About a week after Mr. Bradshaw, my English teacher, gave me a D- on my Dickens essay, he arrived home from work to find his wife bent over the breakfast counter with the carpet man’s cock up her ass.

He left her.

She left him.

It didn’t matter which way it happened.

As it turned out, Mr. Bradshaw liked a drink. I could smell the whisky on his breath when he leaned over me in class. Sometimes his words came out like somebody was holding his tongue.

It wasn’t long before they suspended his duties at school. They told him to come back when he was sober, and maybe his job would still be there. Mr. Bradshaw said all right, and nobody saw him again.

Sometimes I feel bad for making up stories about him.

Fucking prick.

***

I work part time at the local supermarket. Fourteen hours a week that feels like forty.

Today my queue stretches all the way back to canned meats. There is a corned beef promotion stacked at the end of the aisle—buy one get one for free. They call that BOGOFF. I guess whoever came up with it thought they were pretty funny.

I watch some silly fat-ass cow turn left instead of right and take the entire display down with her shopping cart. She carries on, hoping nobody has noticed two hundred cans of pressed meat collapsing to the ground in a hurry. When she recounts the story to her friends she will blame the trolley, but then, customers always do that. Nothing is ever their fault.

She takes a sharp turn into frozen foods—it’s funny how the trolley behaves itself when she has to make a quick exit—and after that I don’t see her again.

Young Mum & Screaming Kid approaches, and while Young Mum empties her cart onto my conveyor belt, Screaming Kid does exactly what he says on the tin. I can see his tonsils vibrating at the back of his mouth as he cries and I wonder why Young Mum doesn’t even attempt to stop him. The sound bounces around inside my head like a pinball, and I want to reach into his throat and squeeze the life out of his little voice box until he can’t produce anything more than a wet squeak.

Young Mum isn’t a day over twenty and Screaming Kid looks like he is already mixing it up with the nursery kids. My mother always told me to keep my legs closed and my textbooks open, but I guess some people just don’t listen to their parents anymore. Mum has a dead look in her eyes, like she is wondering where her life has gone wrong.

I see a lot of that. Mothers with kids. Kids without fathers. One too many double vodkas and nine months later they have a six-pound-seven-ounce life-long hangover. She doesn’t know who the father is because these women rarely do. Maybe it was Don from Personnel; maybe Jack the security guy. It was dark. Who can tell?

It’s a damn shame.

I smile, like I am pleased to see her, say hello, and make some small talk about the weather. Gosh, it has been hot lately! Customers appreciate all that crap, even if it smells like it just came out of a horse’s ass. They don’t want to know the truth. Real conversation is what they have over the dinner table, with people they actually want to talk to. They couldn’t care less that my date cancelled for next weekend, or that my period is particularly heavy this month.

Screaming Kid is pulling at Young Mum’s jacket, demanding a sweet. She ignores him the way parents have a habit of doing these days and continues packing her shopping. Potatoes on eggs; washing powder on bread.

That’s fifty-eight ninety-two. Sometimes I don’t say please but this time I do. She pays with plastic that—like all the rest of her cards—hovers just below the limit. Some folk live on borrowed time: Young Mum lives on borrowed money.

Soon she is gone, and my world is quiet once again. I look at my watch and wonder if it has stopped.

Deaf, Old & Cranky is usually a woman but today it isn’t. Somebody’s grandfather. Somebody else’s great-grandfather. He pushes ninety and a trolley full of old-folk food. Tinned stuff. Creams and lotions. My conveyor belt smells like a dispensary.

I don’t bother with hello because he wouldn’t hear me anyway. All D.O.C does when I open my mouth is nod woodenly and agree; it is a nice day—even if it isn’t, or I am talking about something else.

I say “eat shit and die” and manage to pass it off as “hi” when he begs my pardon. I shouldn’t laugh at my elders—that’s another thing my mum is always telling me—after all, these people fought and died in the war for me. I have never figured out which war she is talking about, though. It seems every codger over sixty was in it, fighting the Russians or the Germans or the Turks, or the fucking mountain men of Peru.

This guy looks old enough to have battled for Independence.

I bet he hasn’t even fired a rifle at a shooting gallery, and I know he’s shooting blanks at home. If he’s still doing it at his age, that is.

