The Apotheosis of the Shopkeeper

And in the town nothing happening. A sea mist pervades the streets, the front doors are locked. Cats scavenge around the remnants of the market, mewing and fighting, in the mist they are ghosts, mere suggestions of the idea of cats.
Nothing happens for a reason and the reason is this. On Wednesday the circus is coming to town and it will be a big circus with lights and wheels and sounds. The town is holding it's breath and when the circus comes it will exhale, the doors will open, the streets will fill and the populace will flood as one to the circus.
When an event comes to town it becomes bigger than the event itself, it becomes the embodiment of carnival passed down in the town form generation to generation, a freewheeling and thrilling genetically programmed excitement, once the spirit of Carnival is loose, it's difficult to put back in the bottle. But for now, nothing, only the smothering mist.
When the circus comes to town all bets are off, some of the people stand and watch, amused, as though Rabelais himself had risen from the grave and was stood taking notes but most tear into the heart of the circus, girls and boys in packs eyeing each other up, the packs splintering and reforming seamlessly, most give up to the whirl and sound, waking with sore heads and the montage of grinning faces already a rapidly fading dream. The circus is coming to town.
But for now, nothing happens. Just mist and silences, the pubs lie quiet, in each street there is a muted square of light at the ground floor of each house, in the mist each street lamp is disused, a phosphor glow travelling on the backs of droplets n a halo around it. The effect is pronounced at the great lynching lights at the brow of the hill, the huge over-arcing lamps at the traffic lights where the arm extends right out over the road like an invitation to a public hanging.
And then the power fails, a circuit in a station has failed and now not even electricity is happening save every burglar alarm in town sensing trouble and launching into their apocalyptic, atonal squalks, in the high street the back-up power comes on and the restaurants are lit as though they were restaurants for ghosts, the shoe-shops shyly offer to sell emergency shoes. The hollering of the sirens summons a hundred business owners from their beds, cursing and stumbling in the dark, pulling on trousers, groping for keys, falling over the cat, and hustling out into the gloom to pull keys from pockets and start cars, marvel at electricity briefly and drive slowly and carefully into town. There are no traffic lights so each junction is a model of decorum and considerate driving as they edge around each other and finally reach their destinations. The noise is deafening, a modulated electrical pulse splitting their ears with it's screech as they stand there, trying groggily to remember their alarm codes, as the are about to turn off their alarms, as one, all across the town the power comes back on with immaculate comic timing and the alarms die.
Of those shopkeepers who came out tonight most go home to their wives "Mr Shopkeeper, is that you?" she cries fearfully "yes dear" he replies "I've been keeping Shop." Some, reasoning that it is not long until they open anyway, stay there and will spend the rest of the day serving customers with their pyjamas hidden by a tightly-fastened raincoat, and their be-slippered feet never shifting from behind the counter (for those shopkeepers who purvey general goods it will be a busy day, as the power-cut excites much buying of batteries, candles and tinned goods). One or two, being of a philosophical bent take a trip to the coast to sit and meditate upon the nature and practices of shop-keeping, dawn sees a string of them at half mile intervals, like stout watchmen in flannel bedclothes staring out to sea as if looking out for Viking raiders. Each thinking his lonely thoughts of a shop-keeper.

I am part of a long tradition. I am part of a nation of shop-keepers, we are legion.

I sometimes think Audrey wishes I was a fireman.

Soon it will be carnival, not now, but soon.

I wish the sun rose in the west, I would be younger and younger by the moment, my bones ache and my arse is wet but soon I will open the shop. Soon it will be time for commerce.

I am old. I am too old for her, she is clearly going to say no, damn these cliffs for being too small to jump off. I'd just get my feet wet and then everyone would say "look everybody, there's the man who tried to kill himself by jumping off a four foot cliff, what sort of an idiot is he?" I'm an old idiot, I'm too old for her.

What did he mean when he yelled "Sophist!" at me? Why did he do that? What does "sophist" mean anyway? I'll have to look it up. Stupid snotty kid.

Da da da da dummm, da da da da dummm diuddle duddle daaa duddle duddle daaa

All apart, but facing the morning together, in place, the shopkeeper-philosophers of the town. Dumpy gnomes of the early morning, waiting for the light to roll over their backs and out, on towards Ireland.
In the darkness of the power cut people confront fears, in the pitch darkness couples hold each other slightly tighter and whisper loving words to each other, those children who were awake when the world plunged into darkness edge their way along landings and into their parents bedrooms, to be lulled with the gentle sing-song words of their mothers and the strong arms of their fathers.
In one small mews cottage a man sits, smoking. He listens to a battery powered radio, when the lights go off he exhales luxuriously, leans back and listens to the late book, an actress' honeyed tones reading Dickens. After a while he smiles for a moment.
In an alley an intense man who has been following an astonishingly beautiful young woman for the last quarter of a mile since she left the club he first saw her in loses his quarry as the lights go out, he lunges forward, trips and falls, breaking his wrist in the process. His cries of pain attract the woman he was stalking, who uses her mobile phone to call for help, it arrives promptly and he is taken to hospital, where the nurses are sympathetic and helpful and not at all brisk and unfriendly and his feelings can only be guessed at.
In the morning the cut will be shown to have had some small effect on peoples lives, a knock-on of togetherness, it gives people something to talk about at bus-stops, in the smoky saloon-bars of the pubs, in the playground and staff-room alike.
It will emerge that it was a grid failure the like of which the county hasn't known since the early seventies, covering an area of over three hundred square miles with a population of approximately nine million people. Police will estimate three deaths caused by failure of traffic systems, and a handful more caused indirectly by emergency services being hampered. A local newspaper will make a hero of an ambulance driver who delivered a baby in a remote farmhouse located on the vast moss. Leader columns in national papers will wonder about the state of privatised utilities. A popular and handsome middle manager will be made the scapegoat, and only a few cynics will notice his regular beating of top brass at squash (he will move on to a better paid job in a different sector, so it all works out fine for him). Time will pass, and a footnote will be written and fictions will remain the only history of what happened. Nobody writes new nursery rhymes any more, so it won't pass into folklore, it'll just be something that happened once.