products, like a peep-show manager deciding that her viewing time was up.
Helen could tell that the assistant was disappointed with her, a teacher marking an F on her favorite pupil’s work. Her customer respect vanished as she desecrated the freshly packed treasures. Helen could not bear it; watching her tear open the tissue wrappings was like watching someone rip orchids apart. She had been cheated of her shopping climax. It wasn’t as though she’d been looking forward to taking everything home—that part of the process was a post-coital duty, like remaking the bed—so she mumbled some excuse about having accidentally demagnetized her strips and fled.
Outside on the street, she felt shockingly exposed. The nonshoppers around her all seemed drunk, stoned, or mad. A fat man with a shaved ginger head was being copiously sick into an octagonal concrete litter bin filled with McDonald’s boxes. Her fingers closed over the Derringer in her bag, warming it. Another man passed her with blood pouring down the center of his face, as if his head had been split in two. The poor always seemed to be fighting each other instead of going after someone rich. They shot up schools instead of storming into financial institutions.
There were no buses in sight. The sky was a strange color. Helen felt unusual.
Her purse yielded seven pounds fifty, not enough for a taxi. She hated the thought of being packed like pencils on a filthy train and arriving home in a sticky sheen of sweat, to sit in the kitchen staring at the spot where her crisp white cardboard bags should be standing. She knew Graham had canceled her cards in revenge for being exposed once more as an adulterer. He was authorized to do that; he played golf with her bank manager.
She needed a drink. She had stopped keeping vodka and orange premixed in a bleach container under the sink after swigging from the wrong bottle. Shopping bred a discontent that could only be assuaged by more spending. Drug addiction would have been a healthier option; at least she wouldn’t have to monitor her weight and would get regular sex from strangers.
Beneath clouds the color of rancid liver, she walked to the nearest vehicle in the car park, a crapped-up blue Renault Megan.
The driver was surprised but made no attempt to take the gun from her. The Derringer was welded to her hand, its steel casing matched to her body temperature. She waggled it at him, opened the passenger door, and slipped inside. She noticed his eyes, brown with black lashes, dirty curls over a single dark eyebrow.
“What do you want?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
“What’s your name?”
“Nathan. Who are you?”
“Helen.” She slapped the dashboard with her free hand. “Drive.”
Nathan insisted she should keep the gun pointed toward the floor while they were inside the car, which turned out to be a good move, because the handle was so slick with sweat that she dropped it under the seat when they hit the first traffic-calming chicane. They rode like this for a while, past burned-out homes that backed right up against luxury stores.
“Pull in here.”
“Now what?” he asked, calmly putting the gearshift into park.
“I shop for clothes and you pay for everything.”
“How is this going to work?” asked Nathan. They were walking toward the bright glass entrance of another mall. “How are you going to try on dresses in a cubicle while keeping a gun trained on me?”
“I won’t have to try anything on. I’m just going to buy things. I know my size in seventeen different countries of manufacture, so I’ll only have to use a fitting room if I see something I like from Estonia or Portugal.”
“You’re a retail opportunist.”
“And you’re on my territory now,” Helen warned him. “If shopping was a university course, I’d have a chair at Oxford.” She wondered if she had gone too far this time. Her condition seemed to be getting out of hand.
“I think you’ve got a problem.”
“Nothing I can’t handle. In here.”
They walked into DKNY half an hour before the store was due to shut. Helen kept her eyes on her hostage. Nathan seemed vaguely amused by her behavior.
She swept up a whole new wardrobe: jumpers, jackets, belts, and pairs of jeans from the racks. Whenever Nathan turned around to complain or to ask where they were going next, she allowed the gleaming barrel of the gun to become visible behind her bag, like a flasher exposing himself to a child. She picked up a trouser suit and a pair of rhinestone evening sandals from Dolce & Gabbana, then pushed Nathan in the direction of Marks & Spencer. She no longer cared whether the CCTV could see her.
“What do you think, the gray or the blue?” she asked, holding different brassieres against her breasts.
“I don’t know, I really don’t care,” her hostage replied sulkily.
She let him see the muzzle of the gun. “Make a decision.”
“The blue. This is like being married.” Nathan shoved his hands into his pockets. “Do you want me to sit down over there and leaf through magazines while you rob the till?” He was sexy in a degenerate way, probably about the same age as her but more worn in. He seemed less concerned about being shot than being embarrassed.
She changed her clothes in the cubicle with Nathan standing on the other side and the gun trained through the door. Balancing on one leg like an armed flamingo was not an easy thing to do. Shopping had been her drug of choice, and she had gone for one final overdose, hoping it would now be out of her system. She applied some lipstick while targeting Nathan in the makeup mirror, Annie Oakley attempting a trick shot. As she did so, she caught sight of a cashier peering at them around a rack of remaindered skirts, but when she looked back, the girl had vanished.
“Just stay close enough for me to kill you if I have to.” She piled her hostage high and aimed him at the checkout.
On the way, Nathan’s mobile rang. She nudged him with the gun barrel. “Answer it.”
He listened for a moment. “Hi. No, I’m not going to be able to get there.” He covered the phone. “It’s my mother. She wants to know where I am. Where am I?” He took a look around. “Marks & Spencers. We’re in mixed separates, but I think we’re heading for knickers and pantyhose. No, I haven’t met someone.”
They waited awkwardly by the counter as a listless cashier detagged the items and folded them into carrier bags. Helen felt the burning panic that had been roaring about inside her receding as each purchase received its tissue-paper prepuce. Nathan withdrew a platinum AmEx card and handed it to the cashier. She almost fell in love with him.
“What’s next?” Nathan asked as they moved toward the exit. Overhead, a soothing voice told them the stores were closing and reminded customers to remain security-conscious as they made their way to the car park. Helen was disappointed because there was a Cartier concession on the first floor and she’d have liked a platinum love- bracelet. Nathan had gotten off lightly.
“Give me a minute,” she told him. “I’ll think of something.”
“You’re a very unusual woman.”
“Call me Helen.”
“So, what do you want to do now, Helen?” he asked. “Dinner? Arson? Blackmail? When you abduct someone, it’s a good idea to have a plan.”
She had no answer for him. Now that she had shopped, the familiar thrill was fading to postcoital guilt. They reached the car with a trolley full of purchases, and he began loading them onto the rear seat.
“You don’t know, do you?” He pushed. “Look in the back of the car, all the clothes you don’t want. People get so restless they don’t know what to do with themselves. You have to figure this out. What the hell is it you want?”
“I don’t know how I turned into this horrible person,” she said, trying not to let her face twitch. “We’re given too much and it’s not enough.”
“So go and find yourself.”
“I don’t want to find myself; I want to find someone else.”
“What, you want me to feel sorry for you? I have to go to work. You can come with me, but put the fucking gun away.”
Nathan ran a soup-and-sandwich van for the homeless, under a dripping railway arch. The services were dying out, he said. They had become unfashionable and could no longer find sponsors. He recited the facts, a
