The Things We Learn When We're Dead

by Charlie Laidlaw

  Yet for the most part, despite the normal grumbles, the rest of the HappyMart family seemed quite content to be there. Maggie, for example, a little overweight and who didn’t like to stack the lower shelves in case she did her back in, said that it was the best job she’d ever had. As Maggie was in her mid-forties, Lorna couldn’t imagine how bad her other jobs must have been; but Maggie hummed as she worked, and was always smiling. Then there was Vlad, a good-looking boy from Poland, who was lucky to possess a healthy sense of humour since he had to listen cheerfully to Impaler jokes every day. His girlfriend, also Polish, had an utterly improbable first name, with lots of ‘z’s and ‘w’s, but had a badge which read GOSIA. Lorna noted how easy it had been to procure VLAD and GOSIA badges from the small tools and personnel drawer, and how difficult a replacement the LORNA badge seemed to be. She wondered if this was Mike’s revenge for turning his advances down. There was also a nervous young single mother called Steph who the others said was secretly mad, although Lorna saw no evidence of it, and nobody could say why they’d reached this conclusion.

  On Saturday morning, just before eight o’clock, Lorna stood impatiently on the pavement as a series of locks were unlocked and, with metallic protest, a thick steel grille, the size and strength of a blast door, thought Lorna, ratcheted upwards. Then there was the inner glass door to open and a complex alarm system to deactivate. The code for this was Top Secret and known only to a select handful of employees, of whom Lorna wasn’t one. Once inside, Lorna braved the staffroom to change her fleece for the company’s smock, then busied herself with inventories, delivery schedules, and floats for the tills. Other members of staff had now arrived; mostly part-timers like her, but ones who only worked at weekends.

  Would Lorna please report to the manager’s office. Thank you.

  Mike’s voice, seeming to come from every surface of the shop. Lorna swallowed her irritation. His office was next door to the staffroom and all he’d had to do was open his door and ask her himself.

  She knocked and went into the holy sanctum – little more than a large cupboard – to find Mike behind the rickety desk that took up most of one side of the office and was surrounded by boxes, mostly cartons of cigarettes. A battered steel filing cabinet and plastic chair were the only other items of furniture. There was a laptop open on his desk, switched off, and beside it, a tannoy system with a microphone on a flexible steel tube. Hung from the ceiling were two TV sets, which relayed CCTV pictures from inside the shop. Lorna could see Maggie filling the top shelves of the bakery section, Vlad stacking bread rolls into the lower shelves.

  Like the staffroom, Mike’s office had a small window overlooking the car park but, unlike the proletariat’s, his didn’t need a plank of wood to keep it open. A warm breeze sighed through the open window as Mike motioned her to sit down. He appeared to be reading a manila file which on closer inspection had her name on it. Being management, he was allowed the luxury of a crisp white shirt, with HappyMart stencilled on the right breast, and a green tie. However, being of Auntie Meg proportions, his shirt buttons were straining alarmingly and his collar was too small to fasten. It wasn’t a good advertisement for the company.

  ‘Thank you, Lorna, for coming to see me.’

  ‘That’s all right, I was here anyway.’

  Mike looked at her sharply, then put down the closed manila file on his desk. ‘Thing is, I’ve got some rather exciting news to impart to you.’ He sat back as he said this, nearly toppling into a large box of Sterling Superkings and looked pleased with himself.

  Lorna’s heart sank. She just wanted to pay her rent; exciting news from HappyMart was superfluous to requirements. ‘I’m all ears,’ she replied brightly.

  Mike again looked at her sharply and leaned over the table, giving his shirt buttons some respite. ‘You’ve been here a while now, haven’t you?’

  Lorna nodded warily, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘And you’ve been ... how shall I put this? ... an exemplary employee. Always punctual, always reliable. A credit to our family.’ Christ! thought Lorna, at the mention of family, her heart sinking further still. I’m about to be baptised with baked beans. ‘Which is why,’ Mike continued, ‘I would like to be the first to offer my congratulations.’

  Lorna had been wondering how Mike managed to circumnavigate his desk to sit behind it, or whether he had to climb over it to reach his switched-off laptop. ‘Thank you,’ she said after a few moments. ‘Um, for what exactly?’

