Freedom of Choice By Laila Murphy
Someone is fleecing the pharmacy blind. Your boss hasn’t noticed. She isn’t as smart as you imagined a pharmacist would be. When she does realise, she’ll collar you for it. After all – you have previous.
Ten boxes each of diazepam and temazepam, where yesterday there were twenty, the remaining boxes rearranged on the shelf to hide the gap. Bottles of cough mixture where there used to be kaolin and morphine. Vacant spaces filled by an unseen hand as soon as there’s a stock delivery. You know the street value of this gear. Addicts, crack users, depressed housewives – all in the market for it.
You can’t lose this job. You know what’s waiting for you if you do. The thought is enough to leech sweat out of every pore.
You never meant your life to turn out the way it did. Sure, you mucked about at school, bunked off lessons, smoked behind the bike sheds, all that. Hard to tell when truancy and petty misbehaviour slid into delinquency and violence. You thought you were a rebel; unique, edgy – until you landed in juvenile and everyone had the same story. You were a walking, talking cliché and it stung. But by then your path was laid out. What choice did you have but to lurch down it?
People would say neither of your colleagues looks the thieving type, but you know there is no type.
Victoria’s over-plucked eyebrows and cheaply dyed, scraped-back hair give her a permanently surprised look. She blinks too much, takes an age to reply, even when the question is a simple, ‘how’s it going?’ She doesn’t know who the Prime Minister is. Even you know and you’re not long out after serving two years inside.
‘So what?’ She riles. ‘It’s not like it’s important. They’re, like, all the same.’ You find to your amusement that she doesn’t know who Gary Lineker, Harry Kane or Wayne Rooney are either. ‘Didn’t he win X Factor last year?’ she asks, brow furrowed while you laugh long and hard.
Though she blushes and swats your arm away, she doesn’t bite on your leading questions. If she’s not the stupidest person you’ve ever met, she’s the smartest – a light-fingered master of disguise. You’d bet fifty quid on the former.
Victoria’s thick as cement but you grow to like her. She laughs at your jokes – when she eventually gets them. Hers is a snort that escalates into a donkey’s bray – dumbest laugh ever. One day you surprise yourself by asking her out for a drink. She hesitates, and then agrees.
With your instinct for concealment you recognise that she’s holding something back. But you have a date and so push your suspicions into that dark space you keep women’s screams, the taste of blood, and the sensation of fist crunching bone. You turn your attentions instead to Barry.
Barry has a comb-over, squinty eyes and doesn’t say much. He looks at you funny, you decide. You don’t like it when people look at you funny. You flex your fingers in that well-practiced way of yours, longing to squeeze them around Barry’s sweaty fat neck. Probably fancies Victoria himself and resents you getting it on with her. Barry often restocks the shelves before they need it. You’ve always dismissed him as a jobsworth. Perhaps there’s more to it.
So you watch. He doesn’t notice – or pretends not to. Under your gaze he grows twitchy, like prey that can sense but not see the predator closing in from the undergrowth. You thrill to his growing unease; you’ve got him cornered – he’s bound to slip up and then you’ll have him.
But Barry proves an elusive target. Drugs continue to subtly disappear without you seeing the hand that lifts them. Now you’re the one feeling edgy. Your boss can’t fail to catch on – it’s going to happen. The slow-eating contempt you feel for Barry mutates into full-blown loathing. You find yourself waking at night, brain firing, wondering how he’s managed to evade you. Your thoughts twist towards the men waiting to drag you into the shadows if your job falls through but you’re not going back – not ever.
At first you were just doing a mate a favour. Then helping those your mate answered to. Eventually you got paid. And that was it. You thought you’d found your tribe. But you were their slave. They owned you. It took a long time to figure that out and by then you were shackled, couldn’t have escaped if you tried.
When you were a jangly-limbed kid you wanted to be a footballer. Another cliché. Not that it mattered. Career options are limited when you have a record instead of GCSEs. You’re no good at anything anyway. Couldn’t spell, or make numbers add up so what was the point in trying?
Should you talk to the boss? No – you’re no snitch. Do you confront Barry; slam him up against a wall, breathe hotly into his face, tell him you’re on to him? Perhaps he’ll offer to cut you in, in exchange for your silence? It’s a tantalizing thought. High profit, low risk. But you vowed to yourself that you were going straight this time. Conflicting choices pinball around your head.
And then it happens, one evening, at the end of your shift. Waiting for the bus, you spot Victoria over the road. It’s her day off and he’s slouching by her side, arm dangled possessively around her shoulder. He kisses her. She kisses him back. Her boyfriend. The one she neglected to tell you about.
