Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  She parked Selma in a chair by the Ten Pence a Ride plastic camel and queued up at the check-out. Looking at her watch she saw that the taxi would already be waiting, so when it was her turn she didn’t bother to pack her shopping but threw the tins and packages willy nilly back into the trolley. Picking up Selma again on the way out she had to push herself forward to stop the automatic doors clamping the walking-frame. The taxi was waiting outside, its meter running, and the driver stood by impatiently while Amelia loaded her shopping into the boot.

  ‘You know, I’d love some chocolates. Did we get any?’ Selma asked from her seat in the front.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you be so good as to help me out?’ Selma asked the driver. Then she tried to turn round towards Amelia. ‘I won’t be a moment darling.’ She grabbed on to the walking-frame parked by the car door, and began shuffling towards the store entrance.

  ‘I’ve got another pick-up in twenty minutes,’ the driver grumbled.

  ‘There isn’t time!’ Amelia called, her head appearing from the boot.

  Selma turned and looked at her incensed. ‘Really darling, don’t fuss. I’m just getting some sweets. I’ll get you some too.’ And helped through the doors by another shopper who shot Amelia a disapproving look, Selma disappeared inside.

  Ten minutes later the taxi driver invited Amelia to unload her shopping from his car. He drove off revving his engine, leaving Amelia to find another trolley before going off in search of Selma.

  She did not find her at ‘Pick’n Mix’ nor by ‘Chilled Produce, Dairy or Household Goods’. Surely no-one kidnapped old ladies? Was there a back entrance through which she could have wandered? Amelia hurried through the aisles finally reaching ‘Tobacco and Spirits’ at the back.

  ‘There you are, darling. We wondered where you could have got to.’ Selma was sitting at the tobacco counter attended by a young man in the red uniform of the supermarket staff, in her left hand was an unlit cigarette. She waved it in Amelia’s direction.

  ‘Yes, madam.’ The young man with a sparse moustache nestling amongst his spots, made the ‘madam’ sound like an insult. ‘To leave Granny like this. She was in quite a state when I found her I can tell you.’

  Selma took a poor view normally of people other than Amelia calling her ‘Granny’, but today she joined the young man in looking reproachfully at Amelia.

  Then with a pointed ‘You take care now’ to Selma, the assistant was off.

  Selma smiled fondly after him. ‘What a dear little man,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t smoke,’ Amelia said coldly.

  ‘Of course I smoke.’ Selma looked at Amelia as if she thought she had gone quite mad. ‘But not in here, apparently you’re not allowed to. Cullen’s never had silly rules like that.’

  Amelia narrowed her eyes at her grandmother but felt it would be unsporting to point out that Selma hadn’t smoked since 1959, the year Amelia was born in fact. Instead, she helped Selma up and again manoeuvred her back out on to the pavement.

  ‘Excuse me madam, do you possess a receipt for these goods?’

  Amelia looked up to meet the pebble stare of a middle-aged man in a black leather jacket. He flashed an ID in front of her face.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Then her brow cleared and she smiled. ‘Oh I see, you think that because I walked out from the shop without going through the check-out …’ The man crossed arms shaped like legs of lamb, heavy at the top, narrow little tubes at the bottom, and pushed his chin out. Amelia stopped smiling. ‘What I’m trying to say is that I paid once but then I lost my grandmother who had gone back in to buy some sweets …’

  ‘Where is the car, darling? I’m feeling rather tired,’ Selma said in a small voice.

  ‘Just show me the receipt, madam, would you? Then you’ll be free to go.’

  ‘The receipt.’ Amelia riffled through her handbag.

  ‘A credit card receipt or check stub will do,’ the man said, scenting blood.

  Amelia knelt down and tipped the contents of her bag on the pavement: house-keys, tampax, lipstick, brush, a photo of Gerald.

  ‘It isn’t there, is it madam?’

  ‘You don’t have to sound so bloody pleased about it,’ Amelia snapped, as she caught sight of Selma’s white face. She began emptying the trolley hoping the receipt would be hiding somewhere amongst the mound of groceries. In the end her shopping was all around her on the pavement but there was still no sign of the receipt.