  ‘On your second star.’

  ‘My ... what?’

  ‘You have been a checkout operator long enough, Lorna,’ said Mike, and with a flourish, handed an envelope over the desk. She opened it to find a single plastic gold star nestling inside. ‘From now on, you are a checkout supervisor!’

  Below LAURA’s badge was stuck one gold star. On Mike’s badge were four gold stars, denoting his great rank.

  ‘Does it come with a company car?’ she asked, trying to decide if her heart could sink any lower and concluding that it had reached rock bottom.

  ‘A modest hourly pay rise,’ Mike replied, looking pained, thinking perhaps that Lorna should be turning cartwheels round his cupboard or, better still, kissing him on both cheeks, ‘and the satisfaction of knowing you’ve earned it.’

  ‘Well, put like that ... thank you,’ she said. ‘May I?’ She indicated her badge.

  Mike leaned back in his chair, again stretching his buttons to breaking point, and looking at her like a kindly father on Christmas morning, his young offspring about to open the best present ever. Lorna stuck on her second star, wondering how generals felt when they stuck on theirs.

  Mike stood up and reached one arm over the table. Lorna took his hand, muttering thank you several times as tears prickled her eyes. She should be happy; other people would be happy. Her mother’s bakery apron didn’t have any stars on it. His handshake was limp and moist and Lorna had to resist the temptation to wipe her hand down the side of her trousers.

  ‘Perhaps we could celebrate later?’ suggested Mike, ever-hopeful, and raised an eyebrow.

  Back in the shop, Maggie asked what the pow-wow had been about. ‘Not been fired, have you? Shit, that wouldn’t be good.’

  Lorna indicated her badge.

  ‘Fuck me!’ said Maggie. ‘You’ve been promoted! Here, Vlad, look at this! Little Miss Clever’s been made a fucking supervisor!’

  Lorna sat bleakly behind her checkout, wondering what her supervisory duties entailed, if they were any – Mike hadn’t mentioned anything – now fully aware what the other members of the HappyMart family called her behind her back. For a few minutes, it was all she could do to stop herself crying. The others would have thought they were tears of joy, and she couldn’t have faced that humiliation. A second star! And only working part-time! Well done, girl! No need to cry! Wish I could get a second star! She was also aware of the CCTV camera at the front of the shop, relaying black-and-white pictures back to Mike’s office. Perhaps he was looking at them now, the kindly father looking after his flock, and abruptly she pushed back her little swivel chair and marched outside for a cigarette. She badly needed to regain some composure and fill her lungs with something more wholesome than Mike’s body odour.

  * * *

  For the rest of the day, she glumly beep-beeped through her customers’ groceries, not playing the game, not bothering to deconstruct peoples’ lives from chocolate biscuits, tea bags, and buy-one-get-one-free washing powder. She only had to stare down one youth who, playing with his MP3 player, expected his cigarettes, vodka, and cans of lager to be bagged for him. Seeing the look on her face, he’d hurriedly packed them himself, making Lorna feel marginally better. None of her regulars commented on her second gold star. It probably wasn’t something anybody noticed. As the day wore on, it seemed as time itself had slowed down; she would look at the wall clock over Mike’s door and, when she looked again what seemed hours later, only a minute would have passed.

  During her indu
ction to HappyMart, KEVIN had explained the corporate ethos behind the franchise and its slogan Where The Price Is Always Happy! It was a brand, he explained, that represented good value, a brand in touch with the aspirations of ordinary people. More than anything, he explained, it was a brand that reached out to today’s shoppers, whoever they were. Our corporate colours, he explained, represent the colours of the rainbow, from dawn to sunset, of different people within the HappyMart family working together within one integrated whole – a new concept of retail modernity, he continued, now reading word for word from a company leaflet, and obviously not convinced by the seemingly random splodges of colour that represented their corporate identity. Lorna looked at the small smattering of customers in the shop. There was an old man in a grey mackintosh whose only purchase, nestling at the bottom of his wire basket, was a jumbo packet of sausages. In aisle three, a rather large young mother had bought ice-cream and chocolate cake. Her baby daughter slept serenely in a pushchair. In aisle four, an elderly lady in a tweed coat was humming loudly to herself, and had been staring at a freezer cabinet of frozen vegetables for several minutes. The HappyMart family, staff and customers alike, often seemed to Lorna to be equally dysfunctional.

