by Adele Parks
‘Where’s Michael?’ asked Eliza as she jumped on to a stool.
‘In bed. He’s had a very busy week.’
I want a husband who’s in bed because he’s had a very busy week rather than because he’s a lazy bugger, thought Eliza, but she didn’t say as much; instead she asked if she could have some breakfast.
‘Haven’t you eaten?’ Eliza could hear from the shock in Martha’s voice that she disapproved of Eliza leaving the house on less than a full stomach. Eliza’s lips tightened, waiting for the reproach.
Perhaps Martha noticed because she didn’t articulate her reproach; instead she rolled off the bill of fare available. ‘Well, I have some freshly squeezed orange juice, some home-made Bircher muesli, which is very nice, even if I say so myself. You could have that with organic yogurt or milk. I’ve got skimmed, semi-skimmed or the tasty stuff. I have eggs, which I could poach, boil or scramble. I also have bacon and sausages. And I think there are some pastries.’
Eliza couldn’t help but compare the feast on offer here to the contents of the fridge and cupboards at Greg’s. If someone dropped in unexpectedly on her for breakfast on a Saturday morning they’d have to make do with Ryvita, Marmite and black coffee. ‘I’ll have muesli, please, and some orange juice.’
Martha scurried around preparing Eliza’s breakfast; it was the fourth she’d prepared that morning. The children had eaten first, then she’d had time to grab a slice of toast for herself. After Eliza was sorted out, Martha would have to start on Michael’s cooked breakfast – which he liked to have at 11.30. At noon Martha would begin cooking the children’s lunch. Eliza looked out of the window.
It was a lovely Indian summer morning. Freakily hot, hot enough to believe that it was August. God or Mother Nature or the guys in the white coats who invented aerosol sprays had got it all muddled again. Throughout the summer you were considered at best irresponsible, at worst an insurance risk, if you ventured out of doors without the protection of knee-high wellies and an umbrella. Now, in mid-September, you wouldn’t be thought peculiar if you shimmied along the high street in a shift dress and slapped on sun oil.
The unseasonally hot weather made Martha worry about global warming. It made Eliza smile. This time last year half the population had been barricading their doors with sandbags against flooding rivers. Anything had to be better than that.
Eliza watched her niece and nephew play. They were glowing with sun and excitement. ‘Look at their rosy cheeks,’ she sighed adoringly.
‘And muddy knees,’ sighed Martha, her tone noticeably less whimsical. She ran outside and rubbed some more sun cream on to Mathew’s face, then scooped Maisie up into her arms. Maisie let out a wail of defiance. She wanted to stay and play with her brother and Dog.
‘Is this Bircher muesli difficult to make?’ asked Eliza thoughtfully. ‘It’s delicious.’ She wasn’t exactly sure what Bircher muesli was.
Martha flushed with pride, unused to compliments. Not that Michael didn’t appreciate her, of course he appreciated her, it’s just once you’d been together as long as they had you got out of the way of paying compliments. ‘It’s very easy. Just buy a batch of muesli, get a good-quality one, packed with grains, fruit and nuts. It’s worth adding extra nuts to a shop-bought one. Pour a cup of cream and a cup of milk over it and refrigerate it overnight. It’s especially nice served with kiwi. I’m sure you’ll have most of the ingredients in your cupboard.’
No, actually, Eliza had absolutely none of these ingredients in her cupboard. She did most of her grocery shopping on an ad hoc basis at the local garage shop. Eliza rarely visited supermarkets; she hated them with a passion. The frustration began almost as soon as she drove into the car park. She rarely drove anywhere, as her battered, ancient Morris Minor was so unreliable. However, her dread of getting on and off buses with huge shopping bags was greater than her dread of trailing oil up London roads, so she did take the car to the supermarket if she really had to go there. Annoyingly, it was almost impossible for legitimate shoppers to find a space because so many commuters from out of town chose to drive to the supermarket, park their cars and then catch the Tube into the centre of town.
