Gardening At Night
8 November 2006
For Lulu it was all about incentives. That was why she didn't care that a man was pointing a gun at her face. She knew that all he wanted was money and Lulu was happy to give it to him. It wasn't hers - it belonged to Cable SuperFood. Quite frankly, if she was only going to get paid $10 an hour to operate this checkout she wasn't going to start pledging loyalty to the firm when some guy started to point a gun at her face. He could have it, it's all insured anyway, and anyway, this was the most exciting thing to have ever happened to Lulu while working at Cable SuperFood. Plus, since having a gun pointed at your face is widely considered vaguely traumatic. She might just get the rest of the day off. Sweet.
The man pointing the gun at Lulu was Troy. Up until this moment Troy had lead a pretty dull life - nothing particularly out of the ordinary to note (he'd be what some in the town referred to as a "lentil child" - someone who had spent their entire life in Cable and whose parents were either directly or indirectly involved with the lentil factory). However when a debt collector came knocking on his door two days ago he decided to finally do some interesting: rob the local supermarket. He spent the next two days coming up with a foolproof plan.
Unfortunately, a fool could run circles around Troy.
He started off simple enough, he entered the store, as causal as anything. Walked around the supermarket and grabbed some things to 'buy', a can of coconut milk, ground cumin, tampons and a mini umbrella. He walked up to the checkout, especially chosen for its special location - obscured from view and placed his items on the bench. He watched Lulu, his target chat some menial chatter to her customer, she gave the customer a smile and gave back his coupon cash plus plus his change - thirty cents. She wished him a good day and he left, an air of satisfaction surrounded Lulu as she reflected on the excellent service she had just provided and with that, she turned to Troy, smiled and asked him he was today. He mumbled back that he was fine.
Troy's plan involved him asking Lulu calmly to hand over the money in register, he'll threaten her with the gun he bought, but he shouldn't need it - she'll comply. But he panicked, she looked at him and smiled - he saw into her eyes and saw the dancing devil. He drew the gun and pointed it into Lulu's face.
"Give me all the money in your register!"
Lulu looked straight at him.
"OK"
Lulu reached to the computer in front of her.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
Troy was truly panicking now. He couldn't believe how happy he was three days ago - so carefree, so dull, now he was robbing the supermarket. His nerves were killing him. Lulu, on the other hand was calm.
"I just need to complete the sale to open the cash register"
"OK then. No funny stuff though. I'll use this thing, his name is Daniel and it's not afraid to go bang bang!"
Lulu nodded. Troy threw on another nervous "bang! bang!" for dramatic effect.
Lulu reached the payment screen and resisted the urge to ask Troy how he planned to pay for his coconut milk, ground cumin, tampons and mini umbrella. She clicked past and selected cash, the cash register opened and she took all the notes and put them in a nice yellow bag for him. She got him a slightly larger white bag for his other items. She gave him both of the bags and wished him a happy day. He walked away - ensuring his face was on at least seventeen closed circuit cameras. Lulu went to the checkout supervisor and told them that they had just been robbed.
She was having dreams about that gun. Not those stupid dreams where you wake up all sweaty and frightened and where you later recount the experience to friends as something negative. The dreams that Lulu was having about that gun was nothing like that, they reminded her of a flash car advertisement. So shiny and exciting. Happiness truly was a warm gun.
Lulu lay beside her boyfriend Jimmy, they had been going out for over a year now - officially the most stable couple at Cable High School. He was asleep, he had been since she snuck into his window. Now, he'd sleep no longer as she poked him awake.
"What?"
Whenever Jimmy got woken up, his response was always the same. Once he got his wits together he managed to string together whole sentences, his first was always:
"When are you going to tell me how you get in? This room's on the second storey and the entire place is locked"
She'll always ignore the question and come in, (from Jimmy's perspective anyway) from left field.
"I don't think my life is exciting enough"
"Well. You live in Cable, a town famous for lentil production"
"We can't accept mediocrity just because we live in Cable"
"We sure can."
"How can you think like that?"
"Can I sleep please?"
"Fuck no you shithead. Getting robbed was probably the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me. I need more."
"You want to be robbed again?"
"No. That's silly. If I'm just robbed a bunch of times, then it'll no longer be fun. My utility will diminish with lots of consumption of the same product"
"Someone pointed a gun at you, threatened to kill you and you're talking about your utility?"
Jimmy said that with an air of finality and took Lulu's pause as an opportunity to dump his head on the pillow and go back to sleep. He always got annoyed when she talked about her utility and how he could never seem to maximise it. He felt she was insulting him.
Suckles was always open for business. An advantage of being the favourite hangout for the undead was that they were pretty much always up. Of course, this was probably hugely outweighed by the main disadvantage - the living, with their actual income would tend to avoid the place - you know, because they might just fear for their life. Not many businesses survive where customers fear for their lives. Suckles makes it works though. Probably through illegal means - but still - it works.
Lulu had heard about Suckles before, it had often been the talk of her school friends. To them, it was an urban legend - no one had ever been to Suckles before, they had never seen it - I mean, come on - Cable is a small town, there's not that many places to hide a vampire bar. Sure it must of been in the shit side of town where all the industrial lentil processing plants are... But surely someone would know of it? According to this group of girls, Suckles was just a fairy tale, like Humpty Dumpty - designed to impart some kind of moral lesson on it's recipients. Though they had a hard time trying to work out what that lesson was that the Suckles myth was trying to leave, then again, who knows what Humpty Dumpty is trying to teach? Horses can't be trusted to put eggs together again? Don't sit on top of a wall if you're breakable? No one has a clue.
The digression aside, Lulu had found Suckles. She had snuck back out of Jimmy's house and started to explore (which didn't take too long - not too much ground to cover) and she found it. It was shockingly easy in fact.
Suckles didn't employ any methods of identification checking. So Lulu walked straight in, she was in awe of the sight... ghastly figures were in booths discussing the sexuality of Shakespeare, darkness dominated the area except in select areas illuminated by a soft red light. Lulu went further in, she become entranced with one woman, unlike the others who were dressed in black, she wore a red dress that just screamed how so much more classy she was. Lulu slowly walked closer to her, she was talking to a man. Eventually, the woman quite sight of Lulu, she looked at her and smiled.
"Hello there."
Things were about to get a bit more exciting for Lulu.
Posted byBren at 2:11 am
Labels: Cable
