The Restless Supermarket (31 page)

No one answered his knock. Was she still manning the charity kiosk at St Cloud’s on weekday afternoons? He could wait. He sat down on the doorstep and looked around. The place was getting tatty. When she came in, he would have to tell her to take better care of herself, and offer to lend a hand. He made a few emergency repairs to pass the time, but his thoughts kept drifting. Soon he fell asleep.

He dreamt of Georgina. He dreamt that she had stopped at the Good Cockatoo on her way back from work to share a meal with Bibliotheker, a fund-raiser and friend, whose advances she had been stubbornly resisting till now. On this day of all days. It was ten before she arrived home, and then she found her old flame slumped asleep against the doorpost. He half-opened his mouth, not to accuse her, but to explain that he had come to seek her blessing, even if he had lost her affection. But his tongue was as thick as blotting-paper in his mouth. She prised the rucksack from his embrace and led him inside, made him stretch out on the settee among the ungrammatical scatter cushions and overstuffed pouffes. She unlaced his hiking boots and loosened his bandanna. As she drew a blanket over him, his hands rose of their own accord and held her. To his surprise, she did not rebuff him. He measured the columns of her thighs with the upsilons of his outstretched fingers and thumbs. Then his hands slid over the parenthetical curves of her hips, smoothed a shiver out along the ridges of her ribs and the rounds of her breasts, paused for breath at the full stops of her nipples, rose again over her shoulders, felt the flutter of lashes against their palms and fell away from her flesh in amazement, as she drew back and receded, plunging him into an exclamatory darkness. He reached for a page of her in his mind. Not a jot, not an iota must be lost. Then his eyes and hands moved over her surface, proofing the metrical skeleton concealed in her warming limbs, reconnecting joint to joint, easing the flow of words like water over skin, making her fluent, feeling the prickle of his own gaze on the backs of his hands, tracing with the crumbling nib every pore and fold, every tendon and sinew, the popliteal hollow, the pillowed lips, the pressed ear, the whorled navel, delete and close up, wound and heal, the wet whisper of the font, the long alliteration of her throat, the elliptical flesh of her face, the bone beneath, the tongue between, the mouth, composing every square word of her into a perfectly ordered meaning, into a sentence that meant exactly what it said. Yet when he awoke, dishevelled and alone, this meaning had escaped
him.

*

It was Munnery’s idea to remove the Restless Supermarket to the countryside, where they could work on it without fear of injuring passers-by. They had decided to act more circumspectly in such matters, and so the implications of the removal were first examined from every angle. What if it harmed the very people it was meant to help? What if it led to shortages in the surrounding suburbs, to a critical want of staples, to starvation? When such questions had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction, the renowned transposer went to work. He found an abandoned aerodrome in the hinterland, at the end of a country road, and put the Restless Supermarket down there, lock, stock and barrel. On the vacated site, Figg inserted a small section of the Rainbow Chicken Farm to tide the locals over until more permanent measures could be taken. Then the Proofreaders boarded their bus, specially chartered, and took the slower route into the interior.

Even from a distance, when the old control tower had just appeared on the horizon, the Restless Supermarket could be heard grumbling and groaning. Fluxman drew up in the parking lot near the delivery bays, and they disembarked into the noisy air. Then he led them inside and down a corridor to the manager’s office. On the other side of a flimsy wall, they heard the contents of the building churning like an angry sea, and some of them slumped a little, and some puffed out their chests.

A closed-circuit camera, the sole survivor among a dozen installed to combat shoplifting, was still relaying its impressions of the store to a television monitor on the manager’s desk. At first, it appeared to them that this camera had also broken down, and that the screen contained nothing but meaningless static. But then among the squirming motes they began to distinguish fragments of sense, flickering here and there, and they drew fearfully closer and gazed at the screen as if it were a window into the inferno.

The interior of the Restless Supermarket was barely recognizable. The entire space was seething, alive with an indiscriminate, indefatigable jumble of tins, jars, bottles, packets, boxes, bags, all mingled into one substance, whose textures eluded them, being simultaneously soft and hard, fuzzy and sharp, perishable and indestructible. Each element remained vividly itself for as long as they focused on it, and then dissolved back into the irreducible compound as soon as they relaxed their attention. It was like trying to watch one wing in a wheeling flock or one brick in a striding wall, although such things gave no inkling of the frenetic movement, the ceaseless and senseless changing of places with which the products had been charged. Occasionally, the ribs of a shelf gleamed white in the roil, or a chequered floor tile flashed like a tooth.

