Michelene Wandor

Michelene Wandor was born in London in 1940, has worked as a poetry editor and theatre reviewer for Time Out magazine, and has written extensively for the theatre and the radio. Her publications include a volume of plays, two books of poetry and an interesting collection of what the author calls "fictions" entitled Guests in the Body in which the theme of possession is explored in a variety of contexts and fictional forms.

Sweet Sixteen1

Sixteen soft pink blankets fold inwards over sixteen soft warm smiling babies. Sixteen dark-haired young mothers meet their sixteen babies' soft mouths in a kiss. Sixteen mothers and babies recede² into the soft-focus³ blues and greens of sixteen immaculate⁴ gardens.

Naomi looks round to see the cluster⁵ of orher mothers, like herself mesmerized⁶ by Granada TV Rental's⁷ windows. The mothers swap⁸ little grins⁹ and turn their attention back to the real babies bundled in push-chairs and prams. The cluster breaks, and its various components span¹⁰ out across the cool marble floor, past the glass and perspex¹¹ walls, through the chrome and glass doors and into the world of echoing footsteps, surrounding arcades and fountains and climbing and weeping¹² shrubbery¹³. Lucy strains¹⁴ to stand up in her push-chair. Naomi eases¹⁵ her out of canvas straps and settles her on the red seat of the silver trolley. She pauses momentarily, to decide which is to be the first aisle¹ of the journey; should, she start with soft drinks, vegetables, frozen foods, tins – she decides on fruit juice.

As they wheel past the rack of special-offer Mars bars, Naomi gently deflects².

Lucy's outstretched hand, her thumb briefly stroking the soft palm of Lucy's hand. I could do the shopping with my eyes shut, thinks Naomi, once a week 1'for how many weeks, everything always in the same place. She turns the trolley to the right, to the fridge where the pineapple juice cartons – she stops. I The open maw³ of the fridge gapes⁴. It is empty. Ah well. Perhaps they have run out of cartons of fruit juice.

She decides to do dairy products next; cream, buffer, some yoghurt – but instead, on the racks where the dairy products used to be, she finds pizzas, steak and kidney pies in coy⁵ transparent wrappings, and further on packets of frozen, sleeping raspberries and apple and blackberry crumbles⁶. Something is wrong. She begins to collect, feeling uneasy that it isn't in the order of her choice, worried that if she leaves things now to go on to another aisle, they will have disappeared when she gets back.

She wheels on, to where she expects to find the vegetable racks: the net bags of French apples, the South African avocados, severely boycotted each time. But instead there are long blue and red spaghetti packets, rice, curled dusty⁷ pasta. Again she collects, panic beginning to rise. She mustn't show it to Lucy, who is happy being wheeled at such sight-seeing speed, happy to have her outstretched hand denied, because her desire is being stroked at the rate of new products every thirty seconds.

Naomi makes confidently for the cold meat counter; it is dark, piled up with unattended towers of soft toilet paper; the plastic box where scraps of meat were sold cheaply, the ends of cuts, is upside down, empty. For the first time she notices the other women. They walk fast, their heads slightly bent, cradling¹ high-piled baskets, anxiety on their faces, grabbing cereals², bread, soap powders, cleansers, hurrying past pensioners, skirting³ toddlers⁴, running, running.

Lucy now has a fist in her mouth, enjoying the game, enjoying the deftness⁵ of the domestic dodgems⁶ where years of unthinking practice have enabled the women to anticipate⁷ corners, come to a full stop at the precise point of need, to turn in a tight space, to avoid and yet not slacken speed. Naomi speeds up to join the pace, taking what she can wherever she can, until she arrives at the back of the floor space, at the point where the soft drinks used to be. Naomi gasps. The once smooth space is now a raw gash, copper cables twisting like thick muscle fibre, clinging to the broken brick and plaster gaps in the walls.

Naomi hears a voice saying. Nothing is where it was. Lucy giggles and she realizes that she has spoken out loud. She looks round. No one seems to have heard her. They are all too busy. Naomi looks down at the trolley. It is full of everything she has meant to buy, but none of it is in the right order, the order she is used to.

Naomi wheels the trolley slowly towards the cash tills⁸. Lucy, sensitive to the change in pace, stops giggling; she is now pale and still. Naomi joins a queue at a cash till, watching the other women, their eyes darting⁹, their hands cupped protectively over their prospective¹⁰ puchases, as if there were some danger of someone whisking¹¹ everything out again and back onto the alien shelves.

Naomi stands behind a woman who fumbles¹ for her cheque-book. Naomi watches as the white snakes with purple figures spill out of the tills, paper bags plastic carriers², boxes and baskets flash³ between the tills and the plate glass⁴ window.

Naomi's turn comes. She lifts a bottle of lemon and lime⁵ out of the trolley.

The outside is sticky. Naomi moves her index⁶ and second fingers to a dry part of the bottle, her hand slips, the bottle falls, its soft edge knocks against the rim of the conveyor belt and bursts.

Thick, bright green liquid squirts⁷ luminously back into the trolley, over tins of tuna fish. Lucy claps her hands in delight, and reaching into the trolley, she lifts a packet of white self-raising flour⁸ and drops it with a dull thud on the floor. A white cloud powders the feet of the women. Lucy giggles. Naomi feels a cloud of answering laughter rise in her, tries to keep it down, looks up and catches the eye of the woman queuing behind her. The woman smiles, ruffles Lucy's hair and then lifts a bag of tomatoes from her own basket and hurls⁹ it overarm against the special offer of tea bags. Red seed drips down against the green boxes.

The women look at one other. Suddenly bits of flattened, squared ham fly free of their jellied¹⁰, cellophane¹¹ packets, duck pate bursts out of its blue pottery bowls, salt and vinegar crisps¹²

crackle¹³ underfoot, sliding through whiter than white cottage cheese, a treacle¹ pudding roosts²" among the spilled biscuit crumbs. The air is thick with suspended golden arcs from tinned peaches, rains of mint-flavoured petit pois³, chunky⁴ Branston pickle⁵ washed along by mineral water from Malvern⁶ spa⁷.

The lights of the cash tills spark⁸ white, the women sitting at the money machines aren't sure which way to turn, one surreptitiously⁹ picks up a cucumber and slides it along the floor, into a welcoming pool of raspberry yoghurt.

Outside the plate glass window red and blue lights flash as pale men in dark blue peer through the window at all the Christmas and birthday and anniversary celebrations in one.

Ten feet away, sixteen dark-haired mothers smile at their babies for the sixteenth time and enfold them in sixteen warm, pink blankets.