A book of silences

Chapter three - strange

Later that evening Cat sat at a large desk with the contents of her pockets and shoulder bag laid out in front of her. She'd grouped them according to functional categories - useful objects, communication, art, food, lint, and general crap, but was having trouble placing her mobile (she used it to ring her friends, but it also had pictures of her work on it). This was one of Cat's many ways of relaxing, placing things in lines and groups and patterns, but the whole 'functional' category simply wasn't working. She sighed and gathered them all together and began counting them instead.

On her fourth try, Cat managed to get the same number twice, but only by dint of ferocious concentration and placing each of her items in lines of ten. She wrote the number down carefully in her sketch book and dated it.

This was the first of Cat's real strangeness's; she had trouble counting sixteen. Not trouble counting to sixteen, or trouble counting past sixteen. Not even trouble counting. Cat had trouble counting the number sixteen. The whole concept of sixteen was vague to her; theoretically she knew there must be a number between fifteen and seventeen, but when she tried to count it, it became illusory, a fog, and unless she concentrated really hard, she simply missed it. Or maybe she didn't, maybe she thought she missed it, and all her subsequent trouble was due to a weird doublethink of both knowing and not-knowing she'd counted it. And it wasn't as simple as anything to do with the number sixteen itself. Two times eight was always sixteen; thirty-two divided by two was also always sixteen – the theoretical side of it and how it fitted into the rest of the number line didn't trouble her (though come to think of it, a four-by-four square felt a little, well, thin when she tried to visualize it). She just had trouble with the reality of sixteen.

The result of this was Cat's obsession with pattern and repetition. If something as primal as a number, and a little one at that, was blurred and insubstantial, what hope had the rest of reality? She felt in a vague way that by collecting and classifying obsessively she was somehow pinning down one tiny corner of the world in which she lived.

She spent an hour drawing everything on the table, four items per page of her sketch book (though she called a handful of coins one item and similarly grouped her paint brushes). Fifteen pages all told, sixty-two in total (one page had only two sketches) and again she dated her work before checking the clock and, seeing it was nearly one am, got ready for work.

                                                                                              .....

Work for Cat was overnight shelf filling at a local supermarket from two am to eight am, three nights a week. Not so strangely, she loved the work, checking expiry dates, filling shelves, squaring up tins and boxes, changing prices. It was only with a great effort that she'd avoided bringing her sketch books along to record her progress, and she'd had to leave her phone in the staff room to avoid taking photographs of the rows and rows of tins.

She'd worked here for two years, starting a week after she'd come to the city, having to prove her age before the store manager would employ her. He'd only been interested in her ability to speak English (check), whether she could lift heavy items (check - just about) and any evidence of criminality (check - don't mention the big knife in her bag). She'd aced the 'getting to know you' part of the interview by noticing the Bombers scarf behind the door. As she'd memorized the whole league months ago, declaring herself an avid supporter and dropping a few players names into the conversation had clinched her the job.

Two years' employment meant that she was one of the Old Guard of shelf stackers; poor single mums, long-term unemployables and slightly odd thirty-year-old dropouts who filled shelves and teased each other as they worked around the store. They shared a loathing of the 'short-termers' as they called the new employees; school kids, students, gap year savers, and hopeless mouth-breathers, all of whom stacked their aisles haphazardly and brought the Wrath of The Store Manager on all their heads. Whereas most of the older employees had a mild dislike for the newcomers, Cat often felt a blazing hatred for their poor stacking skills and felt compelled to tidy up after them, often staying an extra twenty to thirty minutes after her shift had finished to tidy up the shelves.