China Miéville: Looking for Jake and Other Stories

It’s on the outskirts of town, a huge metal warehouse. Full of a hundred little fake rooms, with a single path running through them, and all the furniture we sell made up and laid out so you can see how it should look. Then the same products, disassembled, packed flat and stacked high in the warehouse for people to buy. They’re cheap.

Mostly I know I’m just there for show. I wander around in my uniform, hands behind my back, making people feel safe, making the merchandise feel protected. It’s not really the kind of stuff you can shoplift. I almost never have to intervene.

The last time I did was in the ball room.

On weekends this place is just crazy. So full it’s hard to walk: all couples and young families. We try to make things easier for people. We have a cheap café and free parking, and most important of all we have a crèche. It’s at the top of the stairs when you first come in. And right next to it, opening out from it, is the ball room.

The walls of the ball room are almost all glass, so people in the store can look inside. All the shoppers love watching the children: there are always people outside, staring in with big dumb smiles. I keep an eye on the ones that don’t look like parents.

It’s not very big, the ball room. Just an annexe really. It’s been here for years. There’s a climbing frame all knotted up around itself, and a net made of rope to catch you, and a Wendy house, and pictures on the walls. And it’s full of colour. The whole room is two feet deep in shiny plastic balls.

When the children fall, the balls cushion them. The balls come up to their waists, so they wade through the room like people in a flood. The children scoop up the balls and splash them all over each other.

They’re about the size of tennis balls, hollow and light so they can’t hurt. They make little pudda-thudda noises bouncing off the walls and the kids’ heads, making them laugh.

I don’t know why they laugh so hard. I don’t know what it is about the balls that makes it so much better than a normal playroom, but they love it in there. Only six of them are allowed at a time, and they queue up for ages to get in. They get twenty minutes inside. You can see they’d give anything to stay longer. Sometimes, when it’s time to go, they howl, and the friends they’ve made cry, too, at the sight of them leaving.

I was on my break, reading, when I was called to the ball room.

I could hear shouting and crying from around the corner, and as I turned it I saw a crowd of people outside the big window. A man was clutching his son and yelling at the childcare assistant and the store manager. The little boy was about five, only just old enough to go in. He was clinging to his dad’s trouser leg, sobbing.

The assistant, Sandra, was trying not to cry. She’s only nineteen herself.

The man was shouting that she couldn’t do her bloody job, that there were way too many kids in the place and they were completely out of control. He was very worked up and he was gesticulating exaggeratedly, like in a silent movie. If his son hadn’t anchored his leg he would have been pacing around.

The manager was trying to hold her ground without being confrontational. I moved in behind her, in case it got nasty, but she was calming the man down. She’s good at her job.

“Sir, as I said, we emptied the room as soon as your son was hurt, and we’ve had words with the other children—”

“You don’t even know which one did it. If you’d been keeping an eye on them, which I imagine is your bloody job, then you might be a bit less ...sodding ineffectual.”

That seemed to bring him to a halt and he quieted down, finally, as did his son, who was looking up at him with a confused kind of respect.

The manager told him how sorry she was, and offered his son an ice cream. Things were easing down, but as I started to leave I saw Sandra crying. The man looked a bit guilty and tried to apologise to her, but she was too upset to respond.

The boy had been playing behind the climbing frame, in the corner by the Wendy house, Sandra told me later. He was burrowing down into the balls till he was totally covered, the way some children like to. Sandra kept an eye on the boy but she could see the balls bouncing as he moved, so she knew he was okay. Until he came lurching up, screaming.

The store is full of children. The little ones, the toddlers, spend their time in the main crèche. The older ones, eight or nine or ten, they normally walk around the store with their parents, choosing their own bedclothes or curtains, or a little desk with drawers or whatever. But if they’re in between, they come back for the ball room.

They’re so funny, moving over the climbing frame, concentrating hard. Laughing all the time. They make each other cry, of course, but usually they stop in seconds. It always gets me how they do that: bawling, then suddenly getting distracted and running off happily.

Sometimes they play in groups, but it seems like there’s always one who’s alone. Quite content, pouring balls onto balls, dropping them through the holes of the climbing frame, dipping into them like a duck.

Happy but playing alone.

Sandra left. It was nearly two weeks after that argument, but she was still upset. I couldn’t believe it. I started talking to her about it, and I could see her fill up again. I was trying to say that the man had been out of line, that it wasn’t her fault, but she wouldn’t listen.

“It wasn’t him,” she said. “You don’t understand. I can’t be in there anymore.”

I felt sorry for her, but she was overreacting. It was out of all proportion. She told me that since the day that little boy got upset, she couldn’t relax in the ball room at all. She kept trying to watch all the children at once, all the time. She became obsessed with double-checking the numbers.

“It always seems like there’s too many,” she said. “I count them and there’s six, and I count them again and there’s six, but it always seems there’s too many.”

Maybe she could have asked to stay on and only done duty in the main crèche, managing name tags, checking the kids in and out, changing the tapes in the video, but she didn’t even want to do that. The children loved that ball room. They went on and on about it, she said. They would never have stopped badgering her to be let in.

They’re little kids, and sometimes they have accidents. When that happens, someone has to shovel all the balls aside to clean the floor, then dunk the balls themselves in water with a bit of bleach.

This was a bad time for that. Almost every day, some kid or other seemed to pee themselves. We kept having to empty the room to sort out little puddles.

“I had every bloody one of them over playing with me, every second, just so we’d have no problems,” one of the nursery workers told me. “Then after they left . . . you could smell it. Right by the bloody Wendy house, where I’d have sworn none of the little buggers had got to.”

His name was Matthew. He left a month after Sandra. I was amazed. I mean, you can see how much they love the children, people like them. Even having to wipe up dribble and sick and all that. Seeing them go was proof of what a tough job it was. Matthew looked really sick by the time he quit, really grey.

I asked him what was up, but he couldn’t tell me. I’m not sure he even knew.

You have to watch those kids all the time. I couldn’t do that job. Couldn’t take the stress. The children are so unruly, and so tiny. I’d be terrified all the time, of losing them, of hurting them.

There was a bad mood to the place after that. We’d lost two people. The main store turns over staff like a motor, of course, but the crèche normally does a bit better. You have to be qualified, to work in the crèche, or the ball room. The departures felt like a bad sign.