Addition

As it’s Saturday, after breakfast I go to the supermarket. At 8.45 on Saturday morning in January in Glen Iris the supermarket is deserted - everyone is still asleep in their beach houses at Portsea or Anglesea or Phillip Island, dreaming about whomever it is they dream about while they lay beside their spouses. Waiting for me at the checkout is a handsome boy, twentysomething, with too much enthusiasm on his pink face. Either he’s still full of love for all mankind from last night’s ecstasy or he’s waiting for the right time to talk to me about Amway. Still, there’s no other checkout open.

The boy smiles encouragingly. I feel a headache coming on. I push my shopping trolley over, squeaking with each step. My trolley has 2 trays of chicken thighs, fat and glossy, each tray containing 5. A carton of eggs marked as a dozen. (Each week I assure ecstasy-boy or high-pain-threshold-girl, a Kiwi backpacker with seven piercings in each ear, that I have already checked the eggs. This is so they won’t open the carton and notice I have removed 2 and left them in the assorted spices.) Plastic bags containing 100 beans (that’s a pain), 10 carrots, 10 baby potatoes, 10 small onions. 100 grams of salad mix. (I refuse to shop in a supermarket without a digital scale.) 10 little tins of tuna. 10 orange bottles of shampoo. 9 bananas.

What?

Count again.

How the fuck did I get 9 bananas in my trolley?

This is impossible. I look behind the eggs, behind the bag of beans. This is not possible.

The drug-addled multilevel marketer is standing behind the counter, smiling. Those teeth are money well spent. He’s got a smile like a Scientologist’s. Well, I’m going back. I can’t buy 9 bananas.

He can wait while I go back to aisle 12 and get another.

Just as I am about to excuse myself, someone comes to a stop behind me with a basket hanging over his arm; now I’ll lose my spot. And I was here first. What kind of a Nigel No-friends is at the supermarket this early on a Saturday anyway? Must have had a big Friday night with ‘Inspector Morse’ on DVD and a cup of hot cocoa. The Scientologist drug dealer is still standing there. His smile is fading. He folds his arms.

The guy with the basket is reading Celebrity Nosejobs, or some other Pulitzer-winning publication picked from the display near the checkout. He must be nearsighted because he’s holding the magazine about one inch from his face. All I can see is his forearms below shirt sleeves scrunched up to his elbows. His forearms are smooth on the underside. One has a tendon taut from the weight of the basket. Dark blond hair on the front. Not too much. Not extending to the back of the square, capable hands. Dangling over the edge of his basket amidst 2 trays of mince, 3 trays of sausages, a jar of chilli paste and 3 apples is 1 unfettered banana.

The key to an operation like this is nonchalance. I smile, piranhalike, at the Scientologist. He fiddles with his tie. I start loading my groceries onto the belt at the end furthest from the scanner. All except the bananas. The belt rolls onward, remorselessly. It could care less about the bananas.

‘I’m exhausted,’ I say.

He jumps. Whoever trained him should have mentioned that customers sometimes speak.
‘I spent all day yesterday collecting spare change for the Red Cross. Famine relief. For the kiddies.’ I wink. His smile returns. I beckon him closer with a crooked finger and wave my hand over the groceries. I lower my voice to just above a whisper. ‘Do you mind if I pay for this lot in five-cent pieces?'

His eyes bug and as he says, ‘I have to check with the manager,’ his voice breaks. He spins around looking for somebody, anybody.

While he’s distracted I nonchalantly pick up the bananas from my trolley with both hands. Nonchalantly I rock back, then ever so nonchalantly I spin around, reach my arms full stretch, grab the shrivelled brown end of Nigel’s banana and lift it out of his basket.

He can’t see a thing from behind that magazine.

By the time my prospective money-laundering cultist has looked back, all he sees is me smiling eerily, hands up like I’m about to crown Miss Universe with a bunch of bananas. A bunch of 10 bananas that I lay gently on the belt.

‘Never mind about the coins,’ I say, pulling a fifty from my purse. ‘Not everyone’s a cheapskate.’

Extract published by kind permission of Text Publishing

© Toni Jordan