It was all fields back then, they say, although thankfully, this one doesn’t. Yeah, sure it was. The whole fucking planet was one great big allotment, and their ozone layer didn’t have any holes in it either.

As well as endless comparisons of now and then—which the D.O.C refers to as “the gold old days”—he reminds me that the two-liter orange squash is half price, and that we are out of custard creams; as if I care. I guess he doesn’t know that I’m not paid to keep track of in-store deals, or stock replenishment levels. Hell, I can barely stay conscious long enough to bleep his goods.

The D.O.C stands there at the end of my check-out with his store-bought smile and watches me pack his bags. He tells me I’m a great help to him—which I am—but he plays on his handicaps, which is less a disability for him and more a fucking pain in the ass for me.

I do everything for this guy, even repeat myself three times when he can’t hear me shouting twenty-five sixty-three. He pays me with the loose change he finds at the bottom of his trouser pocket, because the D.O.C always has more of this than anybody else. He empties the coppers and small silver onto the conveyor belt and takes five minutes to count it into my hands.

As he shuffles away, Teenage Waster is quick to jump into his coffin.

As a general rule Waster is drunk, high, under-sexed, or a lethal combination of all three. Slicked-back hair and a cheeky smile are optional, but the designer gear is not—although his horn-dog buddies are the only ones who care about that.

He has an Xbox or a PlayStation, or maybe both. He knows what’s hot and what’s not, and quotes Will Ferrell movies the way a priest quotes the Bible. He still laughs at the number sixty-nine, and thinks that romance is asking a girl which position she wants to be fucked in.

The Waster only has a few items in his basket: a twelve pack of regular condoms, a Mars Bar, and an industrial-sized bottle of cider. We sell cider in four sizes: small, medium, large, and wino, but this kid is still a couple of years from legal anyway. He probably still eats Happy Meals at the golden arches.

But I don’t care about his age. If I don’t sell it to him he’ll just keep walking until he finds someone who will. He isn’t going to stop getting tanked because I lay a morality trip on him. Get drunk. Christ, get hammered. He isn’t my problem. Let the cops deal with him when he’s vomiting in the streets and throwing bricks through windows.

The rubbers will probably last him until the expiry date forces him to throw them out, but the cider will more than likely disappear tonight, when his loser mates come round for a few drinks before heading into town for some action. The guys his age call it getting pussy, but these assholes rarely get any. Teenage Waster is all mouth, and probably still a virgin.

He is a drop-out; left school at sixteen to join the end of the unemployment queue. He spends any money he gets on sex he never has, and alcohol he is too young to drink. Whatever is left he spends on buying another spoiler or exhaust pipe for his souped-up car. You know which one is his because it sounds like a fleet of jumbo jets taking off when it passes.

The Waster is more Captain Birds Eye than Captain of Industry, but he has delusions of the good life nonetheless, even though he will never be more than a pawn in life’s little game of chess. He isn’t black but he somehow thinks he is, and when asked what he is he invariably says, pimp, because he thinks that’s cool.

I say fifteen thirty-two and he pays me with greasy bills. He is still listening to his iPod and holding his mobile phone just in case he gets an important text like c u l8r m8.

Teenage Waster chews gum and makes sure everyone knows it. He winks at me, making me weak in the stomach rather than weak at the knees. As he slithers out of the store he is replaced by a man in his mid-thirties, who starts unloading next week’s food onto my conveyor belt.

The Jones Family is always trying—but never quite able—to keep up with the world around them. The microwave is their best friend, and their diet is mostly ready-meals, because a family on the go doesn’t have time to boil an egg or peel a carrot. They spend more than they should, but it doesn’t matter because appearances mean more than most things to them.

He works seventy hours a week and probably sleeps in his suit and tie combo because it’s just easier that way. He looks at his watch constantly, sighs about the promotion he will never get, and complains there are not enough minutes in his day to do everything that needs to be done. His business trips are rarely just that, and he has at least one mistress in every city.

His wife stands behind him, clutching a celebrity gossip magazine in her hands, because that is the only news she cares about. She preens herself like a peacock at an audition, wears too much make-up and a fake fur shawl over her shoulders. Mink or seal or rabbit. Unfortunately she is not an endangered species. She probably knows about her husband’s indiscretions, but as long as she gets her massages and French manicures—neither of which they can really afford—she won’t ask any questions.

