We get steak every now and then, of course — but it would never be in the company of all the other meats and rich foods. One dose of weapons-grade animal fats per week is quite risky enough for this household, thank you. We live a moderate, evenly balanced life when it comes to food (and, really, when it comes to everything else). The shopping I'd seen, however foolishly, conjured the idea of a household which sailed a different sea — and of a different kind of woman steering the ship.
I was just a little intrigued, that's all.
A couple of days later, I was still intrigued. You'd be right in suspecting this speaks of a life in which excitement levels are relatively low. I edit, from home. Technical manuals are my bread and butter, leavened with the occasional longer piece of IT journalism. I'm good at it, fast and accurate, and for the most part enjoy my work. Perhaps «enjoy» isn't quite the right word (putting my editing hat on for a moment): let's say instead that I'm content that it's my profession, am well paid and always busy, and feel no strong desire to be doing anything else, either in general or particular.
But. nobody's going to be making an action movie of my life any day soon. And that's perhaps why, sometimes, little ideas will get into my head and stick around for longer than they might in the mind of someone who has more pressing or varied (or viscerally compelling) things to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
I was still thinking about this other woman. This different girl. Not in a salacious way — how could I be? I had no idea what she looked like, or what kind of person she was (beyond that spoken of by her supermarket choices). That's the key word, I think — difference. Like any man who's been in a relationship for a long time (and doubtless a lot of women too, I've never asked), every once in a while you beguile a few minutes in fantasy. Sometimes these are sexual, of course, but often it's something more subtle which catches your internal eye. I've never felt the urge to be unfaithful to Helen — even now that our sex life has dropped to the distant background hum of the longterm married — and that's partly because, having thought the thing through, I've come to believe that such fantasies are generally not about other people, but about yourself. What's really going on, if you spend a few minutes dreaming about living in a scuzzy urban bedsit with a (much younger) tattooed barmaid/ suicide doll, or cruising some sunny, fuzzy life with a languid French female chef? These women aren't real, of course, and so the attraction cannot be bedded in them. They don't exist. Doubtless these and all other alternate lifestyles would come to feel everyday and stale after a while, too, and so I suspect the appeal of such daydreams actually lies in the shifted perception of yourself that these nebulous lives would enshrine.
You'd see yourself differently, and so would other people, and that's what your mind is really playing with: a different you, in a different now.
Perhaps that insight speaks merely of a lack of courage (or testosterone); nonetheless, the idea of this nearby woman kept cropping up in my mind. Perhaps there was also a creative part of my mind seeking voice. I don't edit fiction and have never tried to write any either. I enjoy working with words, helping to corral them into neat and meaningful pens like so many conceptual sheep, but I've discovered in myself neither the urge nor the ability to seek to make them evoke people or situations which are not "true." With this imaginary woman, however — not actually imaginary of course, unless it was a man, it was more a case of her being «unknown» — I found myself trying to picture her, her house, and her life. I guess it's that thing which happens sometimes in airports and on trains, when you're confronted with evidence of other real people leading presumably real lives, and you wonder where everyone's going, and why: wonder why the person in the seat opposite is reading that particular book, and who they'll be meeting at the other end of the journey that you, for the moment, are sharing.
With so little to go on, my mind was trying to fill in the gaps, tell me a story. It was a bit of fun, I suppose, a way of going beyond the walls of the home office in which I spend all my days.
I'm sure I wouldn't have tried to take it further, if it hadn't been for the man from the supermarket.
A week to the day after the first delivery, he appeared on the doorstep again. This was a little unusual. Not there being another order — Helen considerately books the deliveries into the same time slot every week, so they don't disrupt my working patterns — but it being the same man. In the several years we've been getting our groceries this way, I'm not sure I've ever encountered the same person twice, or at least not soon enough that I've recognised them from a previous delivery.
But here this one was again.
"Morning," he said, standing there like a scruffy Christmas tree, laden with bags of things to eat or clean or wipe surfaces or bottoms with. "Downstairs, right?"
I stood aside to let him pass and saw there were a couple more crates full of bags on the path outside. That meant I had a few minutes to think, which I suddenly found I was doing.
I held the door open while he came up, re-ladened himself, and tramped back downstairs again. By the time he trudged up the stairs once more, I had a plan.
"Right then," he said, digging into a pocket and pulling out a piece of paper. He glanced at it, then thrust it in my direction. "That's your lot. Everything's there. No substitutions."
Before he could go, however, I held up my hand. "Hang on," I said, brightly. "You remember last week? The thing with the red bags?"
He frowned, and then his face cleared. "Oh yeah. That was you, right? Got the wrong red bags, I know. I've spoken to Head Office about it, don't worry."
"It's not that," I said. "Hang on here a sec, if you don't mind?"
I quickly trotted downstairs, opened one of the kitchen cupboards, and pulled out something more-or-less at random. A tin of corned beef — perfect.
Back up in the hallway, I held it out to the delivery guy.
"I think this should have gone back into the other person's bags," I said. "I'm not sure, but my wife says she didn't order it."
The man took the can from me and peered at it unhappily. "Hmm," he said. "Thought most of the delivery goods was branded. But it could be. Could be."
"Sorry about this," I said. "Didn't notice until you were gone. I. I don't suppose you remember where the other customer lived."
"Oh yeah," he said. "As it happens, I do. Vans in this area only cover a square mile each day, if that. And I had to go through the bags with her, see, in case there was a problem with it, what with you already unpacking it here."
"Great," I said. His use of the word «her» had not been lost on me.
"Didn't say nothing about something being missing, though," he said, doubtfully. He looked down at the tin again without enthusiasm, sensing it represented a major diversion from standard practices, which could only bring problems into his life. I looked at it too.
"Hang on," he said, as a thought struck him. He gave the tin to me. "Be right back."
I waited on the doorstep as he picked up the crates on the path and carried them back to his van. A couple of minutes later he reappeared, looking more optimistic.
"Sorted," he said. "As it happens, she's next but one on my list. I'll take it, see if it's hers."
I handed the corned beef back to him again, thinking quickly. I was going to need my house keys. Oh, and some shoes.
"Don't worry about bringing it back, if it's not," I said, to hold him there while I levered my feet into a pair of slip-ons which always live in the hallway.