'I'm sure it can't be helped,' Helen said, cheerfully, and turned to me. 'Bottom line is that all the bags are correct except for the red ones, which both belong to someone else.'
When I'd put all the items from the counter back into the bags I'd taken them out of, an exchange took place. Their red bags, for ours. The delivery guy apologised about five more times — somehow making it clear, without recourse to words, that he was apologising for the system as a whole rather than any failure on his part — and trudged off back up the stairs.
'I'll let him out,' Helen said, darting forward to give me a peck on the cheek. 'Got to go anyway. You're all right unpacking all this, yes?'
'Of course,' I said. 'I always manage somehow.'
And off she went. It only took a few minutes to unpack the low-fat yoghurt, sharp cheese, salad materials, and freerange and organic chicken breasts.
…
A funny thing happened, however. When I broke off from work late morning to go down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I lingered at the fridge for a moment after getting the milk out, and I found myself thinking:
I wasn't expressing discontent. We eat well. I personally don't have much of a fix on what eating healthily involves (beyond the fact it evidently requires ingesting more fruit and vegetables per day than feels entirely natural), and so it's a good thing that Helen does. If there's anything that I want which doesn't arrive at our door through the effortless magic of supermarket delivery, there's nothing to stop me going out and buying it myself. It's not as if the fridge or cupboards have been programmed to reject non-acceptable items, or set off a siren and contact the diet police when confronted with off-topic foodstuffs.
It was more that I got a sudden and strangely wistful glimpse of another life — and of another woman.
I was being assumptive, of course. It was entirely possible that the contents of the red bags I'd originally unpacked had been selected by the male of some nearby household. It didn't feel that way, however. It seemed easier to believe that somewhere nearby was another household rather like ours. A man, a woman, and a child (or perhaps two, we're unusual in having stopped at one). All the people in this family would be different to us, of course, but for the moment it was the idea of the woman which stuck in my head. I wondered what she'd look like. What kind of things made her laugh. How, too, she'd managed to miss out on the health propaganda constantly pushed at the middle-classes (she
We get steak every now and then, of course — but it would never be in the company of all the other meats and rich foods. One dose of weapons-grade animal fats per week is quite risky enough for this household, thank you. We live a moderate, evenly balanced life when it comes to food (and, really, when it comes to everything else). The shopping I'd seen, however foolishly, conjured the idea of a household which sailed a different sea — and of a different kind of woman steering the ship.
I was just a little intrigued, that's all.
A couple of days later, I was still intrigued. You'd be right in suspecting this speaks of a life in which excitement levels are relatively low. I edit, from home. Technical manuals are my bread and butter, leavened with the occasional longer piece of IT journalism. I'm good at it, fast and accurate, and for the most part enjoy my work. Perhaps «enjoy» isn't quite the right word (putting my editing hat on for a moment): let's say instead that I'm content that it's my profession, am well paid and always busy, and feel no strong desire to be doing anything else, either in general or particular.
But. nobody's going to be making an action movie of my life any day soon. And that's perhaps why, sometimes, little ideas will get into my head and stick around for longer than they might in the mind of someone who has more pressing or varied (or viscerally compelling) things to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
I was still thinking about this other woman. This different girl. Not in a salacious way — how could I be? I had no idea what she looked like, or what kind of person she was (beyond that spoken of by her supermarket choices). That's the key word, I think — difference. Like any man who's been in a relationship for a long time (and doubtless a lot of women too, I've never asked), every once in a while you beguile a few minutes in fantasy. Sometimes these are sexual, of course, but often it's something more subtle which catches your internal eye. I've never felt the urge to be unfaithful to Helen — even now that our sex life has dropped to the distant background hum of the longterm married — and that's partly because, having thought the thing through, I've come to believe that such fantasies are generally not about other people, but about yourself. What's
You'd see yourself differently, and so would other people, and that's what your mind is really playing with: a different you, in a different now.
Perhaps that insight speaks merely of a lack of courage (or testosterone); nonetheless, the idea of this nearby woman kept cropping up in my mind. Perhaps there was also a creative part of my mind seeking voice. I don't edit fiction and have never tried to write any either. I enjoy working with words, helping to corral them into neat and meaningful pens like so many conceptual sheep, but I've discovered in myself neither the urge nor the ability to seek to make them evoke people or situations which are not 'true.' With this imaginary woman, however — not actually imaginary of course, unless it was a man, it was more a case of her being «unknown» — I found myself trying to picture her, her house, and her life. I guess it's that thing which happens sometimes in airports and on trains, when you're confronted with evidence of other real people leading presumably real lives, and you wonder where everyone's going, and why: wonder why the person in the seat opposite is reading that particular book, and who they'll be meeting at the other end of the journey that you, for the moment, are sharing.
With so little to go on, my mind was trying to fill in the gaps, tell me a story. It was a bit of fun, I suppose, a way of going beyond the walls of the home office in which I spend all my days.
I'm sure I wouldn't have tried to take it further, if it hadn't been for the man from the supermarket.
A week to the day after the first delivery, he appeared on the doorstep again. This was a little unusual. Not there being another order — Helen considerately books the deliveries into the same time slot every week, so they don't disrupt my working patterns — but it being the same man. In the several years we've been getting our groceries this way, I'm not sure I've ever encountered the same person twice, or at least not soon enough that I've recognised them from a previous delivery.
But here this one was again.
'Morning,' he said, standing there like a scruffy Christmas tree, laden with bags of things to eat or clean or wipe surfaces or bottoms with. 'Downstairs, right?'
I stood aside to let him pass and saw there were a couple more crates full of bags on the path outside. That meant I had a few minutes to think, which I suddenly found I was doing.
I held the door open while he came up, re-ladened himself, and tramped back downstairs again. By the time he trudged up the stairs once more, I had a plan.
'Right then,' he said, digging into a pocket and pulling out a piece of paper. He glanced at it, then thrust it in my direction. 'That's your lot. Everything's there. No substitutions.'
Before he could go, however, I held up my hand. 'Hang on,' I said, brightly. 'You remember last week? The thing with the red bags?'
He frowned, and then his face cleared. 'Oh yeah. That was you, right? Got the wrong red bags, I know. I've spoken to Head Office about it, don't worry.'
'It's not that,' I said. 'Hang on here a sec, if you don't mind?'
I quickly trotted downstairs, opened one of the kitchen cupboards, and pulled out something more-or-less at random. A tin of corned beef — perfect.
Back up in the hallway, I held it out to the delivery guy.
