I was standing with thermal underwear in my hand in a queue at the pay point in Heatons one afternoon in October. I found myself facing a tray of skulls and severed fingers and other accoutrements that mark the American understanding of Halloween and what might await us after death, all displayed at eye level for the benefit of small children.
“It’s an early age to be teaching them theology,” I said to a lady in front of me, whom I guessed was a nun because her grey shoes matched her grey skirt.
And I was right. She beamed at me and laughed heartily.
“It is indeed,” she said.
She was holding a grey fleece jacket, and the skin of her white hands was as delicate as a Communion wafer. I stood behind her with my long johns and vests like a confused goose that has landed on uncertain ground after a long flight and is in need of reassurance.
I was wondering why she was buying a fleece. Maybe she was sitting in a cold room in the convent on winter afternoons without any heating because the convent might be trying to save money.
Arguing about a chair
That was at Halloween. But last week I met her again.
I was at a car-boot sale, standing at a stall of wellingtons and chainsaws. An ornate wooden rocking chair stood beside the stall, creaking in the wind, and a sturdy woman was arguing with the vendor about the chair.
It reminded her of her grandmother. Or so she told him.
The man wanted €150, but she would not pay that much. He said the best he could do was €130. Then the woman turned the chair upside down and found two or three little woodworm holes in it.
“Well if you think I’m going to give you €30, never mind €130, for that load of junk, you’re mad,” she said.
He knew the game was up, so to avoid losing face he turned the moment into a joke. “The woodworm are long gone,” he said. “But if you want to be on the safe side, just boil up a bit of sugar and water when you go home, and scrub the syrup into the wood so that it fills the holes.”
“You must think I came down in the last shower,” she said, “Are you trying to tell me that sugar would kill woodworm?”
“No,” he said, “but it rots their teeth,” and he laughed as she went off to another stall.
Having kittens
Not far away there was a woman selling country and western CDs, the kind farmers buy. There was a box of cats on her stall. She was petting a white kitten that shivered in a blanket and was eating bits of cold ham from her fingertips. I began petting the kitten too, with so much enthusiasm that the woman offered me half of her ham sandwich.
“Do you want a kitten?” she asked. “Because I have another white one in the car.”
“I’d love to take her, but I’m going to Warsaw at the end of the week, so there would be no one to mind her,” I said.
That is when I decided to cross the road and go to Heatons again for more winter clothing, because it can be very cold in Warsaw this time of year.
I picked up my items and went to the pay point. Before I could vanish off the face of the earth I realised that I was standing behind the same grey-skirted, grey-shoed creature I had encountered six weeks earlier, and I was once again holding a thermal vest and long johns. I began to sweat, worrying she might think I was stalking her, or that I had a fetish about underpants.
I decided that if she stared at me I would say, “Look I know you’re thinking it’s a bit odd that I’m buying the same thing as I was six weeks ago, but my washing machine is broken. And I do a lot of gardening.” And she could make what she liked of that.
She had a duvet in her arms, her entire body holding it as if the bundle were a child in a baby suit, and she never turned round so we never made eye contact. When she had paid, I watched her walk towards the door and into the grey afternoon.
The big empty duvet in her arms made me feel sad, and I regretted not having said hello or even wishing her a happy Christmas.