there is an unerring sense of decay around you. you comfort yourself with the nice-ish thought that it’s autumn and it’s natural for everything to wilt and fall away. this is probably true for leaves, and foliage, and everything else that keeps up the wonderful façade of beauty in the face of cranes putting up £4000 per month two bedroom skyscrapers that nobody you know lives in but everybody you know wants to live in. how could it be any other way? you don’t expect the decay in people, though. your neighbour, her jaw clicks and stiffens whenever in conversation past the custom mornings and thank yous whenever you put her bins out. you don’t know if she notices the sound it makes, but you assume so. wouldn’t that be a bit embarrassing? for you, at least. maybe she’s stronger than you. she doesn’t cry when she mentions her husband, who you don’t have the heart to really despise for telling you to go back where you came from. she came over with cake, and explained that he “didn’t mean it that way.” you realise, this is the decay setting in. unmistakably so. social conventions out the window. they used to call it senility, but you always imagined it as something that brings about doddering and speaking like adrian chiles at all hours of the day. not vitriol. not the glassy look of only your reflection in their eyes, teared and clouded up like a glass of water straight out of the fridge in summer.
you think, or at least start to think, that you bring the decay. you wield some power over those susceptible to withering, a lovingly aloof psychopomp shepherding those unlucky enough between the world of the living, and the not-quite-living. who will take your place at the end of it all? you hope you end up going in a more romantic way. best case scenario, world-engulfing cataclysm, melancholia crashing into us all. worst case scenario, lovers’ suicide. you think that it’s too sad to go in a pair. yet, by yourself is a bit gauche. this is why you always felt sad at the end of romeo and juliet, left in tears at the performance in year eight for some reason you couldn’t articulate until now. the theatre troupe delivering the performance weren;t even particularly talented. you thought that, maybe like the song, you always cry at endings. but that’s not true. you cry at the thought of there being something more past the ending. in the end of the world, you can at least be comforted in the thought that nothing could straggle out, maim a couple more years out of life that should have been left unperturbed.
you head off to the tesco. for a few years, the big tesco near you closed down. turned into some sort of argos or maplin or whatever other electrical shop thought they could make money hawking terribly-made and terribly looking phones at twice the price to any mum who was considerate enough to let her child have whatsapp in year seven, but not doting enough to spend the real money on an iphone. your dad tells you to buy some bin liners while you’re there. he doesn’t understand that it’s a big tesco, and you are a big person. unless you give the entire aisle a miss, you will buy bin liners. it is something that officially registers in your mind, the switch that takes up all the space vacated by wondering if your friends really like you. you can answer, secure in your choice, that at least three of them do now, and isn’t that really what matters? your spotify throws up a song you haven’t heard in a year, one that you instinctually skipped for two weeks until it finally got the message that you were sick of it, sick of the way it made you feel, sick of the way it made you mouth the words along on a walk like an idiot. a boyfriend once told you that this habit made you look “schizophrenic”, but this wasn’t actually all that bad and that schizophrenia as an illness was manufactured by society. he asked if you were breaking up with him because he was too erudite for you. you didn’t want to tell him that you had kissed his best friend the week before, but what else were you meant to do in that situation?
the thoughts of decay begin to set in once more at tesco. there seems to be a feeding frenzy for coriander. one which you would usually partake in, but your aunt told you to buy the dried coriander that’s in a two-for-one deal at the moment in tesco, right next to the cloves, then buy some fresh mint- but not too fresh, it will overpower the coriander- and a bulb of the garlic (she leans in closer at this point, her gesticulations an inch away from whacking you square in the ribcage) the good stuff, not the bargain basement shit your dad used to buy for your mum’s birthday celebrations that would fall apart. this, she said, you want to be properly fresh, you want to almost burn your nostrils with how garlicky it is. then blend it all together, add lemon to taste, and you’ve got something delicious you can do anything with, spread on bread and make a toastie, or use as a base for bolognese, it’s up to you. you look for the bananas. as green as they get, since you don’t want one every day, but only the ones in big bunches taste like real bananas. you wait in the queue for the scale, because scan-as-you-shop makes your life 20% simpler about 70% of the time. plus you think one of your primary school friends works here. you were close, not close enough to be understood and finally get rid of the ben 10-esque want to transform into something else at a whim, but close enough for fetid conversation to set in, to rise around you like quicksand. you did some stalking a year or two ago, and found out she was pregnant. you don’t want to ask about that, kids aren’t your thing. childhood was an aberration for you, a footnote in your unwritten and unwanted future biography, something to be glossed over. give up education as a bad mistake, the lyric goes? it was the record your mum would often play when lightly tipsy and weep to you about how morrissey really was the rounding error of humanity, a glimpse of the beauty we could bring into this world through just our voice, and when especially tipsy, when that bass line would come in after a silence only interrupted by her commanding you to turn the record over, she would admit to you, or more accurately to the bottom of whatever bottle she was currently fascinated with, that you were the other rounding error in life. you remember mentioning this to her a couple of months before, before the decay, and she said that well morrissey’s a wanker now and who cares about him. you never did, she said with a finger-point reserved only for the winking tellings-off she would give you after you got in a fight at school. you don’t remember what any of those were about.
