Losing It. Jane Asher

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