shocked fish arranged on ice like jeweled purses, past the jars of exotic pickles as mysterious as fetuses in a medical museum, to the perfume counters patrolled by women like bony cats, where she stood paralyzed, breathing deep the smell of frangipani, honeysuckle, gardenia, jasmine, lavender, carnation, eucalyptus, lemon, sandalwood, and ambergris. The atomizers, sprays, sachets, pomanders, powders, potpourris, balms, gels, oils, soaps, lotions, sticks, and fixatives pumped such a sweet cacophony into the air that the hall shimmered and slipped in her vision.
She breathed deeper.
In fact, she breathed so deeply that she passed out, like an art lover suffering from Stendhal syndrome.
Helen Abbott regained consciousness to find a gold-braided attendant leisurely picking his nose while peering into her shopping bags and evaluating the contents. As she revived, he mimed such an extravagant show of helping her to her feet that he attracted a crowd, which he was then able to disperse by imperiously waving his gloved hands about like a policeman on point duty until she could gather her purchases and make a break for the exit.
Sometimes Helen shoplifted. Today she stuck her hand into her skirt pocket and closed pearlized nails around a pair of earrings. They were golden yellow sunflowers, bright, cheerful, fake looking. She owned a lot of plastic jewelery because there were wonderful colors in plastic that you couldn’t find in nature. Whenever she flew on a shopping raid over the West End, she bought something for her charm bracelet. On this trip it was a 22-carat gold teddy bear with a tiny secret compartment in its stomach, an object of such utter vacuity that it actually defied you to find a use for it.
Helen Abbott understood a fundamental principle, that shopping was the one thing you could do without ever having to be frightened. It was a sacred rite that had become her strength and guidance. Conventional religion offered salvation in the afterlife, but shopping provided immediate absolution. It had the power to heal, to save and restore. Helen felt she would make a fantastic worshipper in a cargo cult.
She stroked the barrel of the gun in her purse and stepped into the street.
As she exited from the main entrance of Selfridges, she felt as though she were leaving the shelter of the church. The edges of Oxford Street were crusted with rough sleepers, like calcium deposits around a drain. Along the tops of the Victorian buildings, running indiscriminately over the once-graceful roofs and windows, were red dot-matrix reports filled with news so bad that no one read them anymore. She passed a Gap store, and the irony of its name did not escape her. The only gap here was the one between rich and poor. She rushed home as if passing through the atmosphere of a hostile planet.
Helen started chain-smoking when outdoors and drinking hard liquor from ten in the morning. There were two blenders in her kitchen—one for her husband’s fruit shakes (he had high cholesterol) and the other for banana daiquiris. The house was empty from 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. six days a week, so on her days off Helen was able to spend the day alone, peering through the heavily barred windows, honing her bitterness. At her fitness center she repented with leg weights every morning, but then she came home and sinned again, hitting the drinks cabinet with a level of vengeful punishment that was usually only found among nuns.
That week, while the rainy gales of a London summer scoured the increasingly derelict suburban streets, Helen’s house grew so cold that only her startling bursts of anger could heat it back to life. Her husband stayed out late, then stopped coming home at all.
On the last fishtank-gray Saturday afternoon of the month, Helen headed for a less-exclusive shopping mall on the outskirts of town. Its neon corridors were populated by taut-faced teenaged girls with hoop earrings and bare midriffs, their ponytails threaded through diamanté baseball caps, their plastic push-chairs imprisoning stupefied tots. Consumers drifted in stately distance like Seurat figures. There were nearly a dozen megastores linked by a central car park. With her pupils widened and her tubes unblocked by so many glittering second-rate retail opportunities, Helen set off to smack up her American Express card.
First of all she bought shoes, not real ones for walking in, but a pair for slowly crossing her legs on a bar stool and sending young men into inarticulate conflictions of desire. The sight of the gaudy heels sparkling on a black velvet dais like some rediscovered Peruvian artifact overrode the genetic defenses that governed her ability to think logically. They were so obscenely expensive that she had to screw up her eyes to look at the bill.
