It occurred to him, dully, while he was vainly trying to remember what he needed to buy, that perhaps the fruit and vegetable section had been designed to resemble an actual market, with wicker-work baskets of baking potatoes and onions and courgettes stacked in rows of controlled disarray, as if deposited by busy stevedore at the docks. And in the absence of docks, some interior design kid working at the head office had thought to provide them in facsimile, as if the fulfil some subtle need people had for bustle and abundant disorder.
Maybe.
He let out a sigh. Onions. Did he need then or not? While he stood there blinking a maroon-shirted employee – a girl, brown hair tied back behind a white paper hat - rolled past a towering stack of cellophane wrapped aubergines.
It was about five-thirty. He’d just got off work and he’d remembered that Nina was supposed to be coming over later, and he’d promised to cook. She was probably still in the car but he knew he’d better get himself together before she got back.
It was one of the things he both appreciated and vaguely resented about Nina. She wouldn’t let him off the hook. Before they’d met he’d happily let himself slip into a routine of slowly spreading disorganisation, which seemed to have been his default state for years, since he’d been at Uni and the early dutiful enthusiasm drilled into him by his mother had been overwhelmed by the temptations of 9 hour weeks, and the dawning knowledge that he could write an essay pretty much blindfolded. With Nina, it wasn’t what she said, it was how she looked. It was a look that, when they’d come home to his flat on their 4th date 3 years ago and seen the chaos of his front room, told him that he’d better shape up. It was a look that said ‘I didn’t know people still lived like this’, a look reserved for social workers and government officials inspecting condemned factories.
He picked up a couple of onions and dropped them into the basket, a plan forming in the back of his mind. It involved kidney beans, he decided, and headed over to where he dimly remembered they were found. The place was busy with post-work shoppers, student couples in narrow cut jeans and big jumpers, hipster mums and dads, mostly. The queues at the checkout snaked back in anxious antipation, the ambient sound of squeaking trolley wheels and murmured conversation punctuated by the beep of the tills and the self issue machines.
It was its own society, its own cultural world, this place, Nick thought as he mooched along the aisles. He caught sight of himself in the reflection of the glass in the vegetarian foods section, his black overcoat and too-long sideparted haircut, his face still youngish even with the beard that Nina had started to comment on again. He thought, on days when he was being charitable to himself, he could still pass as a latter day Freidrich Engels, or one of those fin de siècle intellectuals who wrote about industrial society and would have been sorrowful atheists, despite their abiding belief in the commonality of mankind. When he’d mentioned this, Nina had raised her exquisite eyebrows and remarked that she liked her fin de siècle intellectuals more when they’d has a shave. Then, seeing his hangdog expression she’d given him a kiss.
She was good for him. He knew this. His friends told him, repeatedly, and occasionally he believed them.
He arrived at the canned foods section, and scanned the shelves intently. A little old lady was gingerly checking something in her purse, her trolley parked a little way up the aisle. An older gentleman, who Nick took to be her husband, was waiting earnestly further up the aisle, a slight tremor animating his bald head as he stared back at her. Nick waited patiently for the lady to finish what she was doing, and then reached down and grabbed a can of kidney beans and dropped them in his basket.
Suddenly his phone rang. He fumbled in his pocket and pressed the call button. It was Nina.
‘Hey babe’
‘Hi Nick… are you free to talk?’
‘Um, yes…’ why wouldn’t I be?, he thought. Her voice sounded awkward, formal. And immediately his heart gave a lurch.
‘Listen, um, this isn’t easy for me to say, but… okay, so I’m not coming over to yours tonight. The thing is…’
He didn’t remember the rest of the conversation, although it had been mostly horrible and obvious and inevitable, and afterwards, he’d recall how he stood there dumbly as she’d laid it out for him, his shopping basket at his feet, the old couple shuffling up the aisle. He could have sworn that the old man had turned and looked at him for a second, as if he somehow sensed what was happening, with that look that all coupled men give in situations like this, an expression of pity and relief, that he himself had made it through.
