Homes For the Future
Gabe slept mostly on the double-bed frame with the storage box space underneath and the narrow headboard that came in at a more than reasonable £685 retail, sharing with Kerry, his supervisor, although there was nothing sexual going on there, they just liked each other’s company, and it was lonely in the hall now if you had to sleep on your own. Sometimes Kerry would not join him but would sleep alongside George, who more often than not crashed out on one of the sofas in the Family Living section, with one of the flat-screen plasmas blaring away until Rachel lost all patience and stalked through to turn it off. Jan and Paul, genuinely a couple, preferred the bed frame with the adjustable sides and the polished walnut headboard. He could hear them now having a subdued argument underneath their duvet, on the other side of the wall that divided Apartment Living from FlatShare.
A moment of slow awakening, the steel veins of the building shaking into life and the strip-lighting crackling in the rafters above. The PA system bled out its tinny Muzak. Gabe stretched his leg out at the side and drew the sole of his foot down Kerry’s hairless calf, slowly and then quickly, and as she struggled into consciousness, knuckling the sleep from her eyes, mouth writhing in protest against a yawn, he said: “Time to get up. We’ll be late for work.”
They had been tearing down all the buildings in his street. Coming back from signing on, Gabe had always been on the back foot with surprise when he saw his building still standing, by now the only tenement that remained upright in a levelled block. It stood guard like a baronial keep, a watchtower monitoring a denuded wasteland. The place had been condemned, and all he owned had been sold or thrown away. The landlord had removed the furniture and left Gabe only an old camp bed to sleep on, and through nights that glowed with a feeling of delayed opportunity, Gabe would watch cars glide by on the flyover express, listening to their doleful sound as they hissed into long silence. There was only him left in the building, as far as he knew. He heard no neighbours’ sounds, and he began to fear an influx of squatters. At night, combating insomnia on the camp bed, odd sounds out on the street would draw him to the window. He expected to see all the city’s dispossessed advancing towards him, to this last building left standing in a decayed street, their worlds contained on their backs, carried with them in plastic bags or pushed in rusting trolleys.
Desperate to move on his own terms before the final eviction, he cast around for job applications and was soon interviewed at the grand HFtF© on the outskirts of town. Job offered and quickly taken, but there was still a sense in him of being trapped, as if he hadn’t chosen this job but had had it forced on him, with no dissension. On the bus to work that first day, Gabe had pressed his sweating forehead to the winter glass. He didn’t know his luck.
After the first break in shift, feeling hot under the arms of his too-tight short-sleeved HFtF© shirt, a dark shade of blue not dark enough to hide the sweat patches blooming there, he came through to a staff canteen astringent with the smell of brewing coffee, Kerry and Jan sitting cross-legged on the beanbags with pads of reclaimed paper in their laps, pencils poised, drawing up action-plans should the worst come to the inevitable worst. Gabe filled his cup. He stood by the window drinking coffee and looking out onto the broad acres of the car park, the trolley-goons in their luminous tabards wheeling snaking lines of trolleys from across the car park back to the supermarket dock on the other side. Rain pelted a meagre handful of change against the glass. The place was half dead; two thirds dead.
Kerry was saying, “Maybe we should go down their route, talk to them in a language they understand?”
“Who?” Gabe said.
“Head Office.”
“They only talk the money language though.”
“Then we could make more money for them.”
“How?” Jan asked her. Jan had the habit, when confused or uncertain of her instructions, of pulling at the lock of hair by her right ear until the hair curled up on itself and the skin began to weep. A garbled page came over the PA, and for its duration all three of them cocked their heads to one side and addressed their sight to the corners of the room. Then, satisfied it wasn’t for their attention, they carried on.
“By selling more,” Kerry explained.
“How?” Jan said, again.
Gabe said, “You can’t make people buy things they don’t want,” and to this pitiless logic Kerry had no comeback. Gabe slumped in the chair by her side and rested his hand against her shoulder. “It’s been the best,” he said. “But we need to start making plans for after.”
Apart from the day of the interview – perfunctory, more of a friendly chat – Gabe had never set foot in HFtF© before. As he was given the tour of the warehouse’s capacious acre of floorspace, through themed domestic sections where the company’s full range of post-assembly pieces were on clinically precise display, he knew that if he was ever to call a place his own, this was where he would find the furniture to stock it.
Every piece was a meticulous arrangement of right-angles, defined and particular without being stiff or overly formal, relaxed without being sloppy and unkempt, and coloured in the primaries without being too garish or bright. Kitchens were elegant and uncluttered, sofas comfortable but brisk and unobtrusive. Kerry took him on this first tour, and in the sharp planes of her glasses, her clean, symmetrical haircut, and her broad cheekbones and tapered chin, she could almost have been designed by one of HFtF©’s austere domiciliary architects, monochrome portraits of whom looked out with gentle, satisfied smiles from the walls of the mock-up rooms where the furniture they had created was displayed to best effect.
Everything was clean and ordered, no round edges or soft contours to delay the eye, and as they walked through the display floor Gabe indulged himself in imagined tableaux, little pictured scenarios he placed amongst each domestic section. Within a compact apartment living room, where low black sofas bracketed either side of a glass and chrome coffee table, with streamlined shelving units gleaming against the suggested walls, Gabe painted an image of himself – older, more contained, and with a sheen of groomed success – returning from a game of squash, perhaps, with a coldly beautiful wife handing him a glass of chilled vodka before they settled down to watch television on the flat-screen plasma for the evening; and, later (as Kerry led him past a study workstation unit), he would go through his spreadsheets on his laptop on a polished pine computer desk, with boxfiles arrayed on minimalist filing shelves behind him, updating his figures, enumerating his gathered wealth. Chilled vodka and squash, and clean design in perfect geometric order, began to assume in Gabe’s mind all the dimensions of a paradise, or an idealised emblematic future, made all the more painful in the depths of his yearning by the knowledge that for some people this was not a goal to be deferred to better luck, a postponed prospect at best or a hopeless dream at worst, but the tangible reality of the everyday world. For some people, waking up was done in beds like these. Smooth fingers drew their tapered touch across these surfaces, somewhere outside this city.
Kerry walked with Gabe along a pathway marked with fluorescent arrows, winding between the assembled rooms and units.
“So what were you doing before this?” she asked him.
“Nothing,” Gabe said. “Signing on.”
“Oh, well, this must be good luck for you then?”
Gabe, who was beginning to think along these same lines, said, “I think it must be the best luck.”
“It’s a lovely place to work,” Kerry enthused. “You’d think it would be a corporate hell, but it’s really laid back. And everyone’s just lovely here. Even the customers,” she said, as if this bordered on the incomprehensible. “Honestly, no one has a bad word to say when they’re in here. It’s just too … ”
“I know,” Gabe said. They didn’t need the word.
The other staff members could not have been nicer. Kerry introduced him round – there was Dave, Paul, Jan, Lisa, and Rachel all on his same shift, as well as Kerry, and then others whose names dropped in and out of his recollection, who he didn’t see quite so much of, but who were always ready with quips and encouragements in the canteen or in the cavernous aisles of the collection floor downstairs, where all the furniture was flat-packed in vast brown cardboard packages, and where the customers wheeled their silver trolleys round and found their items, and took them over to the tills to pay.
He found himself opening up to his colleagues in ways that swiftly made him think of them as friends. There was little of the after-work socialising he had enjoyed in other jobs – often the only thing that made them bearable – no sessions in the pub with the bilious hangovers to follow, as if the pleasures of the work had cancelled out any need for compensation, for the spare-time means of balancing the ledger and taking back all that had been extracted from you over the previous eight, murderously dull, hours. Gabe noticed that his new friends were so happy in their work they almost seemed reluctant to leave at the end of the day, and they were always in before him when he arrived in the morning. They knew about his problems with the demolition order, which his landlord had assured him was imminent, and who was acting like the entire scenario had been orchestrated somehow by his, for the most part, placid tenant. Which kindness and general interest in the lineaments of his well-being, and the fact he was sure Kerry was attracted to him – just a little – was why they decided to let him in on their secret.
“What have you got in your flat, right now?” Kerry had asked him as their shift ended.
“What do you mean?”
“Clothes, TV?”
“Some clothes,” he said. “And, uh … ”
“You can get more clothes. Stay here. Not just tonight, but every night. I have Apartment Life, Paul and Jan are over in FlatShare, there’s Family and Holiday space, we have the kitchen units rigged up, the bathrooms work – for the most part. Okay, I’m not going to lie to you about the bathrooms, but everything else is just as you’d like. There’s the supermarket on the other side of Retail Zone for food, there’s cinemas, restaurants, bowling alleys, the whole shit. It’s like a town of our own, and we don’t have to share it with anyone.”
“Sorry – you live in the shop?”
“Some of us do. When do you think you’d ever get to live in a home like this? Here, it’s like they’re paying us for it.”
