While he wasn’t exactly whooping for joy inside his head at being back here, he did feel a tinge of excitement mixed in with the trepidation. The local farm shops he used provided excellent quality meat, fresh produce and a few extras, but if he wanted something a little more exotic, he was out of luck. And he’d been hankering for Thai green curry for months now. He had all the right herbs and spices. The only thing missing was fish sauce, and his last bottle had run out almost a year ago. And the more he’d thought about it, the more Thai green curry had been all he’d been able to think about.
His plan was simple: three easy steps. A few techniques from the book combined with a bit of stern self-talk should power him through it. It wasn’t as if he was trying to do a full shop, cramming a trolley with items and staying inside the supermarket for up to an hour. Just one bottle of fish sauce. Five minutes, in and out. He could manage that.
Because what was he going to do if he couldn’t? If he couldn’t turn the tide? Live his life like a hermit, growing older and grizzlier and more eccentric in his windswept little cottage on the moor?
Up until now, he hadn’t thought much about the future, not long-term, anyway. Not in the sense of years and decades instead of days and months. But listening to Anna talk about her future, full of pages yet unwritten, had made him think about his own.
When he imagined the book of his life, he couldn’t see blank pages ready for the touch of a pen. It was slammed shut. Locked. Hidden away in a dusty drawer and forgotten about. It made him feel like a coward.
So here he was. Day one. Step one. He had to do it.
His pulse kicked up a notch just thinking about it, then settled into a steady trot, but he didn’t let it deter him. He took a deep breath and reached for the car door handle.
The first half of the walk across the car park was okay. He used his imagination to paint over the top of what was there and turn it into a place that held no fear for him. The low-budget shrubs and spindly trees between the rows of vehicles became gorse and bracken. Scattered cars among the empty spaces became weather-hewn boulders. The sound of the traffic, only twenty feet away on the main road that ran past the supermarket,became the rushing of the wind between the rocky tors of the moor.
However, as he got closer to the store, it became harder and harder to keep the images in place. It was the noises that really threw him: trolley wheels rattling, car doors slamming, bored children whining from their metal carts. He wasn’t used to it anymore.
By the time he got to the entrance, not so much a door but a large rectangular hole, he needed to stop, close his eyes, and breathe. Other shoppers wandered past him; he could feel the breeze from their movement, but he tried to ignore them, concentrating instead on counting to three as he breathed.In, two, three… Out, two, three…
He opened his eyes, keeping the rhythm going in his head. He was on the edge of the cliff of his panic now. This was what he was supposed to be doing, wasn’t it? Pushing himself, bringing himself closer to the edge than was comfortable without toppling over it.
He’d been keeping his focus blurred, trained on nothing in particular, but now he lifted his head and chose something random to home in on – a display stand, full of DVDs of last summer’s blockbuster action hit. He counted the slots, the individual cases, and when his head was full of numbers instead of the whispering panic, he began to move towards it. It felt as if he was edging his way along a tightrope, strung from the edge of his cliff towards the horizon, suspended over thin air.
What must have been only a few seconds later, he reached out to grip the cardboard edge of the stand. He was teetering on his cliff again now, so close to plummeting over the edge.Even though his eyes were fixed on the DVD display, all of his senses seemed hyper-sharp. He could hear the trolley wheels rumbling in the next aisle. His skin prickled and his breath caught in his throat. Even though the aisles were almost empty, just a few determined early birds come to get their shopping before the morning rush, he felt as if he was in the midst of a jam-packed, crowded city.
On his cliff, he could feel air, cold and beckoning, beneath his toes. He could sense pebbles and scree skittering down the face of the rocks as the cliff below them started to crumble.
Push through, he told himself.It’s a supermarket, for God’s sake, full of carrots and celery, currant buns and tins of soup, not a war zone. Keep going. Just keep walking. Get what you need.
He put the DVD back, fumbling to get it into the cardboard slot, and then made his way to the end of the aisle at the back of the shop. From there, he moved along the ends of the rows, stepping stone to stepping stone, scanning the lengths of the shelves for a hint of any Asian foodstuffs – coconut milk, noodles, dark shiny bottles of soy sauce – but he couldn’t see anything like it. When he got to the place he’d always found them before, the shelf was full of baked beans and pots of instant noodles. It seemed as if someone had moved around every single flipping thing in the supermarket just to confound him.
He stared at a can of spaghetti hoops with miniature frankfurters, and his hand shot out to grip the shelf, squeezing it so hard the metal edges dug into his fingers.
Focus, Brody. Focus.
He couldn’t even pick out single items on the shelves now.All the colours and shapes were blurring together. He stumbled blindly down one aisle and into the next, only pausing when his chest felt so tight that he had to stand still to draw breath. By some bizarre, God-given stroke of luck, he found himself staring at a small glass bottle full of sour brown liquid, a curving dragon emblazoned across the label.
Fish sauce.
He grabbed it off the shelf and hugged it to his chest, closing his eyes with sheer relief. He couldn’t imagine feeling any more triumphant than if he’d climbed Everest in a single leap. But just as he was about to open his eyes and head for the bank of tills at the front of the shop, there was an almighty crash behind him. The bottle slipped through his sweaty fingers, and he only just managed to catch it again before it smashed onto the floor.
‘Sorry, love,’ a woman said cheerily, from a few feet away. ‘These trolleys have a mind of their own!’ And she began picking up the cans of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts she’d just knocked off the shelf.
Brody hardly noticed her. He certainly didn’t respond. Everything around him was melting into itself, simultaneously shooting away and becoming distant while feeling so close his skin crawled and he was sure he would suffocate.
He turned and started running. He ran down the aisle towards the tills but didn’t stop when he got there. He just sprinted straight through, the bottle of fish sauce still clutched in his fist, and kept going towards the natural light and fresh air of the gaping entrance.
He was almost there when a security guard spun around to watch him.
‘He didn’t pay for that!’ a voice behind him yelled.
‘Hey!’ the security guard shouted and began to pound after him.
As he ran, Brody fumbled into his back pocket and pulled out a £20 note. He threw it in the direction of the security guard. ‘Sorry!’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘Can’t stop! Emergency.’
The perplexed guard bent down and scooped up the crumpled note, then stared after Brody. But Brody didn’t notice. He was too busy sprinting across the unforgiving tarmac of the car park, which seemed to be expanding and stretching, like distances did in nightmares when something was chasing you. All he could think about was getting back to his car, throwing himself inside and locking the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