Then it was time to hit Inhabit, a furniture shop where she unthinkingly purchased a spindle-legged Regencia table nest, a Locarno foldaway lounge serving unit, a carriage clock, a dozen silver-trimmed tablemats depicting scenes from the Crimean War, and a huge china statue of a leopard scratching its claws on a tree. She arranged to have them delivered and gave a false address: Helen Blimpton, 666 Dingley Dell, Bombokoland. Nobody questioned the delivery instructions. They merely loaded them into the computer with a holding smile and printed out her receipts.
In Petland, she put a deposit on a Borzoi puppy and an inbred hairless cat that you had to wipe down all the time. By the time she reached Sparkles, the discount jewelry outlet, she was being trailed by a suspicious security guard. The assistant refused to let her open an account there because she had become confused about her fake home address and foolishly presented the girl with three options, each of them more ridiculous than the one before.
When Helen surveyed a rack of Diamonique “Catherine the Great” choker necklaces, the strange gleam in her eye made the security guard wonder whether she was on day release, or at least coming off medication. Either way, he watched as she slipped a three-band-clasp wristlet into her jacket pocket on the way to the exit. Seconds later, he pinned her over a display case of rather desirable handbags. The police were called and the manager sent for. When the cops showed up they seemed more interested in discussing the previous night’s football.
The manager of Sparkles was a slender Asian man with thrust-up hair and a permanently surprised look on his face, as though he had just walked away from a car accident. He spoke with the guard, and when he recognized Helen, his expression became even more surprised.
“You know this lady?” asked one of the cops.
“She’s a regular customer. Please let her sit down.”
Helen collapsed on a divan as the manager explained that it was probably just an unfortunate mistake and that he would not press charges. She felt sure he knew she was guilty, but he let her go, preferring to protect someone he considered to be a long-term investment. She would return, he hoped, to gratefully spend a fortune in his store the next time she was afflicted with a shopping brain-cloud.
She needed to clear her head and start thinking straight, so she shared a mug of coffee with the manager, who politely suggested that she might like to arrange twenty-four-month payment plans with him. She agreed so enthusiastically that she felt guilty about climbing out of the window of the ladies’ toilet and legging it across the car park to the next store.
In World of Washrooms, her MasterCard (such a manly, sadistic name) appeared for fresh purchases. Above her, “Material Girl” played from hidden speakers at just the right volume required to send people mad. This particular corporate CD of shopping’s greatest hits had been rescored for bongos, Moog and theremin, making Helen feel as if she had wandered into an old science fiction film.
For the sheer hell of it, she bought a freestanding chrome towel rack, two Rhapsody molded-ceramic toothbrush sconces, an onyx soap holder shaped like buttocks, the Comfort luxury Dralon candlewick pedestal mat available in avocado or pink martini, and a LadyPore magnifying mirror with built-in makeup tray. The staff nearly had to pull her off the shag-covered faux-bamboo laundry hamper and combi-heated towel rail.
She reached the end of the chrome-railed floor and snapped a vacant sales assistant from her reverie. The girl asked her how she would like to pay. With a gunslinger’s wrist-flick Helen withdrew the MasterCard and placked it onto the counter with a sound as satisfying as the snap of her husband’s condom coming off. The assistant rang everything up, then zipped the card through her credit link. While she waited, she stared into the middle distance and touched the edges of her lacquered hair as if gingerly reading braille. When she checked the readout, her cheeks crinkled very slightly, as though she had just experienced the misery of trapped wind.
“I’m afraid this one is invalid,” she explained, returning it. “There might be a fault with the card.” She didn’t believe it for a second and wanted Helen to know that she didn’t, despite the necessity of maintaining the store’s politeness policy. Helen knew her type. She could read more nuances into the guarded smiles of service personnel than Marcel Proust.
Sudden insolvency was an unusual and unpleasant experience. She casually riffled through her purse and submitted a less-scorched card, and when that didn’t work, a third. In a mounting state of mortification, she went through seven more, but none of them registered. She could feel sweat forming in the small of her back. She had no checkbook anymore—who did?—and had no other way of paying. Finally the assistant jealously took back her
