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Look up purgatory in the dictionary and there’s a photo of a queue at a supermarket checkout. Merry wondered how she had sinned to be stuck here. The woman behind her was doomscrolling. Merry imagined the many manifestations of the world’s descent into hell – pestilence, war, fire and floods – galloping down the screen of the stranger’s phone; that or she was playing Candy Crush. Merry checked her own mobile again. The battery had not magically gained new life through the force of her own willpower. She had no way of telling who was not trying to contact her.
She doomscrolled the covers of the women’s magazines lined at the checkout instead. Exhaled discreetly at the lunacy and wondered what was left to fiction writers when celebrity news took on such flavours.
Then a rockmelon took off like a bowling ball when the supermarket worker activated the conveyer belt. He was old, the man in front of Merry buying the fruit. Nimble in his prime perhaps, not now. She stuck out her hand to stop the melon rolling right off.
‘They are $3.70 for half,’ the man commented by way of thanks. ‘And $4 for a whole. We don’t really need so much rockmelon…’
‘But the choice was obvious…’ Merry agreed.
Do I smile now? she wondered. Never make eye contact was the general rule.
He shuffled as he manoeuvred the rockmelon back into the pack with oats and biscuits and unmentionables, before reaching down to the many groceries still left in his trolley. The worker was checking through the shopping of the man in front of this man in front of Merry, so the wait was going to be a while. She glanced over: the scrum at the self-checkouts was worse. Initiating any more talk with a stranger was a risk.
The old man’s wife, a good woman of the parish type with her face painted on for the supermarket trip, bent down into and up out of the trolley alongside her spouse. Old-people calisthenics. As the material of the wife’s blouse rustled, a smell wafted, one Merry recognised – the scent of her grandmother’s face powder. Warmth and security washed over Merry, feelings that decided the question. More words were out of her mouth before her brain made the conscious leap to commit to a conversation.
