*
Fluxman took his leave. He meant to go straight home and set to, but now that his thoughts had turned to the work at hand, he found himself drawn from the path again and again to tinker at the wayside. Little things to begin with, minor repairs to an unhyphenated split pole fence, a badly spaced milestone, a broken win-dow pane … but in the end, an italicized townhouse complex detained him for the better part of the afternoon. The place was an eyesore, nothing but curlecues of stucco and folderols of wrought iron. It took him half an hour to introduce some Roman columns of a plain, upright kind, and another to summon a vine-leaf screen to hide the whole thing from view. He should have referred the matter to one of the others, he thought afterwards, as he went wearily on his way, Figg or Banes would have made light work of it. Or he should have stuck to what he knew best: Strike it out! Away with it!
The effort had exhausted him. He felt uncomfortably disordered. Twice he had to fetch a wandering eye back from the crook of his arm and reattach a limb with conjunctive sinew. And in this agitated state of mind and body, he thought of Ms Georgina Hole, his former fiancée. It was half a year since she had broken off their engagement, and a quarter since she had entered his mind. He went towards her flat.
No one answered his knock. Was she still manning the charity kiosk at St Cloud’s on weekday afternoons? He could wait. He sat down on the doorstep and looked around. The place was getting tatty. When she came in, he would have to tell her to take better care of herself, and offer to lend a hand. He made a few emergency repairs to pass the time, but his thoughts kept drifting. Soon he fell asleep.
He dreamt of Georgina. He dreamt that she had stopped at the Good Cockatoo on her way back from work to share a meal with Bibliotheker, a fund-raiser and friend, whose advances she had been stubbornly resisting till now. On this day of all days. It was ten before she arrived home, and then she found her old flame slumped asleep against the doorpost. He half-opened his mouth, not to accuse her, but to explain that he had come to seek her blessing, even if he had lost her affection. But his tongue was as thick as blotting-paper in his mouth. She prised the rucksack from his embrace and led him inside, made him stretch out on the settee among the ungrammatical scatter cushions and overstuffed pouffes. She unlaced his hiking boots and loosened his bandanna. As she drew a blanket over him, his hands rose of their own accord and held her. To his surprise, she did not rebuff him. He measured the columns of her thighs with the upsilons of his outstretched fingers and thumbs. Then his hands slid over the parenthetical curves of her hips, smoothed a shiver out along the ridges of her ribs and the rounds of her breasts, paused for breath at the full stops of her nipples, rose again over her shoulders, felt the flutter of lashes against their palms and fell away from her flesh in amazement, as she drew back and receded, plunging him into an exclamatory darkness. He reached for a page of her in his mind. Not a jot, not an iota must be lost. Then his eyes and hands moved over her surface, proofing the metrical skeleton concealed in her warming limbs, reconnecting joint to joint, easing the flow of words like water over skin, making her fluent, feeling the prickle of his own gaze on the backs of his hands, tracing with the crumbling nib every pore and fold, every tendon and sinew, the popliteal hollow, the pillowed lips, the pressed ear, the whorled navel, delete and close up, wound and heal, the wet whisper of the font, the long alliteration of her throat, the elliptical flesh of her face, the bone beneath, the tongue between, the mouth, composing every square word of her into a perfectly ordered meaning, into a sentence that meant exactly what it said. Yet when he awoke, dishevelled and alone, this meaning had escaped him.
*
It was Munnery’s idea to remove the Restless Supermarket to the countryside, where they could work on it without fear of injuring passers-by. They had decided to act more circumspectly in such matters, and so the implications of the removal were first examined from every angle. What if it harmed the very people it was meant to help? What if it led to shortages in the surrounding suburbs, to a critical want of staples, to starvation? When such questions had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction, the renowned transposer went to work. He found an abandoned aerodrome in the hinterland, at the end of a country road, and put the Restless Supermarket down there, lock, stock and barrel. On the vacated site, Figg inserted a small section of the Rainbow Chicken Farm to tide the locals over until more permanent measures could be taken. Then the Proofreaders boarded their bus, specially chartered, and took the slower route into the interior.
Even from a distance, when the old control tower had just appeared on the horizon, the Restless Supermarket could be heard grumbling and groaning. Fluxman drew up in the parking lot near the delivery bays, and they disembarked into the noisy air. Then he led them inside and down a corridor to the manager’s office. On the other side of a flimsy wall, they heard the contents of the building churning like an angry sea, and some of them slumped a little, and some puffed out their chests.
A closed-circuit camera, the sole survivor among a dozen installed to combat shoplifting, was still relaying its impressions of the store to a television monitor on the manager’s desk. At first, it appeared to them that this camera had also broken down, and that the screen contained nothing but meaningless static. But then among the squirming motes they began to distinguish fragments of sense, flickering here and there, and they drew fearfully closer and gazed at the screen as if it were a window into the inferno.
The interior of the Restless Supermarket was barely recognizable. The entire space was seething, alive with an indiscriminate, indefatigable jumble of tins, jars, bottles, packets, boxes, bags, all mingled into one substance, whose textures eluded them, being simultaneously soft and hard, fuzzy and sharp, perishable and indestructible. Each element remained vividly itself for as long as they focused on it, and then dissolved back into the irreducible compound as soon as they relaxed their attention. It was like trying to watch one wing in a wheeling flock or one brick in a striding wall, although such things gave no inkling of the frenetic movement, the ceaseless and senseless changing of places with which the products had been charged. Occasionally, the ribs of a shelf gleamed white in the roil, or a chequered floor tile flashed like a tooth.
They stood there mesmerized, and might have gone on standing there until they lost all will to act, had Fluxman not roused them by clapping his Phone Book open on the desk.
Quickly, before they could lose heart, they constructed makeshift desks of cardboard cartons, laid out the documents they had brought with them in their portfolios alongside jars of pencils and rubbers and rulers, and gathered inventories, advertisements, ledgers, marketing plans and flow charts from the filing cabinets. Munnery and Levitas launched into the engineering, locating salients in the soup, righting gondolas and levelling refrigerator units, realigning shelves in the proper parallels, with aisles of the optimum width between, rearranging sections and departments to create a rational flow of custom. Wiederkehr repaved and Figg repapered. And then the two together set about repacking the shelves, tidying up the debris as they went.
It was an enormous labour. The product substance was hard and soft, impenetrable and yielding, solid and liquid. It resisted their efforts to cut into it, to separate parts from the whole. A single item grappled from its clutches and put aside on the end of an empty shelf, in a little white clearing, would maintain its integrity for a moment. But then the substance would begin to exert its viscous attraction, and soon the item would be jiggling and turning on its base, and floating free again into the general mass, where it would be whirled away into restless anonymity. The shelf itself would come loose and be lost in the uproar. The categories had to be built up painstakingly, row by row, line by line, and all the while chaos threatened to overwhelm them.