Free The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith

with torches of burning peat stuck in them for light, and there were huge vats of whisky and beer and it was all free, and they had a great time carousing all night with the young and happy well-dressed strangers clinking their mugs and glasses, and were pretty pleased with themselves for finding a new pub and making such grand new friends until all at once without any warning the great turf door flung itself open again and the hill flung them out, sober, into the light of morning, and since it was a Sunday they made their way into town to go to church. But the town was changed, it was new, things were unrecognizable, and it was when they got to the church, as they walked together up the aisle past the pews packed with strangers, good townspeople who had been in their beds asleep all night, that the two men crumbled away from the head down till nothing was left of them but two smoking piles of ash on the stone floor of the church, and that’ll teach them not to drink on a Saturday night so close to a Sunday and especially not in a cemetery.
    Now in the twenty-first century, under the shifting summer leaves of the perennials in the cemetery of this presbyterian town, the Victorian and Edwardian angels have been pockmarked with pellet dents. Some have wings snapped in half or broken right off; bits of stone wing litter the grass. There are spent cartridges by the decorous peeping naked toes of one, more cartridges in the grass by the stone plinth on which another sits, a chalice in her hands and her nose shot away. The occasional angel has been hit right in the eye or in the middle of the forehead.
    Lucky for the company that it was Kimberley McKinlay who was the duty manager on the night shift tonight when they came into the place wearing the hats over their faces with the eyeholes cut in them. It has all been recorded on the closed-circuit; the one at the front has the shears, the one in the middle has the saw, the one behind him has the leafblower kind of thing with the flex and the plug, you can see it trailing, and even more clearly you can see it jerking about in the air later when he waves the stick part of it at Rod who’s on security tonight, though God knows what else he thought he was going to be doing with it, a leafblower for God’s sake. But it is definitely threatening behaviour, especially the one with the shears, who came right up to the counter and jumped over it and threatened Michael Cardie who was on customer serving and pinned him to the wall, the blades open at his neck like a pair of scissors.
    Would you like fries with that? is what Michael Cardie actually said to him, probably out of nerves, when he was pinned to the wall. Michael Cardie was pale and shaking afterwards. Kimberley sent him home early. She thinks he will be going up to the hospital getting treatment for shock for weeks to come after tonight. Kimberley herself will maybe get a medal. An OBE. ABCG. ABBC Digital. But no, because one day she really will be on the lists at New Year for her services to mankind, maybe when she’s sixty, with her picture in the Highland News and everybody knowing because it will tell them in the paper how years ago, before she was the person she is going to become in her life, when she worked as the duty manager at the burger place at Tesco Village, there was absolutely no spitting allowed on the platelets of the flamegriller when it was her shift, absolutely none of that wanking into the mayonnaise bucket, and if it had been useless Kenny Paton who was on tonight it would all’ve been a different story, and apart from that, apart from tonight, honestly you really don’t want to be eating anything from there the nights he’s manager and all those boys sitting around on night shift bored out of their heads because Kenny Paton thinks the world owes him a living and never gets anyone to do anything properly.
    In fact Kimberley McKinlay makes a point of dumping the old mayonnaise bucket no matter who’s been