All the cancerous rage you feel, at Barry, at the judge who sent you down, at the copper who cuffed and shoved you into the back of the squad car, at the ‘mate’ who grassed you up, at the teachers who didn’t get you; your disappointment, resentment and self-pity, all of it, condenses into a broiling wrath, directed at the stupid girl with the pony tail and bad laugh who strung you along.
The next day, while the boss is out on her lunch break and Barry and Victoria serve customers, you slink into the empty back room behind the main counter, where the prescription medicines are kept. Victoria’s tatty coat and mock-leather handbag hang on a hook near the stairs. You make sure you are unobserved as you slip boxes of painkillers inside it, planning to tip your boss off later.
You picture the ‘o’ of Victoria’s open-mouthed surprise, her gormless incomprehension as she’s taken in for questioning, her hot, fat tears, leaving mascara track marks down her cheeks.
A long, slow hour passes and you slope back into the stuffy little room and return the boxes unseen, prickling with something that might be remorse.
But you were not unseen.
At the end of the day, when the others shut up shop and leave, the boss calls you into the back and you just know.
She shows you video footage on an old mobile phone. It’s been rigged with an app to record whenever movement is detected. Hidden on a shelf out of reach, it’s more discrete than CCTV, which you had clocked was missing.
‘It was one time,’ you swear, sweat pumping out of your pores. ‘This isn’t my fault. It’s Barry who’s robbing you. Check,’ you gesture at the mobile, your slip-shod code of honour evaporating.
‘Barry!’ She laughs, like you told a joke, her teeth unnaturally white. ‘Don’t apologise,’ she says, though you haven’t. ‘This is a good thing. I need something done and from now on, you’re going to do it for me.’ She’s all business as she pushes a paper bag into your clammy hands. ‘Get the number twenty bus. I’ll text you the drop off point. Once they’ve collected, delete the message. Try not to be seen.’ The bag is filled with boxes like the ones you tried to plant on Victoria.
For a surreal moment you become detached from this scenario and watch it unfold like a cut-price, daytime TV drama. Then the bag feels suddenly solid, weighty in your hand and you panic.
‘No.’
‘Yes,’ she replies simply, with her prim teeth and neat blouse and you are terrified of her. ‘Don’t worry. You can keep your job here and do this on the side. What do you say?’ she asks, as though you have a choice; doesn’t bother to keep the laugh out of her voice.
You could refuse and walk out of the door. Jump on a bus and move somewhere new; another concrete wasteland where no one knows your name; another bedsit, another dead-end job, scraping your wages together with your benefits cheque, a coin-toss between another can of no-frills lager or topping up the electricity meter. The inevitable darkness.
Another set-up unspools in your mind. This one involves a call to the boys in blue, their disbelief at your version of events, perhaps another stint at her Majesty’s pleasure. Another mark against your name, no one prepared to take you on, your only choice to go back to what you used to do. A life in the shadows.
She explains your new role in detail, using short words, punctuated with nods, eyes wide, as though you’re stupid. You could tighten your fingers around her throat but all the rage has been lanced out of you.
There’s only one choice. Go along with this and make the best of it. Keep her sweet. Screw her over the first chance you get.
Your boss laughs, eyes glittering and dismisses you with a wave of her hand. She’s your master now.
Judges Comments
The atmosphere in Laila Murphy's ironically-titled Freedom of Choice, the runner up in our Crime Short Story Competition, is so claustrophobic and infused with resentment that it amply demonstrates the way a life of crime can trap its perpetrators as well as its victims.
The focus in this story is a relatively petty crime – the theft of prescription medicines from a pharmacy. The narrator, trapped in their small world, is petty too: their observations are mean; the focus is on small, telling details. But small, petty things have great weight in this well-told story: the reverberations of a minor mistake in judgement are shown to be vast and all-encompassing. In its focus on detail and skill with misdirection, Freedom of Choice is very well crafted: we look where Laila directs us to look; see what Laila wants us to see. As the narrator's suspicions fall on their co-workers and they allow personal feelings to influence their judgement, the close narrative and convincing voice allow readers the experience of that particular perspective. It's not a particulalry pleasant experience but it makes for a very compelling read.
Laila has evidently created a whole world for her narrator and place her story very believably within it – there's a great deal of insight, and the details she uses are chosen because they deliver a particular impact. The way the narrator's present circumstances mirror the ones that originally involved them in a life of crime has been carefully woven in. In the unpleasant world of this story, the narrator is caught up: in a life of petty crime, in their own boiling stew of resentment, and in repeating patterns at the bottom of the criminal food chain – in this world, success depends on accurate judgement, and without it, you're never more than a foot soldier, at the beck and call of someone more observant, more clever, and more ruthless.