I give up on the library at four.
Catch the 142 into town because my head’s too loud for the tram, and the bus is the longer ride. I get off at Piccadilly Gardens, walk nowhere in particular, end up standing in front of a Sainsbury’s Local at the bottom of Market Street with no shopping list and no reason to be there except thatinsideis better thanoutsidewhen the November dusk starts doing its thing.
Strip lights, a queue for the self-checkout, the smell of meal-deal sandwiches, and floor cleaner.
I grab a Red Bull—a tuna crunch. A packet of Discos because the meal deal doesn’t let you put a Red Bull with the crisps, and I’m not in the mood to negotiate the small print. Join the queue behind a woman with a trolley full of nappies.
The queue shuffles.
I look up.
Two places ahead of me. Navy coat. Dark hair curling at the collar because it’s damp from somewhere he’s been. Basket on his arm. His face stays hidden, but I’ve been mapping the back of that head for weeks.
Haldrey.
The strip lights flicker. The shelf of mince pies on my left goes slightly bright.
He hasn’t seen me. He’s looking at his phone, thumb doing the left-thumb thing, inwards, towards the palm, and his basket has in it: a bottle of white wine, a lemon, a bag of rocket, eggs, a baguette, and a packet of those dark-chocolate biscuits in the green box that people with clean kitchens buy. A shopping list from a life I have not been invited into.
Six weeks of mapping and I could draw that head with my eyes shut—the cowlick at the crown that won’t behave on a Friday morning, the way the hair sits damp against the nape when he’s combed it without a mirror, the mole under the left ear I’ve seen twice. I know the line of his shoulders in the navy coat and in the charcoal one. I know which one he reaches for if it’s going to rain. I know how he stands when he’s tired, weight on the left, which he’s doing now.
He has no idea I’m four feet behind him with a Red Bull. That’s the asymmetry. Not the flat, not the age, not the lemon.
Nappy woman moves forward. The person between us moves forward. Haldrey moves forward. He puts the basket on the self-checkout platform and starts scanning, unhurried. I am now four feet behind him in a Sainsbury’s Local on a Wednesday afternoon, holding a Red Bull and a tuna crunch and watching his left hand pass a lemon under the red line.
Don’t look up. Don’t look up. Don’t look up.
He looks up.
It takes half a second. His face cycles through recognition, alarm, and the shutter coming down into the studied arrangement that meanswe are strangers, we are strangers, we are strangers.
I do the same face, I hope. I may do a worse one.
He goes back to scanning. Bag. Card. The beep means paid. The woman on the nappies moves on. The machine ahead of him frees up, and he steps to it, and I track his movements, eyes only, because I am an eighteen-year-old boy who has been touchedby this man and I have no training for holding still in a strip-lit supermarket queue while he buys a lemon.
He picks up his carrier bag. Turns towards the door.
The walk past me is four steps long. He keeps that focus fixed forward. On the second step, his coat sleeve brushes mine. Wool on denim. A full second of contact and no acknowledgement. My skin electrifies, a reaction I’m grateful no one can witness.
He’s out the door. Gone into the damp.
I step up to the self-checkout. Scan the Red Bull. The machine saysunexpected item in bagging areaand I realise I’m holding the can, not on the platform, and my fingers are shaking, and I put the can down like it’s made of glass.
The woman on the next machine glances at me—moves on.
I pass the shelf where he was.
The biscuits are still there. Dark chocolate. Green box. Middle shelf, beside the shortbread.
I grab a packet before I can make it into a decision.
Pay for it at the kiosk with coins because apparently I am now the kind of person who panic-buys biscuits in order to have an emotional event in private.
The walk to the tram stop has a soundtrack: the rustle of the packet every time I breathe. I’ve shoved it into the inside pocket of my jacket because the outer pocket feels performative, and then my hand goes there anyway, flat against the plastic, counting the ridges of the biscuits through the film.
I don’t like these biscuits.
I don’t eat biscuits with tea because I don’t drink tea the way people who eat biscuits drink tea. They are a lump of packaging in a pocket belonging to a person who is not going to open them.
