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He hadn’t finished. Of course there was more to the story. Enough to have made him blush when he’d started it. ‘Except, there was a full-length mirror at the end of Mrs Johnson’s hall. I could see another her reflected.’ He searched for the right words to use now, clearly discarding the ones he’d used to himself as a boy. ‘Her back. Her bum.’
The resurfacing of the memory was so clearly unexpected, so obviously ridiculous in a suburban supermarket. His laughter was contagious. Merry lent into it, their peels banishing any residual youthful embarrassment and confusion, tapping into the absurd delight of life.
His wife reclaimed him suspiciously, even though this memory, inadvertently reborn, had been washed clean by time and tide, coming up as pure as the promise on the packaging of sunlight soap. ‘We met,’ the love of his life said loudly, ‘when I was sixteen and he was seventeen, even though we’d grown up five doors from each other. Not the same street. Around a corner.’
‘Not the corner with the corner store?’
‘The very same,’ they confirmed in unison as if they had told this particular story many times before over half a century.
By then their green bags were packed and ready to go. The bill was paid with the tap of a plastic card. ‘Don’t get him onto pounds, shillings and pence,’ the man’s wife smiled. He pushed the trolley, now his wife’s private delivery boy. They both waved. Merry raised her hand to wave back. Self-consciously lowered it, awash in a heady mix of joy and envy at their companionably identical backs.
She placed her basket on the conveyer belt. Its metal handles had wedged great grooves in the flesh of her arm where it had rested. She rubbed them away, thinking, sadly, the old man’s mirror story would be lost when he died.
‘And what have you got on for the day?’ the worker asked her, as she had every customer as their groceries marched towards her.
‘This and that,’ Merry obfuscated. Thinking, I wish it was more that than this. More than... Just more.
Her hand went instinctively to her pocket to pull out her phone, just to see if there was a missed text. Remembered, too late, the flat battery. Could see only herself reflected in the black screen.
