4. The Woolf Opening
Several small acts of self-sufficiency
Lunchtime and before
Med calls up the stairs that she would go and do the shopping herself. It had been a mistake to depend on her housemate, who had offered yesterday afternoon to go on an essentials spree in the morning but then had gone and got drunk at the pub quiz and puked down the open manhole a few doors up, thrown up a shimmering scarlet liquid a few shades lighter than the deep magenta cider and black that she had put down her, and then eaten some cheddar on toast, oily and bubbling, leaning against the grill by the hip and espousing feminist bullet points, feeling better for the puking, getting cheese in her hair, up her cheek, but not, as it was important to note, burning down the house. So Med walks out, finds herself paralysed for a second on the kerb in the unexpected heat, looking down at her boots and ruffling around in her big oversized jumper, the one that hides her womanly shape from the glowering advances of any number of passing men on any given day. She ruffles around for her purse, which she eventually finds in one of her many hidden pockets, and she decides to keep the jumper on in the heat - as if there was any decision to be made, and she huffs and puffs down through the cannonball run of raggedy kids ollying their skateboards and random mad ‘eds mostly outside The Crook at the bottom of Cambria, to the small Tesco on the edge of the high street where she carefully and heavily fills a cage basket with washing powder, crumpets, cherryade, something else and something else (stain remover?) when she hears the words from a voice the owner of which she doesn’t need to turn around to identify. How’s my beautiful girl, then? Raul, buying a pack of Reds in-between the market fry up and first pint of the day. She rolls her eyes, but it could be worse. Could have been someone much less harmless. Meredith. He makes the most of every letter in that name. He asks if she’s pulling pints this evening and Med says she’s on a double as someone has called in sick already, so she’d love to stop and talk but she needs to go and eat some crumpets and wash her jeans because there’s splatters of cider and black puke up the one leg from last night, and Raul salutes, he respects the necessity and the cause of the call to work. Med salutes back because for all of her eye rolling she has affection for the old bastard regardless of his handsy sweary ways. She gets back home, sweating neath the jumper, flings her jeans in the wash on a scorching heat and then pegs them out in the sun for an hour or two. Her crumpets burn and the stains in her jeans are not washed out, and while she’s sitting in the garden watching them dry and smoking a cigarette her housemate has arisen and eaten the remaining crumpets, unburned, groaned, and gone back to bed. It’s going to be a long day, Med thinks, and closes her eyes to the sun.