The Restless Supermarket (30 page)

Fluxman had a strong stomach. He took his rucksack in his lap, as if it were a frightened child, and scanned the tumult’s ebb and
flow.

Most of the avenue dandies had run away at the first opportunity. But a gang of young bucks from the musical theatres were using their canes to drive the swarthy settlers back into the shanties. As fast as they were routed, others took their place. Then a whole tribe in luminous bubus came spilling out in a rush, men, women and children, reeking of woodsmoke and unthinkable foodstuffs.

As usual, when you needed a waiter there was none to be seen, and so Fluxman picked his way through the overturned furniture and scouted around inside. Fresco himself had scarpered through the back door. Fluxman fetched down a bottle of whiskey from a shelf. In the mirror behind the counter, he saw that he was wearing a velvet cap with an ostentatious aigrette
–
the sort of thing an Athos might have liked
–
and he threw it away with a weary sigh. Disconsolately, he clamped an assortment of notes under the spring-loaded tongue of the till. Then he secured the bottle in his bag, took out an apple to eat on the way, and went back into the street. The young bucks had commandeered a tram and stalled it in the middle of the Avenue. From this redoubt, they were launching attacks against the garish tribesmen, trying to drive them back into their uprooted
town.

Fluxman hurried on his way. In the east, where the Avenue tapered away into twilight, it was raining cats and dogs. As soon as he was clear of the wreckage, he turned aside into a narrow street and went bravely into the
dusk.

*

In days gone by, Maison Munnery, a squaredavel under moth-eaten thatch, had commanded a view of the old city, with the esplanade and the yacht mole beyond it; now it looked down on a jumble of factory roofs and chimneys. Unusually for Alibia, this industrialization had been gradual, a heaping up of cubes and cones and frusta like offcuts from a geometer’s bench, and it took Fluxman an hour to carve his way through it. By the time he broke out of that intricate litter onto the railway lines on the valley floor, night had fallen thickly all around. Munnery’s place was an oasis of glaring light on the dark hillside and Fluxman kept his eyes on it as he ascended.
Climb every mountain
… When he drew closer, he saw the military searchlight parked in the rockery on the slope behind the house, with its beam trained down on the putting green.

Munnery was practising, and Fluxman paused in the shadows to watch.

Alibia’s most famous par 5 had fallen into Munnery’s possession by chance. Returning from a jog up Capitol Hill one Sunday morning, he had found it laid out there like a gift. The sight of it caused a flutter in his heart. He should return it at once to its rightful owners. He went straight in and fetched down his books of maps and registers of title deeds, fully intending to make the transposition. But his pencil remained poised over the page, irresolute and feeble. He was an avid golfer and the thought of his own private practice green was more than he could resist. They would not even miss it at the club, he told his
wife.

Little Horst, Munnery Junior, was now playing with a bucket and spade in the largest bunker. Mrs Munnery, Patsy as she was known, had just left him there, and her skirt was still caught up in her panties at the sides. She was sitting on the doorstep, wriggling her toes in the grass to rid them of sand. Fluxman had never seen her legs before, and he was struck by how pale they were. Munnery himself was wearing plus-fours in the MacLaren tartan and a mismatched pair of spiked shoes, one that was white with black fringes and one that was red all over. He affected a little shuffle and gave the ball a tap. It curved across the green, tracing an s in the dew, and rolled down towards the cup. Fluxman waited for the ball to drop before he stepped from his hiding place into the light. Mrs Munnery hurriedly untucked her skirts. Junior demolished a castle with a backhander from the spade. Munnery dropped his putter with a cry of delight and advanced to greet his visitor, embraced him warmly, and drew him at once through the bright doorway.

*

Settling Fluxman in his study, Munnery went off to pour them each a whiskey from the bottle his guest had brought. As soon as he found himself alone, Fluxman rose from the armchair he had been pressed down in and turned about on the mat, gaping in amazement. The room was papered with printed sheets. Not just the walls but the door, the window behind the desk, the cupboards, the shelves, the desk itself
–
every surface had a page stuck to it. There were even papers pinned to the ceiling, with their edges curling downwards, and untidy stacks on the floors, weighted by rusty cogs and crankshafts and lumps of wood, with their edges curling upwards. Between the reciprocal curves of ceiling and floor, Fluxman felt curiously suspended, like an afterthought in brackets. The papers rustled and waved, making visible an imperceptible breeze, and it seemed as if the room was breathing uneasily and muttering to itself.

