Supermarket

There was a woman standing in an aisle of a supermarket who could not talk to her son. She could see in the tight corner of his mouth and the way he shut doors with a force that something was happening, or had already happened. It was the constant indecision that kept her awake at night, caught between wanting to say something and not wanting to make it worse. She had seen a documentary about men in Japan who decide to never leave their rooms. She felt as if it was only a matter of time. They were playing a losing game. 

She could not decide between the avocados, with their dark green skin encasing their hard flesh, piled into crates and marked with stickers. As she held two in her hands, giving each a light squeeze, she realised they all felt the same. 

It might be nice, she thought, to never leave her house again. She dropped them both into the cart. With her hands on the handlebar of her shopping trolley and the fluorescent lights giving her a headache, isolation seemed an attractive idea. She remembered a recent dream where she had walked into the ocean. Fragments of her unconsciousness, a white nightdress, the starless sky, and the dark waves lapping at her feet. She had been welcomed by the water, the sound of a whale breaking the surface.  

Steering towards the check out, she pushed on. 

The teenage girl behind the check-out till had green hair. The two of them exchanged tense smiles and the woman looked away, wondering if the girl’s mother had been put through hell. If that was what motherhood meant. 

The check-out girl hoped the streaks in her hair looked intentional and not the chemical disaster that turned her to tears the night before. There was something unsettling about the smell of bleach in a dark house after midnight, the sounds of pubgoers pouring through the cracks in the windows as a chill settles over the air. 

That morning, after dressing her little brother for school in the half dark of winter, she had put on enough eyeliner to avoid conversations with as many customers as possible. She had lied about her age to get the job. It was her third hour of sitting in that chair, her back to a man in a matching polo shirt. Her sanity was a tenuous thing, breathing through her nose and consciously unclenching her jaw. 

Almost done, the girl bit her lip as she passed the plastic packages over the scanner. She’d been getting faster, no longer awkward and stumbling. 

There was a young boy around the corner listening to the check-out lines. He was blond and wearing shorts despite the frost. He thought the beep beep beep of the scanning sounded like robots, especially when he passed by them at high speeds. There was a smattering of shoppers on one side of the tills, standing in queues with heavy metal baskets. The other side was empty space with large windows, a runway just for him. 

The boy slipped his thin body through the gaps in the crowd and into open space. He ran, focusing on the lines of his arms and legs, just the way his father taught him. Then he crashed into something.

A warm, aged hand reaching out to hold him back as he was about to faceplant into something red and padded. Then, he was yanked back by a tug on his ear, his mother’s fingers pinching his pink skin. He caught a look at the man as his mother dragged him away, a kind dark face looking down at him from above the round belly he had almost struck. A woman with white hair appeared over the man’s shoulder with a disapproving glare. There was something conspiratorial in the look the boy and the man shared, as if their lives had been improved by a bit of mischief. 

Looking up at the man, who he had decided was Santa Claus on his time off, the boy almost missed the moment his twenty pence piece slipped from his hand and rattled onto the speckled white floor. The clattering of the coin settling on the ground was masked by the howl of the boy, whose dreams of handfuls of jelly beans had slipped through his grasp as his mother tugged him away, her sharp hand wrapped firm around his elbow.

It was a tarnished coin, though it had been shining silver once before, catching a glint of the sun in the village market. It clacked against pennies and pounds with glee as cupped hands passed it over to farmers who rubbed the coin’s face with dirt-stained fingers. The portrait of the Queen was long-necked and smudged by time. 

The coin had been in circulation for twenty-seven years, passing between tills, purses, and tins, never resting in one place too long. It’s design was out of fashion, the newer models gaining more abstractions and marking the passage of time through mass produced wrinkles lining its regal face. It spent dark nights in piggy banks and at the bottom of jacket pockets before being scrounged from a mother’s purse where it had been wedged between the folds of fabric, taken in by the greedy hands of a boy who had clutched the coin as tight as he could.

If anyone bothered to look down they would have seen the distinct side profile. Instead, a girl with dark hair and ripped jeans stepped on the face of the Queen.

The girl, just out of her teens, had not noticed the coin, mind occupied by the music blasting in her headphones. She was heading back to her day-drinking flatmates. When leaving the flat she had heard a purple-haired boy in his twenties shouting in a language none of them spoke. 

As she left the supermarket, cartons of milk in hand, she passed by an older woman pushing a shopping cart towards a small car. Their eyes met before the woman frowned and looked away.

Uptight, the girl thought, she had done nothing wrong. She passed back over the bridge and out of the car park with the thought of the pasta bake her almost-girlfriend was preparing. She smiled to herself at the memory of shy kisses at the back of an underwhelming house party, tasting of liquor and salt.

The older woman, shuttering herself away in her car, lets out a deep breath at the thought of returning home. Her son would get better, he had to. All she has is hope and groceries. The road is thick with traffic as she pulls away from the supermarket, bags sliding in the back of the car.