The Proofreaders worked in shifts. When they were exhausted beyond endurance, they lay down and slept with their twitching hands clasped between their knees. When they were famished, they transposed a tin of something from the stock.
At last, patches of stillness appeared in the tumult. And then a solid shelf or two. The seething died down a little. One day, the space between the shelves and the rafters cleared momentarily and revealed a row of dangling signboards: Tea & Coffee, Breakfast Cereals, Dairy Products, Pet Food, Household Cleaners … The Proofreaders gave a weary cheer. Already, in the mind’s eye and the mind’s nose, they saw the master chefs of Alibia walking enraptured down the gleaming aisles and smelt the aromas of feasts to come. But the battle was far from won. The superstructure was refractory. The gondolas floated off half-laden. The dairy went sour. The overtaxed shelves collapsed. The products kept bubbling back into substance. No sooner was one aisle restored to order, than another rose up clamorously, shedding labels and price tags in promiscuous profusion. From his headquarters in the back room, Fluxman rallied his colleagues again and again. He would not submit. And at the end of a week, the basic shape of the enterprise had been secured.
Night had no meaning in the Restless Supermarket. They laboured on, raising up pyramids of tins and cans, stabilizing barrows of fruit and vegetables, racking and stacking, piling and puzzling, until the shelves began to settle down, rising up and subsiding in waves, as if by general assent, as if a rumour of defeat had run like a swell from aisle to aisle.
Glaring absences became visible. Baked goods were required, said Munnery. They brought in quantities of Chelsea buns, Madeira slabs, Lamingtons, pita-bread with hummus. What about the liquid refreshments? They brought in whiskey, wine in boxes, soda water, ice. Everyone needed something special, some little extra. They added mops, marinades, wonton dumplings, asparagus spears, noodles in the shape of shells. Wiederkehr became quite inventive, importing strings of vanished delicacies he remembered from his childhood. He and Figg devised entirely new dishes, and arranged the ingredients on the shelves by menu, season and refinement of taste, constellations so subtle that only gourmets would appreciate them. Meanwhile, Banes was making his way down the aisles for the last time, straightening labels and marking down prices. Something like peace and quiet descended and endured.
It was then that they noticed the absence of Fluxman. As soon as the tide had turned, he had left his post and gone into the butchery. The air smelt of blood. There was mopping up to do. He must excise sawdust and broadcast desiccated coconut, just as an interim measure. He must delete sub-standard carcases in the freezer room. Munnery found him there, sweeping behind a stiff downpour of plastic curtain, and gave him the news: the sun had risen over the Alibian Sea and the Restless Supermarket was at rest.
*
Although the Wetland Ramble was gone from Fluxman’s yard and a patch of forest rustled in its place, a muddy breath still clung. In the stench that blew into his study, a mixture of dung and waterweeds and feathers, gnawed bones and half-hatched chicks entombed in eggshell, there was a lingering reminder of captivity.
Having risen to shut the window against this poison, he stood gazing at the beeches silvered in moonlight, while a flock of noisy gulls scattered into the heavens. Then he returned with a sigh to the blighted landscape of the Book. The breeze had rifled spitefully through his pages. As he leafed back to his bookmark, his eye fell on:
Lombardo WH Saphire St Imprl Mnt 878-4322
oologi dens Cnstntia
Lombat, D 34 Burrows Rd Blk Hl 642-1986
Lomnitz Z Refinery Rd Pkld Dl 486-0051
Just how the missing half of the Zoological Gardens had landed up in the L’s was anyone’s guess. He had been searching for it for five days; finding it by chance was an affront to his professionalism. He wrung the neck of the blue pencil in the sharpener and put its point down on the first o in oologi …
On second thoughts, he fetched some of Munnery’s catalogues off a shelf and found the section on animal life. He saw that Figg had already been busy among the marsupials. The cage must be bursting! Fluxman deleted a couple of bars in the reference material, a koala and the chubbiest of the kangeroos. And then he thought — what the hell — and put a line through the whole lot of them.
*
The campaign to recapture the Restless Supermarket had been intended as a trial run to prepare the Members for the war of attrition that lay ahead, and it achieved this end. A division of labour was established, and an armoury of weapons tested. A point was made. What remained now was to repeat the point over and over again on a grander and grander scale.
But the Restless Supermarket outdid itself, for Fluxman at least. It proclaimed itself the great offensive against error. It exhausted every potential, it surpassed every anticipation. From that moment on, everything that remained to be done became routine. The initial topographical work — arrangements for mountains, forests and streams, ocean currents and seasonal rainfall, reservoirs and dams, the restoration of mineral deposits and rock faces, the replenishment of slag heaps and landfills — all this could not but seem like a faint echo of flooring and shelving and plumbing.
When it was time for a bit of town planning, Fluxman’s interest quickened. The residential areas and office parks and industrial zones had to be unshuffled and restored to their proper places. There were green belts to loosen, highways to unravel, pylons to restring. The displaced masses of Alibia had flung down their makeshift houses in the buffer zones: now the appropriate social distance could be restored between the haves and have-nots, the unsightlier settlements shifted to the peripheries where they would not upset the balance, the grand estates returned to the centre where they belonged. There was wasteland to play with, and blasted veld, and dead water. The possibilities seemed endless. But when he got down to it, it was no more difficult, and indeed no more important, than the sorting and packing and pricing of boxes and tins on a shelf.
The city pulled itself together. Slowly, the recognizable outlines of Alibia reappeared, as street after street and block after block was knocked back into its familiar, ordinary shape.
It was not a riddle, a puzzle, a paradox, as many supposed. Every little victory had to be earned. The boffins of the Proofreaders’ Society worked overtime. Levered up by their acute pencils, whole paragraphs of the world came and went. Their eyes crossed and recrossed every line of the city streets until the most crooked found their truest delineation. With every hyphen that tacked a building to its neighbour, knit one, purl one, with every colon that suggested a passage from one block to another, with every dotted line that restored a highway to the symmetry of coming and going, the earth drew Alibia tighter to its bosom. It should have been a spectacle, but it was not.
In the corrosive solution of tedium that flowed from this realization, Fluxman’s qualms about his own excesses were dissolved. If ever he went too far, he told himself, and deleted more than was strictly necessary, he could always call on Wiederkehr to undo it again. He became ruthless. First it was dittographies in the Book, people and places, like the Lumleys. Later it was the minor irritations, like that Goosen who refused to answer questions about the price of eggs, and that Schneider who had to go setting up a business with a Sartorius. And then it was the human detritus he found in the margins of the city, the erroneous ones, the slips of the hand, the tramps, the fools, the congenitally stupid, the insufferably ugly. They were incorrigible, he reasoned, and doing away with them, at one painless stroke, was more humane than trying to improve them.