Chapter 15
The first thing that hit her when she showed up for work was the smell. Sickly sweet and yeasty like something fermenting, with an earthy mushroom twang that hit the back of the throat.
“Eurgh! What is that?” she’d asked Kerry when she’d arrived for the handover. Kerry had looked at her quizzically, as had Dave.
“We got some new scented candles in today?” suggested Dave. “But I rather liked them myself. Bought a couple for home.”
And then Casey glanced at the monitors and understood.
Dear god, what was happening? Breathing through her mouth, she said goodbye to Kerry and Dave and hurried the rest of the staff—all equally unbothered by the unholy stink—out of the store.
Then she sucked in one last deep lungful of cold fresh outside air and locked the door behind them.
Pulling her jumper over her mouth and nose, she made her way down to the lower ground floor.
She noted that the Christmas letter candles had been rearranged to spell Itchy Arse—she’d deal with those later.
For now, the bigger issue was the piles of rotting fruit and veg covering almost the entirety of the furniture department and the semi-comatose Spirit of Christmas Present, draped facedown across a plum velvet sofa with her flapper dress hoicked up to reveal a silky green chemise.
She was shouting slurred abuse at no one and dribbling profusely onto a snowman cushion.
A sea of moldering pumpkins had collapsed in on themselves, and as Casey took in the apocalyptic panorama, several more joined their orange comrades, puffing out showers of powdery spores before liquefying into a bubbling mess.
“Holy shit!” she shouted into her jumper.
Margo replied with something that sounded suspiciously like “Jeremiah-was-a-bullfrog,” and started to snore.
A tower of fruit in a silver punch bowl was decomposing at an alarming rate and dribbling down the legs of a glass-topped table and onto a Moroccan rug (￡750 with 20 percent off in the sale).
Loaves of bread, bagels, and pitas coated in green fur littered the floor, and a leg of Serrano ham was attracting a swarm of black fat-bellied flies.
Bottles containing the dregs of brightly colored liqueurs lay discarded on the floor around the sleeping spirit alongside empty cocktail glasses. The scene reminded Casey of a particularly messy hen party she’d once attended in Ibiza.
Treading carefully, she made her way over to the sofa.
She rearranged Margo’s dress to cover her.
“Wake up!” she shouted, noticing a cocktail umbrella tangled in her hair.
Were spirits susceptible to alcohol poisoning?
Who would she even call if they were? The Three Wise Men?
The Ghostbusters? “Margo!” she tried again. “Can you hear me?”
“Kiss-my-arse,” Margo slurred, and belched with such force that the sound reverberated off the walls.
Casey’s improvised jumper-mask was no protection from Margo’s breath, which reeked like a barrel spill in a winery.
She blinked a couple of times, her eyes stinging—could alcoholic spirit burps cause blindness?
“Why is this my life?” she muttered to herself, giving Margo another shake. “Come on, princess, I’ll make you some nice black coffee.”
“Fuch-choff!”
“Unfortunately, I can’t do that, because you are stinking up my workplace.”
Margo rolled onto her back and observed Casey through bleary bloodshot eyes. “It-doesn’t-even-madder.” She began to sob then, moving seamlessly from the belligerent phase of drunkenness to the depressed.
Casey rolled her eyes. “Of course it matters.”
“Ohhhhh, it’s all so hopeless!” Margo wailed.
“What is?” she asked, wanting to keep Margo awake, more than being curious.
“The world!” She flopped one arm dramatically over her eyes. “It’s endless. It can’t be fixed, and I’m so tired of trying and trying and trying and it never being enough.”
“Blimey, the world sounds a bit like my ex-boyfriend.”
Margo moved her arm just long enough to give her a scathing look.
“Though obviously my failed relationship doesn’t compare to the fate of the whole world,” Casey added quickly.
“I mean”—Margo heaved herself up to a Romanesque lounging position—“would anyone even notice if I just stopped doing the interventions?” She hiccupped.
“None of those richy-rich bastards would give a shit. Whadda they care about the next life so long as they can eat like kings and wear Rolex watches in this one? They don’t deserve to have their souls saved!
” She appeared to have slipped back into belligerence.
Casey did not feel qualified to be counseling anyone about the fate of people’s souls, not that she could get a word in edgewise anyway.
“Some of them don’t even eat!” Margo went on, outraged, waving an arm around to encompass the room of decomposing herbage.