Years of practice had made of Fluxman a shameless scrutineer. He stepped closer to the wall and examined the peeling skin. Glacier ~ granite ~ grasslands ~ grike. It was Munnery’s ‘Dictionary of Geographical Terms’. His life’s work. The page proofs. Simoom ~ sinkhole ~ slickensides ~ solifluction. Fluxman tugged at a few dog-ears. Every page was securely attached with tacks or loops of tape, drawing pins or tees. Munnery had been known as the most fastidious of proofreaders, a stickler for sequence and consequence, a meticulous keeper of order. Finding the great project of his life in this disarray shook Fluxman. Perhaps he had come just in time. Or was he already too
late?

When Munnery returned with the drinks, he found his colleague tactfully seated, flipping through the Phone Book, which he had taken from his rucksack.

‘A toast,’ said Fluxman. ‘To the records!’

This was the battle cry of the Society, the oath with which they closed their gatherings, and its import was not lost on Munnery. ‘The records!’ he echoed, and they clinked glasses. ‘Welcome back.’

‘My pleasure.’

They drank. Fluxman, examining his old friend for signs of deterioration, noted that his pullover was back to front. Why did Mrs Munnery let him wear the spikes inside? It would ruin the floors.

‘I thought you were gone for good,’ said Munnery.

‘That was the idea. But I’ve changed my mind, as you
see.’

‘Why?’

‘Some observations I’ve made lately have led me to believe that looking the other way might not be the answer.’

‘It’s a fact that you’ve behaved very selfishly, turning your back on us when you might have done something.’

‘You misunderstand. My presence here is as selfish as any of my old refusals. I thought I could manage well enough as Alibia declined, preserving my own little corner amidst the ruins. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. While we still have the tools to wield against chaos, even if we choose not to, we may feel safe. While we are models of order ourselves, and stuffed with the assurance of our own solidity, we may hold ourselves up to one another as examples and reflect that there is something wrong with the world we live in. But when we ourselves succumb
…’

‘Are we in danger, then?’ The question made Munnery anxious. He gulped his drink and began to pace up and down in the channels between the papers. ‘What do you think?’

Fluxman was tempted to say: ‘Open your eyes, man. Take a good look around you.’ Instead he said: ‘Let’s say I’ve seen signs of dissolution. Surely you’ve seen them
too?’

‘Minor disorders,
yes.’

‘In yourself?’

‘Not really, but I have noticed worrying signs in others.’

‘It’s to be expected that we proofreaders should hold out to the last, that we should be more resistant than the man in the street.’ The mugger on the fairway came into his mind, and he shivered. ‘Which is all the more reason to act now, in concert, while we still have our wits about
us.’

Munnery had grown more agitated as they spoke, marching up and down over the pages on the floor, which stuck to the soles of his shoes in untidy wads. Several times he muttered, ‘Patsy …’ For a while, there was nothing but the rustle of his feet. Then he halted before Fluxman and asked: ‘What do you propose?’

‘To begin with, an emergency meeting of the Society. We must come up with a strategy. Late as it is, I believe we can beat back the plague.’

The mugger stumbled into Fluxman’s mind again, and so he told Munnery about him, and also about the bobber he had fished from the water. That reminded him in turn of the Wetland Ramble. ‘I’m afraid my house will be flooded while I’m gone. Would you mind putting the water feature somewhere else? I haven’t had much practice with such things lately … and it’s been a long
day.’

With trembling fingers, Munnery unpinned some pages from the back of the door. Fluxman couldn’t help noticing that he left the leaves to float up to the ceiling while the pins spiralled slowly to the floor. There was an ordinance survey map beneath, and he studied
it.

‘It can’t go back to the Zoo,’ he said with a worried face. ‘The Stoute Kabouter nursery school’s been squashed in there.’

‘That was probably Banes’s doing.’

