Richard Morgan - Market Forces

Checkout.

The shiny black plastic swipes through.

Nothing.

The machine fails in its habitual insectile chittering and the screen blinks, as if outraged at what it has been fed. The checkout girl looks up at the woman who has handed her the card and smiles a little too widely. It’s a smile that contains as much genuine emotion as there is fruit juice in a carton of Five Fruit D-Lish.

‘Are you sure you want to use this card?’

Up to her arms in bagged shopping, the woman sets down the two-year-old she has been propping against the checkout flange and looks back to where her husband is still unloading the last of the brightly coloured tins and bags from the trolley.

‘Martin?’

‘Yeah, what?’ Voice irritable with the household task they’ve just completed.

‘The card doesn’t. . .’

‘Doesn’t what?’ He meets her eyes and reads the distress there, then switches to the checkout girl. His voice comes out tight. ‘Run it again, please. Must have glitched.’

The girl shrugs and swipes the card a second time. The screen flickers with the same disdain.

TRANSACTION DENIED.

The girl takes the card and hands it back to the woman. A small pocket of quiet expands around the action, bubbling out past the conveyor belt to the boy at the next checkout unit and to the three customers waiting behind Martin. In a few more seconds it will dissolve into the slither of whispering.

‘Would you like to try another card.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ snaps Martin. ‘That account had funds as of the first of the month. I’ve just been paid.’

‘I can run the card a third time,’ offers the girl with studied indifference.

‘No.’ The woman’s knuckles have gone white around the small piece of black plastic. ‘Martin, try the Intex’

‘Helen, there’s money in that acc—‘

‘Some problem,’ asks the man behind him, tapping his own plastic significantly against the pile of shopping he has assembled so close to the Next Customer divider that it’s in danger of tumbling over into Martin’s space.

Martin’s mouth shuts like a trap.

‘No problem.’

He hands over the blue flecked Intex card and watches at least as intently as the people behind him as the checkout girl swipes it.

The machine chews it over for a couple of moments,

And spits it out.

The girl hands it back and shakes her head. Her smooth, plastic politeness is beginning to degrade.

‘Card’s blocked,’ she says dismissively. ‘Terminal audit.’

‘What?’

‘Terminal audit. I’m going to have to ask you to put those purchases back on the far side of the counter and leave the store.’

‘Run the card again.’

The girl sighed. ‘I don’t have to run the card again, sir. I have all the information I need right here. Your rating is invalidated.’

‘Martin,’ Helen presses forward at his side. ‘Leave it, we’ll come back when it’s cleared u—‘

‘No, goddamn it.’ Martin shrugs her off and leans over the counter, into the checkout girl’s face. ‘There is money in that account. Now swipe the card again.’

‘Better do as she says,’ says the pushy customer behind him.

Martin swings on him, tensed.

‘This got something to do with you?’

‘I am waiting.’

‘Well, wait some fucking more.’ He snaps his fingers in the man’s face, dismissing him, and the pushy customer flinches back. Martin turns back to the checkout girl. ‘Now, you—‘

The prod hits him in the side like a rude elbow. A heartbeat later the charge shocks him off the counter and into a seemingly immense clear space. He hits the floor, smelling burnt fabric.

He hears Helen shriek. Sees confusedly from floor level. Boots in front of him and a voice that sounds like tearing cardboard at a great height.

‘I think you’d better leave the store, sir.’

The security guard hauls him to his feet and props him against the counter again. A big man, swelling at the waist but watchful and hard around the eyes. He’s been doing this for a long time, probably cut his teeth on cordoned zone clubs before he got this gig. He’s shocked men before and Martin is out of office clothes at four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, casual in faded jeans and a well-worn crew-neck pullover that doesn’t show what it was once worth. The security guard thinks he has the measure of this one. He doesn’t know, can’t know.

Martin comes off the counter.

The palm heel strike smashes the guard’s nose flat. The knee goes in at groin level. As the guard falls, Martin drives into the base of his skull with one clenched fist.

The guard hits the ground a dead weight.

‘Stand where you are!’

Martin reels around and comes face to face with the guard’s smaller, female partner just as she clears a pistol from her holster. Still scrambled from the cattle prod, he lurches the wrong way, towards her, and the guard blows his brains out all over his wife and son and the checkout and the checkout girl and all the shiny packaged items on the belt that they can no longer afford.

Awake.

Jackknifed there in sweat.

Fragments of the dream still pinning his breath in his throat and his face into the pillow, mind reeling in the darkened room ...

Reality settled over him like a fresh sheet. He was home.

He heaved a shuddering sigh and groped for the glass of water beside the bed. In the dream he’d been falling to, and then through, the tiles of the supermarket floor.

On the other side of the bed Carla stirred and laid a hand on him.

‘Chris?’

“sokay. Dream.’ He gulped from the glass. ‘Bad dream, s’all.’

‘Murcheson again?’

He paused, peculiarly unwilling to correct her assumption. He didn’t dream about Murcheson’s screaming death much any more. He shivered a little. Carla sighed and pulled herself closer to him. She took his hand and pressed it onto one full breast.

‘My father would just love this. Deep stirrings of conscience. He’s always said you haven’t got one.’

‘Right.’ Chris lifted the alarm clock and focused on it. Three-twenty. Just perfect. He knew he wouldn’t get back to sleep for a while. Just fucking perfect. He flopped back, immobile. ‘Your father has convenient amnesia when it comes to clearing the rent.’

‘Money talks. Why’d you think I married you?’

He rolled his head and butted her gently on the nose. ‘Are you taking the piss out of me?’

For answer she reached down for his prick and rolled it through her fingers.

‘No. I’m winding you up,’ she whispered.

As they drew together he felt the hot gust of desire for her blowing out the dream, but he was slow to harden under her hand. It was only in the final throes of climax that he finally let go.

Falling.

It was raining when the alarm sounded. Soft hiss outside the open window like an untuned TV at very low volume. He snapped off the bleeper, lay listening to the rain for a few moments and then slid out of the bed without waking Carla.

In the kitchen he set up the coffee machine, ducked into the shower and got out in time to steam milk for Carla’s cappuccino. He delivered it to her bedside, kissed her awake and pointed it out. She’d probably drift off to sleep again and drink it cold when she finally got up. He lifted clothes from the wardrobe - plain white shirt, one of the dark Italian suits, the Argentine leather shoes. He took them downstairs.