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‘MR CHIPSTEAD!’
Her shout made me jump.
‘What? What’s the problem?’
‘Mr Chipstead’s my manager. I’m calling him, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, but –’ I had a horrible vision of being dragged by the collar from the store, accused by Mr Chipstead of overfamiliarity with the checkout girl. ‘Is there a –’
‘No bar code.’
She held the packet of chicken breasts towards me.
‘Ah, no. I see. Won’t beep, eh? I can’t remember how much they are, I’m afraid. I think they were about –’
‘Don’t matter. I need the stock code.’
‘Of course, yes. The stock code.’
‘MR CHIPSTEAD!’ she shouted again, and then looked back at me. ‘Bell’s gone.’
‘Sorry?’
‘My bell’s gone. That’s why I’m shouting.’
‘I see. Well, I’m sure he won’t be long.’
I suppose I deserved the withering look she gave me in return, my remark having been based as it was on a complete lack of evidence of any kind. In a second’s glance she managed to imply that my pronouncement on the timing of Mr Chipstead’s arrival was so entirely awry as to be laughable. I wondered if perhaps his slowness of movement about the store was legendary. His non-appearance surely couldn’t be blamed on a lack of awareness: the volume of the girl’s shouts had been phenomenal, and there could be few customers or staff ignorant of the fact that his presence was required.
‘Couldn’t we carry on with the other things while we wait?’
But the girl had disappeared behind her glasses, and, with one hand still grasping the uncoded chicken, her body seemed to settle down into itself like a collapsing balloon, her head sinking a good two inches lower than before and telescoping onto the rolls of fat at her neck. She floated, as if on a rubber ring in a calm sea, suspended only by the neck, drifting gently out of sight. I felt challenged to bring her back to the conscious world and wondered if the forceful use of her name would return her to shore.
I decided to be bold, and took a quick look at the badge on her chest, semi-buried in the depths of the green-checked bosom. I could just make out the first few words of cheery greeting: ‘Hi – Happy to Help You! I’m St –’ but beyond that it was tucked out of sight. I couldn’t immediately think of many names that would fit – she didn’t look like a Stephanie, which was the only one that leapt to mind – but a second later she shifted in her chair and the remaining letters were revealed.
I leant forward and said, quite firmly, ‘Stacey.’
The reaction was, surprisingly, instant. ‘Yeah?’
‘Um – why don’t we carry on with the other things, meanwhile?’
‘If you want.’
She put the chicken down on the metal side of the till and reached forward for a large iceberg lettuce, grunting as she untelescoped herself and made the effort to negotiate the distance imposed by her own body. Her expression was completely unchanged: releasing her from whatever place she had disappeared to hadn’t brought her attention any closer to the job in hand. She appeared to be able to function physically on automatic pilot while her brain still floated in some vapid limbo.
She dealt with the lettuce without glancing at it, but then I jumped as she suddenly sat up straight – or as straight as the strictures of her trapped figure allowed – and, unnervingly, what I can only describe as interest flickered across her face. Not, unsurprisingly, directed at me, but at someone or something behind me.
I turned to see a young man of thirty or so, with extremely neat, short black hair, striding towards our till. The hair was, indeed, so short, particularly about the ears, as to make his head look too small for his rather gangly body, and the ears themselves curled outwards towards their reddened tips, gnome-like. These, together with his Adam’s apple, were his most outstanding features, in the literal sense of the word. As he approached I could read on the badge pinned to his navy double-breasted jacket that, on this occasion, it was ‘Warren Chipstead’ offering his assistance to all within reach.
He made a sort of smooth, confident swirl of the hips as he manoeuvred himself round the end of the checkout and came to rest beside me in one swooping movement. ‘Yesssss, Stacey,’ he said with his lower lip pulled away from his teeth, followed by a sort of clicking of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, effectively conveying in the brief words just what a busy man he was. It certainly seemed to impress Stacey, who was looking at the young man now with far more than simply interest. She was gazing at him with something approaching animated approval – even her voice seemed to have acquired a new vivacity as she addressed him.
‘Oh, Mr Chipstead. Sorry to bother you: no code.’
‘Another one, eh, Stacey? Rightio, let’s take a look. Yessss, chicken fillets…’ A little more clicking, then a swift scoop of the packet out of Stacey’s hand and a further smooth swivel out of the checkout area. ‘Won’t keep you a moment, sir,’ he threw back over his shoulder as he went, then, louder in the other direction: ‘Denisha! Find me a six-pack chick. fill. and take it to checkout three please.’
A man with a surname on his badge was clearly one to be reckoned with, and an aura of self-imposed superiority wafted after him as he moved briskly away from the till. Poor Stacey. The light faded from those pretty eyes as quickly as Chipstead’s back shimmied its way over towards the frozen peas. At least I could see now that life as we know it did exist somewhere in the depths of the girl’s vast frame, even if it took the presence of Warren Chipstead to allow one a glimpse of it. I wondered if I could use this insight to achieve a little communication.
‘Seems a nice sort of chap,’ I tried. ‘Efficient, I expect.’
‘S’all right.’
‘Have you been here long?’
‘Eleven.’
‘What? Eleven years do you mean?’
It didn’t seem possible: I couldn’t believe even SavaMart, while allowing for its clearly demonstrated profits-before-quality ethos, could find the benefits of employing child labour worth the risks of prosecution.
‘I begun at eleven, didn’t I? My shift. Eleven till seven.’
‘Oh, I see. No, I meant, have you worked here for long? In this shop?’
‘Yeah.’
I could see I wasn’t going to get much further, and I was quite relieved when a pretty Asian girl appeared with a pack of chicken fillets and handed them to Stacey.
‘Y’are.’
Stacey took them without a word, and I had to stop myself telling her to say thank you, as if I were talking to one of the children. I could understand Judy’s objections to her manner, which seemed purposefully designed to be as unfriendly as possible. Denisha – as I assumed it was – didn’t seem to notice though, and had already disappeared by the time Stacey had successfully scanned the pack and dropped it into my open carrier bag.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘All successfully stock-coded, then?’
‘Eighteen pounds forty.’
‘Right.’
Was there a thin girl inside this one, trying to get out? It was hard to equate a word as active as ‘trying’ with this passive creature. And was it possible that, linked to the thin inner girl, there was a happy, positive personality also just biding its time until the opportunity came along to burst out in a surge of joie de vivre? I put a twenty-pound note into her hand and watched her as she listlessly punched in ‘20’, opened her till and looked up at the ‘1.60’ displayed in green on the tiny electronic screen. Even the small mental effort of calculating the change was denied her; everything that surrounded her conspired to deprive her body and soul of exercise and stimulation.
I felt quite frustrated to be leaving the store with my crusade to evoke a response in my fat checkout girl no further advanced than when I had gone in, and was, again, almost reluctant to go. I pictured myself grabbing her by those huge, rounded shoulders in a desperate attempt to get through, to make her look me straight in the eye, as I shouted: ‘Is there anyone in there?’ or some such. What was she feeling, this apparently indifferent human being with whom I had briefly shared the same small place on the planet? Perhaps she, too, was shy: perhaps the total lack of interest in her surroundings was merely a cover. I had, after all, seen it crack a little at the approach of the manager.
I would describe all this to Judy when I got home, perhaps make her laugh at my description of the girl’s words and expressions, and of her semi-awakening in the presence of Warren thingy.
Warren. Yes, now there was a challenge. Surely, he couldn’t be the only person capable of provoking a reaction. I felt – not jealousy, surely? – more a small challenge to my male pride. No, I thought, it can’t be just you, young man, who can make that tiny light come on in her eyes.
I smiled to myself as I fantasised briefly about how one might go about searching for the switch.