you don’t like mint, but at least the two-for-one deal is still going. the dried stuff tastes pretty similar to the original, at least. safe from the mulch that your aging fridge turns your vegetable drawer into after a few days. you may remember whether or not to buy bin liners, but you still have to enlist your dad into cleaning it out when the cucumber goes soft. it reminds you of when you fell over on holiday, and tried to get up but put your hands directly into a cowpat. your mum couldn’t stop laughing. at least your dad tried to suppress the sniggers, however poorly he did so. you feel like if anybody else were your parents, they wouldn’t laugh at you until you had at least turned thirteen. you hated that holiday anyway. for a caravan park, there were a shocking amount of insects that bit you and left your skin unrelentingly itchy. you still remember when you were going to go and kiss that boy next door, you can’t remember his name but it started with a t, he said it was spelt like the guy from some band or other. why would you care, anyway. the t still lingers, as does that look. a bite an hour or two before, rapidly swelling up. the look of teenage disgust and concern, swirling in a perfectly un-phatic “you alright?” and a point upwards. you felt like you were never going to stop crying, but eventually you relented. the clock said it had just gone eight, the perfect time for you to lie and say you were tired and went to sleep early. no need to acknowledge the note, describing a time they’d be back and the food in the fridge and the kisses in your dad’s scrawled handwriting, etched so forcefully that the takeaway menu underneath had the same message embossed next to the tantalizing offer of £10 pizza, two chips, and a drink. you wouldn’t get that kind of value anymore, even with the bombardment of emails from whatever delivery service you uninstalled after whatever new year’s resolution you made.
the shop feels like it’s decaying. three doors down from the original big tesco, it was hastily repurposed from your old youth club. you don’t remember it being this big, or have so many mis-matched ceiling tiles. you remember, one time, getting a couple of the same styrofoam-style ceiling tiles down in geography, final period on a friday, with your supply teacher nowhere to be seen (you only found out from your mum a few years ago that your normal geography teacher “had to go to rehab for the (she tapped the side of her nose and sniffed, as if the word cocaine was somehow naughty to say, as if you hadn’t come across it at uni, as if everybody didn’t come across it at uni). you remember the winking telling-off when your mum found out that you’d accidentally whacked the supply teacher with a tile, and a promise to “keep this a secret from dad.” how he believed you’d spontaneously come down with a weeklong flu, you will never know.
the checkout goes without an issue, but you see the usually lively flowers plonked at the entrance picked away at and slightly wilted. these are never sold, but are meant to subliminally encourage you to buy flowers once you go in, your dad told you. why would the purchasable flowers be placed so close to the front of the shop then, you want to ask. he won’t tell you the answer. your granny trolley relieves you of the painful hubris in trying to do a weekly shop armed with two slightly ratty tote bags, but make it too embarrassing to run for your bus. you think that the next one is only fifteen minutes away, but your hubris comes to smite you in another way: of course the bus isn’t on time. where do you think you live, london?
by the time the bus lets you off, slightly closer to your house because of a three-month-long diversion that’s on its fourth month, you think about how the rain probably means your granny trolley needs a wash. you never did properly clean it that time apple juice leaked all over the bottom of it. still, at least it was the fancy kind. your dad asks if you remembered the bin liners, and you say of course you did. he mutters something about how he forgot to say before you left, and your next person to ferry across climbs aboard the boat.
