Counter Culture

by JL Merrow

  “Thick tights are fine!”

  “Okay, I’ll head over to hosiery. Do you want matt or sheer? And are you bothered about fibre content? Cotton rich would be best for comfort and health—you don’t want to end up with thrush—”

  Someone sniggered, and Robin realised Heath was now in here with them, witnessing his humiliation. With relish. “Sorry, mate. It’s just the thought of a robin with thrush. That’s like a lobster getting crabs.”

  “Yeah, intimate health problems are a laugh a minute.” Azrah’s sarcasm was so thick you could use it to grout tiles. “Look after Robin and I’ll be back in a mo.”

  Robin watched her go, close to despair—and made it all the way there when a subtle click alerted him to Heath taking pictures on his mobile phone. “Oi! Stop that. And don’t even think about putting it on Instagram.”

  “Oops.” Heath grinned.

  Robin sagged against a wall. Or at least, the costume did. No part of Robin was any closer than three feet away, and it was hideously uncomfortable. He straightened again.

  “Oi, you’ve missed a bit,” Heath said, helpfully pulling something out of the bag. “Here you go.”

  It was a pair of red leggings with massive felt flippers on the end. Presumably they were supposed to look like birds’ feet. “Oh God.”

  He’d be lucky if he could walk at all in those. Then again, they weren’t actually women’s hosiery, so there was that. Robin sighed. “Help me off with this, then? There’s no way I can change my trousers with this on.”

  An uncomfortable, sweaty ten minutes later, Robin was ready to rock and roll. Come to think of it, if he tripped over, rolling would be all he could do.

  “Oh. So I ran all the way to hosiery for nothing?” Azrah stood there, her hands on her hips. “And hang about, how’s he supposed to hand out mince pies in that? He’s got no hands!”

  “You’ll have to come with me.” Robin was going to need her. “I can hardly see where I’m going anyway.”

  “Great. So now I have to babysit you all evening.”

  “Well, if you’d rather be in the costume . . .”

  “Sorry, couldn’t hear that. It came out all muffled.” She huffed. “Fine. I’ll hand out the mince pies; you just stand around, I dunno, radiating good cheer or whatever.”

  “What’s Heath doing?” Given that this humiliating costume was apparently Heath’s idea, Robin hoped he was doing something, if not equally ridiculous, at least fairly onerous.

  “Me? I’m in charge of mulled wine distribution. And general overseeing, of course. Very responsible position. I’d better get back on the shop floor before it all falls apart.” Heath loped off.

  Robin would’ve killed to be in charge of mulled wine. He’d probably have maimed just to be handing out mince pies in his normal clothes.

  “Right, you, stop griping and get a move on. It’s showtime.”

  “Why’s Angry Bird here?” a piercing, childish voice whined ten minutes later, as Azrah handed out mince pies with a sugary smile.

  Robin tried to angle himself to see where it’d come from, but was worried if he leaned any farther, he’d topple down arse over beak.

  “This is Robin Redbreast,” Azrah said brightly.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s Christmas, and Robins are Christmassy.” Azrah’s tone had dimmed by quite a few lumens.

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . red. And . . . I don’t know.” There was a thump on the costume roughly where Robin’s left wing should have been. “Robin? Help me out here. Why are robins Christmassy?”

  “I think it looks like a turkey,” the child said loudly. “Gobble gobble!”

  Another joined in. “Gobble gobble! Gobble gobble!” There was a surge of laughter, not all of it childish.

  Just as Robin was about to expire from the heat and the humiliation, a woman’s voice said firmly, “Come on, kids, we haven’t got all night. Don’t you want to get to the Victorian Market?”

  “Well, that was a good start,” Azrah muttered sourly.

  It didn’t get any better. Several children burst into tears at the sight of Robin, for which he couldn’t blame them. His back and shoulders began to ache with the force of a thousand fiery suns from the weight of the costume, and his throat was sore from putting on his Jolly Robin Redbreast voice, which was similar to a Santa voice only much, much tweetier. At least it seemed to make him less scary to tots. Also funnier.