“People starve, food mountains rot, and the rich compete for the title of most emaciated by living on a diet of Marlboro Lights, vodka, and Ozempic, hand delivered to their doors by private fucking physicians,” she drawled, sucking in a huge breath when she’d finished.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” said Casey.
—
Casey returned ten minutes later with two mugs of strong black coffee and a packet of hobnobs.
She’d used her scarf to cover her nose and mouth and tied it at the back of her head.
Steam had begun to rise from the putrefying vegetation; and there was an ominous bubbling sound coming from behind a half-price sideboard.
Margo was sitting—sort of—with her head leaned back against the sofa and her arms and legs splayed out starfish-style.
When Casey approached with the coffee, Margo held out a listless hand and took it.
Casey sat down on the wingback chair opposite and pulled her scarf far enough away from her face to be able to fit her mug beneath it.
She took a sip and winced; she’d run out of mocha sachets and was missing the chocolaty hit that tempered the instant coffee’s bitterness.
Across the way, Margo made slurping sounds as she gulped down the hot liquid and then sat bolt upright with a start and screeched, “What from the devil’s own arsehole do you call this brew? ”
Casey shrugged and replied, “Shop’s own-brand instant. Unlike you, I can’t just whip a coffee machine out of my knickers at a moment’s notice.”
“Instant coffee?” Margo raised her hand to her forehead and swooned. “Why must I suffer so?”
“Still, sobered you up, didn’t it?” Spirits clearly had fast metabolisms. As the redness around Margo’s eyes began to recede and her speech became less slurred, so too the perishing foodstuffs and empty bottles of booze faded away into nothingness, along with their stench, to be replaced with the usual cornucopia that appeared wherever Margo was present.
Casey removed her scarf and lit a scented candle. “So, what brought on the drunken pity party?”
“You were gone,” said Margo accusingly.
“I am entitled to days off.”
“I was lonely. The ghosts are no fun; all they want to do is talk about how they died.”
Casey had forgotten Margo’s previous allusions to ghosts in the store.
She tried to sound indifferent. “How many ghosts would you say there are?”
Margo waved her question away, “Oh, I don’t know, five or six?
Less than twenty. I shouldn’t worry; there’s no poltergeists among them, although you might be in danger of being bored to death.
” She slumped back again, coffee sloshing onto the sofa and disappearing.
“I mean, sure, getting trapped in a loom isn’t a great way to go; neither is being squashed in the lift shaft but get over it, you know? ”
“Uh-huh,” Casey agreed, not feeling quite so chipper about the idea of nights alone in the store if Nigel wasn’t back by the time Margo had departed. She made a mental note to see how Nigel was getting on with his physiotherapist.
“Tell me about your days off; I need distracting from the fate of mankind. What did you get up to?”
“Oh, the usual. Did some cleaning. Tried and failed to write a gothic short story through a feminist lens.” Kissed a handsome police officer, she thought.
Margo, who had returned to her full splendor, eyed her skeptically and then said, “Well then, since you’re back, we should probably take another glimpse into one of your alternative timelines, see how meme-less life is treating other you.”
“Are you sober? I don’t know what the laws are around drunk glimpsing.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine; I’m practically immune to alcohol.”
“Erm, I beg to differ, you were paralytic when I found you.”
“Oh.” She laughed. “That wasn’t alcohol, that was the melancholy.
I feel things exceptionally hard. I’m right as rain now.
” She burped loudly and added, “Excuse me, melancholy gives me wind.” Then she stood up and spun around, grabbing Casey’s arm as she turned and flipped her over her hip in an O-goshi move that would have made Nigel proud.
—
“What the hell was…Oh!” Casey opened her eyes to find herself in a courtroom. “Do you need to be quite so physical?” she hissed, stretching out her spine.
“Sorry,” said Margo, not sounding sorry at all.
They were standing in the balcony while a case was being heard down below.
She didn’t recognize the man practically filling the witness box.
He was built like a silverback gorilla and had a forehead to match.
His meaty arms were folded across his chest, the logo on his Coopers & Co.
security uniform just peeking out above.
He had the air of a man who felt that society had done him a disservice.
“Mr. Brickly,” one of the barristers began. “In your statement, you said that the defendant lunged at you when you tried to restrain him. Do you stand by that assertion?”
“Yeah. I do,” the man growled.