The Apartment Store #2

Chapter 1, Part 2;

The Apartment Store is the story of Lydia, a little girl who lives in a ramshackle attic apartment, in a ramshackle apartment building, down the ramshackle end of town. All Lydia wants is a proper Christmas, but it doesn't seem likely until a new tenant arrives in their building and changes Christmas for everyone in it.

The Apartment Store is a book length Christmas story of twelve chapters, split into twenty four episodes for Advent.

The windows of the Krampus department store, famous through all the town, through all the country, probably through the whole world, Lydia thought.

Krampus didn’t do the same thing every year. They’d never dream of it. Every year was something different, something new, something spectacular. And this was why Lydia was here this evening, idling her way home from school, joining the jostling, thronging crowds to see the Krampus Christmas windows.

This year they had turned Christmas inside out. The presents had taken over, were having a Christmas of their own. Each window was the room of a house, and in each room was a party attended only by things: by furniture, by clothes, by food and gadgets and jewellery.

In one window a family of clocks gathered around a blazing fire of gems and cogs and springs. The grandfather clock had been folded in two to sit him in a rocking chair, and on his lacquered lap sat a little gaggle of baby alarm clocks, all gazing up at his handlebar moustache of hour and minute hands, as the chair rocked gently back and forth in time to their ticking.

In another window a happy gang of lights were all sitting down to Christmas lunch. An elegant floor lamp, a single curve of polished metal, bent attentively over a little bedside light, who had had to be propped up on a cushion to reach his plate of green flex and heaped plugs. At one end an angle poise was reaching eagerly over the table to lever the lid off a tureen of lightbulbs, all glowing in the depths of the bowl.

And at the corner, at the far end of the store, was a theatre. In the front of the window was a crowd of cutlery, all crammed in together, knives and forks leaning companionably against each other, dessert spoons craning forward to see. In front of them were plush green curtains, footlights and a stage. And on that stage was a food mixer. A bright red, enormous food mixer, with big chrome knobs and trim and attachments. And it danced. It turned on a turntable, the lights flashing and racing across its bright metal body, and as it turned its mixing attachment rose and fell and itself turned and spun. And each movement was at a slightly different speed, so that it never repeated itself but turned endlessly, still harmoniously, to unheard music, rising and falling, spinning and whirling. And perpetually entrancing, glowing, glittering dance.

Lydia loved the food mixer. It was her absolute favourite window. Of all the windows. Of all the windows that Krampus had ever had. She couldn’t have explained it, but there was something wondrous about that mixer. It was hypnotising, delighting. It was brilliant and magical. The absolute bees knees. The best.

She might say she wanted a new father, but what Lydia really wanted for Christmas, that she would never admit, not even to herself, her absolute heart’s desire, was the red food mixer in the Krampus window.

And she would never get it.

She understood why, of course. She understood that her father earned only a very little money working in Mr M’s shop, and that most of what little there was had to go to Mr Krebs for the little rent on their little flat and that left very little over for Christmas presents. And very much far too little for a Christmas present like the red food mixer from the window of Krampus department store. And this, really, was why Lydia wanted a new father for Christmas; because what she wanted was a Christmas - a proper Christmas with a real tree instead of the wooden one her own irritating father had made and painted, and a Christmas dinner around a proper dining table, instead of visiting Mr & Mrs M to eat pastries and the Misses Pleasaunce to eat small green cakes and John and Fairuza for turkey sandwiches in the evening. She wanted a stocking with more in it than a tangerine and a walnut and a bar of chocolate. She wanted a heap of presents where the smallest one wasn’t the one from her own father, her own family! And wasn’t just something irritating he had made for her instead of buying it in a shop. All Lydia wanted was just one day when they didn’t have to be careful and second hand and embarrassing and irritating. All she wanted was Christmas and a new father to have it with.

Fat chance, of course. Krampus didn’t stock new fathers or new Christmases. Not that she had found anyway.

Bang! Someone suddenly clonked her round the back of the head. She leapt round, guiltily and found herself staring at the red of a Krampus shopping bag. They didn’t even put the name of the store on the bag: they didn’t have to, just that shade of red was enough for everyone to recognise. A startling scarlet bag and in the middle, their sign: a small white devil, with little horns and goat’s legs, doubled up, laughing under a great sack, bulging with wonderful things. 

Biff! Another one slapped against her legs. It was starting to rain and people were beginning to scurry and jostle in an effort to get out of the weather. The pavement was becoming a tangle of umbrellas and no one was looking where they were going, especially not looking for small, damp girls who might be in their way.

She ought to getting home, anyway. 

