by Deborah Levy
Chapter 12
‘Good afternoon, all newcomers to FreezerWorld. Take your time. Explore our world at your own pace. Here are some suggestions to help you find your way around. All dairy products are on Aisle Three. Right next to our very own bakery. Aisle Three, bake-eree. Say that little rhyme to yourself and next time you’ll remember it. Now I have an announcement from one of our FreezerWorld staff. I have just been handed a slip of paper and I’m trying to read the writing … yes, here goes. “Who ever stole my Walkman from my locker? I know who you are, signed Mister X. Chicken winglet shift.” See folks, we hide nothing from you here. There are no secrets in FreezerWorld because FreezerWorld is also God’s world.’
Girl walks to the aisle that sells Ethnic Foods (Eccles and oatcakes) so she can get a better look at Louise. There’s a long queue by her Express till. Shoppers with baskets, not trolleys. Louise is floating products over the computer with her limp white hands. Bleep. Bleep bleep. Louise is lost in the land of bleep. Louise is bleep. Louise is Domestos and frozen lamb cutlets and frozen onion rings. Her hands and hair are Angel Delight and Cup-a-Soup. She takes money and starts all over again. Retard rage. Girl feels Louise’s heat whack into her cheeks. It’s twenty to four.
A challenge for the FreezerWorld community. How do you get the new plant of the month home in the family car? A yucca. A big fucking yucca. A whole forest of them out in the car park. Spilt earth everywhere. A customer crushing the leaves of her plant in her rush to get to Express before the man with the heaped basket of nothing but taco shells and jars of salsa sauce.
Girl does not dare to catch Louise’s eye yet. Better to come back at five to four and begin the long walk towards the toy section. Killing time. The toy section is of particular interest on account of her being called Girl right up to her seventeenth year. Girl dolls with the bodies of young women.
All the girl princesses. Standing proud in the FreezerWorld toy section.
White girl princesses, of course, they always are – froth of see-thru gauze and little gold shoes. Boxes of white plastic girls. The special FreezerWorld brand of princess, like the special FreezerWorld brand of pork rashers. Princess of the Frozen World, sneering at Girl with their tiny lips, lips for snowflakes and rice grains … little mouth always open in an O, ooooo, standing in her golden shoes inside her box, right next to the crisp shelves.
Snax. Smilers, squares, twirls, rings, salt ’n’ shake, munchies. Girl is exploding into crisp packets and they are exploding into her. Cheese-and-onion-flavoured shards needling into Girl flesh, double crunch, sour cream with chives, dying into the scampi fries, freaked out by the new-flavour Stilton-wedge crinkle chips.
The princesses with their big hair. Luned-out stare. Blue-eyed devils. Tiny lips, oooooo lips.
Whath yr name?
Girl.
Girl? Thath a funny name. Heee heeee.
Squeethe me and I say, Go away, Girl frm Hell. Polluting me with yr hideouth soul. You’re a sicko if I evr saw one.
Girl strokes the doll-princess hair through cellophane. The princess in her lovely garden, painted on the box. Doves and butterflies and old-fashioned roses.
Go play in the other section. You don’t belong here.
You donth belog here.
Where is it I don’t belong? What kingdom am I banished from? I want to touch the doves and I want to press rose petals in my diary.
Go away. Go find anuuther toy. The one with the lickle horns and fork with pwongs. The one with the warths and the bwig nose. The one with the fwangs and pointy eerths.
Girl says, Listen, cocksucker. Don’t do your segregation thing on me. I am you. I am a Girl princess and one day I will have a kingdom too. I will be in love and ride in taxis, kissing my prince. We’ll stop at restaurants that look like they’re going to give us a good time. The waiters will muzz around me in my blue minidress with the see-thru heart. My prince will have eyes only for me. I will be full of enchantment. Enchantment twinkles inside me, unlike you, squeaker. You are dead. Someone made you dead. That’s why you have to be squeeeeezed. Don’t talk of your own free will cos you’re dead. Someone deaded you. In princess factory. You talk other people’s words. Talk white trash. Talk white bread. Talk margarine. Talk pinkie-ring talk.
Princess changes her tune: Let’s be friends, Girl. I love you. I’m only a virus anyway. Squeezed into Girl bloodstream for ever. I’m contagious matter transmitting princess infection into Girl. A corruption. A pathogenic agent. A combination of chemicals increasing rapidly inside living cells. Girl cells. Got no vitamins inside me: vita meaning life. Do something, don’t just stand there staring at the snacks.
