Thieving Fear

'I couldn't find –'

'Just give me that.'

Justin seized the case and drummed his fingers on it while Hugh typed the exit code on the keypad by the door. As he marched out, Hugh was at his heels. 'There you are,' the customer said in case Hugh needed to be told. 'We thought you'd got lost.'

'Sorry,' Hugh blurted.

'No need to go red in the face about it. He's the one doing the carrying.'

'Plenty of shelving whenever you're ready,' Justin said.

At least Hugh's resentment overcame his panic as he returned to his shelves. If he found out who'd been trying to distract him he would bring their behaviour to the attention of the management, although shouldn't it have been noticed? The incident was so much like a dream that he ought to be able to put it out of his mind. Once Justin ushered the customer to the Loads o' Loaves aisle Hugh managed to give up his grudge too. He was close to emptying the float onto the shelves, and feeling as if he'd regained the control he had inexplicably lost, when Justin reappeared. 'Fancy being helpful?' he said.

'I think I am.'

'Well, here's your chance to prove it.' Justin looked satisfied with his quip. 'We're losing Selma from edibles. Ate a left-over roll she should have binned at the end of trading, and you know that's the instant sack.' He stared at Hugh as if to emphasise a warning. 'You'll be taking over tinned foods,' he said. 'Just don't start taking after your brother.'

FIVE

'Yo Yorkshire! That was Bradford band Benign Lumps with their new single "Crutches", and this is Sabyasachi Chatterjee with the Sabya Show on Moorland Radio. In the studio with me I have Rory Lucas, Yorkshire's most controversial artist. Rory's sculpture Can Do has been on the airwaves lately, and that's why we have him here today to discuss his work and any other arty topics you want to phone about. Was that a face, Rory? Don't you like me calling it a sculpture?'

Rory hadn't been aware of betraying a reaction. 'I don't care what anybody calls it so long as they look for themselves.'

The presenter ducked to a clipboard, giving Rory more of a view of his slick black precisely parted hair. 'You haven't always gone in for this style of work, have you?'

'I've not just piled up litter on the moor, you mean, Sabyasachi.'

'Call me Sabya.' At the hint of conflict his eyes gleamed with anticipation, though his voice stayed suave. 'You were top of your art class at school, weren't you?'

Rory might have borne this kind of regressively nostalgic comment from Betty or Albert, but not from a radio host. 'I did what they wanted,' he said.

'We all have to start by toeing the line if we want to get anywhere, don't we? That's what I tell my daughters. So then you went to art school.'

'Down to London where they think the world is.'

'Quite a lot of art is, isn't it?'

'It's everywhere. It's even here.'

A smile that might have been wryly appreciative flickered across Sabyasachi's full lips. 'I go down to see the exhibitions. I've got family in Brick Lane,' he said. 'Now here are the Refreshing Tissues from Leeds with their latest single.'

As he set the disc off he raised a mobile phone. For all Rory knew the impassioned conversation might have been about him, since he couldn't recognise a word. His incomprehension made him feel enclosed, not just within the fat white walls but inside his head. 'Yo Yorkshire,' Sabyasachi said as the song ended with a flourish of guitars. 'Refreshing Tissues with their single "Left Behind". My guest this afternoon –'

'We are the shadows on the land,' Rory couldn't wait to say, quoting the refrain of the song. 'That goes for art too.'

'Don't they say art's longer than life?'

'You mean it's older. Old paintings, you can't see how they really were. Even if they're restored, that's not how they were to begin with. Everything changes, you as well. We don't need art, we just need to look and listen and feel and get a sense of how we really are.'

'Careful or you'll be talking yourself out of a job.'

'It's not a job, it's what I am. It doesn't have to be a job as well.'

'You mean you don't need to earn a living while Yorkshire Arts is giving you a grant.'

'As long as they're offering I'd be a fool not to take it.'

'Plenty for our listeners to talk to you about. So the year after you left art school your first exhibition got good reviews, but here's a caller. Rory, you need to put your headphones on.'

They felt like earmuffs, even when they acquired Sabyasachi's voice. Rather than bringing it closer, they surrounded Rory's ears with an aloof version of it. 'Hello Mike from Batley. What do you want to say to Rory Lucas?'

The caller sounded even more muffled. 'Are you having a joke on us all, Mr Lucas?'

'I –' Rory swallowed hard, but that didn't render his own voice any less remote. Feeling both cut off from it and confined by it was so much of an obstruction that he hardly knew what he said to overcome his inhibited silence. 'Life's a bit of a joke.'

'I'll wager it looks that way to somebody that's being paid to do the kind of thing you're doing.'

Rory struggled to outdistance the hindrance of his dislocated voice. 'You'll have been to look, then.'

'I don't need to see it to know it's rubbish.'

'No, that's what it was.' The retort seemed to lose force by surrounding Rory at a distance. 'That's what it was,' he had to repeat, 'before I recycled it.'

'There's bins for that. You'd be better off if you got a job emptying them, and a lot more important, us taxpayers would say.'

'No you wouldn't. The money would just be spent somewhere else you'd probably moan about by the sound of you.'

'Thank you, Mike. Mike from Batley,' Sabyasachi said and mouthed 'No need to shout.'

Rory had been trying to project some strength into his oppressively detached voice. 'Do I have to wear these?' he complained mutely. 'Can't you put it through the speakers?'

'It doesn't work like that,' Sabyasachi not just mimed but grimaced before saying, 'Here's Eunice from Holmfirth. You're on the air, Eunice.'

'What's his name, this vandal you're giving all the publicity?'

'Rory Lucas is my guest today. Did you have –'

Rory tried to fend off their dulled voices with his own. 'Do you know what vandal means?'

'People like you and the people you're attracting that vandalise our landscape.'

'Isn't that you if you've been to look?'

'Don't you dare say I find it attractive,' the caller said with a kind of stifled shrillness. 'We aren't given any choice when we're on the motorway. We have to see that rubbish heap and what people did to it.'

'What's that?' Rory was jolted into demanding.

'Don't you know? I thought you said you had to look for yourself.'

'Fine, don't tell me. I'll see later.' Rory felt hemmed in by his own muffled petulance. 'Whatever's happened, it's change,' he made the effort to declare. 'That's life.'

'You just said it was a joke. Don't you care about anything?' the caller said and transformed the question into a statement with the full stop of an emphatic plastic click.

'Eunice? We seem to have lost Eunice from Holmfirth,' Sabyasachi told anyone who ought to know. 'Here's Brenda from Bingley instead.'

There barely seemed to be: just a mumble buried in the headphones. As Rory reached to adjust them Sabyasachi mouthed 'Don't take those off.'

'I can't hear.'

'Brenda says you didn't answer.'