,’ he said.

  I looked and saw my parents’ names elegantly carved into the wood. ‘Did you know my mother and father?’

  The Captain hobbled back over to me and put down his treasure chest. ‘I knew your mother and father very well. Very fine people.’

  I looked at their names once more and back in the Captain's direction, but he was gone. I sat down next to the shelf and ran my fingers over their names, remembering them. I kept touching their names in the wood, as if by doing this I could conjure them back to life.

  When I stood up to leave, something caught my eye, glistening in the darkness between the end of the shelf and the wall. The shelves were more like pews in their build and weight. I sat down next to the shelf and reached my arm as far in as it would go to try to roll the object out. With a little finessing, I managed to scrape it towards me so that I could pick it up. It was an old pewter flask about the size of my hand. On the back was an engraving:

  All my love, Pearl.

  I shook the flask to find that it was full. The heavy screw top clunked against the pewter as I released it and brought the flask to my nose, charmed by a scent that triggered a fireworks display of memories. It smelled dangerous, as if it could tip the world off its axis and send it spinning into a new galaxy. I put the flask safe in the inside button pocket of my jacket and looked up to see Graziano racing down the stairs towards me in the darkness, his arms outstretched as if to grab hold of me.

  Detention

  The room was not a room, but a padded cell. Graziano hurled me inside and slammed the heavy door shut. In the dead silence, I gazed at the rolling canvas peaks and valleys of the walls and floor, sullied by the footprints of shoplifters detained for the police. I'd heard about the room from other staff, but I’d thought that padded cell was just a nickname for it. I wondered how many of these footprints belonged to staff who had defied Doyle. More than belonged to shoplifters, probably. I passed the time counting up how many spots of blood I could find that hadn't been completely scrubbed out of the grubby canvas material.

  An hour later, the door to the room opened.

  ‘Please don't call the police. They’ll take my daughter.’

  As the plain-clothes store detective pushed the man inside, I had to shift to avoid being trampled by his holey trainers.

  ‘Sit down and shut up,’ the detective growled in a thick Yorkshire accent.

  He was about to close the door when he saw me and did a double take. ‘What are you doing in here? Hand in the till? Liberties in the stock room?’

  ‘I ate a sandwich in the stock room. I took nothing,’ I answered.

  ‘Except an unauthorised break,’ he said. ‘You'll be alright. They'll let you out at closing time.’

  ‘So I'm being punished?’

  ‘Reckon you'll do it again?’

  ‘Ok, thanks a lot,’ I sighed in the direction of his inflated drinker’s face.

  ‘Not my rules, mate. I'm just trying to make a living,’ the store detective said, heaving out a smoker's laugh and crouching down to meet my stare. ‘You don't know anything, do you?’

  ‘I know they heard a lot of that at the Nuremberg Trials.’

  The store detective shook his head and smiled, breathing last night’s whisky binge all over me. ‘If Dianne Doyle had been in charge of instating the Third Reich, you'd have goose-stepped your way to work this morning.’

  With that, he closed the door, leaving me with the shoplifter, who was sat in the corner of the cell.

  He had his elbows rested on his knees and his head rested on his forearms in the dead silence. When he spoke, it sounded as if his voice was
coming from inside my skull, because there was no ambience in the room. His voice was very soft. ‘Social services gonna take her this time.’

  He put fingers and thumbs to his eyes in an attempt to stem the flow of tears. The room was entirely dark except for the rectangle of light provided by the peep hole in the door.

  ‘Do you have kids?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘You think I'm just another smackhead on the rob.’

  ‘Are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven't always been like this,’ he muttered, while raising his hands in invitation to look at him, to be disgusted by him.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I ran a tailor's. It was my father’s,’ he smiled, revealing that no nook or cranny of his body had escaped the ravages of destitution. His mouth looked like a bric-a-brac sale of broken, stained porcelain that would shatter if he tried to eat anything stiffer than a Victoria sponge. ‘I still am a tailor,’ he said, smoothing down his talking trainers with his fingerless gloves and brushing off his irretrievably filthy jacket, which was two sizes too big for him.

