China Miéville - Looking for Jake and Other Stories

I was conscious of wanting to look after the kids in the store. When I did my walks I felt like they were all around me. I felt like I had to be ready to leap in and save them any moment. Everywhere I looked, I saw children. And they were as happy as ever, running through the fake rooms and jumping on the bunkbeds, sitting at the desks that had been laid out ready. But now the way they ran around made me wince, and all our furniture, which meets or exceeds the most rigorous international standards for safety, looked like it was lying in wait to injure them. I saw head wounds in every coffee-table corner, burns in every lamp.

I went past the ball room more than usual. Inside was always some harassed-looking young woman or man trying to herd the children, and them running through a tide of bright plastic that thudded every way as they dived into the Wendy house and piled up balls on its roof. The children would spin around to make themselves dizzy, laughing.

It wasn’t good for them. They loved it when they were in there, but they emerged so tired and crotchety and teary. They did that droning children’s cry. They pulled themselves into their parents’ jumpers, sobbing, when it was time to go. They didn’t want to leave their friends.

Some children were coming back week after week. It seemed to me their parents ran out of things to buy. After a while they’d make some token purchase like tea lights and just sit in the café, drinking tea and staring out of the window at the grey flyovers while their kids got their dose of the room. There didn’t look like much that was happy to these visits.

The mood infected us. There wasn’t a good feeling in the store. Some people said it was too much trouble, and we should close the ball room. But the management made it clear that wouldn’t happen.

You can’t avoid night shifts.

There were three of us on that night, and we took different sections. Periodically we’d each of us wander through our patch, and between times we’d sit together in the staffroom or the unlit café and chat and play cards, with all sorts of rubbish flashing on the mute TV.

My route took me outside, into the front car lot, flashing my torch up and down the tarmac, the giant store behind me, with shrubbery around it black and whispery, and beyond the barriers the roads and night cars, moving away from me.

Inside again and through bedrooms, past all the pine frames and the fake walls. It was dim. Half-lights in all the big chambers full of beds never slept in and sinks without plumbing. I could stand still and there was nothing, no movement and no noise.

One time, I made arrangements with the other guards on duty, and I brought my girlfriend to the store.

We wandered hand in hand through all the pretend rooms like stage sets, trailing torchlight. We played house like children, acting out little moments—her stepping out of the shower to my proffered towel, dividing the paper at the breakfast bar. Then we found the biggest and most expensive bed, with a special mattress that you can see nearby cut in cross-section.

After a while, she told me to stop. I asked her what the matter was, but she seemed angry and wouldn’t say. I led her out through the locked doors with my swipe card and walked her to her car, alone in the lot, and I watched her drive away. There’s a long one-way system of ramps and roundabouts to leave the store, which she followed, unnecessarily, so it took a long time before she was gone. We don’t see each other anymore.

In the warehouse, I walked between metal shelf units thirty feet high. My footsteps sounded to me like a prison guard’s. I imagined the flat-packed furniture assembling itself around me.

I came back through kitchens, following the path towards the café, up the stairs into the unlit hallway.

My mates weren’t back: there was no light shining off the big window that fronted the silent ball room.

It was absolutely dark. I put my face up close to the glass and stared at the black shape I knew was the climbing frame; the Wendy house, a little square of paler shadow, was adrift in plastic balls. I turned on my torch and shone it into the room. Where the beam touched them, the balls leapt into clown colours, and then the light moved and they went back to being black.

In the main crèche, I sat on the assistant’s chair, with a little half-circle of baby chairs in front of me. I sat like that in the dark, and listened to no noise. There was a little bit of lamplight, orangey through the windows, and once every few seconds a car would pass, just audible, way out on the other side of the parking lot.

I picked up the book by the side of the chair and opened it in torchlight. Fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

There was a sound.

A little soft thump.

I heard it again.

Balls in the ball room, falling onto each other.

I was standing instantly, staring through the glass into the darkness of the ball room. Pudda-thudda, it came again. It took me seconds to move, but I came close up to the window with my torch raised. I was holding my breath, and my skin felt much too tight.

My torch beam swayed over the climbing frame and out the window on the other side, sending shadows into the corridors. I directed it down into those bouncy balls, and just before the beam hit them, while they were still in darkness, they shivered and slid away from each other in a tiny little trail. As if something was burrowing underneath.

My teeth were clenched. The light was on the balls now, and nothing was moving.

I kept that little room lit for a long time, until the torchlight stopped trembling. I moved it carefully up and down the walls, over every part, until I let out a big dumb hiss of relief because I saw that there were balls on the top of the climbing frame, right on its edge, and I realised that one or two of them must have fallen off, bouncing softly among the others.

I shook my head and my hand swung down, the torchlight going with it, and the ball room went back into darkness. And as it did, in the moment when the shadows rushed back in, I felt a brutal cold, and I stared at the little girl in the Wendy house, and she stared up at me.

The other two guys couldn’t calm me down.

They found me in the ball room, yelling for help. I’d opened both doors and I was hurling balls out into the crèche and the corridors, where they rolled and bounced in all directions, down the stairs to the entrance, under the tables in the café.

At first I’d forced myself to be slow. I knew that the most important thing was not to scare the girl any more than she must have been already. I’d croaked out some daft, would-be cheerful greeting, come inside, shining the torch gradually towards the Wendy house, so I wouldn’t dazzle her, and I’d kept talking, whatever nonsense I could muster.

When I realised she’d sunk down again beneath the balls, I became all jokey, trying to pretend we were playing hide-and-seek. I was horribly aware of how I might seem to her, with my build and my uniform, and my accent.

But when I got to the Wendy house, there was nothing there.

“She’s been left behind!” I kept screaming, and when they understood they dived in with me and scooped up handfuls of the balls and threw them aside, but the two of them stopped long before me.

When I turned to throw more of the balls away, I realised they were just watching me.

They wouldn’t believe she’d been in there, or that she’d got out. They told me they would have seen her, that she’d have had to come past them. They kept telling me I was being crazy, but they didn’t try to stop me, and eventually I cleared the room of all the balls, while they stood and waited for the police I’d made them call.

The ball room was empty. There was a damp patch under the Wendy house, which the assistants must have missed.