‘Thank goodness you became such an authority onButterfliesso very quickly,’ I said, sizing up a basket full of glossy blackberries.
His smile returned slowly, still more removed than before and not quite making it all the way to his eyes.‘I read it again on my Kindle last night when I couldn’t sleep.’
‘You couldn’t sleep?’ I replied with surprise.
Joe picked up a blackberry and rested it on his bottom lip, the forced distance in his eyes dissolving into something warmer.
‘Did you?’
‘How much for these?’ I asked the woman behind the stall, swallowing hard and reaching for a punnet of strawberries freshly picked and plump. They smelled so sweet and strong, I could almost taste them.
‘Four pounds for one, three for a tenner,’ she replied. ‘You can mix and match with the raspberries.’
I looked up and down her table, seeing nothing but a sea of strawberries.
‘But there aren’t any raspberries?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘They’re all gone.’
‘Just the strawberries then,’ I said politely. ‘Thanks.’
Was it any wonder people preferred the self-checkout at the supermarket? Sure, we’d regret it when the robots took over the world but that felt like a small price to pay to avoid interactions like this.
‘Let me,’ Joe said, cash already in his hand when I tried to stop him.
The woman slid the green cardboard punnet into a brown paper bag before handing it to me, openly gawping at Joe. Another thing you didn’t have to worry about at the self-checkout.
‘Thank you,’ I said as I hurriedly steered him out of danger. Two more seconds and he’d have gone the way of the raspberries. ‘I was going to ask if you wanted to play hook-a-duck but I’ll take strawberries instead.’
‘They’ve got hook-a-duck?’
I’d never seen someone get so excited so quickly.
‘Over there,’ I said, pointing past the stalls.
Behind the coconut shy and a truculent-looking pony I wouldn’t have gone near even if you paid me, was a round stall surrounded by people already one Pimm’s too many into their day, brandishing long sticks with metal hooks on the end, a lawsuit waiting to happen.
‘We’ve got to do it,’ Joe insisted, all his walls tumbling down as he grabbed my hand to drag me across the green. ‘I’m amazing at hook-a-duck.’
‘You’re amazing at putting a hook through a loop?’ I gasped in mock admiration. ‘Someone get me a fainting couch.’
‘You wait and see,’ he said as we approached the stall, a sea of little plastic ducks, yellow and pink, sailing around him in a circular trough full of water. ‘I’m the master.’
‘What’s the grand prize?’ I asked the man behind the ducks, keeping my stick safely below eye level when he handed it over.
‘Squishmallow or teddy bear,’ he replied before taking a drag off a vape pen. ‘Up top.’
I followed his pointing finger to find a half-bald teddy bear and a weepy stuffed walrus gazing down at me. The saddest Squishmallow in all the land.
‘I want that walrus,’ I said to Joe, a newfound determination in my hook-a-duck game. ‘Can you get three ducks?’
‘Don’t insult me.’ He was already leaning over the stall as far as was legally allowed, hook at the ready. ‘Whoever gets the most ducks, wins.’
‘You want the walrus too?’ I replied as I assumed position.
‘What I want isn’t up on that board.’
He looked over at me and grinned as his hook slipped through the loop on a neon pink duck and he raised it victoriously over his head. ‘I’ll tell you after I win. One down, two to go.’
