Published in April issue of Nest O'Vipers magazine, 2000

Checkout

by Barbara Welton

She caught my eye as soon as she started work at the supermarket. Though she was dressed the same as me - both of us in dull red uniform frocks and tired white aprons that tried their best to hide as much of the unflattering dresses as possible - she appeared somehow exotic over the rows of cashier machines, the heads of other checkout-chicks, and the stands of scandal magazines and chocolate bars.

Her smile affronted me. We were three checkouts apart, a mother of five who'd returned to the workforce only nine weeks previously separating us on a busy Saturday morning shift.

I was checking through a customer's fruit and vegies. I'd weighed potatoes and brown onions, two cucumbers, a bag of Jonathon apples, a quarter lettuce. Reaching for a punnet of blueberries, I happened to glance up and saw her across the store. She was holding up a phallus, a salami, waiting for a floor-boy to return with a price check. Her auburn hair was piled on her head, harried wisps shaking loose to frame her face, pale in the unnatural fluorescence of the overhead lighting. Her fingernails were a meticulous dark purple - the same colour as the eggplants I now weighed, their flesh waxy and cool to touch. Our eyes met for a nondescript moment, my blues breast-stroking space and air to meet her browns, and she smiled. She had dimples. I had avocadoes. The store's most angelic looking floor-boy shouted the value of her salami and our moment was gone. She stuffed the salami into a white poly-plastic bag, I fumbled a bunch of seedless grapes and caused my customer to tut-tut loudly.

Two days later, I saw her out back as I arrived for my evening shift. She'd found a perch in the loading bay where the juggernauts emptied their bellies into the market, her shapely legs crossed at the ankle as she shared a smoke and a laugh with the angelic floor-boy and two youths from the liquor department. I heard the floor-boy squeal "Get fucked!" and ceased to think him angelic any longer. One of the butcher's department lads entered the loading bay, unlit cigarette already pursed between his lips. He leaned down over her, his face close to hers and they both held their breath while the fire in her mouth leapt up to his, then they exhaled heavily, coils of silver smoke writhing in their hair and stinging their eyes. I hurried by, angry and sulky, not knowing why, but choosing to blame it on the butcher boy's bloodied apron and calloused, cut hands.

'You live over on Anderson Street, don't you?' She asked me later that week, as I replenished plastic bag supplies at each register. I turned to face her, my arms full of recycled plastic, shaking my head.

'No. I'm in the other direction,' I replied, our eyes meeting for the second time.

'Oh.' She bit into her bottom lip - there were tough bits of regrown skin there which suggested this biting was something of a habit. 'Oh,' she repeated, and I realised she was desperately trying to think of something else to say. Why didn't she just walk away? Go outside for another smoke with all the sloppily experienced, wanking-in-the-toilet, eligible males of the supermarket community?

She ground her fists into the front pocket of her apron, each knuckle thrown into relief through the unfriendly cotton material. 'Oh, I thought I'd seen you on Anderson yesterday, that's all. I was sure it was you. I'd been hoping it was. I live just off there, y'see. I thought, if you lived there, I'd have some company walking home at night...'

My eyes wandered to the racks of magazines beside the closest register. Some supermodel was in mid-striptease on one cover. Another pouted as I scrambled for anything to say that might keep her close to me for another moment more. Years of squinted adoration, always from afar, had made me acutely aware of how precious these moments were, how treasured this retarded conversation would be to me on countless lonely nights in my bed.

Yes, alone in my bed, chatter about Anderson Street would become an invitation to press my dull red uniform frock up against hers, to discard my burden of plastic bags and place my splayed hands over the orbs of her chest. Her talk of walks home would become solicitations to let my awestruck hands meander over her trim frame, my mouth close enough to her neck for my breath to fog over the shiny silver plate of her cheap dangling earrings. Alone in bed, I would imagine I felt the coarseness of her triangle of hair through the tough uniform, her thighs spreading imperceptively to accommodate my enquiring knee.

A kiss might be too difficult to imagine - its delicacy and fragile good humour simply too easily broken in the roughness of fantasy. The other things though, would be all too easy to usher into my mind. The heat of the flesh beneath the scalloped collar. The grind of her pelvis against mine. The tickle of her lips against my taut nipples. The exquisite smoothness at the backs of her bare knees. The taste of her, the smell of her, cleaving to my face for hours after acts of wantonness. The hiss of her words as she implores me to bite her, invade her, to lick her and suck her, to move with her, ride her, to part her and fuck her, to hold her, rub her, to turn her over and frig her, to wrestle her, scratch her, to soak her and cum with her.

'Sorry. Don't go near Anderson.' I turned back to the plastic bags.

She stood there a moment longer, biting her bottom lip again. I moved to the next register and she headed out the back for a smoke a little while later.

the end.