Stacey (#ulink_9b571820-9b57-513b-9bf1-3ccae8cda533)
My dad always said it was my fault. My size, I mean. But he didn’t understand – you only got to look at my mum to know I can’t help it. She’s big too – not as big as what I am, but she’s big. No one understands what it’s like: even my mum tells me not to moan about it. But it’s the aching – I ache so much all the time. That’s the worst bit – the aching. It’s the weight on my joints, the doctor says. They just ain’t meant to carry that much around. He says I’ve got arthritis now, too. Well, thanks, great. That’s all I need. And the last time I saw him he said I was lucky not to have diabetes. Lucky? What does he know? I asked him about them new patches I’ve read about that you stick on your arm and sniff and then you don’t wanna eat. He just had this kind of smirk on his face and said I’m being stupid again. No – not stupid. What was it he said? Gullible. He said I was being gullible again. And he says the arthritis won’t go unless I lose some weight – and there’s only one way to do that, he says, and just hands me out another diet sheet.
I’ve been overweight my entire life. There ain’t never been a time when I wasn’t fat. I can prove that, too. My mum says I’m remembering it wrong, but if I show her the pictures she can see I’m right. She doesn’t like to know that, see, because I think she overfed me, because it made her feel good when I ate so much. But when I show her the pictures now I can see in her eyes they shock her. There ain’t that many of course. Dad never bothered much with pictures. But that one of us on the beach at Bognor: I’m next to my mum and we’ve both got swimsuits on and you can just see how fat I am. I look more like her sister than a daughter. I’m as big as she is but half her height. It’s horrible. Why am I so fat? I don’t know.
I don’t behave like other fat people, I know that. I watch them and I see the way they move and the way they look. I’m not like that. It’s different for me. I think it’s an illness I have – I know I shouldn’t eat as much as I do, but it’s not just that. I’m trying some herbal supplement that I read about in the paper, and it said that some people react different to food than normal people; we don’t burn it off and our metabolisms don’t work right. These herbal things are going to regulate it. They cost a bit but I put in overtime last month at work and I got a bit saved so it’s OK. I didn’t tell the doctor because he’d just say I was being stupid again.
It may be genetics. That’s the other thing. They’re finding all these genes now, and my friend says they’ve found the fat gene and if they can take it out you won’t get fat any more, she read it in the paper. But I asked the doctor and he just laughed. He said I need to exercise more, but how can I exercise when it aches so much? Fucking useless he is.
Mum says I was a normal baby but then what does she mean by normal? I know I wasn’t normal when I was going to school, because I can remember going to buy school clothes. I must’ve been about seven or so and we had to get the clothes that was meant for twelve-year-olds. Mum didn’t know how much I minded the way the assistant looked at me. It’s only a tiny memory but I know how ashamed I felt.
And another memory is splitting my jeans. I was playing with my friends in the playground by the church and I was always ever so careful not to move about too quickly because I didn’t want to fall and rip my trousers. We was playing ‘it’ and I tried to touch one of the boys and I fell and, sure enough, I heard that horrible noise of the fabric ripping. Just giving up under the strain. I went home and found another pair but when I went to put them on they didn’t fit so I squeezed myself into them as best I could but my thighs was so large the crotch only came about halfway past my knees.
That old guy came to my checkout again today. That’s the fifth or sixth time running in about a week. Tried to chat to me – I knew he was but I pretended not to notice. I hope he ain’t one of those weird ones.
‘Hello, Stacey,’ he says, ‘how’s it going?’
‘S’all right,’ I says, trying not to look him in the eye. I didn’t want to encourage him, see, and also I could see Mr Chipstead hovering round Sheila’s till and I wanted to keep an eye on them. I just hoped the old bloke wasn’t going to bring up the bogof thing again. That’s four times he’s done it now. If I let on I know exactly what he’s talking about it’ll only encourage him, but if I go on pretending I don’t know what he means then he’s gonna go on saying it every time. Can’t win. Stupid, that’s what he must think I am.
‘S’cuse me,’ I says, before he could say no more, ‘Mr Chipstead!’
