Nobody has attempted to remove them, to clean them off, as though they still have some mystical value, some symbolic link to the label itself—the most valuable part. Disappointed, she replaces the bottle, and as she glances around the near-empty shop she realizes that the missing label is actually the center of all this, of what’s happening here. This isn’t so much a thriving, defiant artisan economy as a desperate clinging to the past, a once-significant tribal ritual still guiltily rehearsed by repentant believers, sneaking back into the same temple where they burned all the icons.
She leaves the shop, drifts anxiously along walkways, confused and distracted. Below, on the ground floor, the crowd still churns, more human bodies in one space than she’s seen in years, their combined mass emitting a constant low, dull drone, conversational white noise echoing off the empty architecture. There’s something restrained to it, Anika senses, as if something is holding it back, keeping it in check.
On the way down there she pauses where a group has gathered, and gently pushes through to see what they’re watching: a shop window full of color and movement, its entire frame filled with antique LCD televisions; the huge, bulky physical displays that had been going out of fashion when Anika was a kid, old enough to be unconnected, unsmart, uninfected. She still feels a curious thrill to see moving images again, despite the lack of sound, the low resolution, and the honeycombing effect the chicken wire lining the windows has, like she’s watching everything with an insect’s compound eyes. One screen is showing an old soccer match, another what looks like an ancient sitcom, the others all flickering with movies that seem familiar in their nostalgic anonymity: giant robots, space battles, food fights, car chases, period costumes. The kids at the front of the crowd giggle and point, whisper to one another. Scrawled in pink paint directly on the window, free of the chicken wire, is the first thing Anika has seen that resembles a sign in any way:
WE BUY SELL ANY:
DVD’S
BLURRAY’S
VHS
CD’S
TAPE’S
SWAPS POSSIBLE, NO CREDIT
THIEVES WILL BE SHOT
It’s the first shop Anika’s seen that appears to have a purpose, to have something of real value for sale. It’s also the first shop she’s seen with an armed guard on the door: a bored-looking teenager propped up on a barstool blocks the way in, a farmer’s double-barreled shotgun resting lazily across his lap. He looks like he’d hardly cause her any real problem, but like the rest of the crowd watching through the chicken wire she decides against going in.
She drops down another static escalator to the ground floor, straight into the thickest crowds, and into a wave of unexpected panic. She’s not been surrounded by so many people since that last night in Bristol, she realizes, and it’s unnerving in its similarity—the tension on faces, the stains on unwashed clothes, the stench of unbathed flesh.
But there’s something else she can smell, and as she works her way to the outside of the crowd it grows stronger as everything starts to fall into place. She couldn’t see it from the balconies above, but the shops down here have had their windows removed and replaced with counters, the crowd snaking out from its central mass, tentacle-like, into huge queues at each one. She’s standing in the center of a circular food market, each counter identified in huge letters, in the Gill Sans font Anika recognizes all too well—VEGETABLES, FRUIT, DAIRY, ALCOHOL, and, in similar but smaller letters below, NO PURCHASES WITHOUT ADEQUATE RATION COUPONS.
The smell now is intoxicating, that marketplace scent she’s not experienced for close to a decade: the musk of unrefrigerated meat mixing with the acrid twang of decaying vegetation. She can’t see much by just peering into the crowd, and her urge is to push through, to see it, to drink it all in, but something stops her.
Between every couple of shops, towering above everyone’s heads on platforms built from scaffold and repurposed motorway signs, stands a Land Army trooper. Woodland camouflage jackets, SA-80 assault rifles, shaved heads turning slowly to survey the patiently queueing crowds.
Hanging from the wall behind each trooper is the first true branding Anika has seen since stepping foot in Cabot Circus, the familiar Land Army poster—the instantly identifiable Coca-Cola white-on-red colors, the stylized crown, the same huge Gill Sans lettering:
KEEP
CALM
AND
CARRY
ON
LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT
Anika feels the people around melt away, feels suddenly, horrifically exposed. She drops her eyes to the filth-strewn marble floor, pulls up the hood of her jacket, and heads for the exit.
Outside in the open air for the first time, she relaxes, slows her pace, silently curses her own naïveté. She pulls back her hood, lets the warm sunlight stroke her face as she stares up at the sun bursting over the concrete canyon walls of Bond Street, imagines impossible cinematic lens flare. It’s quieter out here, just the lessening flow of passing bikes. She probably panicked back there; the chances of anyone recognizing her are much slimmer in Bristol. Still, it feels safer out here.
She takes a deep breath.
She should never have come back.
She’s not going to find what she hoped for.
Fuck it.
Fuck it all.
But.
But.
There’s only one way to be sure.
Anika stares at the sun again, squinting up through smashed hexagonal geodesic wireframes and bird-shit-smeared glass, watching seagulls trace invisible thermals as she tries to ignore the building in front of her, its huge mass mockingly goading her onward.
She walked here, almost on autopilot, until she found herself at the Bearpit roundabout, a century-old futurist’s dream from a time when subterranean public plazas on the wrong side of town were a utopian urban planning solution rather than a crime scene waiting to happen. The entire center of the roundabout is sunk below ground level, and although open to the sky it was always a natural destination for those who wanted to conduct business unseen. Drunks, junkies, dealers, prostitutes, graffiti artists. There’d been the inevitable effort to gentrify it at the turn of the century, to bring in the obligatory performance spaces and organic hot dog stalls—they’d erected an angular, origamic sculpture of a twelve-foot bear, and then, as if blissfully drunk on nostalgic naïveté, they built a geodesic dome over the whole thing—but still the winos and the junkies found corners they believed were unseen.
She makes to leave the Bearpit via the opposite underpass to the one she entered through, but she stops on the way out. It’s still there.
She would see it every time she passed through here on the way home. Everyone would, who came this way. She’s surprised to see it, unsure why. Maybe she expected it to have been ripped down, smashed up. It’s damaged, certainly, pierced by two bullet holes, smeared with filth, uncleaned. But it’s still there, and Anika can’t decide whether it’s now defiant, ironic, or just in bad taste. Whichever way, it makes her pause, triggering emotions she’d not expected, can’t control.
White stenciled text and a laurel wreath on a red board—the wood apparently spared from becoming fuel—the sign is unmissable, its message bold, even if the context is unclear.
STOKES CROFT—RELENTLESS OPTIMISM