Myer is Our Store – by Gillian Hagenus
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
They call it the long sleep. But it felt more like a micro-nap. Like closing your eyes for a second on a long stretch of highway in the flattest part of the bush, wondering, was it a second, or hours? Wondering, how long would your body autopilot the car in a straight line before your hands slipped off the wheel? That’s what it felt like. Though that’s not how we died. Not all of us.
We woke up in a Myer. Not all of us, just some. We couldn’t fathom how the selection process worked.
We woke up in a Myer dressed head to toe in black, covered with a light layer of dust, badges pinned to our chest that displayed names that weren’t our own. Stephanie. Melissa. Sarah. Owen. These have been our names for so long now we have forgotten what they were before.
In life, we’d always joked that Myer was a brightly lit, sparkling ghost town. Shop workers disappearing the moment you turn to ask for help, every counter empty, escalators like Escher’s staircases taking you nowhere or, worse, somehow, right back where you started. It was less triumphant than we would have thought, finding out just how right we were.
We waited for our retail training. We waited for another ghost in a fatigued black blouse, wearing too much blush to cover the deadness, to show up and take us through each department, explain the probation period and how the commission would work. We waited what must have been weeks, puttering about, fingering faux furs and sequined dresses, before we realised that the job was whatever we felt it should be. Without windows, it is hard to mark the passage of time in the aching fluorescent light. We watch the shoppers trickle in and out. When there are only ghosts left, we can assume it is nighttime. Myer remains brightly lit but if we stand at the entrances of each floor at the right time, and stare out at the rest of the mall, we can watch each of the strip lights go out one by one, like slow-blinking cats fighting off sleep. This is also how we know we’re in a Westfield. Which of the thirty-seven in Australia though, that’s a question without a road to an answer.
The first few weeks on the job, the humans petrified us. Their vitality felt huge. It came off them in waves. The more bags they carried the more alive they felt, like consuming material goods, taffeta and spandex and tubes of creams was a bespoke fuel for a designer fire. It made them happy. Sometimes it made them sad, and they did it anyway. Sometimes it made them both things at once and this was the hardest for us to bear. When we first started, there were no rules that said we had to stay on a particular floor, but most of us liked the top floor in the beginning. We liked the homewares and the bedding, because most shoppers don’t bother riding the escalators all the way to the top. It takes too long and people don’t quite trust these goods from a Myer; from somewhere that sells everything and specialises in nothing. But sometimes they snuck by. We wandered through aisles of saucepans and appliances, off guard, and found ourselves snared in their eye contact. They’re in need of assistance. They want to know if it’s non-stick. They want to know if they can put it in the dishwasher. We didn’t know. We had forgotten how to use our voices, or we only knew how to use them too loudly. So, we would point vaguely in the direction of our invisible colleague, eke out a sound that indicated they could help, and we ran.
After a few weeks, we might have gotten brave enough to say hmmm. To lift up the box and say, ‘I think so? Should say on the box,’ hand it to them and make ourselves invisible again when they turn away.
We get more comfortable with humanity as we go along. In fact, some of us begin to crave it.
Those of us women who have been here the longest work in lingerie. It begins as a deep need. To get close to life again. We take women in for fittings, just us and them in a curtained room, so small we stand close enough to caress their ears with our lips if we lean in to whisper. When we wrap the measuring tape around their chests, the warmth of their skin is startling, intoxicating. We want to drink it, let our hands linger so we can feel their heart, pulsing. For a while it’s enough to see their flesh textured by goosebumps, the tiny hairs raised. But too long in this position and the intoxication of life starts to turn poisonous. Vengeful. Those of us who become too far gone sell women the wrong sized bra, only slightly, so the underwire cuts into their flesh, the band strangles, or the cups gape. We see the beginnings of it in the changerooms, but we tell them it fits so marvellously and doesn’t that feel good? We make ourselves found only in lingerie and then tell shoppers they cannot purchase their handbags here. They cannot purchase their trousers here. This is lingerie, we say. You must take your trousers to apparel.
But there’s nobody at apparel. There’s nobody in Manchester. There’s nobody in shoes.
We get them stuck in a loop so they can feel what it feels like to die.
We will check out their items when we feel like it, but it will take too long. We will ask if they have a Myer One card, but it hasn’t got any points on it. We keep spelling their email wrong and they must keep repeating it. We can’t find it in the system. This item isn’t eligible. No returns on clearance stock. No returns on lingerie.
None of this is anything we have been taught. All of it comes as naturally as no longer breathing.
Nights, we sleep on bed displays, too-short mattresses and too many pillows and all of them scratching. We are dead but we can feel the itch. We are dead but we start to go rotten if we don’t sleep. The bed displays change on their own. We don’t know who does it, we don’t know how. We think the beds are ghosts too.
The one threat to our jobs here at Myer are the only employees in the store who are actually alive. They work on commission and smell like desperation and CK One. Their smiles are built into their powdery foundation. They crowd the fragrance section and as far as we can tell, their sale tactics extend only so far as helping shoppers spritz little strips of paper and telling them to let it settle, that it will mellow on the skin. We’d like to work in this section. We’d like to feel the soft underside of a wrist, trace the blue veins that pump blood so robustly through bodies. But our own skin burns like acid with the slightest touch of perfume.
The colognes, we’ve speculated, must contain some chemical form of ghost repellent, like surface spray for spirits. Our dead nostrils cannot inhale the scent anymore without it burning through our insubstantial bodies. The workers in fragrances know of our presence, though they never acknowledge it. We know this because they are forever encouraging shoppers to wave their perfumed strips of papers like fans, to give it a good flap, smell it on the breeze. It keeps us away as effectively as an electric fence.
We still hear them though, through the floors. We hear them ask each customer if they can help, smell their disappointment when the response is no. Sales, not blood, are their life force. We wonder whose desperation is worse – our throbbing need for life, or their feverish search for purpose.
At the end of the day, as we line up at the entrance of Myer in preparation to watch the lights xylophone out from one end of the Westfield to the other, we watch, too, the other workers as they trickle away, through the shoplifting sensers where we cannot follow. They turn to look over their shoulders at the wall of ghosts in faded black, a funeral procession of tired eyes, and they spritz on their perfumes and leave us behind. ▼
Image: Tsai Sen Yu - Unsplash
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