The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  Hat looked up thoughtfully from a ledger. ‘Tell him to fuck off,’ he said pleasantly. Jane noticed that Kevin showed no surprise at this and quickly left.

  ‘The washroom’s in there, by the way,’ he said, gesturing at what looked like a broom cupboard.

  ‘Won’t my coming and going frighten your customers?’

  ‘It depends what you were thinking of doing to them, I Suppose. What did you have in mind?’

  ‘When I came down here by accident once . . .’

  ‘Yeah, Gordon told me you were in here buying. We give a staff discount,’ he said. ‘More than generous.’

  ‘The customers who saw me looked a bit put off. Ashamed, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, you won’t need to come in and out that often, and they don’t look up much when they start on the magazines. Half of them are in a world of their own. Clear as mud now, is it?’ he said, nodding at the books on the table.

  ‘It might take a little while. Your Mrs Fitzgerald seems to have had her own system. I’m sure I’ll manage.’

  ‘Great! Best be off. God knows what those sponge-brains are up to. Call me if you need anything. I’ll get Kevin to bring you a coffee.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He went out, leaving the door ajar. As he reached the top of the stairs she heard him bellowing at Gordon for not having the initiative to open the shop. She shut the door, deciding that whatever it was she was doing here could wait, and turned to the accounts.

  After an hour she revised her opinion of the difficulty of dealing with Trevor Hat’s financial affairs. Her predecessor had devised an entirely eccentric way of tracking the financial doings of the business. Jane was used to dealing with the most complicated forms of accounting, but whatever Mrs Fitzgerald had been up to was still opaque. She had devised a system that only nodded in the direction of conventional ways of accounting.

  ‘Keeping busy?’ Hat put his head around the door, letting in the sound of customers from the next room.

  ‘This is going to take a while, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out. Did you get your coffee?’

  ‘Ah.’ She realised as she expressed hesitancy that someone was going to collect one of Hat’s bollockings. Her decision to lie was pre-empted by Hat shouting over his shoulder for Kevin, who appeared with an appalled look on his face.

  ‘Anything wrong, Trevor?’

  ‘I told you’, said Hat softly, ‘to bring Mrs Percy a cup of coffee and you didn’t do it, did you, Kevin?’

  ‘No, Trevor.’

  ‘Why was that, Kevin? Why did you deliberately disobey a direct instruction from the person who pays your wages? Why do you insult me every fucking moment of the fucking day?’

  ‘Sorry, Trevor.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Don’t insult me again, boy. How old are you? Well?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Nineteen . . .’ he said and repeated it, ‘. . . nineteen . . .’ as if he could barely believe the existence of such a number. ‘You’re nineteen and you’re insulting me every fucking day.’ His voice changed down a gear.

  ‘Give me the knife, Kevin.’

  ‘What?’ said the startled boy.

  ‘Give me the knife.’

  ‘What knife, Trevor?’

  Hat looked at him, mystified. ‘You’re telling me that you’ve decided to be nineteen and to insult Trevor Hat every day of your working life and you haven’t got a knife?’

  ‘No, Trevor.’

  ‘Then I forgive you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I forgive you, and I forgive you because you’ve got diminished responsibility. You must’ve been starved of oxygen at birth . . . WELL?’ he screamed.

  ‘Yes, Trevor.’

  Trevor grabbed him by the front of his shirt and slammed him against the wall. ‘Now go and get Mrs Percy a cup of coffee. Do you take milk, Mrs Percy?’ he said, through gritted teeth.

  ‘A little, please,’ said Jane. She had no idea what else to do other than act as if nothing unusual were happening.

  ‘And do you take sugar?’

  ‘One, thank you.’

  ‘There you are, then, Kevin. A cup of coffee with a little milk and one spoonful of sugar. Do you think you can manage that?’

  ‘Yes, Trevor.’

  ‘Because if you can’t you only have to tell me, Kevin.’

