This is a verbal journey into not that much.
She was in meat. And so was I. Meat is the static region of the supermarket, the place where people tend to stand and stare. For it’s there they make their mind up what to have for dinner.
Once the mind’s made up the rest is easy, simple snatch and grab, but first there’s thinking to be done, and it is done in meat.
Our minds resemble railway systems. They follow certain routes and reach predictable conclusions. In other words, we all have recipes we know and trust and keep reverting to.
It’s easier than trying something new, and safer too. For me the fall-back dinner is Pork Bennett, which I once wrote about in detail on this page and which no reader ever can have made, for if they had they would have written me the most effusive note of thanks that ever was.
Pork Bennett is celestial.
But even things celestial can pall, so often in the meat section I’ll cast about for someone with a friendly face and ask for an idea, a dinner recipe, a meaty starting point from which to set out on a different railway line.
And it was as I cast about six weeks ago that she who haunts me now came into view.
She was a little stooped with age but held herself with dignity. She wore well-polished shoes, a skirt and coat, a headscarf. The whole ensemble spoke of self-respect, but not of affluence.
Her face was narrow, her nose quite sharp. Her supermarket basket held a box of tea-bags - budget brand - and nothing else. She stood before the shelves of pork and lamb, and one look at her face dissuaded me from speaking.
For there was fire behind her eyes. She wasn’t happy.
And then she shook her head and spoke. Not addressing me or anyone else, but rather giving vent to what she thought and felt, as if the stuff within her was too fierce to stay within. Indeed, it’s possible she didn’t know she spoke out loud.
She said three words, and they emerged with such intensity I hear them still. ‘Scandalous prices. Scandalous.’
(The full stop in the middle’s mine. I realise that the first two words do not quite form a sentence, but they’re a heart-felt sentiment. And then when she repeated scandalous, the isolation of the word was audible.)
And that was that. She didn’t speak again. Rather she turned away and shook her head once more and headed to a different section of the store and I was left before the racks of meat still undecided what to have for dinner but with a sense of having glimpsed the molten core of someone else’s life.
Here was a woman in, I’d guess, her early seventies. The clothes she wore announced that she had played the game, been faithful to the social rules, in expectation and belief it was the proper thing to do. But now society had not kept faith with her, or so she felt, because, despite a life of diligence and keeping up appearances and staying out of debt and misery, a meal of chops was now a luxury.
She called it scandalous. The word reflects a sense of anger and betrayal. And underneath it all a sense of fear.
A fear of growing old and being shunted to one side, in a society whose prices and whose standards she deplored and whose transactions she no longer understood.
I wanted to chase after and console her… but what was there to say? Hers was, it seemed to me, an existential grief, beyond the reach of words.
I haven’t seen her since.
She haunts me still.
Perhaps these words will prove an exorcism.
Perhaps they won’t.
