Christmas Shopping at the Non-Euclidean Argos

Sometimes, the stories we tell reveal something in us we weren't even aware of; other times, we walk two circuits of the Arndale Centre in Manchester looking for the Argos and we just want to gently vent about that experience. Fear not: I have since made my escape, elbowed my way through the Christmas markets, and made it safely home to write this silly story.

This week's daily stories

Monday

Danny said a mouldywarp was different to a mole: they were clever like people, and if you left them food they would dig up treasure for you. He was always saying things like that, and always leaving food for vermin, too. And now he’s rich, and he says it’s all because of the mouldywarp king, and I tell him to stop being stupid but he doesn’t care. He just laughs and pays for dinner.

Tuesday

On the way to work your bike skids on the flattened corpse of a pigeon. You saw it in plenty of time, but that didn’t save you: your eyes snagged on the hollow bones, and your wheels followed. As the world flips on its side and you slide along the tarmac, you see the bird kicked up into the air, and then the shattered wings flapping. It pulls left into the sky, and you try to lift your head from the road to follow it, but you are stuck there.

Wednesday

After that Christmas our snowmen stopped coming to life. Coincidence, I said. You can’t fall out so hard it kills the snowmen. It was probably pollution, like every other thing: the changing climate, or the dust from the new road, or the way the LED streetlights flatten the whole world. But there was something else hanging in the air, too, heaviness to hold down something as light as snow. I looked at their gravel eyes and thought: what if they still come to life, and they just can’t move? I thought I knew how that would feel.

Thursday

I went out in the storm in all the old clothes I’d shrunk out of, and my big hat tied tight to my head, and I let it blow me away. Once the wind takes you, everything feels calm: the air and the wind and your little body are all flying around just the same as each other. You look down at the ground and think: thank God I’m not down there, spinning around. It set me down a few miles away, not gentle, but fair. I built a little hut, and waited for the next storm.

Friday

Jenny gave Dave his birthday present in an intricate puzzle box, knowing he would never get around to solving it. But Dave knew how she was: he knew there would be nothing inside. So he solved it the day he got it, ready to fill with treasure and give back to her. Inside were two tickets to the gig that weekend, the one that had sold out before he even saw it. He didn’t mention it, and neither did she. They just met at the venue, and he bought her a drink.

Saturday

I didn’t think school fairs gave goldfish as prizes any more, but apparently this one did. All the parents were holding a fish in a bag, most of them pulling a face to say I don’t really agree with this, but the kids were so excited. The first bag split forty minutes in, and its resident spent the rest of the day in the hook-a-duck tub. More joined, until the golden shimmer was so enchanting that kids started tipping them in on purpose. We made a quiet exit, before we could be asked to help.

Sunday

The continental buffet breakfast was truly unlimited. You turned, or blinked, or just shifted your attention, and all the bread and cheese and meat and pastry was back in place like you had got up early for once. We did what we could, filling bags and touring the city to feed the hungry. We planned how we could do more. But we didn't understand the magic. We didn't even try. We didn't know what unpayable debts we were billing to our rooms.

I have been reading...

• Pity by Andrew McMillan, a novel about three generations of men in Barnsley. This is a very finely-crafted book, intricately patterned beneath its unshowy prose, and revealing beyond its themes of industry and queerness and place without them ever losing focus.
• Never Again by Doug Nufer, a novel where no word is used twice. I've had this on my shelf for more than a decade but it is not what you would call a welcoming book: the cover looks like having a migraine and the text feels like having a stroke. But I had the urge to pick it up at last this week, and it's been interesting feeling my way into Nufer's prose, which is necessarily strange and filled with compounds and puns and other trickery. It's fun the way the mind adapts. In the first sentence Nufer burns through "the", "I", "to" and "a" to open with a pretty normal sentence, and because it's so normal you don't think much of it. After a few chapters, you come across "an" or "she" or "I've" and there's a little spike of excitement. There it goes. Never again. I'm looking forward to finding out what the last word is.

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This week's story: Christmas Shopping at the Non-Euclidean Argos

From behind her phone, Em let out a noise like the closing of a rusty portcullis. I kept at the washing up. Best to let it run its course.

"It's in stock," she said.

"Oh, that's good," I said, brightly, like I hadn't noticed anything amiss.

"It's in stock at the Argos in the non-Euclidean shopping centre."

I knew this, because I had looked earlier, but I hadn't said anything because I was trying very hard not to know it any more.

"You know," I said, with a philosophical air, "there was a time before online shopping when we wouldn't have known it was in stock, and there's no way we'd have gone Christmas shopping in the non-Euclidean shopping centre, and we'd have just got him something else and it would have been fine."

"I know," she said, rubbing her face. "But we do have online shopping, and we do know it's in stock, and he'll look me in the eye and ask about it and what will I say?"

I wiped my hands on my trousers, and regretted it instantly. "It's OK," I said. "I'll go." The time for cowardice had passed. Now that there was no choice, it was the time for bravery.

"Are you sure?" she said.

"Of course," I said. "It's no big deal."

"OK. Great. That's all fine then. Great." She pushed out a long, slow breath, her eyes closed, then went and got her phone to place the order, brushing off the paint mark from where it hit the wall.

The non-Euclidean shopping centre was the first and last of its kind, the future of urban planning for a brief year or two, an unscoopable dog turd curled around the town centre in incomprehensible spirals. It was officially the Turner Street Retail Gardens, but that name was all wrong: Turner Street had folded in on itself during construction, and no plants could live there. Everyone called it the non-Euclidean shopping centre, although most of us couldn't explain what that meant, many of us couldn't pronounce it, and the ones who could do both told the rest of us it wasn't strictly correct. It was fun seeing all the different ways the kids spelled it. You couldn't laugh at them for it, though. Not when they were the only ones who could draw a map of the place.