Eventually, I push myself up and cross to the sofa. The laptop is on the floor, upside down. I must have dropped it – not that it was working anyway. When I press and hold the power button, nothing happens.
‘Please work,’ I whisper. ‘Please.’
I press it again, but there is still only a blank screen.
It’s inevitable, I suppose. From the moment I sat on that wall and opened the envelope that had, literally, fallen into my life, I think I knew it would always come to this.
Chapter Ten
Hunting through charity shops and bargain bins has happened largely through circumstance, but I’d never been much of a shopper before what happened to Ben. It’s nothing to do with money and everything to do with a lack of patience. Trying on so many different items feels like such a faff compared to the end result. Shopping feels like a social thing, too – a team game – and that hasn’t been me for a long time. I can’t really remember when I stopped having friends, but it probably happened at around the time I moved in with Ben.
The number 24 bus takes me straight to work, but, if I remain on, it continues out to the Twin Oaks Shopping Centre. Hanging around there on a weekend was a fixture when I was a teenager who had friends. That feels like a distant memory.
When I last spent any significant time here, there was a massive HMV and a Virgin Megastore. Teenagers craved the CDs and DVDs that were packed onto rack after rack along the full length of the store. My friends and I would waste hours browsing for things we had no intention of buying. Now, everything like that is in the palm of our hands. It feels like life has moved on and it’s somehow skipped me.
As I wander along the wide, bright halls of the mall, it’s all mobile phone stores and pound shops. There are so many people, too, aimlessly going about their lives. I spend so much of my day around others – customers at work, or, of course, on the bus – and yet there’s nothing real about those interactions. They’re people I see and forget; people who’ll see me and forget. I feel surrounded but alone.
Many of the stores are decorated with orange and black streamers, with various standees of werewolves, Frankenstein’s Monster and, for some reason, sexy doctors and nurses. Not only that, the country seems to have undergone some sort of pumpkinisation at this time of the year. It’s American, of course. Everything is. Not like this in my day, and all that.
I continue meandering, getting lost until I stumble across a huge sports store. Another new thing since I was young is being pounced upon by a sales assistant the moment anyone steps into a shop. Most of my work history revolves around being in retail. When I was sixteen, I got a job on the checkout in a stationery shop that’s no longer there. The norm then was a general indifference to any customer who walked through the door. Speak when spoken to and all that. Now, I am barely into the sports shop when two separate people in red polo shirts descend to ask if I need any help. I tell them I’m fine, which I suspect is the sanest of answers, and then follow the signs to the footwear section. Someone wants to talk to me about gait and pronation, but I wave him away and pick out half-a-dozen different sets of running shoes that look comfortable.
There’s a wonderful release in being able to look at things I like, rather than have to check the price first. This is what it used to be like when I was with Ben. I wasn’t particularly extravagant then but I’d look for things I liked, rather than things I could afford. Now, I try on all the shoes and walk around in them, simply because I can. Perhaps shopping isn’t so bad? I take my time and eventually settle on a pair of Asics that claim they will make me run faster. It sounds unlikely, but I’m at the point where I don’t care.
Seeing the price would usually make me anxious. It’s three days’ wages. Twenty-four full hours of sitting on a checkout scanning people’s shopping – all for a single pair of shoes. As the cashier asks for the money, I reach into my bag, into the envelope, and remove eight twenty-pound notes that I hand over.
It’s so simple.
The cashier is a young guy, who I doubt is even twenty. He’s all fuzzy chin fluff and spiky hair. He could be me all those years ago; could be me now, I guess. He barely looks twice at the cash, scooping up the notes and counting them into the till. I get less than £10 in change – and that’s that.
The shoes are mine.
I ask him to cut off the tags and enquire as to whether he can keep the box. He says that’s fine and so I find myself walking out of the shop in brand-new shoes. My taped-together monstrosities are immediately dumped in the bin outside – and I’m done.
I expect there to be guilt, but there isn’t. Perhaps I deserve this money?
My next stop is an electronics store and, this time, I do let the sales assistant talk at me. I feel like the star of the show; the centre of attention. He’s older, probably in his forties, padding out a suit that doesn’t look like it has fit him in years. He reeks of desperation, or cheap aftershave. Perhaps both. There is hunger in his eyes and it’s hard not to wonder if that’s how I look to others. Whether desperation of living pay cheque to pay cheque is something a person wears on their face.
He leads me to the laptop aisle and I stop at the first one. It’s the cheapest they sell – the very one that’s sitting unresponsive on my table at home. It costs even less than I paid when Amazon had it on special offer. I look up and the salesperson can’t hide the disappointment. There won’t be much commission on this. This will be from a stock of which they’ve been unable to rid themselves. The lowest of the low. This is me.
But not today.
‘What do you have that’s better than this?’ I ask.
The man’s lips slip into a smile and then he catches himself, leading me along the aisle into the next.
‘What type of thing are you looking for?’ he asks.
‘Something for my university course. Small – but fast. It has to boot up quickly.’
He nods along and then points to a pair of laptops at his side. He talks about the new Windows, plus RAM and CPU speed, but I’m not sure if I care about the specifics. He continues to talk, but I’ve already switched off. For all I know, he’s telling me about how they can sing, dance, do the dishes or hug a person on those cold winter nights. None of it matters. I can barely contain myself because I know I can afford either.
‘… how does that sound?’ he concludes.
I blink back into the shop. ‘Do you take cash?’ I ask.
He stares at me, wide-eyed, not needing to say ‘nobody ever pays this much cash’, because it’s obvious. ‘I guess…’ he replies.
The man talks to me a little more about the two machines and I end up choosing the cheapest one – but only because it’s the same size as the piece of junk I have at home. It feels a little more manageable; a little more me.
When I’ve chosen, he practically frogmarches me to the front and then radios someone in the back to bring a brand-new laptop from the stockroom. He bangs on about extended warranties, but I tell him I’m fine. My mouth is watering as I reach into the envelope and dig out a fistful of twenty-pound notes. I count them onto the counter until there is a little over £500. It’s ten days of work for me. Half a working month all sitting in a neat pile.
For some reason, the voice in my head that was so insistent I spend the money is now telling me that this is someone else’s. The hypocrite. It’s so brash that I almost shush it out loud, only stopping myself when the till starts to chunter out a receipt. When it’s finished, the salesman hands me the box and the computer is mine. I walk to the exit and pause by the security gates, half expecting them to sound an alarm. I take one step towards them, then a second to get past, but there’s no sound.