  ‘Yes, Trevor,’ said Kevin, wild-eyed with horror. Hat seemed to feel that Kevin had fallen sufficiently far down whatever gradient of humiliation he felt appropriate and let go of his shirt. He reached behind the boy’s skinny back and shoved him towards the door. He turned to Jane. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘I thought you were going to disembowel him.’

  ‘Not that,’ he said, impatient. ‘I’m sorry about the coffee.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t that important.’

  Hat breathed in with an air of injured hauteur. ‘This is a service industry. My customers come to me for one reason. I’m not joking. It’s the service. They can get harder stuff in Soho. Give me five minutes and twenty pounds and I’ll be back with things it’d sicken you to look at. And I could exchange it for ten pound a throw. The real thing, even in Soho, the home of the rip-off. But my shop is always full and theirs aren’t. It’s always full upstairs because I give them what they want up there: good books, interesting books, I read them myself, at a good price. And down here I give them what they want as well. They don’t want to be ashamed. I see them coming out of a nasty sex shop doorway in Soho like little rabbits. They go in ashamed and they come out even more ashamed than when they went in. Would you go to Marks & Spencer if you were ashamed to go in when you could go somewhere else and not be ashamed?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t. But when they come into Hat’s, they come into a proper bookstore with good books on display. So they’re not ashamed to come in and go out. My ambition used to be to make this place the Marks & Spencer of adult erotica. Not any more. They forgot the customer is king. At Hat’s the customer is always king. I’ll give them total quality fucking management. At Hat’s we don’t rip ’em off, we don’t charge ’em a quid for two baking potatoes wrapped up in a bit of foam, and clingfilm. That’s when the rot set in at Marks & Sparks. I let my customers look at the magazines, let them see what they’re buying so they won’t be disappointed when they get home and they’ll come back to Hat’s and buy again. Repeat business, a customer base, that’s what it’s all about. You want to see some real retail management? I’m not putting you on, you just keep your eyes open.’

  Keeping her eyes open, however, was exactly what she intended to do. In practice it was not that easy. Attempting to reconstruct Mrs Fitzgerald’s peculiar ways of thinking about the world of numbers involved too much time.

  At the end of the day she would often browse around the bookshelves upstairs, a part of Hat’s business that returned a solid profit as far as she could tell from the badly kept ledgers. Despite the usually interesting selections, she was not really looking at the books. She moved around the shelves for ten minutes or so watching the men as they went down and came up from the basement. Despite several of these vigils, she’d failed to work out what they had in common. Certainly it was not their appearance. Some were badly dressed in cheap suits with cheap briefcases in which to hide their purchases; and they had poor haircuts and worn skin with a clear sense of defeat about them. Others were young, good-looking and even stylishly dressed. There were at least as many men in their twenties and thirties as there were the middle-aged types she had expected. Oddly, there were few men over fifty. Sometimes there were women accompanied by men; on rare occasions a woman came on her own.

  In general, however, the unexpected difficulty involved in sorting out the tangled accounts meant that she had to concentrate on the work she was being paid for and opportunities to observe the men in the next room were rare, though she had no clear idea what she was looking for any
way. Trevor’s three assistants weren’t going to be of much help: whenever she tried to question them they either went blank or just parroted what she took to be Trevor’s opinions.

  ‘They’re all gonks,’ said Neil, with total contempt, ‘ugly bastards who can’t get a real woman. I’m sorry I have to look at their ugly mugs all day.’ Gordon joined in the disapproval. ‘Thank Christ they’ve usually got their disgusting noses in one of the mags. What a bunch of wankers.’

  She realised that Neil’s dismissal was partly for her benefit, that he was anxious to disssociate himself in her eyes from the men next door. Why this might be so puzzled her, but she began to suspect that he was not just being chirpy, he was chatting her up in a mild way. She was aware, for example, that when she bent forward to pick up the cup of coffee that he, rather than Kevin, now usually brought her, he would always try to look down the front of her blouse. Perhaps, she thought, it was just habit; he’d probably done the same to Mrs Fitzgerald, who had been in her mid-sixties when she died. Now that she looked at him he was quite a handsome boy. In his early twenties with a moustache, a wispy, unconvincing attempt to appear older. He dressed carefully but his shirts, always worn outside his trousers and always immaculately pressed, were horribly ornate. His hair was cut too severely, with a kind of circular fringe that did nothing for his best feature: his dark brown eyes.