  ‘Babe!’

  Lorna looked up from her reverie to find Suzie standing beside her checkout, the first time her friend had ever braved the shop. ‘Lorna, I’ve got news!’

  Lorna pointed to her badge.

  ‘Oh right,’ said Suzie. ‘Laura, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry, people are always confusing us. Peas in a pod, we are. If you like, I could pass on a message?’ she suggested.

  ‘Thank you, Laura. Anyway, I’d be so grateful if you could tell Lorna that I got the part.’ Suzie started to jump up and down and clap her hands, something that MIKE had obviously spotted on his TV monitor because he was now outside his cupboard door and looking over. ‘They want me, babe! I got the part!’

  By then, Lorna was on Suzie’s side of the checkout, both girls jumping up and down and squealing. The elderly customer in the mackintosh, now clutching a packet of digestive biscuits to accompany his sausages, stood forlorn and unnoticed, a banknote in his hand. ‘Oh God, Suzie. Great! Fantastic! Well done!’

  Suzie stopped jumping and held Lorna’s shoulders in both hands. ‘We must drink wine and celebrate!’ she intoned loudly in a French accent, now holding up one hand and placing the other across her chest – Suzie’s utterly unconvincing Napoleon impression.

  ‘But it’s not four o’clock, Suze ...’

  Suzie didn’t bother looking at her watch. ‘It is now, sweetie.’

  Click

  Lorna was barely able to change out of her smock and into her fleece before Suzie had swept her out of the HappyMart and marched her into central Edinburgh and into The Broadway, a basement cocktail bar much favoured by Suzie, dimly lit by candles that had melted over bottles. Drinking cocktails was one of Suzie’s affectations, one she had adopted before even leaving school and, although Lorna didn’t much care for them, it was Suzie who was paying and had the right therefore to choose where they would start the process of getting ‘utterly shit-faced, babe’. First impressions of The Broadway weren’t good. It smelled unpleasantly like MIKE’s office.

  ‘Death by Cointreau?’

  ‘Yuck!’ Lorna pulled a face.

  ‘Vampire’s Bite?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hm. Mostly vodka and tomato juice. A bit Bloody Maryish, with a splash of Jamaican rum, Tia Maria ...’

  Lorna’s mouth puckered to a sour oval. ‘God, no! Isn’t there anything remotely drinkable?’

  ‘There’s Arthur’s Quest.’ In the bad light, Suzie had to squint at the menu. ‘A subtle blend of whisky and green ginger ...’

  ‘No!’ Lorna shuddered.

  ‘Or a Passionate Knight, perhaps? Something to really get you going. Apparently.’

  ‘Is that with a “k” or an “n”?’

  ‘K’

  ‘Ah well, just as long as he takes his armour off first. What is it?’

  ‘Lots of gin and Bacardi.’ Suzie looked doubtful, then brightened. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘I suppose,’ conceded Lorna.

  ‘Suppose nothing!’ commanded Suzie.

  She returned to their table with two brimming bowls of opaque liquid topped with spreading foliage and, inserted through a slice of lemon, a red umbrella. ‘Bottoms up,’ said Lorna, and tentatively sipped from her oversize glass. ‘God, it tastes as awful as it sounds.’

  Suzie patted her on the knee and sipped from her bowl. ‘Actually, it’s not that bad. It just takes a bit of getting used to.’

  ‘It’s ghastly, Suze!’

  ‘Well, it’s Saturday night and cocktails are perfect for getting pissed.’ Her long fingers wrapped round the glass and she winked across the table.

  ‘It’s still afternoon by my watch,’ said Lorna, and was momentarily distracted by laughter from the next table as a tray of exotic cocktails was brought across by a tall man in leather trousers. Some were in the same goldfish bowls that Lorna and Suzie were drinking from, others in impossibly long flutes. One of their glasses had a lit sparkler that fizzed brightly in the dim bar. Lorna saw that several of the other men in the group were wearing leather trousers.

  Lorna leaned across the table. ‘And you’ve taken me to a gay bar!’