They stood there mesmerized, and might have gone on standing there until they lost all will to act, had Fluxman not roused them by clapping his Phone Book open on the
desk.

Quickly, before they could lose heart, they constructed makeshift desks of cardboard cartons, laid out the documents they had brought with them in their portfolios alongside jars of pencils and rubbers and rulers, and gathered inventories, advertisements, ledgers, marketing plans and flow charts from the filing cabinets. Munnery and Levitas launched into the engineering, locating salients in the soup, righting gondolas and levelling refrigerator units, realigning shelves in the proper parallels, with aisles of the optimum width between, rearranging sections and departments to create a rational flow of custom. Wiederkehr repaved and Figg repapered. And then the two together set about repacking the shelves, tidying up the debris as they
went.

It was an enormous labour. The product substance was hard and soft, impenetrable and yielding, solid and liquid. It resisted their efforts to cut into it, to separate parts from the whole. A single item grappled from its clutches and put aside on the end of an empty shelf, in a little white clearing, would maintain its integrity for a moment. But then the substance would begin to exert its viscous attraction, and soon the item would be jiggling and turning on its base, and floating free again into the general mass, where it would be whirled away into restless anonymity. The shelf itself would come loose and be lost in the uproar. The categories had to be built up painstakingly, row by row, line by line, and all the while chaos threatened to overwhelm
them.

The Proofreaders worked in shifts. When they were exhausted beyond endurance, they lay down and slept with their twitching hands clasped between their knees. When they were famished, they transposed a tin of something from the stock.

At last, patches of stillness appeared in the tumult. And then a solid shelf or two. The seething died down a little. One day, the space between the shelves and the rafters cleared momentarily and revealed a row of dangling signboards: Tea & Coffee, Breakfast Cereals, Dairy Products, Pet Food, Household Cleaners … The Proofreaders gave a weary cheer. Already, in the mind’s eye and the mind’s nose, they saw the master chefs of Alibia walking enraptured down the gleaming aisles and smelt the aromas of feasts to come. But the battle was far from won. The superstructure was refractory. The gondolas floated off half-laden. The dairy went sour. The overtaxed shelves collapsed. The products kept bubbling back into substance. No sooner was one aisle restored to order, than another rose up clamorously, shedding labels and price tags in promiscuous profusion. From his headquarters in the back room, Fluxman rallied his colleagues again and again. He would not submit. And at the end of a week, the basic shape of the enterprise had been secured.

Night had no meaning in the Restless Supermarket. They laboured on, raising up pyramids of tins and cans, stabilizing barrows of fruit and vegetables, racking and stacking, piling and puzzling, until the shelves began to settle down, rising up and subsiding in waves, as if by general assent, as if a rumour of defeat had run like a swell from aisle to aisle.

Glaring absences became visible. Baked goods were required, said Munnery. They brought in quantities of Chelsea buns, Madeira slabs, Lamingtons, pita-bread with hummus. What about the liquid refreshments? They brought in whiskey, wine in boxes, soda water, ice. Everyone needed something special, some little extra. They added mops, marinades, wonton dumplings, asparagus spears, noodles in the shape of shells. Wiederkehr became quite inventive, importing strings of vanished delicacies he remembered from his childhood. He and Figg devised entirely new dishes, and arranged the ingredients on the shelves by menu, season and refinement of taste, constellations so subtle that only gourmets would appreciate them. Meanwhile, Banes was making his way down the aisles for the last time, straightening labels and marking down prices. Something like peace and quiet descended and endured.

It was then that they noticed the absence of Fluxman. As soon as the tide had turned, he had left his post and gone into the butchery. The air smelt of blood. There was mopping up to do. He must excise sawdust and broadcast desiccated coconut, just as an interim measure. He must delete sub-standard carcases in the freezer room. Munnery found him there, sweeping behind a stiff downpour of plastic curtain, and gave him the news: the sun had risen over the Alibian Sea and the Restless Supermarket was at
rest.