In the end, Munnery earmarked a bit of virgin woodland on the escarpment and relocated the Wetland Ramble there among the trees. Constructive effort calmed his nerves at once. He fetched a canal, which was gathering slime behind the gasworks, and put that down in the reeds to make a sort of weir, and rounded everything off with some concrete tables and chairs from a picnic site and a circle of caravans from a roadworkers’ camp (long since abandoned). The effect was bound to be pleasing, as Fluxman remarked.

‘Let’s start looking ahead,’ said Munnery hopefully, ‘to the day when Alibia takes its place among the tourist destinations of the world.’

Dinner was a ratatouille, a veritable drumroll of pepper and aubergine, and a sirloin of beef. Dessert was more of the whiskey dashed over ice cream.

Then Fluxman, exhausted by the exertions of the day, bedded down in the lounge with the Phone Book under his head, while his host withdrew to his study to contact the other Members of the Society. Fluxman listened to the murmuring voice behind the door, and watched the searchlight beams toppling like gargantuan spillikins across the sky behind the window, until he fell asleep. And then it was just the rumble and clash of suburbs and streets under the cover to which his ear was pressed, a sound he had long ago grown used to, and was hardly able to dream without.

*

The next morning in
Munnery’s lounge, the Proofreaders’ Society achieved a quorum for the first time in nearly a year. Fluxman had imagined that the others might be awkward in his presence, that his ‘betrayal’ would still rankle, but to his relief the atmosphere was businesslike and bellicose. Munnery had primed the Members and several were dressed for battle
–
Levitas in his broadcloth waistcoat, Banes in his worsted boilersuit. Wiederkehr was wearing his stetson. Consensus was reached before Mrs Munnery even had time to serve the tea. Those present reaffirmed that they themselves were all that stood between Alibia and its ruination, and that duty called them to make one last effort at restoring law and order. This initiative they resolved to pursue ‘jointly and severally’ (as Banes worded it): they would work as a team, coordinating their actions and lending one another support; but each would also take primary responsibility for a particular sphere of correction, and focus on applying those skills at which he was most adept.

Munnery was put in charge of transposition. The others were encouraged to place their personal collections of maps and plans at his disposal for the duration of the campaign. He would work closely with Figg on insertions and Levitas on alignment. Banes was assigned to reappropriation and given leave to commandeer statute books and municipal records, title deeds and carbon-copy invoices, and to take over and take back at his discretion. The director of restoration was Wiederkehr. It was surmised, rightly as it turned out, that his services would prove invaluable if any of his colleagues applied themselves too zealously to their own tasks. No one appreciated this more than Fluxman, who was responsible for deletions and removals, the most sensitive portfolio of
all.

When the toasts had been drunk and the farewells made, when the last of the Members had gone off down the hill, each carrying a little tub of Mrs Munnery’s linguine, Fluxman was left alone to pack his bag. He stood at the window, where a clutch of stray proofs fluttered against the blinds, and looked out onto the sunlit green. Junior lay on his stomach on the grass, with his feet jutting over the bunker and a bucket of golf balls at his shoulder. He held one of the balls in both hands and rested his chin on it. Then, with a flick of his wrists, he sent the ball speeding towards the
hole.

*

Fluxman took his leave. He meant to go straight home and set to, but now that his thoughts had turned to the work at hand, he found himself drawn from the path again and again to tinker at the wayside. Little things to begin with, minor repairs to an unhyphenated split pole fence, a badly spaced milestone , a broken win-dow pane … but in the end, an italicized
townhouse complex
detained him for the better part of the afternoon. The place was an eyesore, nothing but curlecues of stucco and folderols of wrought iron. It took him half an hour to introduce some Roman columns of a plain, upright kind, and another to summon a vine-leaf screen to hide the whole thing from view. He should have referred the matter to one of the others, he thought afterwards, as he went wearily on his way, Figg or Banes would have made light work of it. Or he should have stuck to what he knew best: Strike it out! Away with
it!

The effort had exhausted him. He felt uncomfortably disordered. Twice he had to fetch a wandering eye back from the crook of his arm and reattach a limb with conjunctive sinew. And in this agitated state of mind and body, he thought of Ms Georgina Hole, his former fiancée. It was half a year since she had broken off their engagement, and a quarter since she had entered his mind. He went towards her
flat.