  ‘If you would be so good as to come with me now, madam.’ It seemed hard for the man to hide his satisfaction and Amelia wondered when she was last called ‘madam’ by someone not intent on crushing her.

  I definitely shouldn’t have sworn at him, Amelia thought as he remained with his arms folded across his chest while she re-loaded the trolley. When she had finished, he grabbed the handle and began pushing it towards the shop with one hand, the other he kept at Amelia’s elbow.

  ‘I assure you, I have paid.’ Amelia stopped by the doors. ‘Just ask the check-out girl.’

  ‘Which check-out would that be?’

  ‘How the he … How should I know?’ Amelia said resignedly.

  The man gave her a little nudge through the door, then kept it open for Selma who stopped halfway inside, blocking the entrance. ‘Why are we going in here?’ she asked.

  ‘It seems your … granddaughter is it, left the shop without paying.’

  ‘Amelia? Nonsense.’

  The man ignored her and marched Amelia to the supervisor’s desk, pulpit-like in front of the vast picture windows of the store. Picking up the intercom he announced, ‘If any member of staff remembers taking money from this lady, could he or she proceed to the manager’s office.’

  ‘Can someone please tell me what’s happening.’ Selma, her face grey and pinched, wobbled on her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry but I really must get my grandmother home,’ Amelia said.

  The man looked from Selma to Amelia. ‘I’ll get the police to drive her. She can wait in the office with you until they come, there’s a seat there.’

  As she was marched through the shop, at a pace slow enough for Selma to keep up with, Amelia felt the looks of the other shoppers: hostile, embarrassed, amused. She didn’t look away but returned their gaze, stony-faced. Suddenly overcome with loathing for every one of her fellow men, she felt sure it was moments like these that made people fire machine-guns into crowded places.

  ‘Now I’ve seen it all,’ an outraged voice declared. It was Selma’s friend from the tobacco counter. ‘That woman is not fit to look after a cat.’

  The police arrived at the small upstairs office and Selma was taken home by a sympathetic policewoman. No-one turned up to say that they had taken Amelia’s money. The policeman perched on the manager’s desk.

  ‘Now are you sure you didn’t just think you had paid? It can’t be easy with the old lady to keep an eye on as well.’

  ‘I didn’t, and it isn’t,’ Amelia said tiredly.

  She took the bus home. The girl at check-out number five remembered Amelia paying, but she had been at lunch when the store detective made his announcement. ‘Lucky the supervisor asked me,’ the girl said with a pleased smile, helping to pack Amelia’s groceries in plastic carriers.

  ‘Keep the receipt next time,’ the policeman called cheerfully.

  Amelia had wandered out from the shop, slouching, leaving a trail of multicoloured ice-cream dripping from the air-hole of one of the bags. As she hurled it into the Victorian reproduction rubbish-bin by the bus-stop, she wanted to sit down on the cobbled pavement and scream, give all the shoppers something worth gawping at as she was carried off to a nice, peaceful asylum. She stood there, fists clenched, mouth open and ready to howl. Nothing happened. A nervous breakdown, she thought, obviously didn’t come cheap. Then the bus arrived.

  Back home, Selma was watching the World Cup. She sat leaning back in the armchair, her bad foot stretched out in front of her. In her hand was a lit cigarette ti
pped with a long snout of ashes. As she turned to greet Amelia, the ashes crumbled on to the floor.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, taking Amelia’s hand when Luciano Pavarotti began to sing at the end of the transmission. As the last notes of ‘Nessun Dorma’ faded she sighed, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘Rugby might be the game for gentlemen, but the music isn’t half as good.’

  In the night, Amelia woke from a dream where Gerald had insisted they light a fire although it was a hot summer’s day. She forced heavy eyelids open and sat up, sniffing the stale bedroom air into which flowed the raw smell of burning. She threw off the duvet and ran from the room. On the landing the smell got stronger and as she hurried along, her bare feet thudding against the worn, green carpet, a broken veil of smoke floated towards her from Selma’s room.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘I won’t keep you a moment Alan,’ Dagmar called anxiously from the bathroom. He was taking her to the best restaurant in Devon and now she was making them late. Alan abhorred unpunctuality. Dagmar did not know him well, but she did know that, so she had been sitting waiting in the armchair by the window a good ten minutes before he was due.

