Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

He got his head up just long enough to see, confusingly, what seemed to be the bottom half of a girl in a bikini before his forward momentum drove his head into the soft part between her bikini top and her bikini bottoms. There was a shrill squawk, interrupted by the sound of the air being driven out of her lungs by Sherman’s head. She went down and so did Sherman, rolling off sideways and sprawling on his back.

It was a girl in a bikini – two of them. Both blonde. One of them now on the deck somewhere, the other shying above him on her platform shoes like some sort of horse. As Sherman tried to get his footing and his dignity back, there was the sound of an air horn and his field of vision was obscured by an avalanche of something coming down on him – colours, red, white and blue…

He threw his hands up to protect his face, and yelped. Sherman was engulfed in something soft and multicoloured and swirling. The air horn gave another great asthmatic hoot and Sherman found himself spitting out something dry in his mouth… little bits of paper.

The girl on the floor was crying – or wailing, anyway – and Sherman was sitting in a small snowdrift of red-white-and-blue confetti, half of which seemed to be wrapped in flakes round his tongue. The air horn went off again.

Sherman scrambled to his feet. There was a guy in a white button-down shirt with a tie on, trying to help him up and grinning inanely in his face.

‘-tulations! Sir, yes, sir, sorry. Sorry, sir, let us -’ the man in the shirt sweeping confetti from Sherman’s shoulders, the one girl helping the other girl up – ‘quite unprepared, quite an entrance, ha ha, but no harm done, no, sir, let me extend the compliments of the store to you, yes, sir-’

‘What the fuck ?’

‘Ha ha, sir, no, I’m sorry, sir, there’s no need for that kind of language, I think you’ll be pleased, sir, to learn – let me help you up with that – sir, this is a very proud moment, a proud moment I say, in the history of this store, to be able to say you are our one MILLIONTH customer!’

And with that the man in the shirt and tie extended the open palm of friendship to the man from MIC and the man from MIC hit him in the face.

Alex heard all this – or some of this – behind him as he ran through the store. He dodged a startled sales assistant, brought down a revolving rack of tennis shirts, gulped air, hurdled a low stool on which until moments before someone had been trying on a pair of trainers, and then seeing half concealed between two racks of off-brand sportswear a beige fire door with a bar across it at waist height rammed his hand into the bar so hard his palm hurt.

The door slammed open and disgorged Alex into a corridor of whitewashed breeze blocks and grey floor tiles. It smelled of stale air and long-ago bleach. Alex let the door shut behind him and ran down the corridor and round the corner, grabbing at a bit of pipework to swing himself round as he went.

He heard his own trainers squeaking on the lino, and his chest hurt at the Y-shaped bit where his lungs met.

There were what looked like storerooms off the corridor to one or other side – grey doors, with wired windows in them. He wondered about hiding in one but the fear of being trapped was too strong. Besides, his body – he didn’t know who that guy was, but he knew he needed to get away from him – seemed to be taking these decisions for him. He carried on running. At the end of the corridor there was sunlight leaking in round the edges of another door with a bar across it. Alex bet that would be the outside door.

He didn’t know how long the guy he’d heard fall over behind him would take to be on him and he didn’t want to find out. He barrelled into the door. It resisted the first bump, but then he pushed again and the bar yielded and the door opened. He spilled out into the light. He was by an open loading bay of some sort – a thin and inexpertly laid strip of tarmac led round to the far corner of the building and back out.

Ahead there was a shallow bank of scrubby grass, a low wall, a patch of waste ground. Further away, in the distance, the highway. He stopped for a moment and looked around. If he could sneak back down between the outside wall of the store and the hedge he could maybe make it to his car. But he’d have to cross the car park. That guy had moved fast. If he hadn’t seen where he’d gone would he have doubled back to try and ambush him? Or would he even now be making his way through the back corridor of the building?

Before he had the chance to speculate further, Alex flinched: in the shadow of the loading bay he thought he saw something move. He turned to face it, but his eyes were still adjusting to the brightness. There was something there, though. Definitely something there. He stepped a bit further back -

At that precise moment the fire door banged open again with some force. Out of the door came Sherman, looking as he was: furious. The door itself swung out and struck Davidoff – who had been unfortunate in the moment he picked to pounce – hard on the top of his forehead. Davidoff, behind the door, went down like a rail of shirts, but not before the momentum of his charge had sent the door slamming back onto his colleague. Sherman, weighing not more than three-quarters what Davidoff did, himself fell over, again, right at Alex’s feet.

Alex, not sure at all what had just happened, looked down at the crazy man – who, he noticed, had a gun in his sock and looked like he was proposing to start pointing it at Alex just as soon as he got round to not being on the ground again – and bolted for the corner. If the bad guy was now behind him, the decision where to run had become a whole lot more straightforward.

Jones had caught up with Bree outside the superstore. Jones was smoking and Bree was wondering what to do when Alex emerged from the gap between the low trees and the left-hand side of the store running at full pelt across the parking lot towards them.

Bree looked at Jones, whose expression was perfectly blank. Let him go, thought Bree. This was too public. They knew what car he was driving. The brief was to follow. Protect.

‘Like a bat out of hell,’ Bree murmured as the boy closed the gap between them. She felt a stirring of anxiety in her gut as to what was following him, then quenched it and put on her best bovine bystander expression.

Like a bat out of hell. She wondered about the origins of the phrase. Why were bats, especially, keen to leave hell? The boy ran right between the two of them, legs pumping almost comically high, breath coming in rags and tatters.

Something occurred to her as she watched him go.

‘You have no idea,’ she said to his departing back, ‘what’s going on, do you?’ He took a corner – Scooby-Doo legs – and was fumbling at the door of the silver Pontiac and then was in it, overrevving the engine before he got it in gear, then taking a wide loop round the near-empty parking lot and grounding the undercarriage with a scrape as he bounced down the awkward gradient onto the street. He was gone.

The guy Bree had hit with her trolley earlier came out from the same place more or less as Alex was getting into the car. He had something in his hand that he stowed quickly inside his jacket as he saw Bree. At around the same moment, the front doors of the store slid sideways and out came – to Bree’s considerable surprise – some sort of store detective in a brown uniform, along with a pair of cut-price beauty queens and a really distressed-looking guy with a wad of crimson toilet tissue clamped to his nose and nosebleed all down his cheap shirt and what looked like confetti in his hair.

The guy with the gun in his jacket clocked them. Bree could see him making a swift calculation. He broke into the sort of awkward, loping run that someone who has just sustained a crunching blow to the coccyx might adopt. First he seemed to be making for the road on foot, the store detective making a half-hearted attempt to lumber in pursuit and the nosebleed guy waving one arm and shouting something from the safety of the doorway. Then, a way away, Bree could hear something that sounded like a siren and the man thought better of it and swerved towards a car parked near the entrance to the lot. He was gone before the store detective got halfway across the space between them.