Thieving Fear

FOUR

Hugh had just managed to locate the nightwear section on the upper floor of Frugo when his supervisor beckoned him with a pudgy indolent finger towards the beds. 'Is it all right if I leave you now?' Hugh said.

The older woman mopped her brow with a handkerchief, and her daughter gave her a sympathetic glance. 'Thanks for the tour.'

As Justin folded his arms above his prominent stomach, his expensive pale-blue shirt from Frugo Dude puffed out a spicy scent of Conqueror deodorant. His even paler eyes peered at Hugh from beneath a black fringe combed low on his wide smooth forehead. Their earnestness seemed designed to contradict his other features – nose snub enough to be accused of cuteness, inadvertently pouting mouth, face rounded by at least one additional chin. 'What was that supposed to be about,' he said, 'the scenic route?'

'The more they see the more they might buy,' Hugh thought and less distinctly said.

'I don't remember that in our mission manual.'

'Maybe I should put it in the suggestion box.'

'It'll have to wait. You've done enough wandering all over the show when you're meant to be stacking your shelves.' As Hugh felt his face grow patchy with resentment Justin said 'If there's any problem I should know about, I'm here.'

'It's you. It's how you take breaks whenever you think nobody's looking and suck up to management while other people are getting on with their work. And half the time you never finished a job so I had to finish it for you, and then you took all the credit and got the promotion I should have got.' Even if he found the nerve to say any of this, what would it achieve beyond losing him his job? 'I don't know my way around the new floor yet,' he said.

'Then you should have paid attention when we all walked through.' Justin expelled a breath that twitched a spider's leg of hair in its nasal burrow and said 'Better skedaddle back to your wine.'

For a moment Hugh forgot where the escalator was, and then he saw the restless rubber banister between two wardrobes at the far side of the maze of beds. As the lower floor spread into view, he was borne towards a customer leaning on a trolley and a stick in front of the poster for the month's wine promotion. The man wore a short-sleeved shirt, white except for the armpits, and trousers even more generously proportioned than himself. 'Where's this?' he greeted Hugh by asking.

'Happy to show you,' Hugh said by the book.

He could have imagined that excessively thin footsteps were accompanying the customer behind him, but of course the stick was. When he halted in front of the wine shelves at the far end of the widest aisle, the last rap sounded vigorous enough to be knocking on a trapdoor. 'What's your best deal?' the man said.

'Frugo's Own Extra Special White and Red Peruvian Sauvignon is half price this month, and there's an extra five per cent off six or more.'

'Give us a dozen. Make it red.'

Hugh planted six in the trolley, only to expose the empty shelf behind them. There were none among the cases he'd loaded onto his float in the stockroom. 'Let me see if we've got more,' he said and slapped his forehead harder than he meant to, having turned the wrong way along the aisle of soft drinks.

The door to the delivery lobby was beyond the bottled waters. The staff lift was empty except for a crumpled left-hand rubber glove resting on its wrist as if the shrivelled brown fingers were groping up through the stained floor. Nevertheless the windowless grey cage had scarcely begun its descent with a creak that sounded older than the building when someone muttered Hugh's name.

He twisted around so fast that his feet nearly tripped him. Of course he was alone, and the nearest thing to a speaker – the emergency phone embedded in the metal wall – was beside the controls to the right of the door. The voice had sounded less muffled than buried, and oddly directionless. It must have been on the public address system, calling him in the basement as well as through the store. He was still trying to identify it when the doors crept open.

The stockroom extended under the whole of the supermarket, but in every direction the view was obscured by boxes and cartons and cases piled higher than his head. Some of the gaps between the stacks of merchandise were so narrow that a single float blocked them. Cartons blinkered his vision as he stepped away from the lift, and he spent a few seconds trying to determine where liquid was dripping. It was the shrill blink of a faulty fluorescent tube across the room. 'Anyone in here?' he enquired as the lift shut with a surreptitious clunk. 'Was someone paging me?'

Although nobody responded, he had the impression that he wasn't alone in the basement. Why would any of his workmates refuse to answer? Perhaps they were up to something they would rather keep quiet – perhaps a couple of them were together. Hugh blushed as he lifted the phone from the wall beside the lift and used the intercom. 'This is Hugh. If anyone wants me I'm fetching from the stockroom.'

His own dislocated voice surrounded him. Although the speakers were up in the corners of the room, he could have thought he was hearing a stifled echo somewhere in the maze of merchandise. It distracted him enough that he forgot to end the call before replacing the receiver, and the amplified clatter filled the basement from four directions at once. The idea that Justin must have heard his incompetence made his face hotter, and for a moment he didn't know which way to turn.

The wine was stored at the back, extending from the left corner. He dodged through the maze as fast as he could, because the room felt cold as stone that had never been touched by the sun. The concrete floor, which was grubby with shadows, appeared to be shivering on his behalf. It owed its eager instability to the twittering of the light, which also made the cartons that hid his section restless. Their hulking shadows kept up a primitive dance along the adjacent wall, in the refrigerator cabinets full of Frugo Fusion items for the delicatessen: Fruit Dim Sum, Chicken Tikka Masala Pizza, Thai Style Sushi, Tandoori Smoky Bacon, Black Pudding Pizza, Gnocchi Stroganoff, Gumbo Pizza . . . Sweet 'n' Sour Steak 'n' Kidney Pie had been withdrawn for lack of popularity, though it might be relaunched with a shorter title. Hugh had to clear his head of the clamour of names before he was able to locate a case of Peruvian Red in the middle of a stack.