  As it turned out, Gordon had definitely not borrowed his opinions about the shop’s customers from Trevor, or at least had not borrowed them in the right way. One Friday evening about three weeks after she’d started at Hat’s she had stayed behind to start looking over Trevor’s tax affairs. She had left the door open and could see Gordon sitting behind the tall desk in the bookshop overseeing the customers. They were two deep, sometimes three, because it was the weekend and, presumably, this was the way many of them wound down from the rigours of the previous five days. She moved closer to the door to spy on them. It was so crowded that a few stood forlornly in the middle of the room unable to reach the magazines because of the wall of men in front of them blocking their access. They just stood there, looking at the covers that now mocked them. They became increasingly awkward, as if not doing what they had come to and yet being so close to doing it made them painfully aware of the indignity they were inflicting on themselves. A place at the wall was clearly precious and not to be given up unless a place nearer to where they wanted to go could be swapped for the space they already occupied. A kind of dance emerged in which those at the wall would swap with one another in such a way as to keep out those behind them who had nothing to offer in return for a place. The intense overcrowding seemed to clarify something she had begun to notice as she walked up and down between the two floors and peeked from behind her door. There was some kind of search going on. When it was crowded, the men had to start wherever a space was available – say, the section devoted to women with large breasts, or leather and rubber wear. They would then move around the room, sometimes missing out a section in which they had no interest, but generally scanning the whole collection. Each magazine was examined quickly, but with great care. So careful were they that if they missed a page, they would go back and check it. There were therefore few quick visits. It became clear after she saw them going through this intricate ritual on so many occasions that a specific search was going on, as if on a previous visit they had left an object of immense value in one of the magazines: money, a letter of significance or incriminating evidence. There was no contact between the customers, no one said anything or acknowledged the presence of another except in the peculiar shuffle, like bees signalling the presence of water to the hive, that indicated they wanted to swap places. The men trapped behind would try to take advantage of their movement but would usually be frustrated. Those at the wall seemed as disciplined at holding the line as Roman soldiers in a phalanx. These were professionals.

  ‘Come on, gentlemen,’ sneered Gordon loudly, ‘make your selections – this isn’t a library.’ But it was, thought Jane, it was like a reference library in an ancient university packed with scholars searching for a reference whose source was on the tip of their tongue. And it was the quiet of dedication, desperate though it was, that Gordon had brutalised. As he spoke there was an almost universal start, as of rabbits at an unfamiliar noise. Immediately the room began to break up. Some grabbed books and rushed to buy, but the ones he had scared most left immediately, looking away from him as if anxious that he should not remember them. Suddenly Trevor thundered down the stairs, Kevin at his back.

  ‘I want you,’ said Trevor, clearly angry. He grabbed Gordon by the elbow and pulled him towards Jane’s office, so swiftly that she barely had time to sit down.

  Trevor marched in dragging the white-faced Gordon behind him. He pushed him to the other wall. ‘Sorry, Mrs Percy, but this pony-tailed bastard is trying to destroy my business and I want to know why. Well?’ he yelled at Gordon.

  ‘What have I done?’ wailed the desperate Gordon.

  ‘UN-BE-LIEV-ABLE!’ screamed Trevor. ‘Are you fucking stupid, or what? No one ever – EVER! – tells my customers to hurry up. Do you savvy? Do you?’

  ‘Yes, Trevor,’ said Gordon, shaking his head to underline his total surrender.

  ‘This is a real shop, dickhead, and I don’t want you turning it into a sleazy porn outfit run by fucking pimps who think it’s smart to turn their customers over by ripping them off and treating them with contempt. Is that what you’re trying to do? Because if you are, you know where the fucking door is.’ Gordon started to speak but Trevor seemed to regard his ability not to drop dead on the spot as a deliberately provocative act of outrageous insubordination. ‘Don’t insult me!’ screamed Trevor. ‘Get out!’