Even if she did find a space, there was the bloody trolley to contend with. She loathed the fact that the trolley couldn’t be released from its captivity unless you paid a pound for the privilege. Eliza remembered the time when these things were free. Nothing in life was free now, not even going to the loo. Eliza never had a pound coin, although she did wish that she were the type of woman who always had the correct change. And, of course, after she had run about trying to buy a packet of chewing gum with a twenty-pound note to get a pound coin, and finally secured a trolley, she always discovered that she’d selected the one with the cranky, wobbly wheel. A trolley with suicidal tendencies that wanted to dash across an aisle and throw itself under another trolley.
Then there were the shoppers. Eliza had more or less come to terms with the fact that shopping in supermarkets meant that she was bound to encounter the oddball who insisted on taking six items through the five-items-or-less till. Which didn’t necessarily have to be a problem, but did turn into one if the assistant was an oddball too, and insisted on voiding the transaction and sending the customer through another till. The old dears who were slow, the drunks who were smelly, the Filipino housekeepers who were hysterical, the Mediterranean au pairs who were exhausted, were all an inevitable part of Eliza’s shopping experience. It all bored her.
Usually.
But now Eliza wanted to make muesli. She was sure that making muesli was where she should be as a person.
So it was with some reluctance and great trepidation that Eliza muttered, ‘I think I might go to the supermarket.’
‘Come with us. We always go on a Saturday afternoon, after I’ve made Michael’s breakfast and given the kids their lunch. That way Michael can read the papers in peace, and there’s a chance at least one of the children will fall asleep in the car.’ Martha made the offer with a huge smile on her face, as though she were inviting Eliza somewhere nice. In truth, Martha thought she was. She liked supermarkets. She liked the clean tidy aisles. She admired the armies of people ensuring that the bottles sat side by side, just so. She enjoyed the fact that the jars and tins stood in perfect lines. She loved choosing items, and always imagined the enormous pleasure she’d get as she’d place a special dish on the table and the fresh ingredients, the exotic spices, or the flavoursome cheeses would impress her guests. Her supermarket was her friend and helped her achieve that swell of pride and satisfaction. She liked visiting the supermarket best when Mathew was at playschool and Maisie fell asleep in the trolley. Then she had time to really examine the new lines and products. Reading labels was Martha’s idea of ‘me time’.
Eliza couldn’t think of anything more depressing than spending her Saturday afternoon in a supermarket – it seemed unnatural. Didn’t Martha know that the shops on the King’s Road were open?
‘Why don’t we go now and leave Michael to get his own breakfast?’ suggested Eliza.
‘Yes, we could – why don’t we?’ giggled Martha.
‘Let’s live dangerously,’ muttered Eliza as she reached for her wallet. ‘I’ll leave Dog here.’
An hour and a half later, Martha and Eliza, Mathew and Maisie finally trundled through the doors of the local hypermarket because ‘now’, with two children under the age of two and a half, actually means an age later.
‘There’s so much choice,’ mumbled Eliza, somewhat overwhelmed, as she walked through the fruit and vegetable aisle. There were fruits Eliza could hardly pronounce the names of, let alone recognize – tamarillo, guava, feijoa, grenadillo. She wondered what prickly pear, custard apple or star fruit tasted like and whether she ought to keep them in the fridge.
‘Where do you usually shop?’ asked Martha.
‘The newsagent’s at the corner of our street, or the garage.’
Maisie sat in the trolley that Martha pushed, and Math
ew sat in Eliza’s.
‘It’s a joy to have an extra pair of hands,’ commented Martha. It really was turning out to be such a lovely day for her. ‘If they’re both in the same trolley Mathew often attempts to beat Maisie over the head with a tin of beans or something similar.’
Eliza looked at her angelic, smiling nephew and wondered why Martha exaggerated about how difficult it was to look after the children. It sometimes grated on Eliza that Martha didn’t know how lucky she was. Mathew and Maisie always behaved beautifully whenever Eliza was with them. It was just a matter of discipline; children would push you as far as they could. If she became a mother her children would know the boundaries. Fun time would be great fun, and the other times would be calm, tranquil, relaxed. Perhaps she’d do Zen meditation throughout her pregnancy – that would certainly help the baby’s karma.
Eliza looked around the supermarket and noted with some disappointment that most of the parents with children hadn’t explained the boundaries clearly enough. She doubted whether any of them had ever benefited from Zen meditation. It seemed that every child, in every trolley, was crying, sulking, begging for sweets or pestering a sibling. Eliza couldn’t understand why one mother, standing near the dairy fridge, was arguing with her three-year-old daughter about yogurts. If she really wants the yogurts with the ghastly cartoons of TV characters, then let her have them. That’s the fun of being a child.
