Plastic Baggage by Andrew Kirby
‘…the woman over the road was painting her front door green!’ I concluded, deadpan, just like Malcolm does in the meetings. Only this woman didn’t explode into laughter like we all do when Malcolm finally throws us the bone of a punch-line after one of his long, meandering anecdotes. This woman simply slumped in her seat and fiddled with her name badge; she wore the same vacant expression which she had when I asked her why they were still supplying plastic bags for people to carry their shopping.
‘I mean; how symbolic can you get? She was painting her front door green,’ I continued, now more badly injured wok than deadpan. I was desperate: thinking that perhaps the woman was so loaded up on tranquillisers that she couldn’t understand me.
‘Green with envy?’ I tried, starting to panic now; a bubbling saucepan of frustration.
Still no response from the woman. There was a long queue snaking back from the checkout and people were starting to voice their frustrations in that very English way – they were tutting and sighing. Mal’s an American and he does things differently. He makes people listen to him. He makes people understand his frustrations. Of course, he does it in a polite manner; much better than this underhand muttering that they do here.
‘Is there owt else?’ asked the woman at the checkout. I hadn’t been able to look at her face properly ever since I saw that huge malingering mole on her cheek; I longed to tell her that they have treatments for ailments like that these days.
‘Do you want someone to help with your packing?’ she continued, squeakily, like you’d expect a mole to speak. Can moles make sounds? They’re deaf aren’t they, or is it dumb?
‘Of course not,’ I replied, trying to squeeze the eggs into a tiny space between the bottle of wine and the hair-dye at the top of my hemp shopping sack. I could see that my organic loaf had already been irreparably damaged by the combined weight of the chick peas and mung beans; buy the time I got home, no doubt a good fifty percent of the goods I’d only just bought would be unfit for use. I’d have to order a damn takeaway pizza again.
They should really get some of the science buffs on this problem – how do you carry all of your shopping when you don’t want to use so many plastic bags? Do you know what would be really handy for me; your number two environmentally conscious citizen of Sinton? One of those wheelie shopping cart things that old people push down to the shops every day… Only, I don’t think that it would fit in with my image.
‘And how’d you like to pay?’ asked the woman in that bored fashion that so many of her class default to. I dared myself to take another look at the woman. Although she was wearing a bulky fleece, you could still see a football-shaped outline down the front of it; she was probably pregnant, probably didn’t even know who the father was. Her mouth also looked as though it had been stuffed with something; she looked so weighed down with misery that her bottom lip could have been used as an alternative credit-card swipe. Do they not teach people-skills any more?
‘Hold your horses,’ I said. ‘What about my green points?’
The woman looked as though I’d asked her to go and perform surgery on her own mole. She blew out her cheeks in frustration, looked up into the air conditioning unit for inspiration and then finally called for the manager. I looked towards my fellow shoppers with a look which I hoped said something like: isn’t this awful service. We’re all in the same boat here. The old man directly behind me in the queue sneered back at me. There was no mistaking what his look said; he thought this was all my fault!
When Mal finally answered the phone – four times I’d let it ring and ring until it reached that awful answer phone message of his – I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer.
‘What is it, Dee?’ he said. I swear that there wasn’t the usual soothing tone to his voice. He sounded so abrupt, so cold.
I could hardly breathe. Sobs wracked through me like a hurricane. The car windows were starting to steam up too, in sympathy; little beads of condensation traced their tiny pathways of misery.
‘I’m a little busy now, Dee; if you can’t tell me what’s wrong, then I can’t do anything about it?’
Why was he being like this? Why did he not offer to drive to the car park, open the doors to this hellish carapace and set me free to dive into his arms? I realised that he didn’t, in fact, have any idea that I was in the shopping centre car park, and even less that I would be using a gas guzzler, but he loved me for me, didn’t he? It wasn’t just about being green, was it?
‘They… they threw me out of the super… supermarket,’ I stammered, through hiccupy sobs and strange wheezing from my throat.
‘Excellent,’ said Mal. ‘Were you demonstrating? That’ll teach the bast…’
‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘I was trying to make a point about plastic bags.’
‘Where are you now?’ asked Mal, suddenly all business.
I traced my fingers against the soft leather of the passenger seat and toyed with the idea of telling the truth.
‘Are you at the cop shop?’ asked Mal. I could almost hear the cogs and wheels of his mind ticking and whirring. If I was in the police station, he’d be able to sell my story to the papers; the one woman crusade against the evils of capitalism.
‘No,’ I breathed. ‘I’m hiding in the car park. Come get me.’
‘I can’t, darling… I’m… I’m in the middle of an important demonstration. Hang on… the line’s going bad. I can’t hear you… Dee? Hello? Hello?’
Funny thing was; I hadn’t heard anyone in the background before the line had been cut off. Maybe it had been one of those quiet protests; a protest against the noise of capitalism and the actions of the ‘ruiners’.
I sat in the belly of the beast for a while; every part of me aware of the awful oppression from the concrete, the screeching hatred of the shopping trolleys and the interminable tannoy announcements. When I finally regained control of myself, I fired up the car and drove back home.
I have to park at least two blocks away from the house now. It’s not because I don’t want people to see that I’m using a car, but because I think that her over the road would only go and make a big issue of it with Mal at one of the meetings. I need my car for work and for picking up the shopping; I don’t feel guilty about it, but Mal has this way of overlooking all reasonable argument and stumping you with these god-awful questions like: ‘what if everyone thought the same?’
So, like a martyr to the cause, I lug my hemp sacks through the streets, dreaming of my reward. I’ve seen his lithe body on that BBC documentary when they followed him about on his protest against the material they used in jeans, or the sweat-shop labour they use to make socks or something. Whatever; he was naked. He had these fantastically nimble legs. That was what I liked most about him; when he moved, you could see every sinew, every muscle at work. There was no fat on him at all.
As I turned into my little cul de sac, I began to slow my pace a little. I was out of breath and could feel my heart racing in the veins in my temples – that meant that my face had probably gone all red. I couldn’t let the neighbours see me like that. Anyway, slowing my pace meant that my arms began to hurt more. The hemp sacks were like dead weights. I could almost feel them trying to escape my grasp and crash to the floor. Then I’d be capering down the street after runaway oranges, diving down drains for escaped eggs and licking up the spilled wine.
I was so wrapped up in not dropping the sacks that I almost didn’t see Mal as he emerged from her opposite’s green front door. He was laughing in that easy way that suggested… I don’t know; complicity?
I sneaked behind a green wheelie bin and watched as she followed him out. They were both giggling away now, and I couldn’t help but think how stupid it made Mal look. He looked, frankly, ridiculous, as though he didn’t have a care in the world; as though he couldn’t care less that he’d just walked out into a world which was dying. When he leaned over to kiss that woman, I felt the egg break in my hand. I didn’t even know that I was holding it… I longed to shout something like: ‘having a green door does not necessarily make you a green person’, but I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to even speak to them any more. All that I wanted was to go and put the sprinkler on the twenty-four hour setting. I longed to switch on every single light in my house. I dreamed of chucking away all of the newspapers into the wrong bin. That’ll teach them.
ENDS
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet.