‘Make your bloody mind up!’ the driver grumbled. So much for customer service, thought Billy.
He followed her through the crowds of shoppers, till she ducked into the ladies’ toilets. She was gone about ten minutes. He nearly didn’t recognise her; she came up the steps dressed to the nines, hair brushed up nice, face made-up, a natty two-piece suit and black high heels that she must have had in her suitcase. She went into a store simply called Kennedy’s, the highest-class cash or exchange shop of them all; the stuff they dealt with sometimes ran to the hundreds of thousands. Even those with money sometimes needed to hock their Rolex, he guessed. A higher-class cash or exchange shop for a better class of economic hardship, he thought.
He hung around. She was in for twenty minutes or so. She emerged, went back to the toilets and changed back into her old gear. She caught a bus straight back home. Billy was fascinated, but he had no answer to her strange behaviour. That didn’t stop him speculating.
Yes, he thought, ramming a dented tin onto the supermarket shelf, I know more about you than you know. He wasn’t fooled by that quiet, innocent exterior. She was involved in shady goings-on at the flat. Why else would she pick to live there, lost amongst the dross? She was a fence, most likely, shifting valuables for some hoodlum or other. Some of those shops wouldn’t ask too many questions either.
It didn’t dampen his enthusiasm, it added spice. And he was considering ways he might use that information against her, to get what he wanted from her. Money, for one, to support the Big Plan. And he grew excited by other possibilities. Who gave a fuck that the only way he might bed her was through blackmail? In his soiled book the end determined the means.
He heard the muffled sound of some commotion or other from outside the supermarket. He didn’t pay it much notice. There were many nights when drunken yobs played havoc in the yard. Slimer had regularly called in the police to deal with them when he first started at the supermarket, but he’d called them out so often they pretended not to hear anymore. In the end Slimer accepted it was what you could expect from such a crap posting in such a crap place and ignored the annoying but generally harmless incursion into his territory. Slimer, everyone knew, would much rather sit in his poky little office reading porn or trying to catch up on sleep. One word from a weirdo or two usually put paid to any mischief anyhow.
Billy returned to his shelf filling. He was biding his time, waiting for an opportune moment to confront Beth not-so-innocent Heaney. He let the thought roll over in his mind, the way he’d roll a toffee in his mouth, playing over the sweetness it offered.
The strident, crashing sound of shattering glass rudely interrupted his daydreaming. He couldn’t see the front entrance from his aisle so he left his work and made his way to the front of the store where the tills were ranked. He was joined by the majority of the night staff, each drawn by idle curiosity.
Billy’s eyes widened in disbelief when he saw the seething black mass of a crowd of people gathered beyond the supermarket’s large windows. One of the panes sported a great gaping hole where a brick had been thrown through it. Loud, angry voices raged like a stormy sea. He saw Slimer up front, his finger on a large green button. The metal shutters were shivering their slow way down; he hadn’t bothered to shut them and was giving someone else an ear bashing for his own mistake.
It was too late. More bricks followed the first and a good length of the windows simply dissolved and showered the floor like ice crystals. Slimer jumped away from the button as a torrent of people — mostly youths but some of them were distinctly older — rolled through the rent into the store like an oil slick onto a beach. They wore hoodies to hide their heads, or scarves wrapped around their lower faces, and many of them brandished makeshift weapons like staves of two-by-one timber, or long pieces of iron and chains; some of them still had a brick in each hand.
The crowd charged belligerently, the sound that of an amplified wounded bear, the look in people’s eyes like that of a hungry snake staring at a blind mouse. Slimer, his staff for the first time right behind him, ran down towards the rear of the supermarket screaming: ‘It’s a bastard riot!’
For a moment Billy was rooted, as if his feet had been planted in concrete blocks. He glanced to his right; Beth was also standing motionless, pale-faced, a tin of something or other still clutched in her hands. She looked at him worriedly as the crowd surged towards them.
Stuff this, thought Billy, the instinct for self-preservation never more than a scratch below the surface. He abandoned her to find her own way out it. It was a case of every shelf-filler for himself.
People were hurling shopping trolleys through the opening in the window and they wasted no time in helping themselves to anything they could get their hands on, scooping stock off the shelves and sweeping it into the trolleys like queer kinds of consumer goods waterfalls. Some made directly for the small electrical section, another group for the spirits and wines; a couple of thoughtful fathers, perhaps, began to stock up on tinned baby milk and packets of disposable nappies; another small group, maybe harbouring thoughts of preventing the need for baby milk altogether, loaded up with condoms.
A large contingent simply had violence and destruction in mind and set about trashing all they could with homemade weapons. The sounds of shattering glass and tins hitting the floor added to the horrific din echoing around the supermarket aisles.
Over the tannoy, Englebert Humperdink was singing, ‘Please release me…’
Billy found the way out blocked. He came up against Slimer and the rest of the staff, backing away from the rear doors that led to the warehouse yard; more people were spilling in this way and forcing them back into the store.
‘We’re all going to die!’ Slimer screamed, and Billy, looking at the rampaging crowd swarming like killer bees and settling all over the supermarket, shared similar gloomy thoughts.
He saw Beth briefly, barged out of the way and falling to the tiled floor, disappearing beneath a thicket of legs. If he felt the urge to rush to her aid it was quickly drowned by a cold wave of choking fear. Slimer ducked through the door that led to the upstairs office and everyone played follow-my-leader again. He allowed so many people inside the office before trying to shut out the remainder, saying there wouldn’t be enough oxygen for everyone. ‘Fuck you,’ said two of the weirdos in perfect harmony, and soon the small office was crammed to capacity. They could now look through a small window onto the madness swirling like a menacing whirlpool below them.
Slimer telephoned the police, who it seemed at first didn’t want to believe him. ‘We’re all going to be murdered here!’ he yelled almost incoherently. As if to give weight to his predictions he saw smoke begin to billow from one of the aisles. ‘Jesus, the bastards are using our own firelighters!’ he cried disbelievingly; how anyone could light anything with those crappy things he’d never know, but they’d certainly got a good blaze going now. He waved everyone out. ‘Back down the stairs! Back down the stairs! Get back, damn you! We’ll all be boiled alive!’
Billy would have liked to have corrected him — there was a distinct absence of water around — but he wasn’t going to hang around long enough to debate the matter. He pushed his way out and headed down the stairs. Others took his lead and abandoned their hysterical manager to his fate.
As the flames took hold the crowd shrank before them like cellophane in a fire, gradually retreating back to the front of the store and out through the broken windows, or back into the warehouse yard. There came the sound of a police siren and even the hardiest of hardcore rioters, who’d lingered to load up with a few more bottles of vodka, made a dash for the exits, some cursing the blasted trolley wheels for refusing to go straight.