A book of silences

Chapter three - strange

"Look at this pile of crap!" said Russ from the opposite aisle, breaking into Cat's thoughts. He was her least favourite of the long-term stackers; loud, sarcastic and bullying. His pot belly and florid complexion suggested an unhealthy liking for alcohol, and his moods varied from overly friendly to barely controlled rage. In his favour, however, was an obsession with neatness to match Cat's own.

"July before March! April stacked with January. Haven't you heard of a calendar?" This was shouted at a young student type working further down the aisle. He quickly skittered around the corner to escape Russ' wrath.

"Can you believe it?" continued Russ, looking over at Cat. She raised her eyebrows in support.

"Just shoved stuff in to fill the shelves," muttered Russ, quickly flicking cans around to put the oldest at the front and dropping a couple of expired ones into the trolley at his side. His job tonight was checking the other stackers' work, something Cat hated but Russ loved, wandering around the store spot checking dates and castigating the other workers for slackness. It was an impossible job to do properly, but by concentrating on the newbies you could make quite a difference. He pushed his trolley further into the store, wheels squeaking and left Cat to her arranging.

A shout from further up the aisles, and Russ reappeared, briskly pushing his trolley, wheels squealing with excess speed. He was pursued by another stacker, a slim, long-haired woman, wearing a nicely distressed pair of jeans and waving a can of peaches. "Don't you be checking my work you fecking arse-hole! Go bother the babies!" This was Meredith, twenty-five years old, a single mother and amazingly foul-mouthed. Another long termer, she looked stretched rather than tall, with black straight hair held up in an untidy bun and deep tiredness bruises around her eyes. Her hands were adorned with numerous silver rings and large-stoned tat, and lines of gold hoops hung from her ears. She'd once told Cat that her jewellery and swearing were a disguise to stop people thinking she was posh as she'd spent 3 years at law school before retiring pregnant. The father-to-be had fled soon after, leaving her with a new baby, no money, a massive student debt and a set of estranged parents.

She stopped near Cat. "That should keep him away in frozen goods the rest of the shift, the creep," she said with satisfaction. She glanced over at Cat hopefully. "Er, any chance of you coming in for me for a few hours on Wednesday? Just till four, I've got an assignment due and if the Golden Child sleeps, I can get it finished before I come in."

"Not a problem," said Cat, "text me." She liked Meredith and they swapped shifts and part shifts whenever they needed to. She was slowly working her way through the rest of her law degree, part-time, and had a small group of friends who helped her.

Meredith smiled, then turned and shouted at Russ' fast receding back "That's right, off up there with the rest of the stinking bottom crawling sea life!" She turned back to Cat, voice friendlier. "Thanks a million, though I still don't know how you do it, full-time study and this job."

Cat grinned. "You know us Art School types, never at lectures, lazy all of us. Spend our time in bed or at the pub."

Meredith snorted. "Good one, Cat. I've never met anyone so driven as you. And your memory; I thought I was good, what with all the law I've had to memorize, but you ..." She shook her head and started to move back to her stacking, but then turned back.

"I think someone was looking for you. I came in early today and heard this bloke asking the late shift supervisor about an art student that might work here. Being a stinking day worker, he didn't know anything. Thought you might want to know." She looked more closely at Cat. "You're not in trouble, are you?"

"Don't think so." She was a little perplexed. None of her Art School friends knew she worked here, in fact she encouraged them to think that she had a healthy trust-fund that paid for her education.

"What did he look like?"

Meredith thought for a moment. "Well, you know, sort of arty. Short, darkish hair, about so high," she held a hand at (her) head height. "Kind of boring clothes, with a big coat on top. Dark glasses indoors, which was why I thought he was an art student." Meredith drew a puzzled face. "Anyway, none of the day staff knew you, so he went off muttering. A friend perhaps?"

"I don't think so."

"Spurned lover?"

A laugh. "I should be so lucky!"

"Mad axe murderer?"

"Not so lucky. But no, I hope."

                                                                                         .....

Cat finished work at eight fifteen, spending an extra few minutes tidying up after the student Russ had been shouting at. She felt a little kinder towards Russ after this, and far less friendly towards the weasel who couldn't line up tins. Weasel, now that was a good name for the culprit, she'd have to pass it round to the rest of the permanent workers.

She stretched to get the kinks out of her back and thought about a shower. A quick sniff test assured her she didn't need one too badly, just a quick squirt of perfume. One advantage of being small was that she didn't seem to sweat much, or at least not smell too bad, though it didn't make up for a lack of upper body strength, an inability to reach top shelves, age checks at pubs or condescending blokes in night clubs. Or, worse still, men who liked her because they thought she looked like a little girl; hence the oh-so-sharp knife she kept in her bag. She shook herself mentally and concentrated on the day ahead. She was bit tired after working all night at college, followed by lectures and shelf stacking, but figured she could have a good sit down in the art school library later to recover.

This was the second of Cat's strangeness's. Since the age of twelve, she'd, quite literally, stopped sleeping. Luckily, she'd been getting less and less sleep in the years before this, and being a rather quiet and solitary only child, had adjusted quite well. She'd read for hours at night, listen to the radio, reviewed her day's happenings and no-one had noticed her increasing sleeplessness. Not wanting to worry her parents, she'd trained herself to pretend to be sleeping when others were about and to find things to occupy herself; she'd climb out of her bedroom window at two am and walk around her quiet country hometown; she'd memorize whole chapters of books she liked, and, since she was eight, she'd draw.

She could still remember the joy of first seeing drawings by Leonardo DaVinci in a book at her local library; so detailed, so full of movement, so real. She'd spent whole nights copying them and poring over his pictures of inventions and bridges and people. Whilst she wasn't a natural drawer like Bee or Bev, whole nights spent sketching and painting since early childhood had made putting down on paper what she saw as natural and as easy as breathing for her.

Her fascination with drawing had made the strangeness of her increasing sleeplessness less obvious to her. Still, it had been quite a shock the first night she hadn't slept. She remembered lying there in her blue flannelette pyjamas, waiting for sleep to enfold her and it hadn't. She'd lain still until dawn, lingering, then had got up, dressed, and gone for a walk. The next night had been the same, and the next, until, after a week, she'd decided she was never going to sleep again.

She'd still get physically tired and would lie down and rest for a couple of hours, feeling her body relax and recuperate. Her brain in the meantime would range about, thinking, replaying, speculating. School work had never been a problem, she'd never slept much, and now she had an extra eight hours a day to study, mainly art, but she'd kept up with her other subjects with ease. She'd often wondered if either of her parents had the same affliction, whether they too were lying in bed at night thinking about the world and pretending to be asleep, all three of them wrapped in secret cocoons of quiet pretence. She'd never got to ask them before their car crash; afterwards she'd been so numbed and lost and angry that she'd never examined the question again, the whole issue becoming so intertwined with the loss of her parents that she'd hidden it away in some dark corner of her mind, never to be remembered, never to be addressed.