The Shop, continued
Nov. 30th, 2008 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerI had a dream that night. I was sitting in front of a desk in a bare room, with a light shining in my face, and someone was asking me where I worked. I couldn't remember, and they just kept asking over and over again, and I was getting more and more panicky till I managed to wrench myself awake and lie there breathing hard for a while.
I'd have had trouble telling them even if I could remember. The shop had a name, but it wasn't in English but in some alphabet that looked a bit like Cyrillic and a bit like Greek and a bit like Hebrew. I think most people thought it was Polish or something--there was a Polish grocery down the street from the mall, and various other establishments catering to the non-British scattered throughout the city. Anyway, the indecipherable name didn't stop people coming in and buying stuff.
I remember when I first went there, the shop was still being fitted out, and I thought it was going to be a games place--you know, consoles, computer games, secondhand DVDs. The advert had said "Gamer required. Unique new post. Competitive salary," or something like that. I'd gone in without much hope, thinking they'd be looking for some first-person-shooter merchant with the reflexes of a Gulf War veteran and the attention span of a plastic spoon. Liliana had done the interview--Zoltan-hound-of-Dracula didn't start showing up regularly till we'd been open about a week--and I'd tested out on a demo of the game and done fairly well. Somehow in all that time the name of the shop hadn't come up once.
After I'd been there a month or so, I looked up at it one morning and asked Liliana how she pronounced it.
"I don't," she said.
We were a small operation--there wasn't even a phone in the shop, would you believe--and the only contact we had with customers was when they were already in the place. You wouldn't think it possible, but it worked.
Anyway. I lay there till I felt a little calmer, and then got up and made myself some tea. That was something else we could do with in the shop. You could still get decent tea, but the price had more than quadrupled, and what most people made do with was a mix of tea of lesser quality and other infusible leaf-type products. Dandelion, I suspected, and probably nettles. All very healthy, but not really satisfying.
It was fairly obvious, now that I was awake, where the dream had sprung from. No matter how you tried to avoid it, somewhere constantly beneath the surface was the knowledge that what we were doing, in the shop, was in several very real senses cheating. We were importing goods into the country--into the world, in fact--without going through any form of Customs or paying any duties, and what's more they were better than anyone in Europe--or America, I gathered--could produce. We'd had several customers ask us when we were going to open a branch in New York, and one very forceful power-suited lady had more or less told us that she was going to market us up and down the West Coast. Our solution when this kind of thing happened, assuming prevarication didn't work, was to take them in to see Zoltan-hound-of-Dracula. Fifteen minutes of him being impenetrably foreign at them was usually enough to make them give up in disgust; but they still came back to buy things.
It could only be a matter of time before we were rumbled, and it was a fair bet that no-one would believe the truth even if we were to tell it. The smart thing to do would be to get out before that happened. Leave and find another job, and put out of my mind the taste of the cheese and the bread and the honey, and the feel of the woollen shirt against my skin.
Not that I was even considering it, of course. But it would have been the smart thing to do.
I finished my tea and looked out at the overcast sky. A patch of slight brightness showed where the moon would have been. My watch said 4:36. I went back to bed, and this time sleep came alone.
I'd have had trouble telling them even if I could remember. The shop had a name, but it wasn't in English but in some alphabet that looked a bit like Cyrillic and a bit like Greek and a bit like Hebrew. I think most people thought it was Polish or something--there was a Polish grocery down the street from the mall, and various other establishments catering to the non-British scattered throughout the city. Anyway, the indecipherable name didn't stop people coming in and buying stuff.
I remember when I first went there, the shop was still being fitted out, and I thought it was going to be a games place--you know, consoles, computer games, secondhand DVDs. The advert had said "Gamer required. Unique new post. Competitive salary," or something like that. I'd gone in without much hope, thinking they'd be looking for some first-person-shooter merchant with the reflexes of a Gulf War veteran and the attention span of a plastic spoon. Liliana had done the interview--Zoltan-hound-of-Dracula didn't start showing up regularly till we'd been open about a week--and I'd tested out on a demo of the game and done fairly well. Somehow in all that time the name of the shop hadn't come up once.
After I'd been there a month or so, I looked up at it one morning and asked Liliana how she pronounced it.
"I don't," she said.
We were a small operation--there wasn't even a phone in the shop, would you believe--and the only contact we had with customers was when they were already in the place. You wouldn't think it possible, but it worked.
Anyway. I lay there till I felt a little calmer, and then got up and made myself some tea. That was something else we could do with in the shop. You could still get decent tea, but the price had more than quadrupled, and what most people made do with was a mix of tea of lesser quality and other infusible leaf-type products. Dandelion, I suspected, and probably nettles. All very healthy, but not really satisfying.
It was fairly obvious, now that I was awake, where the dream had sprung from. No matter how you tried to avoid it, somewhere constantly beneath the surface was the knowledge that what we were doing, in the shop, was in several very real senses cheating. We were importing goods into the country--into the world, in fact--without going through any form of Customs or paying any duties, and what's more they were better than anyone in Europe--or America, I gathered--could produce. We'd had several customers ask us when we were going to open a branch in New York, and one very forceful power-suited lady had more or less told us that she was going to market us up and down the West Coast. Our solution when this kind of thing happened, assuming prevarication didn't work, was to take them in to see Zoltan-hound-of-Dracula. Fifteen minutes of him being impenetrably foreign at them was usually enough to make them give up in disgust; but they still came back to buy things.
It could only be a matter of time before we were rumbled, and it was a fair bet that no-one would believe the truth even if we were to tell it. The smart thing to do would be to get out before that happened. Leave and find another job, and put out of my mind the taste of the cheese and the bread and the honey, and the feel of the woollen shirt against my skin.
Not that I was even considering it, of course. But it would have been the smart thing to do.
I finished my tea and looked out at the overcast sky. A patch of slight brightness showed where the moon would have been. My watch said 4:36. I went back to bed, and this time sleep came alone.