Грэм Мастертон - Famine

He hesitated for a moment, but then he gave a decisive sniff, and swung his legs out from between the sheets. He walked around the end of the bed, where his pants were neatly hung with their maroon suspenders still attached, and crossed the bedroom to the window.

Dolores watched him as he held aside the floral drapes and peered down into the street. There must have been a fire burning not far away, because she could see the reflected sparkle of orange in his eyes. On the top of the varnished bureau beside him were the bits and pieces of his hobby – the modelling knives and tubes of glue and carefully-cut sections of balsa wood which he devotedly assembled into tiny ships. The sad gilded face of the Virgin looked down on him from a plastic icon.

Dolores said, ‘What do you see?’

Nicolas frowned. ‘Nothing so far. But it looks like something’s burning on the next block. An automobile, maybe. Or a van.’

‘They’re burning a van on the next block?’

‘It’s hard to say. I can’t see anyone around.’

‘Not even a cop?’

Nicolas shook his head. They were both sensitive about the police, the Prokopious. In this neighbourhood, they were regularly shaken down and robbed, and the police patrols did very little to protect them. There were always plenty of police around at Thanksgiving, or at Christmas, when Nicolas gave away bottles of retsina and Keo brandy. But when the kids came around with their knives and their zip guns and raided the cash register, you could scream ‘Police!’ until you were purple in the face and nobody would come.

‘What do you think’s happening?’ asked Dolores. ‘All that glass breaking. It sounds like a war.’

‘Maybe it’s something to do with the food shortages.’

‘You mean that television programme? I don’t understand.’

Nicolas let the drapes fall back into place. His face was sweaty and serious. ‘You heard what they said on the news. They said keep calm, don’t try to stock up on more food than you need. But you think people are going to take any notice of that? They panic when there’s a shortage of gas. They panic when there’s a shortage of bread. In my opinion, that’s what they’re doing now. Panicking. Breaking into food stores, looking for supplies.’

Dolores said anxiously, ‘They’ll come here.’

Nicolas nodded. On the bedside table just behind Dolores’s black wavy hair, his luminous alarm clock read three in the morning, almost to the minute.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Dolores. Her question was punctuated by a loud crash from across the street, and the sound of a woman shouting. Nicolas turned and regarded the drapes as if he expected them to fly apart of their own accord.

‘I’ll call the police,’ he said.

‘The police? And what will they do?’

‘I’ll call Sergeant Kyprianides.’

‘You really think he’s going to worry? Just because he’s Greek? He’s as rotten as all the rest of them.’

Nicolas unbuttoned his striped pyjamas, peeled them off, and folded them up. He was a short, heavy man, with a girdle of fat around his hips. He found a clean pair of jockey shorts in the bureau drawer and then stepped into his pants. In the stained-pine wardrobe he found a clean red shirt.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said.

Dolores said, ‘What for? What can you do on your own?’ Nicolas pointed towards the window. ‘What for ? Do you hear what they’re doing out there? You want the store wrecked?’

She climbed out of bed. She was wearing the pink baby-doll nightdress he liked, with the frilly panties. Her sagging breasts showed dark-nippled through the nylon, and her thighs were creased with fat.

‘I don’t want you wrecked,’ she said, and she really meant it. ‘Who cares about a few bowls of taramasalata?’

Nicolas held her wrist, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘The day I let some bum walk in off the street and tear my store to pieces without lifting so much as one finger to stop him – that’s the day I’m going to be laid out in my coffin. You got me?’

She bit her lip.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and opened the door to go downstairs.

It was then, right then, that the front window of their own store was smashed in. It was so loud and violent that Nicolas said, ‘ Hah ’ in involuntary shock. Dolores crossed herself, and whispered ‘Mother of God.’

Nicolas was angry now. He could hear people shouting downstairs as they clambered into his store through the broken window. Looters, in his store, trampling over his displays and his counters, and helping themselves to all the things he had worked for years to buy. Helping themselves to the cans and the bottles and the home-cooked pastries. Destroying his life and his livelihood.

The .38 police revolver was on top of the wardrobe. Nicolas stalked over, reached up for it, and brought it down. Dolores said, ‘Nicky – for God’s sake – leave them—’

‘Leave them?’ he asked her. His mouth was tight and he had that bitter, hard, sorrowful look in his eyes, the same look he always had when they were robbed or ripped off. ‘In this country, you have to fight for what’s yours. You understand me?’

He pushed his way down the landing to the stairs which led to the store. Dolores came after, trying to pull his sleeve, but he shook her loose with one impatient twist. He knocked askew a picture of fishing boats off the island of Serifos. Blue skies, bleached boats.

Dolores said, ‘No, Nicky, please.’

Nicky, halfway down the stairs, turned and looked back at her. The revolver was raised awkwardly in his left hand. From downstairs, there was another splintering crack as the looters broke into his refrigerated display cabinet, and someone shouted, ‘Get that canned food at the back – all that canned stuff!’

Dolores said nothing, but walked quickly back along the landing in her pink baby-doll nightie to where the telephone hung on the wall by the stairs. Nicolas heard her dialling, and knew that she was calling Sergeant Kyprianides. He felt short of breath, and afraid, but there was no point in waiting until the police turned up. They might not turn up at all, what with all the smashing and looting that was going on tonight throughout Milwaukee. They’d be busy taking care of the breweries, and the big department stores. What would they care about one small Greek delicatessen in the grittier part of town?

Nicolas went down the dark stairwell, unbolted the brown-painted door at the bottom, and pulled it cautiously open.

He was dazzled straight away by car headlights, directed right into the smashed-open store from a station wagon that had been pulled up across the sidewalk. There was a sharp smell of burning paint, and the night air was warm and electric with fright. He drew the door open a little further, and he could see the outline of a man in a plaid jacket, leaning over the frozen-food cabinet with a large plastic trash bag in one hand, helping himself to broccoli and asparagus spears and mixed vegetables and TV dinners. He could hear feet crunching on broken glass in back of the store, too, but from where he was standing he couldn’t see anybody.

‘Are you through with that frozen food yet?’ a voice demanded.

The man bent over the freezer cabinet said, ‘Give me a minute, will you?’ as he gathered up boxes of Hungry Man dinners by the armful.

Nicolas cocked his revolver, and stepped out into the store. He said, ‘Put up your hands,’ but at first nobody heard him.

Louder, he said, ‘Put up your hands!’

The man at the freezer cabinet turned around, slowly lifting one arm up, but keeping a tight hold on his plastic bag of frozen food with the other hand. He was young, maybe thirty-two, with a moustache and horn-rim eyeglasses. He looked like an ordinary suburbanite, not at all like a robber.