He was replacing the cases he'd had to shift when he seemed to sense movement nearby. He could see nothing new over his shoulder, even if the piles of cartons looked anxious to topple, undermined by the unsteadiness that the light imparted to the floor. Hoisting the case of wine, he tried to take the most direct route to the lift, but more than one aisle was blocked by wheeled floats. He was somewhere in the middle of the labyrinth of merchandise when he heard his name.

It was much closer than any of the corners of the room, yet he couldn't tell where. It felt directionless enough to be inside his head. Was the mutterer hiding to one side of him or behind him or beyond one of any number of stacks of boxes in front of him? Hugh could have imagined it was beneath him, and when he glanced at the floor it seemed to stir like troubled mud. Only shadows did, but he still recoiled, and the weight of the case propelled him several extra steps backwards until he stumbled aside. The stockroom felt colder than ever, as if all the refrigerators had opened wide, and he fought to overcome his shivering so as not to drop the wine. He hitched the case higher on his chest and made to step forwards, and then he realised that he couldn't see the lift. Indeed, he no longer knew where it was.

Had he turned around? As soon as he did, he didn't know how far. He was surrounded by boxed barbecues that helped emphasise the subterranean chill. He hugged the case and glared about at stack after stack upon stack of boxes standing monolithically inert. The longer he stood there the heavier the case would grow, but he felt as if its weight and his disorientation were capable of paralysing him. Surely he ought to be able to work out his position by locating the different lines of stock, except that his growing panic seemed to flatten all meaning out of the descriptions on the cartons, which might have been printed in an unknown language. He had to move, and so he staggered sidelong away from the nervous light, only to realise that he no longer knew which side of the oppressively crowded room he was making for.

He hadn't felt so helplessly trapped inside his brittle skull since discovering that he was useless as a teacher, when less than a fortnight in front of a classful of teenagers apparently determined to break him had left him terrified even to get out of bed. That was as near to a breakdown as he ever wanted to venture, and he'd given up his place at training college to seek another job, any job. However dismaying his failure had been, the vindictiveness that had caused him to fail was worse, and now he felt surrounded by a version of it that resembled a memory he very much preferred not to revive. The concepts of left and right had deserted him, and the ideas of ahead and behind were losing significance. He couldn't see the lift when he dodged to one side and then to the other while the jerky light plucked at his vision as though encouraging him to prance back and forth, to lose his way even more thoroughly. Nothing made sense outside his skull, and that was a dark cramped place in which he had no idea where to turn. He was clutching the wine to his chest, both for fear of dropping it and because its solidity was the nearest thing to even a hint of reassurance, when he heard a voice.

He pivoted towards the side of the room where its owner was lurking, whichever side that was. As he regained his hold on the case of wine, which had almost slipped from his aching arms, the muffled voice was answered by another. Both were female, unlike the one he'd previously heard. 'Where are you?' he shouted.

They didn't acknowledge him, unless their amusement did. Hugh sidled a few paces, which only aggravated the confusion all around him. 'What's funny?' he protested. 'Why won't you show yourselves?'

His panic might have driven even Hugh beyond politeness if the girls from the cosmetics section hadn't strolled into view at the end of an aisle. He could have taken them for contestants in a slimming competition, not to mention one for blondeness. Tamara turned sideways to hold a round-bottomed pose for a second. 'Seen enough, Hugh Lucas?'

Without copying the posture Mishel said 'That's all we're showing of ourselves to you.'

'I didn't mean that,' Hugh declared, but his vehemence didn't stop his face from growing hot and, he knew, mottled. 'Who was calling?'

The girls stared at him and even more incredulously at each other. 'You were,' Tamara said.

'I don't mean just now. Who was saying my name?'

'On the intercom?' Mishel said with every appearance of concern.

'I suppose.'

The girls burst out laughing. When she could Tamara said 'That was you.'

'I didn't mean then,' Hugh pleaded, sidling to keep the girls in sight as they lost interest in him and returned to the aisle they'd emerged from. In a moment he saw why their voices had started out muffled. The girls hadn't been hiding from him. They'd been in the lift, which was beyond them.

He dashed along the aisle as if the case of wine were dragging him. He kept his gaze on the metal doors while he jabbed the button and struggled to hold onto the case and poked the button again. When the doors parted at last he staggered in and leaned on the case against the wall as he groped to send the lift upwards. He was labouring to face them when they opened once more, revealing the lobby and Justin. 'Where did you get to?' Justin demanded. 'I've been having to hold your customer.'

'I couldn't find –'

'Just give me that.'

Justin seized the case and drummed his fingers on it while Hugh typed the exit code on the keypad by the door. As he marched out, Hugh was at his heels. 'There you are,' the customer said in case Hugh needed to be told. 'We thought you'd got lost.'

'Sorry,' Hugh blurted.

'No need to go red in the face about it. He's the one doing the carrying.'

'Plenty of shelving whenever you're ready,' Justin said.

At least Hugh's resentment overcame his panic as he returned to his shelves. If he found out who'd been trying to distract him he would bring their behaviour to the attention of the management, although shouldn't it have been noticed? The incident was so much like a dream that he ought to be able to put it out of his mind. Once Justin ushered the customer to the Loads o' Loaves aisle Hugh managed to give up his grudge too. He was close to emptying the float onto the shelves, and feeling as if he'd regained the control he had inexplicably lost, when Justin reappeared. 'Fancy being helpful?' he said.

'I think I am.'

'Well, here's your chance to prove it.' Justin looked satisfied with his quip. 'We're losing Selma from edibles. Ate a left-over roll she should have binned at the end of trading, and you know that's the instant sack.' He stared at Hugh as if to emphasise a warning. 'You'll be taking over tinned foods,' he said. 'Just don't start taking after your brother.'