Lydia turned from the bright windows of the Krampus department store and slipped through the crowds, across the Main Street and then in under a thin arch, that you might never notice if you did not know the city, and even, perhaps, if you thought you did. Here a steep flight of narrow stone steps wound up between tall, thin buildings, up into a dimly lit yard. This was Lydia’s secret way home through the Old Town, all up and down and through the snickets and shambles of the city, a way she had ferreted out for herself in all her time wasting journeys. It went through strange little alleys where the buildings leaned in above you, gently sagging over the street until the night above became just a distant sliver. There were little squares with lonely trees where the only light was the multi-coloured jewels from the candles flickering behind stained glass in high windows. There was an old church that had quite fallen apart - it had no roof any more, no entrance or exit, just walls, so it had become nothing so much as a long corridor, lined with the weather-beaten statues of kings and saints. There was a winding stone stair, with painted tiles, that climbed up actually inside another building and brought you out on top of an ancient stone wall that became an arch over a broad, winding street, that you could just walk straight over the top of and down the other side.

That brought you down into a garden, dark with evergreens and ivy, where there was a pond of secretive fish and a statue of a lady so overgrown that only her face peeked out of a fringe of leaves. From there you went through a gate, being careful to shut it behind you, up another short flight of stairs and you came out into a little cobblestoned square with a drinking trough for horses in the middle of it, which was full of flowers these days, and there, directly opposite you, were the bright lights of Mr M’s Olympic Mini-Supermarket.

While there might have been nothing particularly Olympic about Mr M’s store, there was nothing particularly Mini about it either. Except perhaps in size, especially when compared to somewhere like the Krampus store, but even that wasn’t quite true, because however small the Olympic might look from the outside, inside it never seemed to end.

The store was a maze of shelves, all reaching from floor to ceiling, in no particular orientation or order - turning left or right suddenly, ending in dead ends or suddenly depositing you in front of the deli-counter, unannounced. It was quite easy to get confused, even in such a small and crowded space and Lydia often wondered how many people had gotten lost in there - might still be lost, wandering forever among the tins and packets, searching fruitlessly for fruit.

It certainly was not Mini in its ambitions, either. Mr M stocked everything. Everything he could fit it and slightly more. Right at the back of the store was the deli counter, full of meat and cheese, where hams hung from the ceiling and tins of fish piled up on the floor. That was where Mrs M worked often, preparing big tubs of pasta salad and thin slices of sausage. There were shelf after shelf of bottles and cans, every kind of preserve and pickle, every kind of bean and soup. There was a shelf that was all tools and nails and lightbulbs and one that was all silk flowers and gardening equipment. There were mops and brushes all crowded in one corner and pogo sticks and stilts in another. There was a spinner rack of paperbacks with covers where ladies ran away from castles and gun toting detectives carefully opened doors on scandalous scenes. Down one aisle, comic books hung from clothes pegs so that you had to jump up and pull one down at random to discover what it was. Down another, swags of fairy lights criss crossed, showing off all the different colours and designs. There were lightbulbs and preserved lemons and buckets of popcorn and cans of sparkling beetroot juice. There was everything you could ever want.

And then, at the front, there was her father.

“Lydia, Oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia? Lydia, the tattooed lady?”

He father sang this song all the time, even though she had made it very plain that irritated her immensely.

“Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopaedia, Oh Lydia, the Queen of tattoo!”

In fact, she strongly suspected that he sang because it irritated her.

“Is that the child Lydia?” Came Mr M’s voice from the back of the shop.

“It is some kind of goblin,” called back her father, “It's hard to believe that such a strange little creature should be called something as harmless as 'Lydia'.”

Her father talked like this a lot. There were supposed to be, Lydia suspected, jokes, but instead of making everything jolly and fun, they made everything irritating instead.

Lydia stuck her tongue out at him.

“I’m here, Mr M!”

“Good, good, close the door, then Door, close the door, shut up shop.”

Close the door, Door. Even his name was annoying. Her father’s real name was Theodore, but everyone called him Door, which made him sound like a thing instead of a person.

Her father came out from behind the till and flipped the shop sign to “Sorry, we’re closed” as Mr M came bustling down, so plump that he brushed the shelves on both sides of the aisle as he came, his nimble little feet dancing round the goods piled up on the floor.

“Now, child Lydia, you must help me,” said Mr M, rubbing his hands together, “I want a display for the Christmas things, you understand? And you can help me, you have a good understanding for these things, I think.”

“And I don’t, I suppose,” said her father, “I’ll make sandwiches, shall I? Mr M, Lydia? Turkey would be appropriate I think.”

“Mrs M will be most upset if I spoil my appetite for our supper,” said Mr M, “A little ham in mine. And mustard.”

“Dijon,” said her father, disappearing into the rear of the shop.

“Dijon, indeed,” agreed Mr M, “Now, child Lydia, about Christmas…”

And so they began. It was a tricky business as Mr M and Lydia, it turned out, had quite different ideas of what constituted a shop Christmas display. Lydia’s head was still swimming with the visions of the Krampus windows, of wintry streets and Christmas lights. Mr M, on the other hand, was very much concerned with finding an excuse to finally sell things he hadn’t been able to shift all year and kept trying to find reasons why swimming goggles or left over Halloween pumpkins were Christmassy.