  When Sean’s father died, the tailor’s was only closed for a week, but Doyle wasted no time in opening a men’s fitting department within Menswear. Six months later he’d been forced to sell the shop, unable to meet the rent because Doyle had undercut all his prices, bought the block of shops and raised the rates. It had been eight years since Doyle took over, and before that, things had been very different, according to Sean. He was sad about Mr. Tanner's disappearance not just because they had an understanding between them as businessmen, but also because when Sean was a child, the old man would bring him chocolate at Christmas. Sometimes, he even brought him toys with damaged packaging that couldn't be sold in the store and he was always supplying his father with extra material and haberdashery whenever he could.

  Once Sean had been declared bankrupt, his wife left him for another man, leaving him to care for their daughter alone.

  ‘That's when I found Golden Brown, texture like sun,’ he sang.

  ‘Why do you do it?’

  ‘It makes whatever hell you’re in a little smaller, that’s all.’

  The footsteps in the corridor were barely audible, yet thundered in my ears. Any hope of a normal life was running away as they approached. Sean begged me to help him, not knowing what I stood to lose myself. My guts knotted as the door opened and he was dragged from the cell.

  ‘What about this one, Ms. Doyle?’

  I hid my face from the police in my forearms as blood galloped through my head.

  ‘We're checking our camera footage to see if he stole anything from the stock room. Leave him ... for now.’

  I sensed the glare of the police torch on the top of my head.

  ‘Aye. Well, let us know if you need us back here.’

  ‘Thank you, officer,’ Doyle said as she stepped inside and closed the door. Her high heels made no sound as she stalked over to me and stood so close that I could smell her skin through her stockings: clean and fresh in the wake of Sean's stink. I lifted my head to see the outline of her shapely legs and her stilettoes, threatening to puncture the canvas flesh of the cell floor.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Mr. Black?’ Doyle asked.

  I did not answer. Instead, I returned my head to the sanctuary of my forearms. Doyle stood silent, basking in my misery.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’

  My fists clenched as Doyle played with me like a cat pawing at its half-gutted prey.

  ‘I might remind you that Graziano is watching everything on one of his monitors. I suggest that you remain calm,’ she said, running her hand through my hair.

  ‘Are you in love?’

  Silence.

  ‘I was in love once, but I couldn’t make him love me back,’ she said, raking her fingernails across the canvas pads covering the walls. ‘Imagine an endless summer so hot that you think you're going to burst into flames.’

  ‘Not a British summer, then,’ I mumbled into my arms.

  ‘No, not a British summer,’ she said quietly, still staring out of the little white rectangle and tapping her nails on the Perspex. ‘I had to send him away.’

  ‘Sent who away? Actually, I don't want to know.’

  ‘You need to know, Mr. Black. Of all people, you need to know that if I don't get what I want, bad things happen,’ she said.

  ‘I know that if you do get what you want, bad things happen,’ I replied.

  Doyle's laughter made me wince in the dead ambience of the cell. ‘That’s exactly what he used to say, before I sent him away.’

  ‘Maybe he couldn’t love you?’

  ‘Once he missed his deadline, he no longer had a say in the matter, my dear,’ she said, raking her fingers through my hair one last time before swiping her security card and letting herself out of the room.

  Artery

  I pulled my collar up around my face and tapped my pocket to ensure that the Captain's flask was still there. Fifteen minutes after Doyle had left, the store detective let me out and told me not to take any more unauthorised breaks unless I wanted an authorised break in my arm. He also told me not to mess with these people and reminded me that he was just trying to earn a living, holding his hands up and shrugging.

  As I considered all that Doyle had said to me in the cell, snow began to fall. It was all too feasible that she had been talking about Rachel’s father. Looking up at the streetlight, it seemed as though I was travelling through a starlit artery towards a bright, mysterious destination. I continued walking up the hill, against the wind and snow, the blood thudding through my own vessels.

