Sometime in the first year of the new millennium, A&R Perth decided to expand. Business was booming; there were a slew of new female crime authors and the book wars between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were money in the bank. Katherine was happy, but stressed. She was moving up the ranks to start taking on higher management duties, and one of her first tasks had been finding a new store. Most of Perth’s shopping streets are repurposed commercial offices from the Gold Boom of the 1890s, which meant that the ground floors are shiny glass and tile but the act of walking up the stairs transported you back by about a century. There was some vague talk about buying the abandoned movie theater next to A&R and expanding into it, but I’m fairly certain the rest of the building was littered with typewriters and tickertape stock machines from the early the 1900s. Eventually all the managers, lifers and casuals were herded onto the shop floor to hear from the Regional Manager, a towering Irishman named Johnny.
“The decision’s been made: we’re moving,” announced John, clapping his hands to emphasise the point as his thick Irish brougue rolled over the assembled staff. “The shoe shop over in Murray Street has just become available. The lease has been signed and we’ll be closing this weekend to start moving the stock over.”
There were a lot of groans from the lifers who were hoping to have a weekend to themselves, but the casuals were paid by the hour.
“Nice,” whispered Dan next to me. “Double time Sunday.”
“Which we’ll spend lugging boxes and shelves across the street,” I shrugged.
The A&R casual team had undergone a few changes by this point. Paul had left at the start of the year to focus on his studies; the last time I saw him was on TV as part of a pack of lawyers rushing down the steps of the Perth Courts, talking animatedly on his phone as the journalists tried to snag an interview with firm’s client. Denise was still with us. Besides being good at her job, she got along so naturally with all the managers that I doubt they would have had the heart to fire her. The last to go was Tanya, who knew the new store would have security cameras and had decided to move back to the Eastern States (note for US and British readers; as Western Australia is separated from the rest of the country by a massive inland desert, “the Eastern States” generally means Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales, but can also mean anything outside of the WA state boundary).
True to form, Tanya said her goodbyes with her head held high and that same cocky, take-no-bullshit attitude as she swaggered out of the staffroom.
“Catch you round Chris, it was fun working with you,” she said. “Just need you to do one thing for me.”
“What’s that?” I asked solemnly.
“Learn to loosen up. Hell, if I stuck a pencil up your arse it’d turn into a diamond.”
By the time I could furiously think of a comeback she’d already cheerily said her goodbyes and waltzed out of the store.
A&R had however taken on a slew of new casuals for the expansion. The first was Elaine, an eighteen year old uni student. Elaine was gorgeous – bronze skin, wavy brown hair with delicate, soft look of a model, and I later found she did, in fact, do stock photo modelling on the side for extra money. However this was something of a drawback for the young physics and engineering student, as the male customers assumed that the fashionable, popular young woman was something of an airhead. To be fair, watching Elaine switch effortlessly from the latest Cosmo article on “Sex in the City” to a textbook on calculating structural stresses in architectural design threw me for a second too.
The other new starter was Daniel, or Dan for short, a stocky, muscular guy who looked like he started shaving at 13 and was a breakdancing/mixed martial arts enthusiast. The one time we asked him to demonstrate some moves he picked up a red felt tip marker and took a step toward me: the moment I blinked (and to this day, I swear it was only the length of a blink), his hand moved in a blur and I found myself with three long red “cuts” across my chest. The casuals watching were amazed, although it made serving customers that afternoon a little awkward. While some men in Dan’s position can turn into bullying meatheads, the solid figure was the complete opposite: his strength and capabilities gave him the confidence to approach every situation with a breezy, fun attitude – although when Dan and I started feeding off each other’s mood, things sometimes went a bit far.
Sure enough, that weekend A&R shuttered its doors on Hay Street and moved one block over to Murray Street. The company hired a moving truck for the books but the casuals were given the job of ferrying across various odds and ends. Some of these items were purely utilitarian, some, such as the giant A&R penguin, were well-loved (that’s a story for another day). One item however was pretty much despised by every member of staff.
The children’s music player.
You see, back in the old A&R store, the children’s section had a wooden stand with a series of big red buttons that, when pressed, played a variety of music samples. Some where nursery rhymes, others were those godawful Australiana songs like “Tie me kangaroo down, Sport,” and a few were instrumental only. The point of the display is that it would direct shoppers to ask to buy one of the music CDs kept behind the counter, although I don’t remember selling a single one. Of course, none of that mattered to the children hanging around in the store, and their natural instinct was to push the first big red button in the row. The moment they did, the music would start up, sung by American woman in cloyingly sweet tones:
I love my milk,
I have it with my breakfast, that’s when I like it best – my milk,
It’s poured out by my Mommy, with cheese and macaroni…
The electronic keyboard would would then trail off, and then the bloody kids would press the button again.
And again.
And again.