So he took them up on an offer freely given. He was initiated into the mysteries, and the idea that they had liked and trusted him enough to reveal their secrets almost outweighed the relief of having somewhere to live before his old place was pulled down around his head. At night he was in the most comfortable bed he had ever slept in; he had coffee early in the morning amongst the smooth planes and sharp edges of those minimalist kitchens, as austere as surgical units, and after work they would all relax on the low-slung primary-colour sofas, the black armchairs, the moulded rattan seats. Gabe was enthralled, and so moved it drew moisture to his eye, to find the lean fridges over in KitchenWare stocked with chilled Scandinavian vodka; they would all have a drink or two out of tall shot glasses before turning in to sleep, everyone calling out “Goodnight” to each other over the cavernous display hall. During the day at work, everyone who called this place home took a proprietorial pride in the displays, as if they were in fact showing customers round their own home and not the commercial space of a multinational retail establishment.
This went on for months. Management didn’t know; Kerry was a shift supervisor and had keys to open and close morning and night, as well as all the codes for the alarms. Gabe felt for the first time in years that he belonged somewhere, and that everything that was going wrong outside HFtF©’s smooth automatic doors was happening just on the news, in a foreign country, and had nothing to do with him. He got the best night’s sleep, every night. He enjoyed his work. No one was trying to pull his building down. He felt safe and comfortable and loved. But you could never measure that feeling up against cold currency and come out winning.
“They’re what?” Kerry had howled. Jan had bitten half her fist. Gabe hid his eyes, and Paul sucked in a breath that he directed the exhalation of towards the occluded rafters. George stood and writhed on the spot, trying to force the passage of grief and disappointment like a bad case of wind.
“Closing the place down,” their Manager had said. The Manager was a willowy woman with psoriasis who had been promoted several grades above her competency, and who spent most of her working days secluded in her office. Kerry later found that this staff meeting was supposed to have been conducted as a series of sensitive one-on-ones, instead of being announced first thing on a Tuesday morning before the shift started. But that was that, there really was absolutely nothing they could do to argue against it.
“Where will we go?” Kerry asked him that night. Gabe, unsettled even on the rattan chairs, could give her no answer. How would they get jobs, and how could they possible find a job like this? He took to sitting in the Manager’s office after hours, staring out at the motorway flyover, at the traffic that thickened the road and that moved with such a sense of urgency it was as if they were all fleeing the scene of a terrible crime.
All of them put a fraction of the effort in at work. There were fewer customers, they had to admit, and less money was being made now. At night, Gabe could hear some of his friends stifling their sobs in their pillows. In the mornings, more and more staff seemed to have flitted away during the night, until there was only a hard core of the dedicated left behind.
They came at the end of the week, HO regulators and administrators, marking up the cost value of everything on display and, more importantly, everything downstairs in the warehouse. All the flat-packed, untouched furniture was taken back to an HO distribution centre. The display furniture was put up for sale at a massive discount, to Gabe an offensively small price. A flurry of bright eyed and joyless customers flocked from outside the city to deck out their reinforced homes. Before long, the place was empty and closed for business, and on their last day all that was left for them to do was walk around the floor, still following the fluorescent arrows on the paths, clearing up the rubbish.
Gabe thought Kerry was going to break down when she handed over her keys to the Manager. The Manager had the decency to look abashed, and scurried off to her car without a backward glance. All that were left, secrets still safe at the end, stood at the edge of the empty retail park and looked out at the lights that were closing down. Gabe could hear the cars out on the motorway. Jan and Paul, without saying goodbye, began to wander off into the night. Kerry composed herself, sucked down a steadying breath, and headed off across the concrete without looking back.
“Where are you going?” Gabe said, to no reply. “What are we going to do now?” Kerry’s form grew dim, blacked out by the shadows, and after a while he couldn’t even hear her footsteps. He felt in his pocket; he had made his own set of keys.
Slow, melancholy night, poised and still. From the office window, bisected by Venetian lines, Gabe can hear cars breathing their lonely sighs along the curve of the motorway flyover; globes of yellow light that describe a low parabola, then flare and fade out as they rejoin the steady flow that takes the traffic west, out of the city, on towards the quiet coast and to the safer places. The light passes in a steady pulse, like blood beating through a circulatory system, or a stream of neutrons sparking through the city’s synapses. Far beyond the flyover and the motorway, on the other side of the black river, there are broad stacks of light coming from the dockside flats; irregular, hole-punched squares of orange, hanging there in the darkness. When the cars fall quiet, or the pulse slackens to a less regular beat, he can hear the old river pouring on, and beneath it, the low rolling static of a city closing down. They couldn’t leave you with anything to call your own.
Richard W. Strachan was born in 1977 and is currently based in Glasgow. He has had short fiction published in Gutter, The View From Here and Litro, and writes regular reviews for The Scottish Review of Books. He writes a blog at richardstrachan.wordpress.com, and is co-editor of the literary journal Free State. He is working on a second novel called In Borderlands.
