“All right,” Mr. Moorhead said, “if you think you’re up to it.”
“I do. I do think I’m up to it. Ta, sir. Ta, Mister Moorhead.”
“What about you, Janet? How do you feel?”
“Shipshape,” Janet Order said. Shipshape, she thought, the very color of the seas they ride upon.
“All right. As an experiment, then. But remember, you operate on the buddy system when you’re by yourselves. Under no circumstances, no circumstances, may you leave the hotel. And no sweets. If you’re thirsty you may take water. Have you money?”
“The twenty dollars you gave me in London, Mister Moorhead,” Noah said.
“Well, that’s quite a lot. You mustn’t spend it all. We’ve another five days yet, plenty of time to think about what sort of souvenirs you’ll be wanting to take home with you.”
“When may we have the rest of our money, Mister Moorhead?” Noah asked timidly.
“Why, when I give it to you.”
The children started toward the door.
“You’re quite sure you’ll be fine?”
“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”
“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”
“At the first sign of weakness, the first, you get word to me. Don’t try to return to the room. You’ve your pills that I gave you?”
“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”
“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”
“You know each other’s symptoms? You’re alert to the danger signals I told you about?”
Janet Order nodded; unschooled Noah, uncertain about the words Moorhead had tried to teach him — stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, syncope — but who remembered in a general sort of way what bad things to look for in his blue buddy, did.
So for him it’s like being plunked down right in the very center of those bright-colored supplements in the Sunday paper. He tells this to Janet Order.
“No smart remarks, nine knuckles,” the little blue girl says.
“Look at it all,” Noah says, and thinks with pride about the sort of customer he’d make.
“What, this junk?”
“My mum would love this.”
“Film? Your mum would love a box of film?”
But he’s not listening. He’s lost not only in his first shopping spree but in the first experience he’s ever had of any sort of shopping at all. Within ten minutes he has bought the box of film, a bottle of shampoo, an antihistamine he’s seen advertised on television, a flea and tick collar, and a pair of infant’s water wings. He has spent more than twelve dollars (and guessing incorrectly — he’s not too embarrassed to ask Janet, he’s too excited by the actual act of spending money to remember that she’s even there: if she is struck by stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, or syncope just now she is almost certainly a goner — he waits for the clerk to take the money from his hand and almost forcibly wrenches his change from her own) but isn’t bothered because he still has, in addition to the change from the twenty dollars that Moorhead advanced him out of the hundred each child has been promised for spending money, the fifty his dad had slipped to him at Heathrow and which he’s not even mentioned to Moorhead. (It’s the long-term and higher maths he can’t do, those which perhaps even he knows he has no use for.) And returns to the same clerk five separate times, once for each of the five items he has purchased. Janet, beside him, is almost breathless. She’s never seen anything like it, this frenzy, and wonders if she’s in the presence of some seizure Mr. Moorhead has neglected to tell her about.
“Come away,” she says. “Come away, Noah. Please, Noah. We’ll find another shop. There are these other shops we can go to.”
She feels her breathlessness — the dyspnea — and is almost prepared to squat down right there in the middle of the store. (Squatting sometimes restores her breathing, though it’s an act that embarrasses her, conscious as she is that people seeing her will be listening for grunts, looking for little blue turds beneath her skirt when she rises.) She has her Inderal ready to hand when Noah can suddenly see her again.
“Other shops?”
Clumsily, he holds five paper bags, which another clerk, noticing his deformity, offers to put into a large plastic carrier that he can hold by its handle.
“Other shops?”
“Would you like me to take one of your parcels, Noah?”
“No,” he says sharply, angrily, almost greedily. But though they’re quite light he can’t manage them very well and twice they have to stop while Noah rearranges his packages. Which he does with his nose, with his teeth, which he keeps in balance by bringing his hands up and moving the bags from side to side with his face, all the while thinking, who cannot read — Who would fardels bear? Before they have reached the next shop along the hotel’s wide concourse, the sack with the shampoo drops to the hard floor and Noah starts to cry.
“Look, Noah,” Janet Order tells him reassuringly, “the bottle’s plastic. It didn’t break. Why don’t you let me carry this one for you?”
“You better not drop it if you know what’s good for you.”
And in the store, which is a sort of Disney boutique, Noah’s strange frenzy returns. He seems neither irritable nor calm but somehow triumphant, rather, Janet supposes, the way explorers might look, discoverers at the headwaters of great rivers they have been tracing, men come upon new mountain ranges, waterfalls, archaeologists at digs yielding sudden, spectaular treasures.
“Oh, Noah,” Janet Order says, and watches him as he performs what she does not know are his entirely personal maths, his customized sums. He flicks price tags, turns over china figurines to see the prices on their base. (How did I know? he wonders. How did I even know that that’s where they’d be?) He doesn’t bother to add the odd cents but counts by two- and five- and seven- and ten-dollar units, rounding the figures off to the next highest dollar, the sums to their next highest even number, adding on taxes, too, all the old asterisk attachments he’s seen beside the goods pictured in the adverts he’s not only looked at but studied, drawn, copied. Even unschooled Noah, who can’t read right, knows that’s where the catch will lie, in the fine print, the asterisk not only a trap but fair warning that a trap exists: “plus V.A.T.” and “Batteries Not Included” and “Allow Eight to Twelve Weeks for Delivery” like all smug arms-across-the- chest-folded caveat emptor. So adding on taxes too, adding on anything he can think of, not so much extravagant as preparing himself for disappointment who can’t read right or do any but the personal maths and who is going to die. (Nor does he understand American money, seeing it for the first time not when his father had slipped fifty dollars to him at Heathrow, since that had been sealed in an envelope, and not even when Mr. Moorhead had advanced them the twenty out of the hundred that had been promised, since that had been sealed in an envelope too, and not even when he had torn the envelope open and patiently waited for the clerk to take the twenty-dollar bill out of his hand when he made that first purchase, but when he physically wrested his change out of the clerk’s astonished grip, having no notion at all of a dollar, a dime, a nickel, a penny. He has a vague idea of the United States as a rich and powerful country — on the news this evening they never mentioned redundancies, shipyards shut down, factories closed — and so supposes the dollar is worth more than the pound. To him it even looks more valuable, the high numerical face values of the paper bills, the portraits of the nation’s male rulers, that wicked- looking eagle, the green artillery of the arrows. Even the dull, flimsy coins suggest an indifferent sense of plenitude. And he has an impression of bounty, of infinite variety — the things in this shop that fall neither under the category of staple nor luxury and that seem to him products for which no real use exists — the Mickey Mouse candle holders, for example, the cartoon stamp books, their gauzy, transparent envelopes filled with pictures of Mowgli, Mr. Toad, Bambi, Snow White, the dwarfs on gummed stamps.)