China Miéville - Looking for Jake and Other Stories

The doors were propped open by now and he had me help him carry a portable desk from the show floor into the ball room.

“Kids make us, John. Nearly forty percent of our customers have young children, and most of those cite the kid-friendliness of our stores as one of the top two or three reasons they come here. Above quality of product. Above price. You drive here, you eat, it’s a day out for the family.

“Okay, so that’s one thing. Plus, it turns out that people who are shopping for their kids are much more aware of issues like safety and quality. They spend way more per item, on average, than singles and childless couples, because they want to know they’ve done the best for their kids. And our margins on the big-ticket items are way healthier than on entry-level product. Even low-income couples, John, the proportion of their income that goes on furniture and household goods just rockets up at pregnancy.”

He was looking around him at the balls, bright in the ceiling lights that hadn’t been on for months, at the ruined skeleton of the Wendy house.

“So what’s the first thing we look at when a store begins to go wrong? The facilities. The crèche, the childcare. Okay, tick. But the results here have been badly off-kilter recently. All the stores have shown a dip, of course, but this one, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, it’s not just revenues are down, but traffic has sunk in a way that’s completely out of line. Usually, traffic is actually surprisingly resilient in a downturn. People buy less, but they keep coming. Sometimes, John, we even see numbers go up.

“But here? Visits are down overall. Proportionally, traffic from couples with children is down even more.

And repeat traffic from couples with children has dropped through the floor. That’s what’s unusual with this store.

“So why aren’t they coming back as often? What’s different here? What’s changed?” He gave a little smile and looked ostentatiously around, then back at me. “Okay? Parents can still leave their kids in the crèche, but the kids aren’t asking their parents for repeat visits like they used to. Something’s missing.

Ergo. Therefore. We need it back.”

He laid his briefcase on the desk and gave me a wry smile.

“You know how it is. You tell them and tell them to fix things as they happen, but do they listen?

Because it isn’t them who have to patch it up, right? So then you end up with not one problem but two.

Twice as much trouble to bring under control.” He shook his head ruefully. He was looking around the room, into all the corners, narrowing his eyes. He took a couple of deep breaths.

“Okay, John, listen, thanks for all your help. I’m going to need a few minutes here. Why don’t you go watch some TV, get yourself a coffee or something? I’ll come find you in a while.”

I told him I’d be in the staff room. I turned away and heard him open his case. As I left I peered through the glass wall and tried to see what he was laying out on the desk. A candle, a flask, a dark book. A little bell.

Visitor numbers are back up. We’re weathering the recession remarkably well. We’ve dropped some of the deluxe product and introduced a back-to-basic raw pine range. The store has actually taken on more staff recently than it’s let go.

The kids are happy again. Their obsession with the ball room refuses to die. There’s a little arrow outside it, a bit more than three feet off the ground, which is the maximum height you can be to come in.

I’ve seen children come tearing up the stairs to get in and find out that they’ve grown in the months since their last visit, that they’re too big to come in and play. I’ve seen them raging that they’ll never be allowed in again, that they’ve had their lot, forever. You know they’d give anything at all, right then, to go back. And the other children watching them, those who are just a little bit smaller, would do anything to stop and stay as they are.

Something in the way they play makes me think that Mr. Gainsburg’s intervention may not have had the exact effect everyone was hoping for. Seeing how eager they are to rejoin their friends in the ball room, I wonder sometimes if it was intended to.

To the children, the ball room is the best place in the world. You can see that they think about it when they’re not there, that they dream about it. It’s where they want to stay. If they ever got lost, it’s the place they’d want to find their way back to. To play in the Wendy house and on the climbing frame, and to fall all soft and safe on the plastic balls, to scoop them up over each other, without hurting, to play in the ball room forever, like in a fairy tale, alone, or with a friend.

On the 27th of November 2000, a package was delivered to my house. This happens all the time—since becoming a professional writer the amount of mail I get has increased enormously. The flap of the envelope had been torn open a strip, allowing someone to look inside. This also isn’t unusual: because, I think, of my political life (I am a varyingly active member of a leftwing group, and once stood in an election for the Socialist Alliance), I regularly find, to my continuing outrage, that my mail has been peered into.

I mention this to explain why it was that I opened something not addressed to me. I, China Miéville, live on —ley Road. This package was addressed to a Charles Melville, of the same house-number —ford Road. No postcode was given, and it had found its way, slowly, to me. Seeing a large packet torn half-open by some cavalier spy, I simply assumed it was mine and opened it.

It took me a good few minutes to realise my mistake: the covering note contained no greeting by name to alert me. I read it along with the first few of the enclosed papers with growing bewilderment, convinced (absurd as this must sound) that this was to do with some project or other I had got involved with and then forgotten. When finally I looked again at the name on the envelope, I was wholly surprised.

That was the point at which I was morally culpable, rather than simply foolish. By then I was too fascinated by what I had read to stop.

I’ve reproduced the content of the papers below, with explanatory notes. Unless otherwise stated they’re photocopies, some stapled together, some attached with paper clips, many with pages missing.

I’ve tried to keep them in the order they came in; they are not always chronological. Before I had a sense of what was in front of me, I was casual about how I put the papers down. I can’t vouch that this was how they were originally organised.

[ Cover note. This is written on a postcard, in a dark blue ink, a cursive hand. The photograph is of a wet kitten emerging from a sink full of water and suds. The kitten wears a comedic expression of anxiety. ]

Where are you? Here as requested. What do you want this for anyway? I scribbled thoughts on some. Can’t find half the stuff. I don’t think anyone’s noticed me rummaging through the archives, and I managed to get into your old place for the rest(thank god you file) but come to next meeting. You can get people on your side but box clever. In haste. Are you taking sides? Talk soon. Will you get this? Come to next meeting. More as I find it.

[ This page was originally produced on an old manual typewriter. ]

BWVF Meeting, 6 September 1976

Agenda.

1. Minutes of the last meeting.

2. Nomenclature.

3. Funds.