  She had dressed with even more care than usual: was there not a flavour of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ about the black lace dress? It would look lovely on Amelia, she thought with an irritated sigh as she slipped it off. She brought out a blue check suit. The sort of suit that turned her into just another middle-aged woman, a background person past whom the indifferent eyes of shop assistants and waiters swept on the way to something worth while. She chucked it on the bed.

  Finally she had appeared in the sitting room wearing a translucent cornflower-blue skirt that billowed round her ankles when she walked, and a bright yellow blouse. Alan was fond of Matisse. Lounging in the emerald-green armchair, she thought she’d remind him of one of the painter’s languid ladies reclining.

  While she had waited, craning her neck to see if his car had arrived in the street below, she felt a smell. Not a strong smell, more a faint discord mingling with the rose and lily of the valley of her scent. Tilting her head, sniffing the air like a setter scenting a bird, she decided it must be her shirt. She wasn’t absolutely sure it had been to the cleaners. Even if it had been they seemed to throw everything in together these days, bundles of stained trousers, dirty macs and fine silk blouses, all into those great troughs by the counter. She looked at her watch and hurried off to her bedroom, tearing off the shirt and pulling one she didn’t like quite as much off its hanger. Nothing was going to be allowed to spoil her evening. She was going to be as pristine as a library book, just unboxed.

  The door bell rang as she buttoned the last button. ‘Come in.’ She had flung the door open. ‘Nervous pee.’ She flashed Alan an apologetic smile as she dashed off to the bathroom.

  ‘I won’t keep you a moment Alan,’ she called again as she washed her hands and straightened her skirt, checking her face in the mirror. Parting her lips in a fake smile to check there were no pink lipstick smears on her teeth, she picked a comb off the shelf. It slipped from her fingers, landing on the floor behind the basin. ‘Bugger,’ she murmured softly to herself as she bent down groping for the comb.

  ‘I’m coming,’ she called again, but her hands had begun to shake and her heart thumped hard; she feared the undersides of things, the unseen surfaces, like others feared a dark cellar. Her fingers touched the plastic of the comb and she pulled it out between her forefinger and thumb and put it under the tap, rinsing, soaping, and rinsing again. Then it was the turn of her hands. She washed them like a surgeon would before an operation, scrubbing between the fingers and high up on the wrists. The soap foamed round the shirt cuffs leaving transparent patches on the silk. Last she washed her yellow and white metal watch in case it too had rubbed against the back of the basin. When she dried it the strap left little grey oxidization marks on the pale-yellow towel.

  ‘There you are. I sure hope they’ll keep that table.’ Alan, amiable normally to the point of placidity, frowned at Dagmar as she draped a flowery chiffon shawl round her shoulders.

  Dagmar hurried down the stairs behind him, her chafed hands stinging from the hot water. She really would have to stop all this nonsense she told herself sternly. She smiled up at Alan as he held the car door open. I won’t waste you, she thought. Not you.

  As they drove out of town, she chatted ceaselessly, drowning her lurking fears in great rivers of words. Now and then she glanced sideways at Alan to make sure she still amused him.

  The restaurant was small and the crowded tables so close that, to sit down, Dagmar had to slide her bottom along the top of the next door table. The smell of cooking food, grilled and sautéed, steeped in garlic mingled with tobacco fumes in a warm haze above the rustic oak furniture. On each table stood a vase of pinks and lavender and a Dartington glass candle stick with a pink candle.

  ‘Hey, not bad.’ Alan reached across the table for Dagmar’s hand. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you back there. I suppose I’ve got something of an obsession with punctuality.’

  I wish people wouldn’t use that word ‘obsession’ so lightly, Dagmar thought as she smiled back, giving Alan’s hand a little squeeze. When her friend Claudia didn’t care to leave her warm bed on a raw Monday morning, she suffered from exhaustion. When Penny had a weeping attack after three weeks of building works at her house, she suffered depression. What did Alan know about obsession, the tiger that gripped Dagmar between its claws day and night even in her dreams.

