Chap One

Sash stands anxiously at the check-out, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. Behind her, a large queue snakes towards the center of the supermarket, irritated customers happy to glare at her angrily.

“Come on, please”, Sash quietly whispers to herself. Every so often she cranes her neck to try and look at the till, before looking back to her left, horrified to see someone else join the ever-increasing line.

The plump assistant clicks chewing gum against her teeth while she waits for the machine to tell her what to do next. Her skin is so fake-tanned and dented by acne, she looks like a gigantic orange. Next to her, Sash could be a completely different species. She’s compact but perfectly proportioned, with delicate features and gorgeous eyes.

The human orange looks from the computer up to Sash and blinks slowly, one eyelid slightly behind the other, like a treefrog waking up.

“Denied”, she says lazily. Clack goes the chewing gum against her teeth.

“That can’t be”, Sash says. “I put money in there on Wednesday.”

“Today is Friday”, the assistant says flatly, as though Sash may have overlooked a crucial piece of information. “Maybe it went somewhere else on the days in between.”

“What’s the hold up?” comes a voice from the queue behind her. Seemingly happy to ignore the question, she just continues to look across to Sash as though examining something uninteresting, she’s just had the misfortune to step on.

People tap their toes impatiently. Others drum their fingers on the long since stopped conveyor belt. A child folds his arms, mimicking his scruffily dressed father.

“Let me try again”, Sash says. “It must be a problem with the machine.”

Moving at a snail’s pace, seemingly unaffected by the enormity of the queue that has begun to swell so much it’s now impossible to see the end of it, the assistant rubs her fingers along the black stripe of the credit card and langorously re-swipes it. Any slower and her heart would stop. The till hums. The eyelids blink, out of synchronization. She pauses briefly, like a game show host at the moment before revealing the winner of a year long event.

“Denied”, she says again, emphasizing the first syllable of the word.

Someone’s hands go up in the air. “Come on”, he says. “That’s four times now. It isn’t going to work.”

“Do you have another card?” the assistant asks, handing back her broken one.

Sash looks down at her shopping. A bottle of wine, a pre-packaged salad, a beef steak, a punnet of strawberries, a health food bar to eat on the way home. She rifles through her purse, practically tipping the coins out in front of her to count them.

“This is ridiculous”, the same man from the queue says. Others nod their heads in agreement. One says, mostly to himself, “call the manager already.”

“I have three dollars, eighty six cents”, Sash says, trying her best to follow the assistant’s lead and ignore them.

The assistant looks at the shopping. She looks at Sash and then she looks at the till. “That’s not going to be enough”, she says.

Outside, the sky has clouded over. Sash looks up into the black stormy swirls as though expecting to find a reasonable answer there. Instead, all she gets is a spot of light rain dampening her cheek. She feels like the world is spitting on her.

“Looks like it’s rolling in again”, an old lady says, holding on to her hat while she passes, in case a sudden gust of wind might blow it off.

Sash sighs. “What happened to the fucking sun?” she mumbles, the old lady already out of earshot.

At the entrance to the train station, a dark skinned man taps enthusiastically on upturned plastic buckets with a wooden kitchen spoon.

Sash pauses for a moment to listen, losing herself pleasurably in the hollow, vibrant sounds.

The man blinks at her kindly to say hello, lifting the corner of his mouth into a smile, and tilting the top of his head downwards, in a way in which Sash mistakes for an attempt to indicate the collection hat on the ground in front of him.

She smiles sweetly at the old man, whose leather skin reminds her of her grandfather, immediately embarrassed she can’t tip him. As if she’s already outstayed her welcome, she heads into the station, rushing quickly towards the train that’s already pulled up to her platform.

Her three dollars eighty six cents were just enough to buy the health food bar and leave a sufficient amount for the train ticket home. Digging it out of her purse now, she realizes for the first time, in her haste to get out of the supermarket, she’s bought the only flavor she doesn’t like.

“Fuck”, she says, a little bit louder than she wanted to. A wide-eyed child sat on the edge of the seat opposite, regards her with a mix of fear and excitement, as though he’s heard something he’s not supposed to and because of that, he likes it. His feet dangle down, a good twenty centimeters from the floor.

“Sorry”, Sash says to the boy who looks far too young to be traveling on his own. She looks at the health food bar and then hands it over to him. “Here”, she says, “you like apricots right?”

The city shoots by, framed through a toughened plastic window covered in scratches and graffiti.

A fat attendant checks Sash’s ticket, eyes the boy as though he were her own and then shuffles along the compartment, his company issue trousers frayed at the bottom and hanging off his ass where a belt does nothing to keep them in place.

There is a quarter mile walk uphill back to Sash’s apartment over pitted pavement slabs not designed for high heels, and by the time she gets there, she’s soaked through and absolutely exhausted.

A stack of bills jam the progress of the door momentarily. Some of them have been there for months, as though now forming part of the apartment’s design. She fights her way past them, kicks her shoes off in the hallway and swings the door shut behind her without bothering to look. Just before it hits the latch, a hand comes up to stop it.

“Miss Cole?”

The voice freezes the blood in Sash’s body. She makes fists with her bare toes in the worn carpet. Her head hangs at the end of a long, deep sigh. Finally she turns.

“Martin”, she says.

Martin is a man of extreme proportions. His nose, his fingers, his belly and his ankles. It’s as if he has been beamed down from another planet, or belongs to a completely different race entirely.

“The rent”, he says, tapping the part of his wrist where a watch would sit if he wore one. “It’s late.”

“It’s not a good time”, Sash says.

The door still isn’t fully open. The effect is that only half of Martin’s immenseness can be seen, as he hovers on the periphery. For all his bulk and presence, he’s reserved, and a little bit timid. To be polite, and because she knows he won’t do it himself, Sash takes the three steps back to the door to open it fully.

“I’m sorry, Martin”, she says. “It’s just been a bad day, that’s all.”

“It’s been over two months”, Martin says. “I can’t wait any longer.”

“Just give me until the end of the month”, Sash pleads.

“The end of the month is twenty eight days away”, Martin says.

“The end of the week?” Sash asks hopefully.