The woman behind us sighed. Loudly, and on purpose.
“Oh, come on.”
My mother said sorry. Her hands were going.
And the woman pushed a full trolley forward into the back of my mother’s legs — not hard, but she made contact — and said:
“If you’re too old to manage the shopping, maybe stay at home.”
Six or seven people turned round.
I said, “Excuse me?”
And she rolled her eyes at me and said, “I’m saying what everybody here’s thinking.”
Mum found the purse. She got her card out.
And as she was handing it over the woman laughed and said, to nobody, at volume:
“Unbelievable. All this for six items.”
And that is when the cashier looked up.
She was about fifty. She had been scanning and had not looked at either of them.
And she looked at my mother’s face and she stopped.
Not politely. She stopped completely, with a tin of tomatoes in her hand, and she did not move for about four seconds.
Then she said: “What’s your name?”
Mum was confused. She looked at me and then back and said:
“Eilis.”
And the cashier put the tin down and reached under the counter.
There was a click.
She locked her till. Then she switched the belt off.
And she said, not loudly, to the whole queue:
“Nobody’s going anywhere. Two minutes.”
The woman behind us said, “Are you serious?”
And the cashier did not look at her. She did not look at her once, at any point, for the whole of what followed, and I want that noted because it is the most eloquent thing anybody did that day.
She picked up the phone on the till and said something into it that I could not hear.
And two minutes later the manager came down the front of that shop carrying an old cardboard box.
Her name is Rosalie Quint. She is fifty-one and she has worked at Brackley’s in Colverne since 1999.
And in September of 1983 she was nine years old and she went back to school after the summer in her cousin’s shoes with the toes cut out of them, because her father had gone in the June and there was no money for shoes.
And a woman in the school kitchen took her out of the dinner queue on the second day, and took her into the little office by the kitchen, and looked at her feet, and asked her what size she was.
And by the Wednesday there was a new pair.
Not handed to her in front of anybody. They were in her PE bag on the peg with nothing said, and Rosalie Quint found them at half past two on a Wednesday afternoon in September of 1983 and sat on the floor of a cloakroom and cried.