Snax. Girl is fainting into the crisp shelves again. Chilli garlic. Salsa with mesquite, four cheeses, tomato and basil. Dhansak puri fading into chilli and lime tortilla, T-bone-steak-flavour crinkle something, pastrami bagel aaaaaaaar pain something forging its way into Girl body. Pain something opening its eyes and mouth. Tingling terrible something, invisible, insidious, making its entrance in the superstore light. Aaaaaaaaaaar. Citizen Pain. Astronaut Pain standing on the moon, pain walking because there is Mom. If it isn’t the princess, it’s Mom.
Drunk. Head bowed over the frozen sweetcorn. Aisle Three. Mom’s fate is girl’s fate. Mom is girl’s internal crucifix. There she is. Mom lives in FreezerWorld. Citizen Frozen. FreezerWorld is the only world that will have her. Concentrate on the potato snacks. Snax. Tomato and sweet pepper four cheeses treat prawn cracker salt ’n’ vinegar. That is Mom with her kind, bleary eyes and worst worst worst of all, Mom is holding the little pink shoe in her hand, the left little shoe, one of a pair, Girl having nailed the right shoe to a piece of wood to keep for ever. Move to the juice.
Move to juice quick. Where is Billy? Juice. Look at the cartons and give whole Girl self to them: Five Alive, five fruit burst, apricot and guava, mango and passion fruit, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaar, orange ’n’ passion fruit, cranberry with vit C, raspberry ’n’ apple, strawberry crush. Mom ’n’ Girl.
Five to four.
Louise looks cute in her overalls, her blond hair tied back, hands scrubbed. The Express till is the most popular queue in FreezerWorld. Customers are only supposed to have six items in their baskets. Basket people are rebels and refuseniks. Cheats. They load up as much stuff as they can and Louise doesn’t care. She just takes their cash and hardly ever looks up. Girl walks right up to the till.
‘Tea break.’
Louise nods, head still bent, but her blue eyes flicker for one second towards Girl’s hair. The roots are coming through the blond.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’ll just finish this lot. Funny sort of Express this is.’
A basket person is packing five frozen ducks and twenty boxes of frozen garlic bread into FreezerWorld bags.
Louise says, ‘You press this button here to open the till, and this one to close it. Cash only.’
‘Right.’ Girl makes faraway eyes like the information is not important.
Louise is persistent. ‘Don’t take cheques or cards. They sometimes try to trick you –’ she points to the queue – ‘they pretend they haven’t seen the Cash Only sign. Some of them load up three baskets and still come to Express. They’re cunning. Do anything not to queue with the trolleys.’
‘Cash only,’ Girl says with feeling.
‘’Nother thing.’ Louise stands up and moves out of the way for Girl. ‘Sometimes the till’s stiff. Won’t open. You have to call Mr Tens.’
‘Right-o.’
Louise takes a lipstick out of her overall pocket, squints while she smears it on her lips, glances at her watch and walks off.
Girl reaches for whatever is nearest her hand. A packet of chocolate-chip cookies. Bleep. Seven more packets of chocolate-chip cookies. Five tins of meatballs in tomato and basil sauce. Jeeezuz. How do they cram them into the baskets? Girl wants them to shove the whole of FreezerWorld into their baskets. Two bags of nappies. One large tin of powdered milk formula. Three bleeps. One tiny weeny tin of spa
ghetti rings. Two jars of rollmop herrings. The herrings won’t bleep. Nothing happening. No red light, no green light.
Complete fucking silence. It’s like there’s been a nuclear accident and there’s a horrible calm in FreezerWorld. A rustle in the undergrowth and then silence again. A big sad sky. A bottle of 4711 Cologne lying in perfect condition in the ash. A mangy teddy bear with one shattered glass eye sitting on a pile of corpses. The world has come to a standstill. The end of FreezerWorld, Girl can’t bear it when the silver herrings tremble as she floats the glass over the bleep border. Nothing. The fish hasn’t got what it takes to get through. Girl tries again.
