At your leisure, short story number 6.
Thank you and best wishes,
Philip
Necessities
Was it a dull life? She rarely asked herself that question and even when she did she wasn’t sure if she could answer it. Mrs. Johnson was fifty seven. She’d been a widow for more that eleven years – it could just as easily have been five or seven. Time was no enemy to her. She never looked longingly to the past and the future was simply a non - threatening blank. She had a cat of whom she was fond and she lived on the 3rd floor of a bland but comfortable block of 1970s flats. Nothing particularly perturbed her. She was on friendly terms with her neighbours, paid bills on time, was punctual for appointments and never returned her library books late. She occasionally went away by herself to a quiet hotel on the coast, Bengy and her modest pot plants being fed and watered by a friend. Despite these domestic assurances, she was never entirely comfortable and felt a heave of contentment as soon as her train returned home to Oakhampton.
Saturday was market day and when it wasn’t raining she was glad enough to push her shopping trolley around the familiar stalls. True, the fruit and vegetables were not in convenient packs or plastic bags but her inherent instinct for economy would never have allowed her to forego this weekend ritual; however, the supermarket was another story. There were no restrictions as to which day she went and she never imposed any. It was just five minutes from the flat and from her living room window she could see its red neon sign, a beacon of comfort and security, which blazed assuredly night and day. There was always some little thing to be bought. She had become expert at convincing herself of the utter indispensability of any stray item that came into her head. It wasn’t unknown for her to actually go in with no pending item at all but with the certainty that the temporarily unremembered necessity would announce itself forthwith, and it always did. There was a glow about the place; a cheery welcoming plethora of all that reinforced her feelings of well being. The music was never too loud and the songs were neither too modern nor vastly out of date. The wheels of the trolleys were smooth, the floor was smooth and the aisles were wide and welcoming. She knew every shelf and every corner and prided herself on remembering the cashier’s names without having to look at their identity tags.
There weren’t just items to be bought, there were friends, old familiar friends, loyal to the nth degree. She knew their colours, their shapes, even their smells. They sat in her trolley and spoke assuredly to her, ‘We are with you, we will always be – you are quite safe with us’.
There was only one thing guaranteed to unsettle Mrs. Johnson’s sea of calm and that was when, just to peeve her personally, the manager took the unthinkable decision of transferring a perfectly well placed sector of the supermarket to a totally foreign location. It vexed her and she would return home, not before having had a good few words with the erring manager, with the feeling that an intruder had broken into her home and deliberately rearranged all her furniture – it was so upsetting.
One fine Thursday afternoon, a notion to clean the silver came over her. There was more than enough silver polish to complete the job but she couldn’t possibly run the risk of letting stocks run low. She ran her entire home on the same lines – like a tip-top supermarket itself, only in miniature. Immediately, she reached for her pale blue woollen scarf, picked up her handbag from the hall table and lightly stepped out for her daily spiritual sustenance. Not the most fervent church goer could have rivalled her for loyalty and dedication.
As she crossed the road something disturbing caught her eye – the stalwart neon light, the herald to the faithful, was blinking erratically. She would have to speak to the manager at once, it was unheard of. And was it a trick of the light or had the ‘m’ from ‘market’ dropped slightly to the right? There was no time to lose and, quickening her step, she almost threw herself through the plate glass doors, determined to remedy this careless oversight at once.
Her path was almost blocked by a barricade of shopping trolleys – all huddled together any old how instead of in nice neat lines and she was obliged to squeeze through the end one and a pillar, and then she stopped short. The first aisle was littered with pyramids of packages piled high in all directions. She glanced nervously to left and right and almost felt her heart in her throat. Stretching along the shelves and into eternity were dozens of white objects, some square, some rectangle. She craned her neck slightly and found herself reading in plain black lettering ‘sugar’. A long marching column of square white boxes all exactly the same. The boxes swam into other boxes and she read ‘coffee’ and then ‘tea’. All white, all a monotonous uniform white. Her eyes were beginning to glaze over. She looked bewildered up and down the row.
And now she began to notice there were other shapes: bottles; tins of different sizes but all of them, every single one of them dead white. One said ‘oil’, another ‘fish’. Her knees were trembling and she reached out to steady herself.
‘Everything all right, Mrs. Johnson?’ – It was the manager himself but he was different. His tie had gone and he was wearing a white t-shirt with big black letters on it that read ‘Back to basics’. She mouthed the words falteringly and slowly looked back into his face.
‘That’s right, Mrs. Johnson. Back to basics. We sell food here now, not ideas. You’ll have to bear with us for a while until we’re sorted. Feel free to look around – and now you must excuse me, I have a hundred things to attend to. Good bye, Mrs. Johnson’.
She had never felt so lonely in her life. A woman accidentally nudged her back with a trolley that jogged her forwards. She stumbled like an abandoned child to the end of the aisle. There was a horrible noise in her ears and a ritualistic beat – almost tribal. The voices were laughing at her, taunting her. Something they called ‘rap’, was it? She wanted to get away but there were people behind her and she had to go on – on into that world of white.
‘Oh my friends, why have you forsaken me? Through a doorway with thick strips of transparent plastic, somebody was stuffing something into black sacks. She just had time to see a rich brown, red capped jar, smooth and comforting with ‘Bovril’ written boldly across it being thrust into oblivion; and wasn’t that a noble green and silver tin of golden syrup disappearing into the black void? No, it was too horrible. No act of barbarity could have more agitated this woman’s heart. They were massacring her closest companions right in front of her and there was nothing she could do about it.
‘Bumper introductory bargains this way’ a harsh confident voice growled over the intercom and she found herself being jettisoned forward like a piece of driftwood at the mercy of the tide, carried by a great wave of animated and excited shoppers anxious to buy the basics at sensible prices. Perhaps she should have been grateful for she was suddenly standing by the exit and, inhaling deeply, pushed herself forwards out into the open.
One unsteady step after another and she was at her own front door. It opened heavily. She took off her scarf and placed her bag on the table and, with trembling hands drew the living room curtains. There was comfort in the dark room. She steadily lowered herself into her armchair and sat perfectly, perfectly still.
It’s been six months since the supermarket initiated its new policy. You very rarely find Mrs. Johnson on the premises: in fact, it’s very hard to get hold of Mrs. Johnson at all, what with painting classes, Italian lessons, bridge parties. Nowadays, she’s pretty much game for anything – that is, when you can drag her away from her allotment.
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