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150
Wives tend to believe that their husbands are infinitely resourceful and versatile. Even husbands who
can hardly drive a nail in straight are supposed to be born electricians, carpenters, plumbers and mechanics.
When lights fuse, furniture gets rickety, pipes get clogged, or vacuum cleaners fail to operate, wives
automatically assume that their husbands will somehow put things right. The worst thing about the do-it-
yourself game is that sometimes husbands live under the delusion that they can do anything even when they
have been repeatedly proved wrong. It is a question of pride as much as anything else.
(Extract from "Developing Skills" by L. G.Alexander)
SHOPPING FOR FOOD
Text Sweet Sixteen
Sixteen soft pink blankets fold inwards over sixteen soft warm smiling babies. Sixteen dark-haired young
mothers meet their sixteen babies' soft smiling mouths in a kiss.
Naomi looks round to see the cluster of other mothers, like herself, mesmerised by Granada TV Rental's
windows*. The cluster breaks, and its various components span out across the cool maible floor.
* Granada TV Rental — the name of a supermarket.
Lucy strains to stand up in her pushchair. Naomi eases her out of the canvas straps and settles her on the
red seat of the silver trolley. She pauses momentarily, to decide which is to be the first aisle of the journey;
should she start with soft drinks, vegetables, frozen foods, tins — she decides on fruit juice.
As they wheel past the rack of special-offer Mars bars, Naomi gently deflects Lucy's outstreched hand,
her thumb briefly stroking the soft palm of Lucy's hand. I could do the shopping with my eyes shut, thinks
Naomi, once a week for how many weeks, everything always in the same place. She turns the trolley to the
right, to the fridge where the pineapple juice cartons — she stops. The open maw of the fridge gapes. It is
empty. Ah well. Perhaps they have run out of cartons of fmit juice.
She decides to do dairy products next; cream, butter, some yoghurt — but instead, on the racks where the
dairy products used to be, she finds pizzas, steak and kidney pies
in transparent wrappings, and further on
packets of frozen raspberries. Something is wrong. She begins to collect, feeling uneasy that it isn't in the
order of her choice, worried that if she leaves things now to go on to another aisle, they will have
disappeared when she gets back.
She wheels on, to where she expects to find the vegetable racks:
the net bags of apples, avocados. But
instead there are long spaghetti packets, rice, curled pasta. Again she collects, panic beginning to rise. She
mustn't show it to Lucy, who is happy being wheeled at such sightseeing speed.
Naomi makes confidently for the cold meat counter; it is dark, piled up with towers of soft toilet paper;
the plastic box where scraps of meat were sold cheaply, the ends of cuts, is upside down, empty. For the first
time she notices the other women. They walk fast, their heads slightly bent, cradling highpiled baskets,
anxiety on their faces, grabbing cereals, bread, soap powders, cleansers, hurrying past pensioners, running,
running.
Lucy now has a fist in her. mouth, enjoying the game.
Naomi speeds up to join the pace, taking what she can wherever she can, until she arrives at the back of
the floor space, at the point where the soft drinks used to be. Naomi gasps. The once smooth space is now a
raw gash, copper cables twisting like thick muscle fibre, clinging to the broken brick and plaster gaps in the
walls.
Naomi hears a voice saying. Nothing is where it was. Lucy giggles and she realises that she has spoken
out loud. She looks round. No one seems to have heard her. They are all too busy. Naomi looks down at the
trolley. It is full of everything she has meant to buy, but none of it is in the right order.
Naomi wheels the trolley slowly towards the cash tills. Lucy, sensitive to the change in pace, stops
giggling; she is now pale and still. Naomi joins a queue at a cash till, watching the other women.
Naomi stands behind a woman who fumbles for her cheque book. Naomi watches paper bags, plastic
carriers, boxes and baskets flash between the tills and the plate glass window.
Naomi's turn comes. She lifts a bottle of lemon and lime out of the trolley. The outside is sticky. Naomi
moves her index and second fingers to a dry part of the bottle, her hand slips, the bottle falls, its soft edge
knocks against the rim of the conveyor belt and bursts.
Thick, bright green liquid squirts luminously back into the trolley, over tins of tuna fish. Lucy claps her
hands in delight, and reaching into the trolley, she lifts a packet of white flour and drops it with a dull thud
on the floor. A white cloud powders the feet of the women. Lucy giggles. Naomi feels a cloud of answering
laughter rise in her, tries to keep it down, looks up and catches the eye of the woman queuing behind her.