Chapter 2

1995

"Excuse me young man."

I turned to look at the speaker. I heard giggles and from the corner of my eye, I saw Angela and some of her friends staring and pointing at me. The sun was shining outside, making the shop seem darker than normal. I wondered what fate had in store for me now. I groaned inwardly at the unintentional pun. The security guard motioned me to one side.

"What's the problem?" I spoke warily, aware that, even at this early stage, people were looking at us. The 'little angel' and her friends seemed to find my predicament extraordinarily diverting. The guard ignored my question.

"Have you paid for everything in your bag today?" The guard spoke with heavy irony, he must have seen something; or thought he'd seen something I amended to myself. Outside the girls were becoming more animated. I started to get a bad feeling about this. I realised that the guard had stopped and was waiting for my answer. I replayed the conversation in my head up to this point.

"I think so, that is, yes." I had a thought. "Unless someone has slipped something in my bag without me noticing."

The guard looked disappointed. Then I realised that I'd said one of the 'magic phrases' that I'd learnt from some of my wilder acquaintances. I struggled to remember other things that were important to say or do when you've been caught shoplifting. Since it wasn't an activity that I had a lot of interest in I hadn't taken much notice. I started to regret my inattention. I was led to a door with the legend 'Private' on it. I remembered something else from what my 'friends' had said. I stopped walking towards the door.

"Excuse me, you didn't answer my question." The guard looked disgruntled. "What's the problem?" I re-iterated.

"I have reason to believe that you haven't paid for all the items in your bag."

There, he'd said it.

"I want to see the Manager."

"That's where I'm taking you."

"No, I want to see the Manager out here."

"Stop messing about and get in there."

"I don't have to do that. Get the manager please."

"I told you, that's were I'm taking you!" The guard was beginning to lose his temper, and I was becoming uncertain. It was too late now though. Angry as he was, I trusted him less than I did at the start of all this, if that were possible. Could you have negative trust, I wondered?

"I don't want to and you can't make me. Besides, my mother told me never to go off with strangers." I sounded like a petulant little boy. The guard, predictably, was less than pleased.

"Why you little..." The guard raised his hand to me and then he realised where we were and lowered his arm. We had started to gather a small crowd. Eventually he spoke into his radio. "The kid wants the manager out here. There're too many people for that. The longer we mess about the bigger the crowd." The radio crackled unintelligibly. He turned to me. "The manager'll be here in a minute," he tailed off talking to himself, but I still heard him say, "for all the good it will do you."

About a minute or so later a man in his thirties, wearing an ill-fitting suit, came out from the door marked 'Private'. He looked impatient and walked quickly and purposefully towards us. His expression was set in a frown; he stopped in front of me and spoke in a hectoring tone that was calculated to browbeat me into submission. "All right you, let's have a look in your bag." I pulled the bag out of reach. No way was I letting him look in there, my acquaintances were adamant on that point.

"Are you a policeman?"

"What's that got to do with anything?" The man looked nonplussed.

"Are you a policeman?"

"No of course not! Give me that bag!" He made a grab for the bag, but I was too quick for him again. Desperation leant my reflexes the extra edge that I needed to keep the bag out of his grasp. Someone in the still-gathering crowd giggled. The manager, who hadn't started out in the best of moods, got crosser still. Surprisingly, the angrier he got, the easier it became for me to act coolly.

"You haven't got a right to search me unless you're a policeman. Want me to tell the police that you searched me, in front of all of these witnesses?"

The manager looked around at the crowd that had grown appreciably larger since voices had been raised. My heart was thumping and I was sweating buckets. I just hoped that I could bluster it out.

"Aren't you gonna call the cops mister?" A voice from the crowd jeered at him.

Just as the unknown voice spoke, the crowd parted and a policeman and a policewoman walked towards me. I sighed in relief; perhaps I could get out of this unscathed after all. The manager looked at me strangely, shoplifters aren't supposed to welcome the presence of the police, he started to look less sure of himself.

"All right, what seems to be the problem?" The policeman spoke to me in fatherly sort of way while his partner, a woman, shooed the assembled shoppers on their way. I decided to get my version of events on record first.

"This man," I pointed at the guard. "Stopped me before I could leave the store and tried to get me to follow him through that door." I pointed at the door, in front of which, we were standing. "I didn't like the idea of being in 'private' with him, so I stopped here and made him call the manager." I left out the threatening behaviour, though I stared at the guard to make sure that he understood this might only be a temporary state of affairs. "When this bloke came," I pointed at the manager this time, "he tried to search me and I was refusing to let him and then you came." I wound down, suddenly I felt very tired.

The Manager and the policeman turned to stare at the guard, who shifted uncomfortably at this scrutiny. The policeman spoke first, "Is this true? Did you speak to him and stop him from leaving the shop?"

"Yeah. But he was gonna leave, why else would he walk to the door? Why should I have to chase him all the way down the High Street?"

