1/Persistent Delusions
The doors of the sports gear shop hummed as they smoothly opened. Reg Ulage didn’t notice as he stepped through them. He was to be the last customer of the day. His attempt to project a swaggering expectancy was thwarted by a detectable hesitancy. In his late thirties, flushed and puffy, he sought the air of an aspirant but had the demeanour of the dispossessed. Reg loved Success but it was a relationship that was singularly unrequited. He smiled at, drooled over and dreamt of his elusive partner. Success merely gobbed at him. Reg never gave up.
Sports Equipment would change everything – as bargain after bargain gleamed around him, Reg was convinced. Reg had a wonderfully short memory span. Whenever he’d saved up enough of his paltry credits for an all too rare lifestyle-changing spending spree he’d had that same sense of conviction: the new shoes to get his foot in the door, the sharp suit to cut a swathe through the crowd, the toupee to top it all. As far as getting off with Success was concerned, he might as well have been buying a blow-up lover. Now his ego’s next chance of getting pumped up lay with the all-in-one body exerciser, the Total Anatomical Toner; he’d have a physique that couldn’t fail.
Firmed-up, his every movement made with a supremely masculine muscular grace, surely then he’d find the springboard that being a shop assistant was supposed to be would really have some bounce in it. Then, after ten long years, he’d begin his long overdue meteoric rise to the top, to the Board of Trustees. Reg’s spine actually tingled at the prospect. A simple purchase was all that was needed. He knew he was his own man. He had the credits and the T.A.T. Starter Model’s catalogue code. Nothing could stop him.
Everything about the shop seemed to say different. If the neon tubes could have made a noise they’d have smirked at the till-fodder that Reg represented. Perhaps they did wink at each other. Perhaps the door slid shut behind him with an unusual, ensnaring finality. A retail killing ground. The lean individual looking up from the transaction summary screens towards the back of the shop surely didn’t smile such a murderous sliver of a smile at every customer, didn’t survey all of them with such coldly twinkling eyes – as bright as the most polished chrome in the shop. He didn’t need a dorsal fin as he glided towards Reg. He ran his hand through his thick, gelled, pitch black hair; as he did so the chunky gold nugget ring on his left forefinger brushed against the top of his ear. Reg had just noticed and was admiring the smell of gentleman’s perfume arriving at his nostrils when the oily-moist lips in the face that had silently appeared at his shoulder opened: “If I might be of some assistance…”
