Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction) by Padrika Tarrant

Author:Padrika Tarrant [Tarrant, Padrika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2010-09-15T23:00:00+00:00

Shopping

WHEN I WAS a child I was sent by my mother to the grocer’s to pick up the tins and dry goods for the month. With an ancient pushchair that I was to use as a trolley, and the hood of my coat pulled over my hair, I scurried down a sidestreet, the wheels racketing along loud enough to wake the dead.

When I saw the grocer’s ahead in the dark, the light and warmth from it made me think of illness. The shopkeeper was standing in the doorway; I slowed right down and walked towards him reluctantly, half deafened by my awful pushchair. When I stopped in front of him, the silence whistled in my ears like a milkfloat. The shopping list was clenched inside my hand; I took one step forward.

The shopkeeper held the door for me; I ducked beneath his arm and entered the shop. Inside it smelled of mothballs and tobacco and cough candy. Boiled sweeties were lined up in heavy jars along the top shelf; a butterfly wing was plastered to a flap of flypaper.

The shopkeeper lifted the hinge on the counter and folded himself behind it, wiping his hands on his apron. With a flick of his headmaster smile, he asked what he could do for such a sweet young lady out all by herself in this weather.

I glanced behind me, at the grocer’s name spelled out backwards in the window, and the plastic crates laid out beneath, filled with potatoes, cabbages, carrots. A flayed brown curve of onion skin lay by itself on the floor like half a secret message. I put my fingers in my mouth.

The shopkeeper was standing there, beaming encouragement. I took the shopping list from my fist, and uncrumpled it carefully, running the creases with my fingers until it was almost flat; I laid it out as lightly as I could against the shopkeeper’s palm. His hand sprang shut.

A movement caught my eye, and I strained my gaze sideways as he read the list aloud. Tea. Sugar. Matches. Abruptly, the shopkeeper swung around and turned his back to fetch and weigh out tea leaves.

A mouse tiptoed out of the shadows from behind a sack of dog food. He was shaking his clever whiskers through the air and against the floor, until all of a sudden he sat up on his haunches with his eyes as bright as spilled jam.

Safety or pink? enquired the shopkeeper. I blinked at him, confused. In one hand he held up a box of matches, Scissors brand; between the fingers of the other were Swan Vestas. Pink, not safety. I pointed. He laid out an oblong tower on the counter: four, five, six. The seventh one unbalanced the lot and they toppled with a rattle. The shopkeeper turned away again, humming.

In the very corner of the shop was a mousetrap, garnished with a dried-out twist of chicken skin. The mouse rubbed his paws against his nose and began to groom his fur, wiping the ladles of his ears.

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