The old guy smiled a bit and turned round to look the way I was shouting. God, Mr C looked gorgeous: his arse looks so good in them navy trousers he wears for work, and you don’t often see it because it’s hidden under that long jacket of his, but he was leaning over Sheila’s till and you could see it under the suiting, all round and lovely. Two apples. Braeburns? No – more Pink Lady, although that don’t sound quite right for Mr C. Not that I can see the colour, of course, although, God knows, I imagine it often enough, but Pink Lady’s much too poofy for Mr C. All man, he is. Gala, maybe – that sounds good. A Gala arse, that’s what he’s got. I’ll write Crystal that in my next letter: she’ll enjoy that – she’s always on about great arses. Muscly, she likes them – what does she call it? Sinewy or something. I like them a bit rounder, myself
Anyway, he come over at last and the old guy was just stood looking at him.
‘Yes, Stacey?’ He’s got a gorgeous voice, too.
‘Can I go for lunch now, Mr Chipstead? Only I’m doing late shift and –’
‘Stacey, you don’t have to call me over for that, you know you don’t. Check it with Mrs Peters.’
‘Yes, but I never had my lunch break Tuesday and Mrs Peters said I should ask you about taking extra time today to make up.’
‘All right, Stacey. If Mrs Peters said so then that’s fine – go for lunch when you’ve finished this customer and I’ll send Janet over. Now get on with your work, this gentleman’s having to wait. You’ve got to get your speeds up, Stacey – I’ve told you this before.’
It’s funny but I don’t mind when he tells me off. I just mind when he don’t talk to me. Or when he talks to Sheila. I can’t stand that.
‘So, Stacey,’ the old guy says to me, ‘you’ve got your lunch break then. That’s good. Your manager – Mr Chipstead, isn’t it? – seems like a nice sort of chap.’
‘You said that last week.’
‘Did I?’
He looked pleased when he said that. I wondered for a moment if he was gay, but I don’t reckon he’s the type. Just happy that someone’s remembered something he’s said, if you ask me.
‘He’s all right.’
There was a bit of a pause while I checked the vegetable on the belt. Funny-looking thing it was, and I couldn’t find it in the idents for a bit. While I was looking he was watching me again, but I never let on I knew.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ he said.
‘Well, you can tell me what it is.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I meant – well, is there anything I can do for you – sort of – generally. You just looked a bit upset. When Mr Chipstead was here.’
‘Sweet potato,’ I said. ‘Found it.’
What a weird guy. One of those that fancies big women, as they call it. Really creepy. I wondered if I could call Mr C back to get rid of him, but there wasn’t really nothing I could put in words, just a feeling that he wasn’t coming to my till every time by chance. I was coming to dread it, really, when I saw him approaching with his little basket with four or five things in it. Why don’t he do a big weekly shop in a trolley? It wasn’t like he was short of the cash or nothing, you could tell that just by looking at him.
‘No, I meant – is there anything I can do to help, Stacey? I mean, if Mr Chipstead is worrying you about your speed. Perhaps I’ve been a bit slow in unpacking my basket or something. I always find you very efficient – would you like me to put in a word?’
I felt like telling him to mind his own fucking business, but I knew he was just the sort to complain about things and get me into trouble so I kept quiet. I finished off his basket and waited for him to pay.
‘Here you are, Stacey,’ he said. ‘Sorry to interfere – I was only trying to help, you know.’
I took a quick look up at him as he give me the money and I have to say I felt a bit mean then for not answering and all that. He was watching me with ever such a worried expression, and it didn’t seem so creepy after all – more like my mum looks when she knows I’m hurting and stuff. Maybe he really was just a friendly old guy who was a bit lonely.
‘S’all right,’ I said, and I smiled at him. Not so’s I was encouraging him or nothing – I wasn’t gonna thank him ’cos I never asked for his help, did I? – but the least he deserved was to be let off the hook. In any case, I thought I’d better keep on the right side of him – I didn’t want him going home and plotting something nasty. You never know with customers – they can be a dodgy lot if you ain’t careful.
