An artist friend of mine recently suggested I write a short story based on a memory of Boxing Day sale shopping that I’d been recounting him. Today’s post, The Tiger Rug, is the result of that effort.
As usual, please let me know what you think in the comments — I really do appreciate your feedback, positive or otherwise!
The group of two adults, a man and a woman in their late thirties, accompanied by two small boys, left the car in a subterranean car park which was buried underneath a plain-looking square. Tall, uninteresting-looking buildings surrounded the square on all four sides, and there were few people around. It was winter, dry and cold, and the London plane trees which filled the square were stately and bare, bearing few or no leaves.
The woman asked the man if he had remembered to lock the midnight-blue car and he replied in the affirmative, bowing his head slightly and pulling an expression that suggested he was tired of her asking.
It was the day after Christmas, and the family had woken up early to catch the start of the Boxing Day sales. Today they would pay visits to all of the big department stores in town. This experience had become a ritual of this time of year, and one of the two boys noticed that his parents always seemed to express a great deal of feverish excitement at the prospect of the sales. Much more excitement, in fact, than they did about the big day of Christmas itself. He was too young then to understand this aspect of his parents’ lives, and his parents felt no need to explain.
Inside the department stores was a whole overwhelming world of electric light and colour. The brightly-lit and shining floors of the store were filled with all kinds of people coming and going, many of them holding bags of shopping in their hands. Smartly-dressed store assistants manned small divisions of the floor, each an entire store unto itself, with its own lettering and kerning, its own colour palette and festive mood. It was as if one had stepped right inside of a Christmas decoration, or the yuletide tree itself. It reminded the elder of the boys of a ballet his parents had once taken him to around this same time of year, where a young orphan girl is given a toy nutcracker which miraculously comes to life and dances around the orphanage she inhabits, enchanting the girl, whilst out the corner of his eye he could see his little brother getting excited and running off at every available opportunity…
The parents seemed off in their own world on these holiday days out, although they never quite forgot about the boys. Occasionally they’d look back to make sure the two were still tailing them, most often one or both seriously engaged with their portable games consoles, or the elder directing the younger to play. The two adults spent what to the boys felt like hours trying on new clothes, pained expressions on their still-youthful faces. “I shouldn’t…” one would say pleadingly to the other, who would reflect the first’s wracked expression right back at them, sometimes saying nothing. And so it went all day long. In contrast to the frenzied attitude with which the two adults had woken up early to leave the house and drive up from the suburban borderlands into town — the drive itself already a marker of an occasion out-of-the-ordinary — there did, the elder boy noted, seem to be some cool logic in the order in which his parents visited the various different clothing stores. He noted, for instance, that the two adults seemed to regularly visit the same set of shops each year, their favourites, and he had become familiar with some of those names, a kind of catechism but he did not understand its meaning. Or perhaps the logic he perceived was a chimera the boy himself had invented, he wondered.
At lunchtime, the children’s favourite moment of pause in the long midwinter day, there would be hot chocolates and sandwiches, biscuits and cakes. The parents would engage in hushed excited conversation, discussing what they’d bought so far, and where they wanted to go to next. The elder boy watched his young father ask the waiter if they had something called ‘decaf’, and then hesitate to order a coffee when the answer was given in the negative. “What’s decaf?” asked the boy, intrigued by the artifice of a word he did not yet know the meaning of. His mother interjected to explain, reassuring him: her husband had recently given up drinking coffee, and the withdrawal symptoms (whatever those were) had been really awful for him. His father meanwhile seemed to be absently looking around, and there was that pained or panicked look on his face once again. Perhaps he had forgotten to tell them all something.
The café was in the basement of Selfridges — which housed the ever-intriguing food court, with its beautiful displays of macarons and gingerbread houses and other such Christmas delicacies — and it was noisy and busy down here, with the sounds of china and steam and people talking. There was a deep blue neon light spelling out some lettering on the far wall, which lent the place an intriguing and sophisticated air, as if the café were in fact a late-night basement jazz bar, and the clientele were waiting for a performance to start. The boy assumed that all of the other families here were on a similar expedition to his own, too, although he saw few other children.
In the afternoon, the group would make its way down Regent’s Street to what was usually — bar a quick trip to a place called Fenwick’s or “Fenny’s” — the final stop on the Boxing Day tour. Liberty’s was the name of the sprawling mock-tutor edifice which housed his parents’ favourite department store. And the elder boy had often heard his mother say to her friends, at the dinner parties she infrequently hosted, “I love Liberty’s,” a glass of wine raised elegantly in one hand, and he noticed how she always stressed the liquid “l”s as she talked. Liberty’s, the boy decided, repeating the word to himself, represented some acme of class in this world the boy was surely destined to one day inhabit, along with things like his father’s ‘decaf’ and that glass of wine, although he could not for the life of him understand why.
It was the peak of the winter season and the day would already be drawing to a close, the Christmas lights helping the ever-thronging crowds of shoppers continue to find their way. The two boys were already tired and bored, playing hide-and-seek in the upholstery section amid the expensive rugs. Sooner or later their parents would notice that they were tired too, and then, with some reluctance, they’d all head back to the car parked beneath the dismal square. As his parents excitedly discussed what they should and should not have bought, thrilled by the daring of the expense, and all disputes put aside, the two boys would fall asleep on each other’s shoulders, dreaming of home.
Really enjoyed this one, I’d love to see more of this ❤️