  Getting laughed at appeared to be his new role in life. Could anything make this evening any worse? Right now fire, floods, and acts of God would have been a distinct improvement.

  Robin should have known not to tempt fate like that. He glanced up from a particularly giggly toddler who kept kicking his legs from her pushchair—and looked straight at Archie.

  Robin’s stomach plummeted so fast he glanced down automatically to check it wasn’t lying, egg-like, at his feet, only to realise once again that, in this monstrosity of a costume, he couldn’t actually see his feet.

  Then again, in this costume, nobody could see him, could they? Heady relief made him feel, for a moment, as if the transformation into avian form were complete and he was flying. He was safe—safe from the utter disaster of being recognised.

  But what if Archie recognised Azrah? Robin prayed that (a) Archie would prove to have some form of face-blindness and (b) she wouldn’t give the game away. Archie’d only met her once, for an hour in the pub over a week ago—she wasn’t that memorable, was she?

  No, no, Robin was safe, just as long as Azrah thought to pretend she was a customer they’d be fine.

  But what was Archie doing here? He’d said he never came into the store. Robin was starting to feel rather hard done by; if you couldn’t trust what your boyfriend told you . . .

  “Heath, why are you making faces at me?” Azrah said. Heath was there? Oh God. Robin turned his beak to locate him. Yes, yes, he was. Archie was going to recognise them, wasn’t he? Even if you were the worst person in the world at recognising faces, the combo of Heath and Azrah was bound to ring a bell or two. “Is there something behind— Oh shit.”

  There was a pregnant pause.

  “Um, hi, Archie. Fancy seeing you here. Nice top hat, by the way. Makes you look very Artful Todger. I mean Dodger.” Azrah was clearly shooting for bright and breezy. She missed it by a couple of light-years.

  Then Heath’s voice rang in his ears like a portent of doom. “All right, mate? Hey, get a load of our Robin, here. That was my idea, that was. Geddit? Robin, dressed as a robin?” He cackled.

  Archie’s eyes widened.

  Somewhere in the infinity of parallel universes, there must be a version of Robin who, having made a variety of different choices, hadn’t ended up in this position, and was even now being fatally mown down by a double-decker bus.

  Some bastards had all the luck.

  Archie stared. He’d finished in the gents’ and had been hanging around near the entrance, waiting for Nikki, when he’d seen the giant robin, accompanied by a petite female figure wearing a familiar trouser suit and a slightly less familiar pair of reindeer antlers.

  Azrah? She’d had her back turned, but Archie was pretty sure it was her. He wandered over to say hi. Just as he got there and was able to confirm that yes, it was Robin’s mate Azrah, Robin’s other mate Heath—and there was no mistaking him—popped up bearing a steaming jug and a stack of disposable cups. His eyes widened when he saw Archie.

  Archie knew, even before Heath spoke, who the robin must be. This was his Robin. Robin, who’d said he was an accountant. Dressed as a giant festive bird and handing out mince pies to shoppers.

  In Willoughbys.

  No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk about his work.

  “I thought you were accountants, not shop workers,” Archie said slowly. The buzz from the gin had faded, leaving him unpleasantly sober.

  Heath gave him an assessing look. “Would you buy that we’re moonlighting here for some extra Christmas c
ash?”

  “Are you?” Archie glared the giant bird right in the beak. He could just see part of Robin’s face in there, his eyes wide and guilty.

  Robin seemed to shrink further into his costume, like a tortoise pulling in its limbs in the face of a threat. “Not . . . as such.”

  “You lied to me. You lied to Lyddie.”

  “I’m sorry! I panicked, okay, and then it all kind of snowballed. I didn’t mean—”

  “You lied, and you kept on lying. Were you ever going to tell us the truth?”

  “I’m sorry,” Robin said again, hanging his beak.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Archie said harshly. When was he ever going to learn? Men were bastards. They’d been bastards to Lyddie, and now he was carrying on the fine old family tradition of getting shafted by someone he lo— someone he’d trusted.

  Robin squawked something unintelligible and waddled off, his beak down low and his ridiculous tuft of tail feathers waggling sadly behind him.

  Archie closed his eyes for a long moment, but when he opened them again, Azrah was still there. “You all work here?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Well, yeah. We’re colleagues, like we said.”

  “Totally,” Heath put in. “We didn’t lie about everything.”

  Archie winced. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  Azrah cocked her head. “Kinda?”

  “Sorta?” was Heath’s contribution.

  “Not doing a great job right now, I can tell you.” Archie folded his arms.

  Azrah looked shiftily away, then rallied. “Anyway, you told Robin you never shop here, so where’s your bloody moral high ground now, huh?”

  “I’m not shopping. I’m in here because one of my friends needed a wheelchair-accessible loo, and the public one’s locked.”

  “Oh.” Azrah seemed to struggle with herself. “I could get you a mince pie?”

  “Mulled wine?” Heath offered.

  “No, thanks. I’ll be leaving as soon as my friend’s back.” He turned away, then spun back to face her. “Did you know about COC?”

  “About— Oh, your campaign.” A steely glint entered Azrah’s eye. “Yes, about that. Cheers for doing your best to lose us all our jobs. Especially at Christmas. Really appreciate that.”

  It was Lyddie’s campaign, not Archie’s, but he didn’t want to talk to Azrah anymore. All he wanted was to get far, far away. “Maybe you should pay more attention to the kind of employer you’re working for,” was all he said before walking off.

  Luckily Nikki was rolling towards him. Her eyes widened as she met his gaze. Archie wondered what she saw. Tight-lipped and silent, he held the door open for her and followed her outside.

  “What’s up, Arch?” she said urgently once it’d closed behind them. “Are you banned from there, is that it?”

  It startled him out of his anger. “What? No.”

  “Then what is it? You’ve never said why you hate that place.”

  It wasn’t quite true—he’d only mentioned that Lyddie disliked the store—but, well, there was no reason for her to remember everything he said, was there? “I . . . It’s turned out someone’s not who I thought they were, that’s all.”

  “Shall I get Bridge?”

  Archie gazed over the crowds, tempted to say yes. Not the done thing, though; crying on your ex’s shoulder over your latest love. “Think I’m heading home. Are you going to be all right?”

  “Course. I didn’t have that much gin. I can see Perry and Edith over there, anyway. You won’t be leaving me on my own.” She clasped his arm for a moment. “I’m sorry about your person, whoever it was.”

  “Yeah,” Archie said, his voice harsh. “I’m sorry too.”

  Robin was getting on quite nicely with his nervous breakdown, thank you very much, when Azrah found him slumped in the stockroom in his work shirt and bird leggings. The body of his festive costume rolled listlessly at his feet like the Ghost of Christmas Utterly Fucked.

  “Well, that went a bit tits up,” she said by way of comfort. “I did say you shouldn’t have lied about your job.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Okay, so I should have. Hindsight’s a bitch.”

  Robin hid his face in his arms. “He hates me now, doesn’t he?”

  “He didn’t actually say so. But he did bugger off pretty quickly. Then again, you’d already beaten the land speed record on buggering off. You know your fight-or-flight reflex? I’m fairly sure it’s not supposed to be stuck on flight all the time.”

  “Would you rather we’d fought? That’d really put Willoughbys on the map, that would. I can see the headlines: ‘Steampunk and Robin in Festive Fisticuffs.’”

  “Yeah, probably not what Gail was hoping for.” Azrah crouched beside him. “Want me to make Heath wear the costume for the rest of the evening?”

  Robin shook his head. “No. It’s fine. Just . . . give me a moment, okay?”

  She nodded and stood. “I’ll be back in five minutes to give you a hand. If anyone asks, you’re on a pee break.”

  “Cheers, Azrah,” Robin said hollowly.

  “Only an hour to go, then we can get paralytic on what’s left of the mulled wine,” she said, and left.

  There wasn’t, as it turned out, anything left of the mulled wine, but the Millstone was mercifully close and there was still an hour until closing time. The barmaid, whose T-shirt tonight said, Todger Dodger, gave Robin a sympathetic smile and a free packet of ready salted, so he was guessing he looked almost as bad as he felt.