  Suzie shrugged, having obviously never given it much thought, and finished her glass. ‘Drink up, petal. We’ve got Arthur’s Quest to try next.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be any worse than this,’ said Lorna, looking cagily about and hoping there was nobody she knew there.

  ‘I suspect it could be quite a lot worse,’ replied Suzie. ‘You really don’t like cocktails, do you?’

  ‘Suzie, you know I don’t like cocktails,’ she said, tasting a strange mixture of alcohol on her tongue and reaching for a cigarette. ‘What exactly is Demon’s Revenge?’

  Much later, they ended up at a champagne bar in Leith, which looked out over a disused wharf on which floated crisp packets and plastic bottles. It was a part of Edinburgh’s gentrification: redundant warehouses finding new leases of life as up-market homes; old streets being reinvented with gastro-pubs and themed restaurants. How or why they came to be there Lorna couldn’t remember the next morning. It was probably somewhere that Suzie had been recommended. On first inspection, it was much like The Broadway; the same candles melting over bottles, lots of exposed brickwork, and bare wooden flooring. The candles did little to lift its reverential gloom, and Lorna almost had to feel her way to the bar, her feet sliding in sawdust.

  Suzie was already there and drumming her fingers impatiently on the counter. ‘Who do I have to sleep with to get a drink around here?’ she demanded.

  Suzie was more than a little drunk and alarmingly loud, even by her standards, and immediately there was frozen silence. A dozen heads turned in their direction. It did, however, attract the attention of the barman, a spotty youth with lank hair who had been leaning on the counter and chatting to a couple of customers. He rushed down from the other end of the bar, his face flushed.

  ‘That would be me,’ he offered hopefully with an encouraging smile. His encrusted face looked like the surface of the moon.

  ‘In which case,’ said Suzie, enunciating clearly and brushing back hair, ‘we’ll have a bottle of house champagne and two glasses. Oh, and peanuts. Might as well push the boat out,’ she said over her shoulder. Lorna was wishing she was invisible.

  They found a corner seat, looking out onto dark water. Across the disused dock was a building site, with long shadows and a tall crane. Through the shadows she could discern an advertising hoarding, announcing the imminent arrival of two and three bedroom executive apartments. Lorna wondered when an apartment could be considered executive. Were factory workers allowed to live in an executive apartment?

  ‘Just in case I haven’t said it already, congratulations,’ said Lorna, for about the hundredth time.

 
It wasn’t exactly a starring role but Suzie would have her name in the credits. Much further up the pecking order were Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant. She’d been on tenterhooks throughout their Greek holiday, but had heard nothing and assumed the worst. Then, that morning, out of the blue, an assistant producer had phoned to give her the good news. Filming was due to start and Suzie was required immediately.

  ‘Just don’t do anything stupid,’ said Lorna.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like sleeping with him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think? Hugh Grant.’

  Suzie thought for a minute. ‘Is that the best advice you can come up with?’

  ‘It’s the only advice I can come up with.’ Lorna was aware that this had emerged as one long blurred word. ‘He does have a reputation,’ she added slowly, enunciating each word, as if she regularly read Hello! magazine.

  Suzie had spilled most of her glass on the table but seemed oblivious, planting one elbow in the pool of liquid and holding her almost-empty glass at a precarious angle.

  Squinting through befuddled eyes, Lorna saw a younger Suzie: the Suzie who liked horse riding and ballet. Her parents had bought her a part share in a dappled mare that Suzie would gallop through waves on Gullane beach. Lorna remembered her singing along to Mariah Carey with a hairbrush, the volume turned to seismic, gyrating her hips and jumping around her bedroom until her mother came upstairs and told her to shut up, a not uncommon occurrence. She was big into Vanilla Ice, and Bryan Adams’ ‘Everything I Do’ would make her cry. Where had the years gone? In between, Lorna had read books, learned maths and English, then precedent and jurisprudence, hunched over their Arthuria Road kitchen table while, from Suzie’s bedroom, the bass notes of her latest rock group, and the familiar sound of Suzie jumping about, this time without a mother to tell her to shut up, sometimes alone, sometimes with Pete, or Dan, or Rob, or Carlo, or once a wiry Chinese boy called Dennis. And those were the ones she could remember, which was hard, now that the bar had begun to spin like a fairground roundabout.