The Jones Family lives the lie that everybody else aspires to. They spend most of their time—which is more valuable than mine—trying to escape their second-class lives, but their package-deal holidays are three-star economy, and they always have to go into debt for them. They have two-point-four children—one boy, one girl—and a dog sitting in their clumsy estate car in the parking lot with one window cracked open just enough so the poor mutt won’t croak before they get back.

The father pays the eighty-three ninety-one with American Express, because these people never carry old money in their wallets. Hell, they don’t even carry wallets anymore, just shitty little card holders that expand like accordions. Visa, MasterCard, gold store loyalty cards, platinum store loyalty cards, country club memberships, and his Asshole of the Month card.

The Jones Family never leaves home without them.

I shake my head when he slaps the letters Esq after his signature on the receipt, and I bite my tongue to keep from laughing. I hand the pretentious prick back his plastic and bid him a good day, with as much charm as I can muster for him.

The Jones Family leaves with fifteen bags of shopping that between them they can barely carry.

The store is quieter now.

The afternoon is getting old, and my patience is wearing thin. My watch tells me it is half an hour until the end of my shift.

A stranger approaches me out of the emptiness, but somehow I know even before I lift my head that it is Mr. Bradshaw. He looks different without a blackboard behind him, and for a moment I find that funnier than it really is.

He has no trolley, no basket, and no items. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days and I can smell stale sweat on him. He has on the same shabby grey suit that I remember him wearing to class, but now it is wrinkled and stained. He sways a little from side to side, and reminds me of a fright-flick zombie.

Mr. Bradshaw is in his early forties but the lines on his face and the sag of his chin makes him look at least ten years older. He looks drunk, but when he opens his mouth to speak I know he is perfectly sober.

He knows exactly who I am, says hello and fakes a smile, but I find it impossible to reciprocate. His voice is cold and distant as if he is speaking from the bottom of a well, and the words are now nothing more than sterile syllables.

I don’t know why he is here, but I don’t have time to think about it. He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a gun, and I know right then that I am not going home at seven o’clock.

Whatever went wrong with his marriage was his own doing. We all knew he had problems. All I did was fill in the blanks, hurry things along a little. Maybe he didn’t come home and catch his wife cock-deep in trouble; maybe the drink didn’t stink as much as I had said.

I did get a D- on my Dickens essay. That much was true. Everything else was coming sooner or later.

Mr. Bradshaw tells me to look directly at him and nothing else, but he doesn’t have to because you don’t turn away from a man with a gun. Instead of pointing it at me he jams the barrel under his own chin and presses it hard against his jaw. I wince at the ugly sight of cold steel on hot skin, but he seems very calm, and at no point do I actually think he will go through with it.

I call him Harry, because if he’s going to blow his brains out right in front of me, I’ve got a right to be on first name terms with him. I try to say something helpful like don’t do it, but I soon get the feeling that he is past the point of being talked down from the ledge.

I think he’s calling my bluff, but Mr. Bradshaw doesn’t flinch. He pulls the trigger, and splashes himself all over my conveyor belt.

***

I’m probably sitting there for ten minutes before the world stops swimming. When it does, there’s a guy up-close and personal, wiping blood and brain off my face. I can smell Bradshaw on me—can taste him like chicken at the corners of my mouth—but I can’t see him anymore. All that remains is a trail of gunk on the polished supermarket floor.

The man is wearing emergency service get-up, and it’s only then that I realize what has happened. I don’t know if he is police or ambulance or fire, but he is smiling at me. Maybe he likes me or maybe it’s just part of the job, but a smile always means something. There is a gold band on his finger, but I guess that doesn’t make much of a difference sometimes.

I look at my watch. It’s seven thirty-four.

I hope I’m getting overtime for this shit.

999 Man smiles again, more broadly this time, and I know there’s more between us than just a bad situation. I wonder how many times he has flirted, fucked, and forgotten, before going home and having dinner with his wife, the smell of another stranger still on his clothes.

He’s probably been caught and forgiven several times over, because relationships are all about second and third chances.

I don’t know who is worse—him for doing it or her for allowing it to continue.

I return his smile.

Some people will never learn.

END