"Because, you lazy moron, if he hasn't left the shop, he hasn't stolen anything yet!" The manager almost shouted at the man. He turned away in disgust and opened the door jerking his head at the hapless guard who shambled, reluctantly, ahead of him through the doorway.

"Are we to understand that you don't wish to press this matter any further, sir?" The fatherly policeman was polite to the point of rudeness. The manager scowled at the policeman and stalked after his subordinate, ignoring the question. The door cut off the sound of him screaming imprecations at the guard, as it closed. I turned to move away and, suddenly, the world seemed to turn grey and colourless.

"Are you all right son?"

I shook my head and sat heavily on the floor. "Feel faint." I stuck my head between my legs and waited while the shop and all its fittings seemed to swirl about me. I started to feel very sick.

"Mark!" The sound of Susan's voice cut through the rushing sound that was almost all I could hear and the next thing I new I was being held by a pair of comforting arms. My faintness receded. No way was I going to lose consciousness and miss the chance of feeling her hugging me!

"It's all right officer, he lives next door to me. I'll see that he gets home all right." I said nothing and relaxed in the circle of her embrace. Sometimes these situations did have their compensations after all.

"You do that miss, he's had a very lucky escape." The policeman spoke with heavy irony, "If that guard hadn't been so impatient, we'd be knee deep in social workers around about now." And with a fatherly pat on my shoulder the two of them sauntered out of the shop.

I looked in my bag. I still had no idea of what the little horrors had put in there. Lingerie. No wonder they looked so thrilled with themselves, imagining my embarrassment when this lot came to view. I pulled it from my bag and threw it vaguely in the direction of a clothes stand. Someone would pick it up eventually and I couldn't bring myself to care all that much one way or another anyway.

"When I see them I'll..."

"Say nothing. What's the point? You might want to talk to your friends in their hearing, about how some kids who played this sort of trick on someone and they all got caught as they were seen on CCTV and the police just assumed they were all one gang."

Susan laughed at that. "They'll be shitting bricks by the time I've finished with them." She turned to me, "How did you know all that stuff?" She waved vaguely at the door marked 'Private'.

"It was just something I remembered hearing. Come on let's get out of here."

As we walked out of the shop Susan laughed, "You saved her again you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"The little angel could have had a police record if you'd simply rolled over. I bet they were on CCTV like you said."

I shrugged; I didn't feel like I'd saved anybody. I just felt tired. Susan turned to me and spoke again. "I don't care what you say, I'm putting it in my journal."

"What journal?"

"The one that I'm keeping, I want to be a reporter one day, so I'm practising. I write a journal every day. Then I read it a year later, I reckon if I can make a boring day sound interesting a year later then I must be doing something right. And today is definitely not boring."

"Oh." I felt too tired for witty repartee. She pushed open the swing door in preference to the revolving one and I breathed a sigh of relief. The gaggle of girls broke up as we approached them. I said nothing and Angela stared at me as we passed. At least, I reflected, if this was one of 'those times', Angela wasn't crying.

The blackness had returned once more.

Was it my imagination or was it not quite so stygian?

I reflected on the scene I'd just been part of. Susan and Angela were common factors. If it was VR, it was the most detailed VR I'd ever heard of, and how the hell did they manage to capture people's thoughts? I veered away from the dawning realisation that this was no VR scenario, but now the thought was planted it was impossible not to keep returning to it. Was I dead? I didn't feel dead. That seemed hilarious, what was death supposed to feel like? I struggled to remember anything, but all I had apart from the odd fact was the last two scenes. For some reason the details of the scenes seemed etched on my consciousness. But then when I concentrated on them they flowed away.

Even so, I persevered, and found that I could eventually bring everything to mind. My name was Mark and I knew two girls: Susan and Angela. For some reason that I couldn't fathom, Angela's mother hated me. I thought of Angela, I remembered the way that the sunlight had caught her hair and made it glow. She was a nice kid, on the whole, apart from a tendency to cry at awkward times. If it weren't for her mother, I'd have been happy to live next door to her.

I let myself drift and for a second I thought I could hear a voice. A girl's voice. I turned towards the sound and it stopped. And then I was turning and weaving to put me in position to dive into the next bubble...

1996

I watched in horror as Angela grabbed the half-full bottle of brandy that they had filched from her mother and drank it down.

I'd been hidden in the trees where I had been standing for an hour or more waiting for the time when they would feel sick or something and I could grab the bottle away before the could do any real damage to themselves. I'd watched as the three girls took swigs in turn from the bottle. It had been obvious to me though, that the other two weren't half as drunk as they made out. I remembered something I'd read about drunkenness - it has said that drunken behaviour was a learned behaviour and then it had gone one to detail a tribe of South American Indians that got progressively quieter the more drunk they got, because that's the way everyone else behaved when they were drunk.