After she’s said hello to everyone, Alma inspects herself on the closed circuit television while she waits in line. The camera is over by the Abington Street entrance several yards behind her, and so only gives a rear-view long-shot of the leather-jacketed old woman with the hanging-gardens hairstyle, a good head and shoulders taller than the other people in the queue. This is the nearest that she ever gets to an objective image of herself and finds she doesn’t like it very much. It makes her feel obscurely isolated, and besides, she doesn’t see herself like that. She sees herself as bigger and a great deal nearer. And not from behind.
She checks her balance and draws out a random wad of cash to stuff in the side-pocket of her jeans. Just yesterday she’d had a chat with the incorrigible serial-sympathiser and unlikely innocent Melinda Gebbie, her best mate from Semilong. The other woman artist had remarked on how she always liked to have some reassuring totem in her pocket, useful Kleenex tissues, dead bees or particularly pretty leaves that she’d picked up. Alma had thought about it for a while and then said “Yeah, well, see, for me that would be money.” While she’s probably lost several high-denomination notes across the years she still resists the idea of a purse or handbag, reasoning that this would only be a good way to lose everything at once. She thinks it highly probable that she’d eventually leave the handbag in a café, whereas it’s unlikely that she’d leave her trousers. Not out of the question, but unlikely.
Exiting the bank she nips next door into the premises of Martin’s, the newsagents, so that she can stock up on essentials: Rizla papers, fags, Swan matches, magazines. She pulls the latest issues of New Scientist and Private Eye down from their upper shelves, wondering if their placement might be part of an entirely sensible campaign to make sure that only the tall receive appropriate intellectual stimulation. One day soon, when she and her kind have grown smart enough to formulate a foolproof plan, then Stephen Fry will give the signal and they’ll all rise up and massacre the short-arse numbskulls in their beds. Something like that, at any rate. Let a girl have her daydreams.
Alma takes the two mags to the till where genial, bullet-headed Tony Martin and long-suffering wife Shirley have already got her forty Silk Cut Silver, five packs of green Rizla papers and two boxes of Swan matches waiting for her. Tony shakes his shaved dome ruefully while ringing up the Rizlas.
“Alma, honestly! All o’ these Rizla papers! Surely you must ‘ave got that scale model of the Eiffel Tower completed ages ago? What’s the matter with yer?”
Shirley looks up from re-stocking shelves and tells her husband to shut up and not to be so rude, but Alma’s grinning.
“Yeah, I did, but I got bored with it and started on a model of the Vatican. Now, are you going to ring those up, or shall I get my matchstick Pope to excommunicate you?”
It’s a running joke between them. Years ago someone who worked behind the counter had asked Alma why she bought so many Rizla papers, to which Alma had replied with a deadpan expression and without a beat that she was building a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of the flimsy, gum-edged leaves. While this had only been a gag she’d found it an appealing one, an idea she could get a bit of mileage out of. Well, more than a bit as it turned out. She sees ideas much as a farmer sees his pigs, and doesn’t even want to waste the squeal if she can help it.
With her purchases inside a flimsy plastic carrier-bag, the national flower, she waves a clattering metallic goodbye to the Martins and steps back out of the shop into the wide pink precinct. She continues her descent of Abington Street, calling in at Marks & Spencer’s to pick up some bits and pieces for her evening meaclass="underline" a couple of long demon-tongue Ramiros peppers, cranberry and orange stuffing, and some feta cheese. She navigates a designated path between the open-plan departments, overlooked by Myleene Klass and a still-lovely Twiggy. Alma never feels entirely comfortable in the conspicuously poncey store, but, having recently boycotted Sainsbury’s, lacks for a convenient alternative.
The Sainsbury’s episode still makes her smile, though it’s the ghastly smile of something that one really should have killed but only wounded. She had been emerging from the Grosvenor Centre branch of Sainsbury’s, where she knew most of the ladies at the tills by name, laden down by two bulging store-brand bags-for-life filled with her purchases. A uniformed security guard, shrewdly noticing the lizard-green-with-watermelon-pink-interior hoodie that she happened to be wearing, had deduced she was therefore a member of the underclass (which, emotionally at least, she was) and stepped to block her path, demanding to see Alma’s till receipt. Towering above the relatively pint-sized individual she had craned her neck, lowering her massive head to his eye-level as if talking to a woefully underachieving eight-year-old. Explaining that she wasn’t in the habit of collecting till receipts, Alma had asked if this was some new policy of random stop-and-search, or if he’d had some other reason for selecting her amongst the dozen or so more conventional-looking shoppers who were then emerging from the supermarket. Looking more and more uncertain by the moment, the guard had then pointlessly requested that she show him what was in her Sainsbury’s shopping bags, perhaps suspecting somehow that they’d prove to contain shopping that had come from Sainsbury’s.
She had repeated her inquiry, leaving an exaggerated gap between each word so that he had the time to fully comprehend one syllable before being required to struggle with the next. “Why … did … you … stop … me … specifically?” By this point other customers were nervously approaching and protesting Alma’s innocence, looking more worried for the clearly-new employee, understandably, than they were for the famously belligerent giantess. Attempting to salvage a sense of his authority in this deteriorating situation, the guard had said that Alma must keep her receipts. Alma had duly noted this new Sainsbury’s policy but had explained that since she wouldn’t be returning to the store, it wasn’t really going to affect her. Smiling anxiously as she’d begun to walk away, he’d called out a reminder to hang on to her receipt next time, which had made Alma pause, sigh heavily, and then explain in her best child-friendly voice what all the long words about not returning to the store in her last sentence were intended to convey. When she’d got home she’d rung customer services and told them it was Alma Warren calling, at which the young woman on the other end had chirpily informed her that she’d seen Alma on telly just the previous night. Alma had told her that was nice and then gone on to detail what had happened earlier, explaining that she could only interpret the guard’s scrutiny as being class-based and how this had prompted her decision to give Sainsbury’s a miss in future. She’d assured the perfectly-nice woman that she wasn’t asking Sainsbury’s for an apology, though anyone who knew her would have heard the implication that it was too late for such a useless trifle to placate her; that she was by now embarked upon a grudge that she would carry to the grave.