The Christmas Store
Rebekka was beginning to get very tired of sitting beside her sister in
the bank. Her sister was reading a leaflet on ISA saving opportunities,
but without a guaranteed rate of return. And what’s the point of a
savings system, thought Rebekka, without a guaranteed rate of return?.
She was just beginning to wonder if the pleasure of sitting drinking
coffee was worth the bother of walking across the road to Starbucks when
a man who looked like a rabbit came out of an office and looked at his
pocket-watch.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Kalico. Conference call got held up. Would you
like to come in?”
Rebekka’s sister got up, and Rebekka rose to follow.
“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to discuss this with anyone but our
customer” said the bank manager.
“Sorry Bex,” said Janet, the sister, “I’ll meet you outside Malicesons
when this is over. You’ve got your mobile?”
Bekka allowed she had her tracking device and wandered off to Malicesons
to wait for Janet.
Rebekka Kalico is our Heroine. She doesn’t carry a sword; dress in
armour of questionable coverage; or eat men for breakfast, preferring
Weetabix. She will not – and I guarantee this – sleep with the main bad
guy, she will fail to run crying to her room when the big strong men
won’t let her play with their toys. She is a competent swords-woman,
though she’s not ever harmed anyone with a sword of any type. She’s 18,
will be wandering off to University as soon as she gets her A-Level
results, doesn’t have a boyfriend, bright and sane. She doesn’t believe
in adventures, elves, Santa, the tooth fairy or free lunches, and on
most of these points is perfectly completely accurate. Especially about
the free lunches. She grew up around here, which is a smallish market
town somewhere in the cluster of counties around London, England.
She’s heading to Malicesons, which is a department store. Department
stores are beginning to die out in today’s economy, but Malicesons is
still doing the same as it has done for over a hundred years. It doesn’t
sell over the Internet, it doesn’t have a store card. It only has one
shop, a massive Victorian structure that takes up the whole of one side
of the market square and is still nowhere near big enough to contain the
rat’s-nest of interconnected tin-pot kingdoms within. Malicesons is a
store of departments, interconnected and interrelated kingdoms from
kitchenware though to computers, from golf though to gravity guns, from
toys to travel-bags, from tiny departments that sold only pens though to
massive empires dedicated to selling you white goods. Fashions were
waved in with new departments which peaked, faded and were folded into
the department they should have been in originally, or continued forever
with no reference to reality, stuck in a weird parallel universe where
the world still needed staff trained to fit ruffs and cravats. And,
stranger still, it quite often did. Everyone knew someone who worked at
the store, nobody knew anyone who ran it, it just existed, drifting
though fashions, wars, deaths, new lives and floods with the same
indifferent stoic attitude that had lasted two centuries. The rumour – there was always rumour – was that William Maliceson himself still lived
on the top floor, over two centuries old, and the richest, most
demanding customers would hand over their black American Express cards
to him and him alone. There was nothing you couldn’t buy at Malicesons.
It was the place you went to if Harrods was out of stock.
It didn’t take long to get lost, if that was your aim. Rebekka wandered
the store until she found somewhere that she didn’t recognise – apparently a department devoted to the sale of deerstalker hats – and
wandered around. Here a rack of display swords, over there a thousand
different colours of bow-tie, by the stairs a light shaped like a
cucumber. Though department after department she went, from florescent
empires to dimly lit hamlets until, after almost an hour of wandering,
she found something.
The thing caught her eye, though she couldn’t really say why. It had
rolled halfway under a shelf in the lighting department, it was covered
in dust. It was a small plastic snowman. If you pressed the hat, the
snowman split into four pieces and spread out to reveal a smaller
snowman underneath, which played a tune.
It was, as a piece of tack, impressively tacky. The tune attracted the
attention of the few other shoppers around, so Bex, not enjoying being
the centre of attention, stopped it. She decided to find out where it
was supposed to go and put it back.
A couple of hours more exploration failed to find any kind of Christmas
display, or anything it could conceivably belong to. She gave up and
went looking for staff instead, finding a thin man in a dark suit which
appeared to be called “How can I help you I’m Eddie Ass. Dept. Head”.
“Excuse me?” said Rebekka. Eddie Ass. Dept. Head jumped a couple of feet
in the air – taking its contents with it – and landed in a somewhat
surprised heap facing her.
“I’m – er – sorry miss – er – you star – er – startled me”. He spoke
like a man who had just run a marathon, or one who needed to line his
words up far in advance. “Welcome To Malicesons How Can I Help You?”, on
the other hand, came out like he’d spent hours rehearsing it.
“Hi, Yes. I found a thing under shelf in Lighting, I’ve been trying to
work out where it’s supposed to go, but can’t. Do you mind taking it and
putting it wherever it goes?” she held out the tacky snowman. She was
expecting him to take and put it down somewhere, or forget about it, or
say she might as well keep it, or possibly comment about its incredible
tackiness. Of of the things she wasn’t expecting was for him to take one
look at the white plastic, scream in terror and make a bolt for the
nearest Staff Only door, which is – in fact – exactly what he did. It
would have been a more impressive gesture if he’d remembered to open it
first, which he didn’t, but he got there eventually.
This, as you may expect, caused the surrounding department to fall into
dead silence and turn to look at the increasingly red Rebekka. They
stood in tableau a few seconds before a door opened behind her and two
men in black suits asked her to please follow, as the manager would like
to speak to her. Bex followed.
The men refused to touch the snowman.
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