  I took out Rachel’s phone and called her number, but there was no answer. Texting her instead, I told her that we needed to talk.

  On the black cab journey to the cottage, I decided to come clean and tell her everything.

  When the taxi pulled up on the country, there were no lights on and no vehicles in the driveway of the house. The driver seemed none too pleased that he had navigated all those snow-laden roads in vain, so I passed the full fare and a tip for him to take me to Emma’s penthouse. Glaring at me in the rear view, he turned the cab around and headed back towards town.

  The taxi fare still glowed red and angry at me in the dark as we pulled up outside the apartment block. The driver mumbled a seasonal greeting to me before unlocking my door to let me out on to the forecourt.

  Entering the flat, I could smell laundry and garlic and outside my door hung washed and ironed shirts. I peeked inside a cardboard box in the lounge to find all my stuff from the squat. Emma must have braved the rat shit, barbed wire and broken glass to fetch my belongings. In the kitchen, the oven glowed and hummed on a low setting. I poured myself a glass of red wine and moved to the sofa, where I found a note stuck to the coffee table:

  Gone to work. Your dinner’s in the oven. Lots of love, Emma x.

  I looked out of the balcony's sliding door over the snow-covered docks and the city. Not bad for a hideout. I put the chain on the door and laid a large kitchen knife on the glass of the coffee table next to the note before heading to the oven to find a dish of pasta.

  I woke up on the sofa to the sound of the door slamming into the chain. I was relieved to find it was only Emma, coming in from work. I undid the chain and welcomed her inside, though she paid me no attention whatsoever, throwing her bag on the floor and staggering to the couch before collapsing on to it.

  ‘Nice and warm,’ she purred.

  ‘You alright?’ I asked, sitting down next to her.

  ‘I'm fine. Nice and warm,’ she slurred and purred.

  I lifted her chin and looked in her eyes, which were black and vacant.

  ‘What have you taken?’ I asked, watching her tongue chase around her lips.

  ‘Oh, just a little something for the pain,’ she smiled.

  I rolled up her sleeve to check her arms and found tiny bruises in the crease of her left.

  �
��Who gave it to you?’

  ‘A customer,’ she mumbled, falling asleep. ‘Dianne.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ I asked, lacing up my brogues and picking up my coat.

  ‘No. Please,’ Emma said, struggling to reach out her hand towards me. She found my cheek and stroked it, then hugged me as tightly as her opiate-soaked limbs would allow. ‘Thank you.’

  The snow was settling on the roofs of the houses, the cranes of the docks, the pavements of the deserted streets. I could see our reflection in the balcony's sliding door superimposed on to the red-lit circuit board of the city. We were something less romantic and more desperate than lovers, clinging to each other in this haven. We were survivors.

  Shaky Jake’s

  ‘Hello?’ Rachel answered the phone as if she’d just woken up.

  ‘I need to explain a few things,’ I said.

  ‘So do I,’ she replied.

  ‘Let's meet up. You've got the day off as well, haven't you?’

  ‘Meet me at 10 a.m. at Jake's. I need coffee.’

  ‘Where did you go last night? I called by the cottage, but no-one was in.’

  ‘I'll tell you later,’ she said, putting the phone down.

  Shaky Jake's was something of an institution amongst the natives. It was a greasy spoon café on the outskirts of town, overlooking the broad and violent river. Everyone seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Jake's, climbing the long steep hill to get their bacon sandwich/black pudding/bitter coffee/builder’s tea. The place looked much better from the inside looking out, with its bare brick walls and Mediterranean décor. The exterior of the building had been weathered by the salt from the river carried on fierce winds up the hill, and attacked by kids with spray paint and a preoccupation with genitalia.

  I placed Rachel's coffee in front of her and sat down. She didn't meet my eye, instead concentrating on her mocha.

  ‘Things aren't working out the way I’d planned,’ she said.

  I braced myself for the inevitable: