The Way Out Page 11

  Mezzanine

  From the top of the racking, if you tilt your head and let your eyes go slack, you can see right through the perforated steel of the mezzanine floor, down to Groceries below. Then further, if you stay with it, through that floor to White Goods on the ground level. Must be, what? Sixty foot, give or take.

  It’s a rush, especially when I’m leaning out and holding on by only one or two fingers (the best way). That jolt of vertigo when the total height snaps into focus, the feeling there’s only a few twigs of bone and stringy loops of muscle keeping me anchored to the living world. It’s fucking terrifying. Makes me dizzy and weak but I do it every time. Because I can. Because I can feel all that and not lose it, not shake or cry or scream. I am in control.

  There’s that.

  Then there’s the feeling that comes next. Like I’m balanced, almost weightless, right at the very top of an idea so simple and perfect that it’ll clear away all the shit in my head and make everything line up and fit together. That tipping point where all the effort of getting up there is over and the reward will be total lasting peace. Exactly there. That peak of anticipation before I go tearing down the other side, hair streaming, wind in my face, headlong into another brick wall. Not the Answer after all. Just another dud. I smash into but not through it. And I have to start again.

  Can’t hang around here forever though. Work to be done.

  Aisle 12. Kitchenware. Check my folder. Vyleda mop heads - 3; mop handles - 2; Hozzlehock pegs - 2 standard size plain, 1 multi-coloured, 2 jumbo pegs with the springs. Section 7. Shelf 10. I don’t know who racks the stock in the warehouse when it arrives but it’s as if they deliberately put the difficult to carry stuff right at the top. Mop handles being a good example. The heads I can safely drop from any height and they’ll be fine but the handles are different. Bits can get broken off. I have to find a way of carrying them down without losing my grip.

  I leave the folder and clamber sideways, hand over hand, gripping the metal struts, pushing my toes between cardboard boxes for a foothold. We’re not supposed to do it like this. Health and Safety and all that crap. But there are only so many ladders and so many stands and never enough to go around. If you always try to do things by the rules then you’ll never get anything done at all.

  My guidance teacher at school used to say if I didn’t improve my attendance record and study for my exams then I’d ‘end up stacking shelves at the supermarket.’ Like that was the very worst thing that could happen to a person. Mr Smiley was surprisingly stupid. I remember I used to think teachers had to be clever, but the longer I stayed in school the more I noticed that most of them didn’t have a scooby, and some weren’t even half-way bright. That was a real let down.

  As it turned out, I don’t stack shelves. (Fuck you very much, Mr Smiley.) I’m behind the scenes, supplying those that do. I’m what’s called a Picker. I write down what’s missing from the shelves in a special folder full of plastic-covered shelf plans, using a special pen so it can be wiped clean at the end of each shift, then I go to the warehouse and load everything needed into tall metal trolleys and send them down in the lift to the shop floor. The shelf-stackers take it from there. I wonder whether Smiley would consider what I do better or worse than shelf-stacking. I wonder why I wonder that, because I honestly couldn’t give a fuck.

  I work from seven in the evening till midnight. The twilight shift, they call it. Makes it sound romantic and maybe a bit mystical, like we’re a bunch of elves or pixies, tippy-toeing around the store in the half-light, sprinkling fairy dust and working our magic to make sure everything’s perfect for the humans by morning. Hope I’m not bursting your bubble here but it’s really not like that. No magic. No pixies. Just shit work and minimum wage. Same old same old.

  Mum used to say ‘don’t pick it, it’ll only get worse.’ The phrase pops into my head every single time I clock on, like it’s programmed into the card puncher. Card in, ka-chunk, fucking annoying advice out. It’s irritating the way her nonsense hangs around, wormed into unexpected places, wherever there’s a gap. It’s like she’s haunting me before she’s even properly dead.

  I stop for a little light refreshment. Section 5. Shelf 8. Still there. In a dusty old box of cracked draining racks that someone should really throw out, a half bottle of Bell’s, tucked down the side. The very thing. Onwards. I take a wide swing out, one arm gripping, the other swooping in an arc. As a species, we should’ve stayed in the trees. There’s something about climbing like this. Feels somehow real.

  Mum also used to say ‘little pickers wear bigger knickers.’ Never mind big knickers, I’m wearing cycle shorts under my blue polyester uniform skirt. All the female pickers learn that on their first shift. When you’re high in the warehouse racking, even if you use the ladders like you’re supposed to, there’ll always be some smartarse down below ready to pass comment. Be easier if we could wear trousers, but that’s against the rules too. Not a big fan of the rules, me.

  Right on cue, I get a drawn-out, sarcastic wolf whistle from Davey, pushing a trolley below where I’m pulling packets of pegs out of a box. He hasn’t stopped, or even looked up properly, it’s just a reflex.

  ‘Away and piss off!’ I shout down. Doesn’t cost anything to be polite.

  ‘Love you too, Babe,’ he calls back over his shoulder, still pushing his trolley towards the lifts.

  ‘Jackie,’ I call after him. ‘My name is Jackie.’

  Davey’s alright. Some of the others aren’t, which makes Davey a Good Guy. The clunk and rattle of his trolley wheels dwindle away to nothing, lost in a few turns of the high-sided cardboard maze.

  I drop the three mop heads, one after another and they land with soft thuds. The wooden pegs can be safely dropped as well but not the plastic ones, they’re likely to break. I start wrestling the mop handles out of their box. At least there’s only two. Heads wear out quicker than handles. Shame people don’t have replacement heads for when the ones we’ve started out with get knackered or worn out. Folk could have a collection of spare heads for different occasions. A head for every day of the week. Useful for those difficult mornings too. Which might not be quite so difficult if I stopped drinking so much. But the thing about drinking, proper drinking, till I’m almost-passing-out (but not), is that I get close to the edge, which is the only place I can feel alive.

  No matter how smashed I get, no matter how physically incapable, there’s always part of me sitting in a corner of my head, calmly watching, absolutely sober. Nothing can touch that part of me. Nothing. It’s cold. Immune to everything (I’ve checked it all). I like to get close to it so I can remind myself it’s still there. I’m still there. Standing near the edge is the only place I can get a grip, feel the shape of things, feel my hold on them.

  I wedge the two mop handles under my arm and start climbing down, pausing at each shelf to move the packets of plastic pegs down as I go. It’s tricky. My arms are getting tired and the mop handles keep catching on the racking and threatening to lever me off into thin air. But I’ve done this before. I can handle it.

  It’s always better to visit the edge deliberately than to wait for it to come and find me. Often, it arrives without warning. I wake up and it’s right at the side of my bed and just putting my feet on the floor is taking a step off a cliff, off the edge of the world into endless black space, and I’ve no idea when or if my feet might land again on solid ground.

  Made it. I stack everything together on my trolley and take a moment to roll my shoulders, stretch my arms out, imagine them growing and spreading out and out and up and up.

  And sometimes the edge stalks me all day, lurking under kerbs waiting to snatch at my ankles when I cross the road, or in the lift shaft where the lift should be but hardly ever is, waiting to suck me down. Or in the silences I don’t know how to fill when people talk to me. Wherever there’s a gap. It could be anywhere.

  My mother came out through the gaps between her father’s words and what his silences admitte
d. I met him, that once, though she didn’t want me to. ‘There’s nothing to be gained,’ she said. Another of her ready-made phrases. Her speech was always full of them. She hardly ever put words together herself. Her talk was all verbal chicken nuggets – bland, bite-sized and pre-processed. Now she’s even lost the ability to choose the right one for the occasion. She’ll sit there and smile vaguely, her eyes drowning in themselves, and say things like ‘you’ll catch your death’ and ‘what a wicked web we weave…’ then trail off and start humming some never-ending tuneless tune.

  Lately she doesn’t seem to care who I might be but sometimes she hazards a few guesses. Some of the names she comes out with – I’m sure she’s never even met folk with those names, she’s just pulling them out of the air, or maybe from memories of TV soaps.

  Mary? Trisha? Amelia? Gracie?

  ‘Jackie,’ I tell her. ‘It’s Jackie.’

  She looks at me and frowns like she’s searching through the clutter in her head and I think maybe she’s going to find me in there somewhere, but she just shakes her head and says, ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’

  Finding him was easier than I’d imagined it could be. He wasn’t even bothering to hide. As if he had nothing to be ashamed of.

  I went to the pub first, steadied myself, then went and sat in his piss-smelling front room and watched as everything I didn’t know but half-suspected about my mother’s childhood came hissing like steam out through his words and formed the shape of a girl struggling to disappear. He gave me a battered box-file of papers, old photos and letters. Said he had no use for them anymore and I may as well take them away. Pandora doesn’t know the half of it. Inside that box were packed the overlaid shadows of those who came before him, like a lesson in cause and effect. All the generations rising up out of it until they clenched together and swung back down, like a fist coming right at me on the mezzanine floor. I start climbing again. I feel better up high and I left the stock folder up there anyway.

  There are holes in everything. Holes, in fact, if you want to take it all the way (and why wouldn’t you?), are what the world and everything in it is made of. I’ve been thinking about this. Atoms, right? They’re mostly empty. Electrons and whatever else, whizzing around a big load of nothing. So, the truth of it is, there’s more nothing than anything else. There are more gaps than not-gaps, more holes than Mum still likes to crochet. She’s rotten at it but never lets that stop her. She makes squares with different patterns in endlessly ugly colour combinations then sews them together to make scarves and tea cosies and cot blankets. The results were always misshapen and full of holes but they’ve got a lot worse recently. Holes are what they’re made of now, loosely strung together with wool.

  There were similarities. Of course. You can’t get away from genetics. It’s inheritance. Passed down, hand to hand, one to the next. He was old, but still managing to live on his own. He looked at me as I was leaving, sniffed the whisky on my breath and said, ‘the apple never falls far from the tree.’

  And what a tree it is. Our family tree. Maybe every family is the same if you peel back the bark and inspect the wormholes. Maybe we all come from the same long line of broken minds, drunks and bastards.

  It’s like some kind of optical illusion, seeing all the stories layered on top of each other, snapping in and out of focus. Like there’s a hidden meaning in the way the pattern shifts, some secret to be revealed from the way new patterns develop.

  I climb back to Section 5, shelf 8 and the bottle’s near enough empty now. Might as well finish it off. The racking lurches to the side as I stash the empty bottle back in the box but I don’t let it faze me. The effects of that joint I smoked in the car park are joining forces with the whisky now, setting the outer edges of my perception spinning like a wobbly carousel. I look down and watch the racking twisting round on itself, groaning under the strain into a spiralling ladder of metal. Not even going to try and get down that.

  I go sideways again, find that narrow gap at the very top of Section 9 and crawl in, shoulders brushing against the boxes on either side. Just a short break and I’ll get back to work. It’s not bad here. Quite cosy. I could have a nap. No one would notice.

  The sober part of me that’s been observing, taking notes, agrees. Sleep would be a Good Thing. In my dreams, I’m always climbing.

  Rubble

  Matthew, who knows his name only as a sound his mother often makes, sits and looks at the thing in his hand. He doesn’t have the words to describe its shape, colour or texture. To you or me, this would be a red wooden cube with sides about two inches long. And that’s all it would be. Matthew, however, holds infinite possibility in the palm of his hand. He lifts it to his mouth, sucks a corner and discovers it is not a thing for eating.

  Another cube nearby looks almost exactly the same, but this one is more like outside. We’d call it green. Matthew crawls over and grasps it in his free hand. This is not for eating either.

  He drops one cube on the carpet and looks at the other in his hand, then back at the one on the floor and an idea begins to form. He feels it swelling in his mind, like an enormous bubble. This idea is so big, so shiny, he doesn’t dare blink in case it bursts. This is important. Slowly, so slowly, he lowers one cube until it rests on top of the other and then he takes his hand away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  In the kitchen, Matthew’s mother is unaware of her son’s discovery. She’s pacing back and forth with the phone jammed to the side of her head, her whole body tilted towards it, as if this will help make sense of what she’s hearing.

  ‘Not coming back? What do you mean, Not coming back?’ she says. She tries to think behind his short sentence, to prise the words apart and find the alternate meaning that surely must be hidden somewhere.

  There’s a long silence. She puts the phone down and leans her forehead against the cupboard door, presses hard and rolls it from side to side, focusing on the small, controllable pain this produces. There’s no time to think. It’s past eight o’clock and they should be on their way.

  She splashes cold water on her face, locates her work shoes, bag and keys and goes into the front room for Matthew. At any other time, she would’ve paid attention, would’ve knelt on the floor and been properly impressed. But not today. Today, she scoops him up before he succeeds in placing brick number three and a cube of blue, bright as a summer sky, falls from his hand and rolls across the carpet. Matthew twists and wriggles. He stretches out his arms, fingers straining, and howls in protest.

  With Matthew securely strapped into the back seat, Melanie joins the rush hour traffic which turns the five-minute journey to her sister’s house into twenty. The windows of the corner shop have been smashed again. Boards have been hastily hammered in place and stare out over the shattered glass still strewn across the pavement. The place already looks abandoned.

  She concentrates on the day ahead. Another day of job hunting. She doesn’t enjoy deceiving Karen, dropping Matthew with her and heading off as if she was going to the office as usual, but if she lets go of the routine, anything could happen.

  The lights at the crossroads cycle back to red but the queue doesn’t move forward. She sighs and opens the windows a crack. Off her passenger side, the wall surrounding the vacant lot has a hole in it about four feet wide into which a flimsy wire fence has been crammed. A sign hangs lopsided from the wire bearing a one-word message – Dangerous.

  Beyond the fence, an expanse of rubble stretches out in mini-ranges, weeds sprouting between the low mounds. There’s a movement at the edge of her vision and a dry, shifting sound as a small landslide spills pebbles down one of the slopes. Just the ground settling, a cat perhaps, or children playing where they shouldn’t. That sign would be a magnet to some. The movement comes again, this time on the far side of the empty lot. Too big for a cat, or a child, a rolling wave that sends earth and stones tumbling from the peaks. She imagines the rubble as a living thing, a massive creature looking out at the traffi
c and shrugging its shoulders in puzzlement, or simple indifference.

  Perhaps the fence and the sign aren’t to stop people getting in, but to stop whatever’s in there from getting out. Maybe the real danger is that the rubble may rise up and break out, inciting a revolution of collapse which would sweep through the streets in an orgy of destruction, calling other buildings to join it, pulling down garden walls, factories, empty offices, dilapidated warehouses into the boiling tide. Some structures would need very little encouragement. Others might seem stable enough but they too would succumb eventually. Ruin is innate and inevitable in all things. Everything disintegrates.

  A car horn blares behind her. The lights are green.

  She thinks about their last holiday. She’d been six months pregnant with Matthew and the idea was to spend some time together before the baby arrived. The island was a parched, dusty tourist trap of bars and dirty beaches, the air slimy with coconut suntan lotion and frying fat. Between the concrete blocks of hotels and the beachfront restaurants were stretches of wasteland that nobody claimed, full of rubbish and rubble and starving, thorny weeds. These patches of forgotten land disturbed her. If you stepped into one, you might not be seen again.

  The heat was unbearable and she feared the baby would cook inside her. She tried to stay in the shade, switching seats in the cafés as the sun climbed overhead and the line of blinding heat advanced across the tables. Gazing out across the dull pewter Atlantic to an indistinct shape on the horizon, she asked, ‘Is that another island?’ He shrugged and made a ‘Phff’ sound. She asked what he thought was beyond the island. ‘The end of the world,’ he answered, without hesitation. There was no question in his voice, no hint of an upward inflection to soften the blow. They sat and looked at it and she knew from that moment the end was coming. Still, his timing could hardly have been worse.