I never thought something significant would happen to me in the condiments section of the local supermarket. But that’s where I am, just reaching for a jar of piccalilli, when a voice inside whispers for me to take it. Not to put it in my basket with the bread and the bananas, but to put it in my handbag. To steal it. And it’s Dot’s voice, like a call across the years. Light as air, full of mischief. We used to get up to all sorts. Push and prod at things, at rules and shoulds and musts, just to see what might happen. She was the ringleader, but I was happy to be led. Glad of the excitement, after all those years of being told what to do and, more often, what not to, at school and at home.
Arthur was the kind who’d make up a rule if there wasn’t one in place already. Who’d draw a line just so he’d know where not to step. People used to say he would have made a good copper. I don’t know about that. He couldn’t even watch a crime drama if there was a bit of blood. But I knew what they meant. Upholding the law, and all that. Over the years, I suppose I became more like him in that respect. Couldn’t face the disapproval he’d show me if I did something slightly outside the rules. But he’s gone, now. And who’s going to notice one jar of piccalilli missing? Who’s going to suspect an old lady like me? I hold it for a minute, pretend I’m reading the label. It’s all a blur without my glasses but no one needs to know that.
And it’s just as I’m slipping it inside my bag that I see her. She’s come around the end of the aisle and she’s looking at me. She’s seen. Can’t be more than about sixteen, skinny and angular, her hair cut short like a boy’s, wearing that green fleece uniform. A name tag that reads ‘Erin’. I’ve seen her before on the checkout, scanning products and looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. Her look now is more curiosity than outrage. I meet her eye and she doesn’t look away, and I’m the first to break eye contact. I can’t take it out again now, can I? I’m hot, feel sweat prickling under my arms.
There’ll be a scene. A burly security guard with his hands on me, turning me around and asking me to step into an office. And then that weaselly manager who’s always lurking about. Kevin Chieveley. I can’t bear it. She walks towards me, still meeting my eyes. She smells of citrus fruit and something else. Buttered toast.
‘You can’t prove anything,’ I say.
She looks amused.
‘What do you want?’ I ask.
‘Me? I don’t want anything. I was looking for something.’
‘For what?’
‘Piccalilli.’
I almost laugh. In another life, one in which I’m not an old woman and she’s not such a young girl, I could see us being friends. Is she going to let me get away with this?
‘I want to put it back,’ I say. ‘I don’t know why I did it.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, and then she turns and disappears around the corner.
My heart is going like the clappers. I look around, but there’s no one else, and I take it out of my bag and put it back on the shelf. Is that it? Is it over? I spend longer than I need to walking up and down the aisles, because I don’t quite believe she isn’t going to pounce or reappear with her boss. But she doesn’t. When I get to the checkout, it’s her, and she smiles a bit stiffly at me.
‘Good day?’
‘Pardon?’ I ask.
‘Are you having a good day? You don’t have to answer. I’m just supposed to ask. Small talk, you know.’
‘Oh. Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean, no, not really. I’ve recently lost my husband.’
I’m offering it up as an excuse. Will she take it? She pushes the items I’ve chosen past the scanner, one by one. I could imagine being hypnotised by it. There’s a tattoo of a swallow on the inside of her wrist.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Do you need help with packing?’
‘No, I…’ I pull out the folded bags I carry in my shopping trolley, and she nods.
She doesn’t say anything else until I’m getting ready to go, and even then, she speaks so quietly I almost don’t hear her. ‘I’m finishing my shift in ten minutes, if you want to talk.’
I’m so surprised I just look at her for a minute. She’s a teenager but there’s something in her eyes that suggests she knows more about living than you’d expect.
‘Or not,’ she says. ‘It’s fine either way.’
What could she and I have in common, when she’s so near the start of her life and I’m so near the end of mine? What could we possibly find to talk about?
‘I need to get back,’ I say.
It’s a lie. There’s no one at home to care whether I get back in ten minutes or ten hours. She shrugs, like it’s nothing to her, and she must think it’s nothing to me, too, the way I reacted. But all the way home, I replay her words. To talk. To listen. I don’t know when someone last offered me that.
At home, Olly wants feeding. I open a pouch of the food he likes the most, fill his water bowl. Arthur used to give him all sorts but I’m trying to get him to like me more by offering his favourites. It’s not working. He still sits at the far end of the sofa, looking at me in my armchair like he’d rather I wasn’t there. I bend down to pat his head and he looks up from his bowl, his eyes doleful.
‘What is it, boy?’
I’ve started talking to him more, since it’s just been me. He puts his head on one side, the way people do when you tell them something sad, then goes back to eating. He hasn’t growled for a couple of days, though, and that’s something.
It must be the thought of Dot in the supermarket that has me standing on a chair in the spare bedroom pulling the photograph albums out. If I fell, if I ended up on the floor with a broken leg, how would anyone know I was there? Olly might bark a bit, once he was hungry. It’s a sobering thought that I could die here, alone, with no one to find me.
There they are, tucked away at the back, two albums in pretend leather, one blue and one red. Tissue paper crinkling inside. I don’t look at them until I’m sat in my armchair by the window, and when I open the first one I catch my breath. There she is. Dot.
It’s an image of me and her, Bill and Arthur, all of us looking a bit formal. Mother took it, if I remember correctly. It was one of the first dances we went to as a four and she suggested getting a photograph ‘for posterity’. Perhaps she thought that was going to be the night, that Bill was going to come home saying he’d proposed to Dot. She and I had dresses that pinched in at the waist and had full skirts. The photograph is in black and white, of course, but I remember that mine was pale blue and hers a lemon yellow. It was a little tight, that dress, and I never had much to eat before putting it on. I could have asked Mother to let it out a bit but I preferred to pretend I was that bit slimmer than I was.