But Eliza had no concept of sugar content.
She lost interest in the ignominious yogurt battle between the mother and daughter and turned her attention to trolley-reading. That woman over there had digestion problems: her trolley had more prunes and bran cereals than was normal. That other woman was bulimic: two apples, one carrot and a box of Milk Tray. This one was cooking dinner for a lover: salmon, a selection of florets on a microwave tray that cost an entire trust fund per pound, tubs of Häagen-Dazs. That couple was happy: mozzarella, tomatoes, avocados, fresh pasta and pesto sauce. That couple was waiting for payday: baked beans, sliced loaf, tinned fruit.
Eliza and Greg never shopped together.
Eliza sighed, wondering if her obsession with other people’s trolleys was healthy. Was it something to do with her intense feelings of jealousy and inadequacy, all brought on by the lack of a suitable husband? The woman with the trust-fund-microwaveable florets was certainly not the type of woman to waste four years – four significant, biological-clock-ticking years – dating a commitment-phobe musician.
Then again, had the floret woman ever had multiple orgasms or made love on a kitchen unit? Had she ever drunk wine out of her lover’s mouth?
Aghhh. Eliza couldn’t, no wouldn’t, think about this now. She picked up a packet of biscuits, then noticed that another brand had a ‘two for one’ offer. She couldn’t choose, and so she eventually put all three packets in her trolley.
Comfort food.
‘How do you do it?’ marvelled Martha, looking at Eliza’s shopping. Despite Eliza’s good intentions to buy fresh fruit and nutritionally valuable products, her trolley was full of biscuits, microwave chips, pizzas, sugary cereals and crisps. ‘How do you manage to keep your figure? And your skin is terrific.’
Martha’s trolley was full of nappies for Maisie; for Mathew there was organic chicken, organic cheese and organic crisps (the only concession to childhood). There were a number of expensive products labelled ‘Tastes so special’ for Michael. And whilst Martha knew that these were probably another marketing ploy, she found the Parmesan cheese – with black and white pictures on the packaging of Italian kids eating pasta – irresistible. Michael would love it. Then there were a number of low-fat, low-taste products for herself. Eliza looked at Martha’s groceries and began to doubt her ability to read trolleys like books. Because Martha’s trolley said she was repressed and that she undervalued herself, which simply wasn’t true. Eliza knew Martha was a happily married woman with a fulfilled life. Martha was always saying as much.
The sisters split up. Eliza wanted to stock her cupboards without Martha seeing the full extent of her neglect, and Martha wanted to buy the food for that night’s dinner party and read the headlines of the quality papers.
Martha dawdled in the aisle with magazines and newspapers and started to read the tawdry and tantalizing headlines of the gossipy mags. Were they true, she wondered, or did people make them up so that other people, people like her for instance, felt dissatisfied and provincial? Not that Martha wanted one of those messy lives. She had never broken a rule, let alone a law, in her life. She had never parked in a disabled-driver space, and she paid her TV licence by direct debit. She was a law-abiding, upstanding citizen.
Eliza wondered if there was a single person in the whole world who had never stolen anything at all. She asked herself this question as she watched a well-dressed man in his forties slip a can of furniture polish under his coat. What an odd choice of booty. Eliza decided not to report him to the burly-looking security guard; it was probably a mid-life crisis thing, so why bother? Besides which, the burly-looking security guard elicited absolutely no sympathy in Eliza’s heart; he looked bored and aggressive. Whereas the man with the furniture polish now in his inside pocket looked excited and pathetic. Eliza started to list mentally all the things she’d ever stolen: biscuits and pens from work; as well as Tippex, paper clips, Post-it Notes. As a student she’d regularly raided her flatmates’ kitchen cupboards. She’d avoided her council tax for three consecutive years. She’d never paid Tube fares when she visited London as a teenager; she could afford them but it was a thrill to jump the barrier, part of the holiday experience. Eliza started to feel a bit like a cross between Ronnie Biggs and Bonnie-and-Clyde, so she pursued a different train of thought.
