Stickers

my visit to the discount shop

The discount shop is located precariously, on the edge of town, before the estates, but long past the point where you expect to come across shops at all. Its glass frontage is covered up with unmarked vinyl, because the view of this street is worth less than the extra aisle of shelves pressing up against the other side of the glass. The interior has a smell, like something has fallen into a cavity, and expired there, and crumbled to powder. The exposed vents and cables on the ceiling are plastered in half a centimeter of cream paint. I walk past shelves clogged with cheap stationery, out-of-season tinsel, rolls of sellotape, and extension cords in polyurethane bags. There are no prices on the shelves; instead, every single item has a little yellow sticker on it. If you look closely, you notice that the stickers are everywhere, on the shelves, on the carpet, sometimes just the white silhouette where someone has tried and failed to peel it off. £1.49, £2.99. I’m looking for something specific.

I’ve read online that this place sells Hot Wheels. It comes up in a forum thread from 2018, but that was before the pandemic, and it was unclear to me if the business would have survived unchanged. Being here, it’s obvious that it’s been unchanged for much, much longer than that.

But, you know what, it is fairly busy. People older than me, or people my age who nevertheless don’t resemble me remotely, hurry around just grabbing things, throwing them back in piles, sometimes without even seeming to look. It’s not a feeding frenzy—a shoal of scavengers tearing at whalefall—no, it’s somehow more methodical than that. Like an assembly line in reverse: a completed, perfect car being dismantled by many hands.

The lights cut out, then after a split-second, come back. As if the place is struggling to sustain its own existence. I see a cashier with a little reel of stickers, labelling the contents of a display of individually-boxed lightbulbs one by one, and when the lights come back on he doesn’t appear to have reacted; sure enough, a couple of minutes later, the lights flicker again. I have to assume they’ve been doing this all day, but no longer than that. They can’t just be like this all the time.

I can’t find the Hot Wheels. But just as I’m about to give up, I see a banister behind a revolving display of wall calendars. This place has a basement! I go down the stairs. Halfway down there’s a door marked PRIVATE, and it’s hard to work out how it fits into the geometry of the building, if it sticks out the side like a wart.

The basement is like a second store, grafted onto the first. It’s hard to imagine it has the same owners, the same workers. The racks and shelves are all different. Some of the stock seems redundant; I could have sworn I saw a display of identical plastic sandcastle buckets upstairs. The basement has its own counter, with its own till.

The floor is slightly uneven, wooden panels that warp and knock as I step on them. There’s a wall of pegs carrying bagged toys, rubbery dinosaurs and construction kits, sealed with transparent plastic in front and coloured plastic behind. No branding, just price stickers. I genuinely cannot tell if the items are secondhand, or new; they seem like the kind of thing you find overflowing in charity shops, already donated, already unwanted. I become convinced that they must be secondhand, because the alternative is somehow disturbing. Yes, this is the store’s side hustle: the buying and selling of secondhand toys.

The Hot Wheels are on a rotating gondola, lined up on long pegs, except for those which have fallen, resting askance halfway down in a strange game of Kerplunk. Every single one is individually priced, and they are all the same price. I spin the top layer of the gondola, and it squeals badly. But in the third layer, I find the car that I’m looking for. I’m pleased, I’m excited.

I go to pay, and the girl at the counter flashes such an authentic beaming smile, like we’re friends and she’s genuinely happy to see me, that I suddenly feel completely at ease. “Hi!”

“Hey! This please.” I give her the car.

She flips it over and scans the barcode, and she audibly says “Beep.” when the red line connects. “So why this one in particular?” she asks me.

I freeze up. I think about it for a moment. Then I say, truthfully, “To be honest I don’t know.” She laughs but not to be mean. “Can I ask,” I ask, “are you guys hiring here?”

“We are! They’re looking for someone full time, during the week. Here, there’s a flyer about it, take one.” She points at a little stack of A5 flyers next to the till. They’re a proper professionally-printed job, glossy, full colour. Weird.

“Ah, damn, I can only do part time. But I guess I can take one anyway.”

“Or you could leave it for someone else,” she says. I’ve already picked one off the pile.

“Okay, I’ll put it back then.”

“Nono, I was joking-”

“No, no, I can see they must have been expensive.” I carefully line up its edge with the rest of the stack.

“Anyway, that’s £1.49 please!”

“Cool. Card please,” I say, but she’s already got the reader out. I tap it.

“Thank you! See you again hopefully.”

“Thanks! You too.”

I take the car and the receipt she gives me and go to get outie. At the bottom of the stairs, I stop for a second to open it, putting the rubbish in my bag and the car in my pocket.

I notice something else that’s weird about this place. Something in the corner of the basement. Like there’s a space where a display should be, but it’s not. And where the wooden panelling of the floor should meet the two walls, there’s a triangular gap, with steep wooden steps leading down. It’s not marked PRIVATE, like the door halfway down the stairs was. It seems like part of the shop.

I descend into the sub-basement. The space beneath the basement is much, much bigger than I’m expecting, but it’s obvious I was mistaken; there’s nothing here. A black curtain runs around the walls. Someone’s left a large bag of commercial rubbish down here. Its contents are obscured by the translucent red membrane.

This place was a theatre, once. These premises had a big room underground, which they bisected, laterally, to create the impression of a normal-height room. Maybe not a theatre, there’s no sign of a stage, or seats. But it served some other purpose.

Either way, I was obviously mistaken; this isn’t part of the shop. Behind me, the light from upstairs suddenly goes out, and comes back on. The stairs croak as someone comes down. It’s the cashier. She’s holding a sword.

“Sorry about this, man. You need dead,” she says.

And then she’s earnestly trying to kill me. She slashes in a figure-eight, criss-cross, then tries to stab me. There’s no time to think, to speak. I run away and she chases after me. Desperately, I throw my keys and my car at her, which doesn’t do anything, but then she treads on the car and falls flat on her face, accidentally stabbing herself through the throat. While she dies I can’t work out whether I’m hoping that she gets back up, fine after all, or that she doesn’t. I guess to me it feels proportionate that she tried to kill me?

Anyway, I retrieve my keys and the car. The little metal rod that forms the front axle has bent; one wheel is crushed up against the body, and spins in a drunken circle. I also feel quite bad about having basically killed someone with it. So I hurry back up the stairs and out of the store, and throw the car in the nearest bin. These things are extremely mass-produced so I could definitely get another if I wanted to, but I probably won’t.

A couple of weeks later, while I’m looking around another discount store, I find that they’ve also got bags of secondhand toys. And in one of the bags is the car I was looking for the other week. It’s got a bent wheel and I can see a bit of blood on it, so I know that it’s the one I had. I don’t really think it’s haunting me, or anything. I don’t see it again after that. People just sort of move these things around from place to place, until they end up somewhere.

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Thank you for reading “Stickers”.

This year, I’m under-employed, working part-time minimum wage. I’m reaching the end of my buffer, so I won’t be able to sustain my weekly schedule much longer, but stay tuned for more posts, including a commentary explaining what the hell is the deal with this one. As always, check out this page if you want to directly support my work.