They split up, scampering round the shelves, fetching back discoveries to compare and discuss and gradually they started to assemble a collection. A pile of boxes of strange chocolates, the illustrations of Alpine scenes and Viennese streets on the front a little obscured by dust. A pile of boxes of crackers, all gaudy foil and tinsel, bound up by glittering gold ribbons. Last minute cooking needs: cranberry sauce and instant stuffing, cake mix and maraschino cherries. Last minute present needs: a faded shaving set, a pile of assorted romance and western novels, talcum powder in pale shades of pink and blue, ornately stoppered perfume bottles with unlikely names: Twine, Shepherdess, Remora. And some very sorry looking toys - a few colouring books, a tub of army men, stamped onto their bases in contorted poses, My First Business set with working calculator, a doll that was supposed to cry real tears but which Lydia knew from bitter experience just leaked water out of her ankles.

They stood around, eating the sandwiches Lydia’s father had made, looking at what they had collected. Lydia knew that when it came to Christmas it was the thought that counted but she couldn’t help feeling, looking at these meagre presents, that this kind of thinking probably didn’t count for very much.

“Christmas,” said Mr M, taking it all in with a satisfied nod. Lydia’s father shot her an amused look out of the corner of his eye, which annoyed her, given that she had collected at least half of this.

“Christmas,” she agreed.

“So, we clear a shelf, now, to put it onto,” said Mr M.

This was a slightly more complex undertaking that it might have appeared. They had to clear a whole wall of shelves by the till to pack all the Christmas things in, so everything already on it had to go somewhere onto the shelves elsewhere in the shop. Which meant moving other things to make the room to fit new things in. Lydia and Door ran between the shelves, following Mr M’s orders: flour two shelves down, peanut butter into the gap. Tins of bean into the space left by the peanut butter, socket wrenches and boxes of screws into where the beans had been, then you could move the soaps up and that would make room to put the toothpaste away. Somehow Mr M kept the whole store in his head - one aisle over, three shelves down, just to the left, up to the right, shuffling it all round like some gigantic puzzle.

And eventually it was done, the shelves cleared and then the Christmas display mounted right in front of the door. Lydia looked at it. She still wasn’t convinced it looked like Christmas.

“Dad,” she said, “We need lights. The fairy lights.”

They scaled the shelves and unhooked the displays of fairy lights, disconnected the neon signs for beer over the fridge and plugging them in by the till, looping them up and over and round the shelves until finally the whole display was winking and blazing with lights.

“Christmas,” said Mr M again, happily. And now you couldn’t quite make out all the goods they’d lined up under all the flashing fairy lights, Lydia was inclined to agree.

“I would have said that the last thing we needed was more light on that display,” said her father, "but I would have been wrong."

They stood at looked at the Christmas display for a moment, each thinking their own thoughts. And then it turned out that her father’s thoughts had been about how late it was and how Lydia should be in bed by now, so Mr M thanked them for their help and Lydia was bundled off to the dumb waiter.

The dumb waiter was one of those things left over from when their building had been a complete house of all its own instead of an apartment block. According to her father, Mr Kreb’s apartment in the basement had been the kitchen and the dumb waiter, which was a kind of tiny wooden lift hauled up and down by hand, had been used to carry food up to the people in the dining room where Mr M now lived, or up to the higher floors, to nurseries and bedrooms. It was still there and still in working order, running up through the walls, with hatches on every landing where you could get in and out.

Ever since she was small, Lydia had ridden in the dumb waiter, hauled up and down between the floors by her father. She was starting to get too big to fit but she could still, just, and she tucked herself in and Mr M and her father grabbed hold of the ropes and started to pull and she rose into the close and dusty dark between the walls.

Up past the M’s apartment and

“Goodnight, child Lydia,” called Granny M.

Then another floor up and the Misses Pleasaunce called out in a piping unison

“Good night, Lydia,” and Fairuza knocked a rapid little rhythm on the wall with her palm and knuckles as Lydia passed and John shouted

“Sweet dreams!”

There was a record playing as she passed Ivy’s apartment and Ivy was singing to herself and on the other side she heard George Joseph Sweet say

“There goes Lydia, time to put some milk on for cocoa. Good night.”

And then she was at the very top, up in her attic, and she scrambled into their flat, cleaned her teeth and washed her face in seconds flat, racing so that she was across the floor and into the bed and the lights were out as she heard her father climbing up the last flight of stairs:

“Oh, Lydia the Tattooed Lady!

When her muscles start relaxin’

Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson,”

And the door to their flat opened and closed and he called out

“Good night and sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Then she heard him open the door to his desk-bed-cabinet and fold back all the leaves and turn on the light and sit down with a sighing then all was finally quiet.

And she pulled back the curtain just a touch, so that the thin moon, shining down on the wet rooves of the Old Town, lit up the picture she kept by the side of her bed.

“Good night, mum,” she said, and let the curtain fall back and turned over and went, at last, to sleep.