The customer has an anxious expression on her face. Girl hates that look. She hates it particularly because her first customer is one of her Mom-check specimens. The one with gonk slippers and tissues. The Mom with the Polish husband. Herrings for her husband. Jeezus. What bad luck! Can’t get away from them. FreezerWorld is probably crowded with mother material. Didn’t she just see her real mom on Aisle Three? Girl punches numbers into the till like she went to supermarket school at five years old. She lets the herrings go. Get that woman out of her sight. Go. Back to Poland with your husband and die in a tram crash.
Girl tells herself: If something doesn’t bleep, let it go. Thing is, she wants the money. It’s like she’s management. If it doesn’t bleep, ring it up, punch numbers in, any numbers. Get cash. A basket person waits with basket fear in his heart. Two bags of frozen prawns. Two bags of steak chips. Two trays of pork rashers. Two tubs of peanut-cluster ice cream. Two pots of noodles. Two potatoes. Whaaat? Two potatoes? Why is everything in twos?
Aaaaaaaaaaar. It’s a soft sound. Aaaaaaar. The breath trickles out of her lips. Pain inside Girl. Crackling inside her Girl form. The shoes. The little pink shoes. They come in pairs. Girl has one shoe and Mom has the other.
Twelve giant economy bags of lo-calorie crisps. Girl looks up from bleep. The customer is a woman, that’s the important thing. Fat white arms. Lo Calorie. Kwik Bake. Rol and Bake. Every single woman in FreezerWorld could be Mom. Girl wants to interview every one of them. She presses the Open button and the till drawer slides out effortlessly. It’s crammed with cash. Girl handles it like she owns it, counting the notes possessively. A bit resentful about giving change. Like she’s giving away something that is hers. Keeping an eye on Billy who has just appeared out of nowhere and whisked the NEXT CUSTOMER PLEASE ruler onto the sliding belt. Girl sneaks a look at the mountain of goods heaped in his trolley. A senior FreezerWorld citizen stares at him in dismay. She could be Mom. Kind but firm. She shakes her head at him and says something about Till Five. Billy looks puzzled and hurt. She points to one of the other tills. Mimes him wheeling his trolley over there, far far away from Express. ‘Express is baskets only,’ she explains slowly, dragging out the o-n-l-y. He gasps like she’s explained the meaning of his presence in a universe where everything is energy and nothing is certain. Baskets only. Thank you so damn much for that information. It’s changed Brother Billy’s life. Like when he’s cycling at night and he hasn’t got lights and he’s wearing black everything, and a kind motorist takes time off to point out that he, Billy, has not got lights. If only he had known. Thank you for that insight. He’ll walk his bike the twelve miles home now and ruminate on the information; so dense and perplexing is it, he won’t even notice the blisters on his feet, the muggers, the drunks, the runaway kids in their sleeping bags, the night rats chewing winglets and suet and Valium, the kerb-crawler blokes with their lack of hair and toilet-chain bracelets, or even the rain so cosy with its pitter-patter. So much to think about and so much time to think it in. Billy plunges his arms deep into his trolley. Yep, here it is. A giant-sized Frozen Family pizza: JUST LIKE MAMA USED TO MAKE. He flings it onto the sliding belt and walks his trolley to the other side of the store.
Girl glances at her watch. Give him thirty seconds.
Bleep. Bleeeep. Bleeep. Music to Girl’s ears. Where is FreezerWorld Louise? She’s due back any minute.
Three uniformed FreezerWorld staff (little black bow ties) are running through the gleaming aisles. They are like paramedics, moving in unison, running and talking at the same time, revving up to crash through the emergency swing doors of superstore surgery. Bruising past soporific shoppers wheeling their trolleys in a trolley ballet, reaching for bread and biscuits and cereals and teabags. Someone shouts ‘He’s bleeding, call Mr Tens!’
Bleep.
Girl thinks, Billy is okay. But not that okay. The till is working like a dream. A crowd of customers are gathering near the Toiletries section. Billy’s weedy voice gabbles something about the razor blades not being properly wrapped. Girl turns to the queue by her till. ‘Move to Till Five, please,’ she insists in a Don’t Fuck with Me voice. Customers look at her in numb disbelief. It is as if she has just told them a relative has died. Girl fixes them with her most malevolent stare.
‘This till is out of order.’
No one moves. Girl points vaguely to Till Five.
‘Over there. This one is not working.’ Jeezus. If she had a gun she’d mow them down. Haven’t they got homes to go back to? Children and lovers and pets waiting for them? Appointments to keep? Customers. Dazed and confused. Jeeeeezus. Get on with it. Get a life. But this is the Life. FreezerWorld life. Is there life after FreezerWorld life?