After working in the store for more than a year, the constant jingle of that goddamn milk song had become a constant background noise. I think however designed the A&R layout back in the day had already foreseen the problems the music player would cause, and the machine was kept near the back of the store. However considering that the point of the machine was to sell CDs, it still faced enticingly towards the main aisle, and was inevitably spotted by every brat that walked into the store. Occasionally we would get a brief respite when one of the staff members would unplug the damn thing “to vacuum around it” and “forget” to plug the player back in. However Katherine, die-hard professional that she was, would always switch the machine back on.
“Come on Scruffy, you’ve gotta learn to love the music!” she whooped, her purple streak of hair bobbing as she danced around next to the music player.
“This. Is. Not. Music.” I grated, standing in sullen attentiveness on the other side of the aisle. “It’s just the same few lines, over and over again.”
So it came to pass that Dan and I were mindlessly ferrying random odds and ends down the alleyway between Hay Street and Murray Street, doing all those stupid things that young men do like bragging about what we would have been doing that weekend, and seeing who can lift the heaviest boxes when we thought the girls were watching. Once we were back to the old store for a fresh load, we were stopped by one of the new store managers, Kimberly.
“Hurry up, you two,” she snapped. “I need you back as quickly as possible, do y’understand?”
“Yep, we got it, no worries,” we mumbled. Normally we would never answer the person who could have us fired in such a blasé manner, but we’d already entered into the arrogant young male headspace and neither of us wanted to look like a kiss-ass.
Besides this, none of the casuals liked Kimberly much. She was a short, mean-spirited woman with frizzy blonde hair and overly large horn rim glasses who resented the costs of casual staff. On quiet days, she was prone to gathering up all the casual employees and simply sending them home mid-shift, and there periods where casuals might go weeks without any hours when Katherine wasn’t in the store. Her love of aggressive sales techniques meant that staff were expected to hound customers to buy more than their intended purchase, and we later found that the store lost money as a result.
In hindsight, all of these actions were pretty reasonable for a manager under the pump to perform, but this meant little to a pair of teen boys who were a bit excitable and full of themselves.
“Alright, next up I want you to take the music sampler from the children’s section across. Hop to it this time, I want you two to be pulling your weight.”
“Do we really need this in the new store?” I asked innocently, but my words withered into silence under Kimberly’s baleful gaze.
After a certain amount of mumbling under our breath, Dan and I picked up the wooden machine and started ferrying it across. The music player wasn’t particularly heavy, but it was awkwardly shaped with little in the way of handholds. As we shuffled along, Dan and I had our own running commentary on the usefulness of the device between us.
“Tell you what, we could hook it up to the security system,” I said, trying to look over my shoulder as I walked backwards down the alleyway. “Just think – the moment someone breaks into the store, they’ll be so disgusted by the alarm that they’ll hand themselves over to the cops.”
“Nah mate, that’s just too cruel,” replied Dan cheerily. “It’d be banned under the Geneva Convention. Perhaps we can just it out the front of the store at night and hope someone knicks it.”
“Perhaps this player will have an accident.”
“What, we could tie weights to the bottom and throw it in the river?”
“Perhaps it’s just feeling depressed. Keep it away from tall buildings, it looks like it could be a jumper.”
“Oh, I think one is feeling very depressed. Might just slip out of our hands.”
“Just might, you never know.”
Crunch.
“Oh shit! I thought you had it!”
“I thought you had it! Don’t blame me!”
“Oh crap, what are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know – let me think.”
Knowing that Kimberly would be watching the clock for our return, Dan and I walked the stricken music player over to the loading docks behind the new store and cautiously poked our heads around the corner. Thankfully, the other staff was inside unpacking boxes, so we quietly leaned the music player up against a wall behind a pile of odds and ends where hopefully no one would notice it. Our bravado had escaped us entirety and we returned to work with barely a word.
A few weeks later were all working in the new Murray Street store; I was behind the cash register and both Dan and Elaine were standing nearby waiting on customers. It was all business as usual until Katherine walked past to check on us.
“Busy day today, Scruffy,” she said thoughtfully. “By the way, I checked the old children’s music player and I couldn’t get it to start. I wonder why?”
I froze in mid-smile, and Dan broke off from dramatically re-enacting his last breakdance battle for Elaine.
“I guess it must have gotten old, or perhaps reacted badly to being left out in the moisture overnight,” I replied slowly, keeping my face and voice carefully neutral. “Who knows? It could have been anything.”
“Who knows indeed?,” repeated Dan in hollow tones. “It’s a mystery.”
Katherine shrugged and went back to her work, but flashed Dan and I a certain smile that meant one thing.
She knew.
A&R never did get another music player, by this point they’d realised no one goes to a bookstore to buy music CDs. The new store could afford a decent sound system so Dan and I would work to daggy hits of the 70s played on MIDI keyboards (Katherine again), the bad “interpretations” circumventing copyright laws. However, possibly as kind of karma for my stupidity, the songs of the children’s music sampler have never left me.
Almost twenty years later, I can still hear those nasally, saccharine tones. They plague me, even while writing this.
There may come a time, far in the future, when my sanity utterly collapses – although considering I have three kids that might not be so far off.
But when I do lose my mind I’m certain there’ll be one thing left, a tinny little tune echoing through the remains of thought and memory.
I love my milk.
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