*

Although the Wetland Ramble was gone from Fluxman’s yard and a patch of forest rustled in its place, a muddy breath still clung. In the stench that blew into his study, a mixture of dung and waterweeds and feathers, gnawed bones and half-hatched chicks entombed in eggshell, there was a lingering reminder of captivity.

Having risen to shut the window against this poison, he stood gazing at the beeches silvered in moonlight, while a flock of noisy gulls scattered into the heavens. Then he returned with a sigh to the blighted landscape of the Book. The breeze had rifled spitefully through his pages. As he leafed back to his bookmark, his eye fell
on:

Lombardo WH Saphire St Imprl Mnt 878-4322

oologi dens Cnstntia

Lombat, D 34 Burrows Rd Blk Hl 642-1986

Lomnitz Z Refinery Rd Pkld Dl 486-0051

Just how the missing half of the Zoological Gardens had landed up in the L’s was anyone’s guess. He had been searching for it for five days; finding it by chance was an affront to his professionalism. He wrung the neck of the blue pencil in the sharpener and put its point down on the first o in oologi
…

On second thoughts, he fetched some of Munnery’s catalogues off a shelf and found the section on animal life. He saw that Figg had already been busy among the marsupials. The cage must be bursting! Fluxman deleted a couple of bars in the reference material, a koala and the chubbiest of the kangeroos. And then he thought
–
what the hell
–
and put a line through the whole lot of
them.

*

The campaign to recapture the Restless Supermarket had been intended as a trial run to prepare the Members for the war of attrition that lay ahead, and it achieved this end. A division of labour was established, and an armoury of weapons tested. A point was made. What remained now was to repeat the point over and over again on a grander and grander scale.

But the Restless Supermarket outdid itself, for Fluxman at least. It proclaimed itself the great offensive against error. It exhausted every potential, it surpassed every anticipation. From that moment on, everything that remained to be done became routine. The initial topographical work
–
arrangements for mountains, forests and streams, ocean currents and seasonal rainfall, reservoirs and dams, the restoration of mineral deposits and rock faces, the replenishment of slag heaps and landfills
–
all this could not but seem like a faint echo of flooring and shelving and plumbing.

When it was time for a bit of town planning, Fluxman’s interest quickened. The residential areas and office parks and industrial zones had to be unshuffled and restored to their proper places. There were green belts to loosen, highways to unravel, pylons to restring. The displaced masses of Alibia had flung down their makeshift houses in the buffer zones: now the appropriate social distance could be restored between the haves and have-nots, the unsightlier settlements shifted to the peripheries where they would not upset the balance, the grand estates returned to the centre where they belonged. There was wasteland to play with, and blasted veld, and dead water. The possibilities seemed endless. But when he got down to it, it was no more difficult, and indeed no more important, than the sorting and packing and pricing of boxes and tins on a shelf.

The city pulled itself together. Slowly, the recognizable outlines of Alibia reappeared, as street after street and block after block was knocked back into its familiar, ordinary shape.

It was not a riddle, a puzzle, a paradox, as many supposed. Every little victory had to be earned. The boffins of the Proofreaders’ Society worked overtime. Levered up by their acute pencils, whole paragraphs of the world came and went. Their eyes crossed and recrossed every line of the city streets until the most crooked found their truest delineation. With every hyphen that tacked a building to its neighbour, knit one, purl one, with every colon that suggested a passage from one block to another, with every dotted line that restored a highway to the symmetry of coming and going, the earth drew Alibia tighter to its bosom. It should have been a spectacle, but it was
not.

In the corrosive solution of tedium that flowed from this realization, Fluxman’s qualms about his own excesses were dissolved. If ever he went too far, he told himself, and deleted more than was strictly necessary, he could always call on Wiederkehr to undo it again. He became ruthless. First it was dittographies in the Book, people and places, like the Lumleys. Later it was the minor irritations, like that Goosen who refused to answer questions about the price of eggs, and that Schneider who had to go setting up a business with a Sartorius. And then it was the human detritus he found in the margins of the city, the erroneous ones, the slips of the hand, the tramps, the fools, the congenitally stupid, the insufferably ugly. They were incorrigible, he reasoned, and doing away with them, at one painless stroke, was more humane than trying to improve
them.