David Langford - The Motivation

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The Motivation

by David Langford

Born in 1953 in South Wales, David Longford has been a bit of gadfly and a

bit of Monty Python to the science fiction community for some years now through

his fanzine, Ansible, and through his satirical novels and stories. His horror fiction

runs from clever parody to grim nightmare. "The Motivation" is one of the latter.

Asked to account for his whereabouts since his last appearance here (The

Year's Best Horror Stories: XIII), Langford reports: "Ansible quietly folded, not

before picking up a Hugo. Monthly SFIfantasy review column in the British games

(God knows why) magazines White Dwarf (to 1988) and GM (1988 onward).

Published Earthdoom! with John Grant (1987), a spoof disaster novel in which

every disaster happens from polar slippage to invading aliens, and the parody

collection The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge:

Odyssey Two (1988), including 'The Thing in the Bedroom' of XIII fame. Sold and

collected full payment for another Grant collaboration, Guts, which does for

horror what Earthdoom! did for public toilets, but in the end the publishers were

too terrified to print it (we keep the money and are selling it elsewhere)." Hope

Langford remembered the zombies.

The shop was a rich stew of smells, dry rot and cigarettes and sweat. Its

buzzing fluorescent light couldn't cut through the staleness, and the August sun was

not allowed to penetrate. As with every branch of this exclusive chain, the display

window was painted dead black; the invisibility of its promised BOOKS AND

MAGAZINES was full and sufficient advertisement of the stock.

Peter Edgell reminded himself regularly that he was slumming, that this wasn't

his true niche in the literary world. An observer, which was it, scanning the

customers who fingered BOOKS AND MAGAZINES through their aseptic plastic

film. From behind the counter Peter read the customers and savored the emotions

that burned as pungently as the shop's smell. Businessmen brimmed with a synthetic

heartiness, wielding it like a charm against limp fears. Younger nondescripts let off

their little firecrackers of defensive aggression. Those too young were allowed a brief

ration of giggles before being chased away; most pitiful were the fossil emotions of

the very old, who from long habit cringed furtively and offered token mumbles of

"Just getting it for a mate, see?"

Peter welcomed them all, not only because each swing of the door wafted

fresh, clean exhaust fumes through the sweaty closeness: with his half a talent, he

saw the pornophiles as raw material. One day his special insight would pin them

down in some astonishing piece of journalism, a cancellation of his failures at

university and everywhere else. Jessica Mitford, Tom Wolfe, what-sis-name in

Private Eye -- he'd be with them one day. The thought was so thumbed and worn

that it skidded past like an overly familiar quotation.

Minor hubbub arose as old Benson ejected a gaggle of browsers from the

small back room. He swept them managerially before him, exuding a steady dribble

of apology and exhortation, as though dealing with drunks or kids where the secret

was to keep talking and keep calm. Peter was checking a wad of magazines being

returned for credit at the usual vast discount (you riffled very carefully through the

clean-limbed poses, and refused them if pages were either incomplete or stuck

together). Benson reached past him to the till.

"Lock up half five like usual," he said, passing a grayish handkerchief over a

broadly glistening sweep of baldness. His other hand methodically stripped the till of

banknotes -- so that when he looked up and added "I'm trusting you, Peter," it was

an effort not to snap back, "What the fuck with?"

"See you tomorrow," said Peter, wondering again about the manager: there

was nothing to read from him, as though he had no feelings whatever. Perhaps you

got like that after ten years in the trade. A roar of traffic and a gale of carbon

monoxide swept through the door as Benson slouched out on the weekly errand

which was not supposed to have anything to do with Thursday evening's greyhound

races.

A dozen or so literary and artistic items changed hands in the final forty

minutes of trade, but business was slack without the lure of the back room. It was a

milder breed of customer that Peter finally chased out: men whose longings didn't

burn as brightly.

He carried the old, battered till into the back, locked it in the concealed

cupboard (cunningly papered over, but outlined with a frieze of greasy fingerprints)

dedicated to Stronger Stuff. Which left him half an hour before his bus: this had

happened before, and Peter had spent the time in unedifying study of 'strong' goods.

His eyes had widened several times as he flicked through; the only after-effect had

been a slightly reduced appetite for sausage and chips that evening, and a greatly

reduced opinion of certain customers.

The misuse of this art form, he had written conscientiously in one of his

notebooks, is a species of Blatant Beast, repelling the assault of our curiosity by

revealing far more than we wish to know.

Today, curiosity took him through the back room into the dusty regions of

no-customer's-land. There was a toilet stinking of ammonia; a passageway lined with

miscellaneous old stock, growing ever more unsalable as mice chewed it into lace...

and the grimy kitchen where the mouse-smell was stronger yet, though all that was

ever made there was the tea they drank daily from mugs whose brown inner stain

exactly matched that of the toilet. A hair-dryer might have indicated some token

concession to cleanliness, but was only used for one of Peter's morning chores:

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David Langford - The Motivation

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