As an ordinary person like me, you only see the reality underlying the complexity of our 21st century world through rare and accidental tears in the noisy curtain drawn over the engine room of commerce by the media, in its uneasy alliance with politicians and their agents of control, and its much more comfortable conspiracy with big business which provides the lifeblood of advertising revenue.
I was provoked into writing this account by witnessing the third of three incidents, the last at second hand, but reported by a trusted friend.
The first happening was in the late autumn of 2010. Like hundreds of others I drove to the supermarket for a weekly gathering of supplies for my wife and myself. We were fairly well organised and I went alone with a list of requirements. It was cool, grey and blustery that November day. Errant plastic bags tumbled in the whirling wind. The foetid stink of a landfill dump upwind of the car park mingled with diesel fumes from a badly tuned camper-van parked nearby with its engine ticking over, and the mixture hit my nostrils, whilst I found a pound coin and gathered the 'bags for life'.
As always on entering the shop, joining the herd with their rattling trolleys and screaming undisciplined children, I had a feeling of oppression. The utilities of the apparatus of consumer control were part hidden above and behind the cold glare of the overhead lighting system, but the ducts, pipes and cables that conveyed energy and information and money could be seen in their neat complexity.
To persuade, cajole, tempt and intrigue the undecided, offers were made in vivid yellow lettering on scarlet boards. Two for one. Three for ten pounds. Reduced price.
To confuse, divert, and distract, the noisy live radio station owned by the supermarket poured out a mix of adverts and popular music and this same stream of auditory persuasion would be hitting the ears of thousands of consumers throughout the country. Your last opportunity to buy. Unbeatable offers. The latest new Wii game.
To finally ensnare the senses the scent of fresh baked bread permeated the air.
Fortunately I knew the layout of the store, at least in its current configuration, and could find my purchases quickly. The checkout position I chose was being efficiently handled by a small, dark-haired, olive-skinned girl. When my turn came I saw her face full on, as she mouthed the standard words off the card she no doubt had been trained with, "Hello. Thank you for waiting. Are you alright with packing? Have you enough bags?"
The questions came quickly, and normally I would have been able to answer them promptly and confidently. But I was dumbfounded by the appearance of her eyes. With her colouring I would have expected dark brown eyes. But hers were a vivid, translucent turquoise with tapering black spokes radiating regularly and precisely from the pupil to a black ring at the edge of the iris.
I mumbled something about being OK. The ballet of the laser reader pinging and her passing the goods down the stainless steel ramp for me to pack, commenced. It came to an end and she faced me, told me the bill amount and I put my credit card into the reader. We were looking at each other while the internet validated the card. I blurted out, "Has anyone told you that you have the most extraordinary eyes?"
The next ten seconds took me back forty years to when, as a junior engineer, I was making a pitch to my boss, Brian. I was seated across from him at his desk. I had his full attention, until the phone rang - it was his boss. Brian's eyes were still looking at me, but defocussed, the attention now on the message coming through his ear to his brain. Effectively, for him I was no longer there. That was exactly what was happening to the checkout operator. I had disappeared from her universe and she was receiving some other stimulus from something, somewhere, somewhen else. It was so short a moment I almost dismissed the incident. But it was burnt into my memory.
She came back to me and pinning me with those hypnotic almost unearthly eyes, through a half laugh said, "These are my new contact lenses."
"They're great," I responded, "very unusual."
I busied myself over the next couple of hours in the routine of taking the shopping home and with my wife, putting the goods away. I recounted to her the essential features of the contact lens incident but not the puzzling hesitation that had occurred. Nor the presence in the back of the supermarket car park of a large white van with a complex of satellite dishes mounted on the roof. The latter I noticed as I entered the supermarket roundabout, but it was momentarily forgotten before I reached home.
Over the weeks that brought us to the deep freeze in January 2011, a few more of the dark haired olive skinned girls populated the supermarket check outs.
"You girls and your contact lenses," I quipped on one occasion," it's become a fashion."
Again the distracted hesitation, but much shorter than that in the incident I had encountered before.
"Oh yes," she said," we love them."
Ultimately the deep freeze tightened and we endured power cuts. One occurred just before I was due to check out the weekly shop. The emergency generator cut in promptly, and light was restored in less than thirty seconds, but in that interval I thought I saw in my check out girl's eyes a red glow. It was so fleeting I felt it must have been an illusion. But the memory was imprinted and formed the second of the three incidents I am relating.
I have a friend, Peter, who is a lot younger than I, but at one time we used to race go carts together, and the friendship endured whilst he became an ambulance driver, and then underwent paramedic training. We met nearly every a week on Fridays at the local pub. My wife used to excuse herself as she said the never ending talk about cars and engines was too tedious for words - even worse than Top Gear.
The summer of 2011 was the time of riots and looting. I heard on the local radio one Friday afternoon that the supermarket we regularly used had been targeted.
I met Peter at the usual time. He was very subdued, and his normally ebullient demeanour now was almost taciturn. I brought him a large whisky as well as his usual pint of lager.
"You look as if you need a bit of a lift," I said as I placed the drinks on the table,"what's up?"
"Sorry. I'm not sure what I've seen. You know the local supermarket was targeted by the rioters today?"
He took a sip at the whisky.
"Yes. It's lucky we shop on Wednesdays."
"It was terrible. They called us in - the place was a mess, the windows gone and the store trashed and open to the elements. And somehow the thing had turned into a racial conflict and the injuries and some deaths were terrible. And this is England and Lancashire. Where have we got to?"
He sighed wearily and sipped again.
"Anyway, the police were there interviewing and arresting some people. So I went to see if I could do anything. A few of the checkout girls seemed to be dead in their positions. I went to one of them with Paddy and started to try to find out what was wrong. She was slumped over the till but there was no blood. And then I heard this roar of a V8 diesel and a bloody great white van with satellite dishes on the roof crashed through the debris of the windows, and black uniformed men waving guns, ran out shouting at me and Paddy to get away from the check outs. They fired shots into the air and Paddy and me stepped back and the posse picked up the checkout girls and took them to the van and it roared away in a cloud of rubber smoke. The second puzzle is that the police did absolutely nothing. There were four Panda cars and two motorway patrol cars, and not one engine turned."
"Hey," I said,"you're a bit ahead of yourself. What was the first puzzle?"
"It all happened so quick, I was parting the hair of the checkout girl to see if she had a head wound, and then the van and its army arrived. But I saw something. Very briefly but I'm sure it was real."
He shuddered and drank the rest of the double whisky in one draught.
"And?" I asked.
"There was a tiny label on her scalp concealed by her hair. I think it said 'Hitachi robotics division'."
And so a tiny chink in the armour of corporatism was penetrated, and the cynical and uncaring pursuit of profit at any cost momentarily revealed.
But dare I tell anyone?
The End