At last. At last the queue begins to disperse, but not without mutterings and complaints about how they deliberately chose a basket and not a trolley even though a trolley was easier for them and how they would have shopped differently if they had known they were going to have to queue in the trolley section. Some of them, Girl is informed, might as well shop all over again because if they are going to have to queue with trolleys they might as well do a week’s shop instead of just a weekend shop. What’s the point of just popping into FreezerWorld to get one item on special offer if they have to wait behind those customers doing a family shop, an extended family shop by the look of that trolley over there, and anyway, just take a look at where Till Five is – right over the other side of the store. Management should provide a courtesy shuttle.
Girl is pressing the Open button and the till is stuck. It won’t budge. And it’s making a strange bleeping noise, a new kind of bleep with a different tone. A red light is flashing. Not only that but some grotty customer with ginger eyes, God, how do you get to have ginger eyes, is asking if Girl knows which aisle does green washing-up liquid? Girl, preoccupied but still playing sweet, says, ‘They’re all green,’ but the customer has turned into a citizen and he’s muttering on about ecological washing-up liquid. Girl sends him to the diabetic jam section. One last punch of the fucking Open button. Nothing happening. She’s going to have to do a runner, empty-handed. She might as well kill herself there and then. What the hell did Billy do to ooze out all that damn blood? Cut himself with the lickle knife he saves for cinema seats or what?
How does she kill this new damn bleep siren? Press everything. Press every button in every combination. More staff are running over to where Billy is. Someone has turned the Muzak up. Is Billy alive? Did he slit his throat? A young black man saunters over to the Toiletries aisle carrying a bucket and mop. Jeezus. Hope he doesn’t get Billy blood on his trainers. That would really be a lousy way to end the day. Yes Yes Yes Yes. The till is open. Girl takes a FreezerWorld carrier bag and begins to pack wads of notes into it, fast but calm, looking around but no one’s looking at her. The basket people haven’t even reached Till Five yet.
Till Five is Terminal South compared to Terminal North. It’s colder in that part of the store. They speak another language there, Trolleyspeak. It’ll take a bit of time adapting to the new culture. Never mind, Basket People. Learn the ways of the Trolley People. Join in their feast days. Get used to their humour. Enjoy their music. Understand their superstitions. Watch out for diarrhoea and dysentery. Comply with Trolley bureaucracy, red tape and visas. Become familiar with tipping procedures, toilets, time zones, opening hours and water.
Finally, Basket People, avoid blood transfusions unless absolutely necessary and always wear a condom.
Saturday Girl is working fast. Go for the fifty-pound notes first, then the twenties, forget the fives, might have time for the tens.
The PA makes an announcement: ‘Mr Tens. Mr Tens, please come to Till Five. Mr Tens. Mr Tens, please come to Till Five.’ Might have time for the tens. A nice wad of fifties. Thicker than Girl’s thighs. ‘Mr Tens, Mr Tens, please come to Till Five.’ Billy’s voice is drowning under the PA. He’s shouting about how he’s going to sue the store for damaging his hand and he wants to see the manager. He wants to see Mr Tens. Mr Tens is the most wanted man in FreezerWorld. Everyone wants Mr Tens except Girl. She wants the tenners, small potatoes but she wants them after all and she is just about ready to go. Mr Tens is making his way through Aisle Three. Mr Tens.
FreezerWorld superstar. So much gas in Mr Tens, he’s got a bigger bow tie than the rest of the male staff and he’ got a different pace. Girl presses the Close button. It slides like a perfect cremation.
Mr Tens looks a bit anxious. What’s wrong, Mr Tens? Will your children inherit a better FreezerWorld than this one?
Girl slips off the chair and moves over to pick up the pizza. She puts it in her FreezerWorld bag with the cash, walks out of the store into the car park and takes off her overalls.
Time to smoke a gold band menthol. Smoke and walk. Walk fast, smoke like there’s all the time in the world. Smoke like she’s on vacation wondering which beach taverna to drag herself to next.
FreezerWorld really is a good world because Girl has just caught sight of a Freephone to order a cab. What perfection. Girl is truly grateful. A cab will arrive in five mins, enough time for another menthol and to comb her hair, which is stuck to her scalp with warm salty nerve sweat.
Jeeezus!
Girl doesn’t know what to do. She has just seen Louise.
