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‘There was a box of broken biscuits on the bottom shelf. Half price. You could smell them as Mr W. poured scoops of them into a bag. Yum.’
Time did not stand still as he talked, as much as it felt like it to Merry. The conveyer belt delivered pre-packaged bar-coded products to the scanner, his wife feeding their shopping in one end, their green bags gaping, waiting at the other.
‘But other customers rang in for deliveries. All the smaller paper bags were put in a big hessian sack. On Friday evenings it was extra busy so I was allowed to drive the delivery van. I didn’t have a licence, I was fourteen, did I say?’
Yes, he had said. Merry nodded an ambiguous ‘those were the days.’
‘It was all local. I delivered to Mrs Johnson quite regularly. She was on the route.’
The next moment was when Merry’s eyes widened, the claggy mascara in the far corners resisting before releasing her lashes fully top from bottom.
‘One day…’ he paused. He laughed. He blushed. An old man in contact with the fourteen year old inside him. ‘One Friday I got to Mrs Johnson’s front door and called out groce, you know, to let her know it was the groceries.’
The word sounded like gross, as in horrible, not nice, yucko, the word kids called out to each other in the playground. But a word that clearly brought the customers to their front doors.
‘She opened the door after a bit. She had on, well it was hardly on, a towel. Modest, like. She was holding it up in front.’ The old man picked a bag of crisps out of the trolley beside him and clutched them to his chest, a subconscious illustration. ‘The towel was quite long, so discreet, fell below the, you know, bare shoulders but all the bits covered. A lilac towel. The colour of those old tins of Quality Street.’
The supermarket’s scanner beep-beeped, hard at work.
‘I’d never seen a naked woman.’
Merry heard the old man’s wife snort on the other side of him. ‘You’ve never told me this story?’
