Through the window, near motionless nodes of life stood drumming their fingers methodically over smooth, shiny blobs of plastic and glass, all laid out tidily on grand tables of thick pine wood. Between the walls, floor and ceiling a repetitive drumbeat looped, occasionally accompanied by dense synthesised keyboarded melodies. Lee panned into the scene feeling out of complete sorts with the other passing occupants littered around the vast open plan retail space. The overly warm, still air immediately brought a pink to the young man’s face, reducing his appearance of age by some five years, increasing the extent to which a member of staff could patronise at his each undoing of a shirt button or scarf knot to release the itchy warmth of consumer angst.
Lee’s fingers remained firmly inside his pockets whilst little eye contact above floor level was made. The anticipation of patronage rolled along with the store music. Contact lurched slowly towards him, commenced by a firm, confident hand from behind, patting his shoulder. A blindingly white set of perfectly formed teeth danced behind a smile so smug it could snap.
The intruder of personal space’s eyes scanned every pixel of Lee’s face. The maximum volume of Lee’s voice seemed muted by the assistant’s unsettling over familiarity. He reached into his inside pocket, presented a diagram of the input ports behind his new television and pointed at a presentation laptop he owned a model of. The intruder swaggered into a back room, half dancing in his stride on returning and placed a series of wires into Lee’s hands. Lee paid for the items, re-knotted his scarf and did up a few shirt buttons. With determination, he power walked through the sliding electric doors to outside.
‘It’s incredible, the self importance great marketing can provide someone who ultimately just works in a shop’ typed Lee into his personal diary, letter to pen pal, tape cassette player and camera all rolled into one digital soapbox come necessity, whilst taking in the real, fresher air of the street. Outside of that businesses’ doors, he could have been standing anywhere, such is the regularity of international brand strategy. This time he was in London. The usual mild busyness of a mid morning performed choreographed poses the city knew too well.
‘It’s equally as unfathomable how right and sure a customer is that a particular product is the best choice because of bleached white television adverts positioned relentlessly throughout programming schedules’ typed somebody outside of that company’s San Francisco equivalent, into their own pocket PA system.
Lee stepped down into an underground station and watched the insides of his eyelids until his mental tally told him it had been six stops and was time to get up. The peaceful solitude of his own mind’s canvas was then drowned in buckets of noises sweeping, hanging, stomping and wheeling around the market stalls pitched immediately at the exit of his destination’s tube terminal.
In between prams, past snail paced shoppers, behind a leafleteer and across a set of traffic lights, Lee walked across an uneven terrain of paving slabs, seemingly against the flow of the earth, as baggy tracksuit bottoms, clouds of smoke, hints of urinated upon walls and bus dust marched towards him. A crisp packet got stuck on his foot. The unzipped tracksuit top of somebody running for a cab pinched past his forearm. At his front door atop six flights of stairs he refused to take a lift to avoid, Lee panted, took keys from his satchel containing an apple, notepad, box of cigarettes and newspaper, and shut himself away from it all.