  “Do you think I should call him?” he asked his friends for the ninety-fifth time. Probably. He kept hoping for an answer that would miraculously mend his shattered relationship, and so what if the previous ninety-four tries hadn’t worked? It wasn’t like there was anything else he could bear to talk about.

  “No,” said Azrah, her patience audibly wearing thin. It was probably the lack of alcohol, Robin decided muzzily.

  “Give it some time, mate,” Heath’s voice was enviably calm, and he’d had almost as much to drink as Robin had. “Let him cool down a bit.”

  “But he hates me now. I can’t have him hating me.” It hurt, a physical pain like a hot, lead weight in the pit of Robin’s stomach. “I can’t believe you told him it was me,” he whinged to Heath for the seventy-eighth time.

  “Told you, mate. He knew. The game wasn’t just up, it was menacing satellites. The pitch was queer as a new fifty pound note. Your festive bird, my friend, had been roasted, carved, and served up on an artisanal chopping board with a dollop of homemade chutney.”

  Azrah threw her head down on her arms with a groan. “Do you even speak English?”

  “Your only hope,” Heath went on, ignoring her to jab a bony finger in Robin’s face, “was to plead guilty as charged and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.”

  “Yeah.” Azrah snorted. “Shame you bottled it and did a runner.”

  “I was going to tell him everything,” Robin said plaintively.

  “You were? When?” Azrah didn’t sound convinced.

  “I was! Last night. But I fell asleep.”

  “Well, what did you do that for, you numpty?”

  “I was tired! I stayed up all night working before my meeting with the directors.”

  There was a long silence.

  “What meeting?” Azrah snapped.

  “What directors?” Heath asked, leaning forward to fix Robin with a tipsy eye.

  “It’s . . . complicated.”

  “No worries.” Heath pulled out a pen from his breast pocket, and grabbed a beer mat. “You can draw us a diagram.”

  “It’s not that complicated. Look, it was just a . . . a thing, okay? The directors were coming in anyway to talk about COC—” Robin glared at Azrah until she’d stopped snickering “—so when I went to Gail with my suggestion, she told me to present it to them.”

  “Huh. So when you told us you were brown-nosing Gail, you were actually br
own-nosing the Willoughbys themselves?”

  “There was no brown-nosing! It wasn’t about me, or them, or anything. It was about helping the homeless. And about stopping Willoughbys—the store, not the people—from becoming a byword for ‘socially irresponsible.’ You know, looking after all our jobs?”

  Heath nodded and raised an unsteady glass. “Hero of the hour. Man of the match.”

  Robin flushed with a sort of prickly pleasure. Then he sighed, and slumped back down in his seat. “Not according to Archie, I’m not.”

  When he got home, Robin poured himself a pint glass of water, had a brief internal debate over whether he deserved to avoid a hangover tomorrow, told himself he owed it to the customers, and drank it. Then he collapsed into bed and closed his eyes.

  Three seconds later he opened them again, and checked his phone. Just in case he’d missed a text from Archie. He didn’t care if it was an angry text—Archie had every right to be angry with him. But at least . . . at least it’d mean Archie hadn’t cut Robin out of his life completely.

  But there was nothing.

  Archie made his way home. There was a hollow ache in his chest, worse than that time when he’d been sleeping rough and he’d got back to his patch to find the council had cleared away his stuff and taken it to the tip. And now he was going to have to tell Lyddie what Robin had done. There she was in the living room, happily filling in a crossword in the paper—she never looked at the clues, she reckoned it was more fun to put any old words in and try to get them to fit—and he had to go in and ruin her night.

  And he had to tell her tonight, because otherwise she’d be bumping into Robin accidentally-on-purpose and inviting him round the house again, and Archie . . . just couldn’t.

  “Love?” was all she said when he walked in the room. His face must have tipped her off he wasn’t bringing good news.

  “Hey.” His voice came out rough. “Come and sit with me on the sofa?”

  Lyddie nodded and scrambled to her feet, but instead of moving to the sofa, she came to wrap her arms around him where he stood.