  ‘I do understand,’ she lied easily. ‘There’s nothing more irritating than being kept waiting.’ She warmed to the subject. ‘I mean it’s a kind of arrogance, assuming that other people’s time is less precious than one’s own.’

  ‘Now that’s exactly it!’ Alan emphasized his agreement, banging his fist on the table. ‘And Imogen, my ex-wife, she never saw that, she was just late all the time.’ He scanned the menu. ‘The snails here come recommended.’

  Dagmar, who disliked snails, said she’d love to try some. Her cheeks glowed and her laugh, as she arched her long white neck, was a little loud.

  ‘If you prefer,’ the waitress said at her elbow, ‘we do a mock escargot.’

  ‘I don’t think I like the sound of that.’ Dagmar laughed again. ‘How is your mock turtle?’

  The waitress registered polite confusion.

  ‘Now don’t tell me you’re a fan of Alice too?’ Alan leant across the table.

  ‘But of course,’ Dagmar lied. She had always been uncomfortable with Alice in Wonderland.

  Alan talked about his favourite writers and Dagmar followed like a practised dancing partner. He thinks I’m wonderful, she thought jubilantly. Her next thought, snapping at the heels of the first, was: Dear God, let it last, let me stay in control.

  ‘You’d love the Cape.’ Alan pushed his plate away, and leant back in his chair contentedly. ‘My home is pretty small, but it’s in a real nice part of town, all clapboard and wisteria.’

  Dagmar had made sure to place her handbag on a shiny, stain-free part of the floor and now the waitress coming to clear the plates caught her foot on the strap. Losing her balance for a moment she put her other foot flat on to Dagmar’s bag. As Alan spoke of his home town Dagmar stared at the brown mark on the toe-cap of the waitress’s sturdy shoe.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go to the States, especially New England.’ Dagmar dragged her gaze from the floor, looking up at Alan with an uneven smile.

  ‘Christmas back home is glorious,’ Alan said. ‘Snowdrifts like candy floss, coloured lights on the trees in the yard …’

  The girl could have stepped in something. There was enough dogmess on the quaint streets outside the restaurant to render it a faeces minefield. Dagmar nodded and smiled across the table as her thoughts rampaged. It was like the test of coordination Robert had set her when they were children, rubbing your tummy with one hand while you patted your head with the other. She would smile and talk while all the time her mind
was engaged in a quite different dialogue.

  ‘I’ve always loved a white Christmas,’ she said, but the constant performing of the trick made her weary. She could almost feel her mind being drained of sparkle and enthusiasm, leaving her conversation stale. She tried hard to plug the leak.

  ‘One year when I was a little girl in Sweden during the war, we had what we call a real Wolves’ Winter …’ Her voice trailed off as she kept sneaking glances at the floor, checking the bag for marks. She thought she could see a tiny smear by the clasp. ‘It was Christmas …’ she began again but the gloss had worn off her story like glitter off an old bauble. She had wanted to tell Alan about the huge Christmas tree her Jewish grandparents insisted on decorating so that she would not feel left out from the fun of her friends. She wanted to tell him of the night when she had crept up on the deep window-sill and peeked through a gap in the black-out curtain at the snowdrifts glistening in the starlight. By the time Selma came and led her away, she had decided that God must be rather careless to let all that light through the black sky.

  But she said nothing of this to Alan. Instead she picked up the bag from the floor, searching the tan leather for dirt whilst pretending to have difficulties with the clasp. ‘Got something in my eye.’ She brought a powder compact out and pulled at her eyelid.

  Alan chatted on but after a while his conversation too grew less animated. They finished their pears in port wine sauce with the odd routine sentence interrupting their eating.

  ‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ Alan put his hand over hers. ‘I’ll take you straight home.’

  Back in her flat, Dagmar tilted her face up for a good night peck on the cheek, and closed the door behind him. She stood for a moment, her back against the door, thinking of how the charm had been squeezed from their evening by that great, spreading tumour of anxiety. With a little moan of distress she held the handbag up to her face. Then she shook it hard, tipping its contents on the floor, before running white-faced into the kitchen, smashing the bag into the bin, kicking the bin lid shut.