  Gordon, now gopher-eyed with terror, fled, melting around the formidable figure of his boss without obliging him to move. When he had gone Jane, appalled but now secure that Hat would not speak to her in this way, felt it safe enough to point out how crowded the basement had been. Trevor’s reply was calm and polite. ‘Don’t think I haven’t tried to explain. I try to give these boys the benefits of my philosophy, but they never listen. It drives me crazy. I learned to stop using my wide-boy routines with the customers years ago. On my own I might add – I didn’t have anyone to inspire me.’ This was said with a mixture of indignation and loss. ‘But I tell them every day: your customer is king. He may also be a miserable little wanker but if he wasn’t you wouldn’t have a job. But does it go in? No.’

  ‘But surely it was too crowded,’ said Jane, perplexed at his obvious concern over customers he always spoke of with unmitigated contempt. ‘And they weren’t buying much. He only said it wasn’t a library.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Trevor with distaste, ‘that’s what he said, was it? Lippy bastard.’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  He looked at her with tolerant condescension. ‘It doesn’t matter what he said. I knew everything I needed to know by a trail of gonks coming out of the basement instead of a trail of gonks going down – the way it should be on a Friday at six forty-five. It was like the retreat from fucking Moscow up there. There were . . . what? . . . fifteen customers out of there in two and a half minutes. I lost eighty or ninety quid because of that bird-brained pillock Gordon.’

  ‘But they weren’t buying anything, most of them,’ she said, bewildered.

  He breathed out heavily in exasperation. ‘Look, you’re supposed to be an expert with numbers. I’ve got it all worked out. I did it years ago. I timed the gonks for a week, y’ know, to find out how long an average customer took to buy a mag. Put it this way, for every twenty minutes browsing, they buy one mag. I’ve brought the buying time down over the years – it used to be more like twenty-seven minutes. Anyway, the more twenty-minute periods you pack into a day the more you sell. And you don’t sell magazines by frightening the gonks or making them feel ashamed. Would you buy your clothes at a shop where they made you feel ashamed? Would you go back? I know, I already asked you before.’

&n
bsp; ‘They look ashamed to me,’ she said.

  ‘Of course they’re ashamed. So they bloody should be – but it’s my job to make ’em feel as good about being here as I can. Then they’ll buy more.’

  ‘Like Marks & Spencer.’

  ‘You may laugh,’ he said quietly, ‘but it’s just the same. They don’t care about their customers at Marks & Spencer. If they cared, they’d all be social workers or have buggered off to Calcutta to join up with Mother Teresa’s mob. If they really cared about their customers they wouldn’t rip them off just because there are enough dickbrains wandering around the aisles without the sense to realise that a pound for two baking potatoes wrapped in cling film and foam is fucking daylight robbery. What they care about is their customers’ money. But they forgot that people aren’t totally stupid even when they’re being led by the dick, like here. People get fed up of being taken for granted. Marks & Spencer thought that just because some of their customers were stupid enough to want to pay fifty pence for a fucking potato, then fuck ’em, that’s what we’ll do. And look what happened. Hero to fucking zero in a couple of years. So we treat our customers with respect even if the dodgy little creeps don’t deserve it. Only M & S don’t have to put up with gits like Gordon.’ He paused and when he spoke again it was in a mildly inquisitive tone as if the previous ten minutes had been utterly erased from his memory. ‘How’s it going with the books?’

  ‘These figures are peculiar,’ said Jane. ‘I can’t make them out yet.’

  Trevor sucked his teeth and wiped his hands over his scalp. ‘Bloody hell, don’t tell me old Ma Fitzgerald had her fingers in the till. It’d destroy my faith in human nature.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘You think I don’t have any?’ said Trevor. ‘I know you think I’m just a lowlife with a porn shop and a bad temper,’ he winked at her, ‘but I’m not all bad.’

  ‘Perhaps I should ask Gordon what he thinks.’

  Trevor laughed and turned to go then changed his mind and turned back. ‘You don’t think she was ripping me off, do you?’