Ben (#ulink_fe521593-e76b-55df-aa24-a28c45b8ea77)
Sometimes I can see life in the simplest possible terms, and I feel as if I’ve discovered the answer to everything, and then at other times I’m completely at sea and out of control. It’s scary, and I’m not sure which is true. It started with all the stuff we had at school about the uncertainty principle – at first I didn’t bother to take it in much, just wrote it all down so I could learn it for the exams, but when I really started thinking about it I could see that it made life impossible. If nothing really exists – or at least not in a decided form, kind of thing – until you observe it, then surely nothing exists at all? Or at least it’s as good as if it didn’t. And if things change just through you looking at them, then nothing I see, hear or feel has any reality, because it’s reacting to me observing it. So what I see is unreal, and what I don’t see doesn’t exist. It makes me feel quite frightened at times, and it’s not easy for me to talk to anyone about it, because when I’m in the really bad moods then I have to be by myself so that I don’t change anything by communicating with it.
Even on a mundane level it affects the way I look at things. It’s like Mum and Dad getting so brittle with each other: I’m never sure how much of that is due to my watching them. Were they easier with each other when Sally and I were little, or was it just that I wasn’t consciously judging them then? A while ago I’d have talked to Mum about feeling so strange, but she always seems so busy with her work now, and when she isn’t she’s either lying down in her bedroom or rushing about the house being tense. Or she gets into those weird moods when she’s really hyper. Does things like hovering about downstairs for the post in the mornings as if she’s waiting for something. She always says it’s just a magazine or a catalogue she’s expecting, but she goes all girly and happy for a bit and buys us things and gives us treats. Sally and I used to wonder if she was having an affair, but it doesn’t seem like that, somehow. Anyway, I can’t see it.
Trouble is, thinking about what objectively exists makes me want to stop working, because in a way everything I’m doing is a waste of time. When I’m sitting there at school it all feels really pointless because I’m observing it and changing it. And all the books and theories and mathematical formulae and religions and portents are worthless. I’m not sure if it makes me want to commit suicide or live for ever. Who was it said there was only one real philosophical question – whether to kill yourself or not?
It’s not that I’m always gloomy – more confused. Sometimes it’s like I’ve discovered the key to everything and it feels really good, because if nothing has any true reality then nothing matters, so there’s no need to get upset about anything or to hurt about the way things are. But I still don’t know what I’m going to do about these thoughts. I feel rather like I’ve been given a very important message to deliver but they’ve forgotten to address the envelope.
I started to talk to Holly about it today in the dining hall, but I didn’t get very far. I thought it might help if I could explain it to someone else and get it out of my head for a bit, but I could see she didn’t understand how important all this was. She was looking really cute, with her hair up in one of those grippy things – and she kept smiling back at me as I tried to explain.
‘When you measure something,’ I said, having decided I should start from basics – Holly’s doing languages for her A-levels, and science has never been one of her strong points – ‘you’re never sure if your answer is right. Never. That’s why it’s called the uncertainty principle.’
‘Well, obviously you can never predict things,’ she said, dipping her head to look down at her hot chocolate. She tipped a sachet of sugar into the plastic cup and stirred it. ‘It doesn’t take a scientist to tell me that.’
‘No, it’s not exactly that,’ I went on. ‘It’s more that – oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that stuffs already sweetened: it’ll be disgusting – no, it’s not so much that we don’t know how atoms and particles and things are going to behave when we look at them, it’s more that we don’t even know the rules. I mean, even if we could measure things without affecting them, we’re probably judging them by all the wrong rules. Common sense doesn’t really work any more, at least not once you try to look at both quantum and macroscopic physics at once. They just don’t gel, you see. And it makes my life – all of our lives – pointless.’
She had that sweet, patient smile on her face again, and the weird thing was that it made her look as if she understood far more about all this stuff than I did, while at the same time I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t got a clue what I was on about. Holly always does that to me – whatever I’m trying to tell her she always seems to be one jump ahead, even though she doesn’t really know a thing about quantum mechanics.
She put one elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. ‘I don’t see that at all,’ she said, still smiling and pretending to be interested. ‘Of course your life isn’t pointless, Ben. Try and explain.’
‘I’m trying to tell you something really important here, and you’ve got that “let’s humour Ben” look on your face. Forget it, Hol.’
‘No, go on. Don’t be so touchy. I will try to understand, I promise.’
‘It’s really simple – but it frightens me. I just feel sometimes that everything round me is unreal because I can’t look at it without changing it. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say.’
‘How’s your dad, by the way?’
‘My dad?’