Chioca, what the fuck was it? Apparently, it was ‘tasty waxy red tubers, originally cultivated by the ancient lncas’ – or so the packet said. Eliza looked for the cooking instructions; she was none the wiser. ‘Do not need peeling and have a slightly sweet taste; ideal roasted.’ Eliza shrugged. She put a bottle of organic balsamic vinegar and a bag of wheat-free flour into her trolley. She had a vague idea that you could splash balsamic vinegar on salads, but she wasn’t sure if it would work with chips; she would never open the wheat-free flour but the packaging was very attractive and would look good on Greg’s shelves.
Bored by her own ignorance, Eliza headed towards the bakery, drawn by the smell of freshly baked bread and sugary doughnuts. She decided to ditch her idea of buying rye bread and honey to be served with prunes. She was going to buy some bacon and eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms. She was going to go back to Greg’s flat and cook a massive fry-up and then they could spend the afternoon making love. She’d put all ideas of pension policies and mortgages out of her head for now.
9
They did not spend their afternoon making love. When Eliza returned from Martha’s she found the flat empty. There was no note to say where he’d gone. Of course not. To think of writing a note, Greg would have had to… well, think, for a start. A note would assume a measure of responsibility way beyond Greg’s capabilities. Eliza didn’t bother cooking up the eggs and bacon; she had no stomach for a brunch for one.
Eliza flung open the windows in an attempt to rid the flat of the various stenches of their lives: from fish and chip wrappers, stale tobacco, sweaty clothes and trainers. She couldn’t help but think of the aromas that drifted around Martha’s home: freshly brewed coffee, clean clothes, shampooed babies. Eliza felt grubby. She went to the bathroom with the intention of removing some of the grime that seemed to be a permanent symptom of her lifestyle. She pushed the door with some caution – the bathroom was never a pretty sight; even spiders objected to being in there on grounds of health and safety. Wet towels abandoned on the floor had obviously reproduced in her absence and were now forming a barricade. There was a tide mark around the bath that suggested Eliza and Greg worked down t’pit. Various ointments and unguents had mysteriously splurged from their tubes and tubs. They oozed across the sink, mirror,
tiles and floor, as though they too were trying to effect an evacuation from this hole of Calcutta to a more sanitary environment. Her feet stuck to the lino, there was no loo roll, the blind didn’t open.
Eliza sat on the edge of the bath and cried. When she stopped crying, she started packing.
‘Hi, Babe,’ Greg called from the hall. Well, from the sitting room really, as the front door more or less opened into the sitting room, which smudged into the kitchen, which was barely divided from the bedroom. Only the bathroom was a separate entity in Greg’s flat, and even then the door was always open. Eliza was not going to live in a studio flat for the rest of her days.
She flung another pile of Ts into her open suitcase. She heard the front door slam, the TV come on, and the pshushhh of a can of beer being opened. She checked the clock; it was half past four in the afternoon. She knew Greg was now lying on the futon (with his trainers no doubt muddying the throw). His jacket would be on the floor. Greg didn’t actually fling it there: his clothes seemed simply to drop off him and land in untidy heaps. Eliza listened to him flick through the channels, horse racing, documentary, rugby, soap omnibus. Greg paused at the Tweenies and shouted, ‘The Tweenie Clock, where will it stop?’ He did a great impression of Jake. Eliza would have thought this adorable if they’d had children, but they didn’t, so, as it was, she thought it was stupid. Finally Greg settled on MTV. She knew he’d be scratching his stomach and wondering what to wear to the club tonight.
What a man, she sighed.
Eliza continued to pack her clothes. She didn’t really know what to take. She’d noticed that whenever anyone ever left anyone on TV they always packed one neat case. How was that possible? Eliza had already filled a rucksack, a suitcase, a vanity case and three bin liners. She hadn’t even opened her summer wardrobe. Perhaps she didn’t need that black roll neck – she had packed two others, she could come back for it. Eliza sat on the bed and stroked the duvet. Why was she worrying about what to pack when what she should be worrying about was what to say to Greg? She rubbed her hand across their duvet again; it felt cool and smooth, nice. It was just a cotton thing from Debenhams, nothing particularly special, so why did touching it make her stomach lurch? She lay down to smell it. It smelt of Dog and Greg.
