Page 24 of A Face in the Crowd
‘There was this man,’ I say. ‘We said hello, but I didn’t ask for his number. I was hoping to run into him on the bus today, but he wasn’t there. I was hoping that you might be able to help me ID him…?’
I’m one of those people who are excellent after a crisis. When it comes to thinking on the spot, to sounding plausible when needed, I’m a joke.
There is another, far lengthier, pause. It’s agonising and I know I must sound like some sort of desperate stalker. This is what it’s come to. First there was online dating, then Tinder, now stalking people on public transport. There’s nothing lower.
‘I don’t think I can help,’ the poor man says.
‘I can pay.’
It comes from nowhere. It’s suddenly my default answer to everything – buying myself out of trouble.
There’s more silence, then a shuffling and then the voice replies much lower this time. ‘I guess I might be able to do something,’ he says. ‘It might take a day or two.’
He asks about which bus I was on, what time, roughly where I was located and whether I was sitting or standing. I answer all his questions, almost through politeness. After that, he takes my phone number and says he’ll call back if he comes up with anything.
By the time the line goes dead, my chest is hammering once more. It’s partly through embarrassment but also because I wonder if the images that might come will show whoever dropped the envelope in my bag. I suppose this is how the world really works. Money gets people what they want.
When I get into the staff changing rooms, Daff is already there. She talks about how she was bladdered on Saturday night, which is reason enough for avoiding work nights out. We don’t talk about money, but I do wonder how people afford it all. Even if I wanted to be an alkie, I couldn’t afford it.
I’m about to head towards the checkout when the manager, Jonathan, waves me across. He’s always in a suit and shuffles around the supermarket, permanently looking as if he’s lost something. Despite that, he’s also the type who’s stacked the odd shelf in his time. I’ve seen him do aisle clean-ups while still in his jacket. He’s always been fair to me, allowing me to skip shifts at short notice when Billy has been ill.
‘Can I have a word?’ he asks. His features are stony, which isn’t entirely rare.
I follow him into his office, which is a windowless room at the very back of the store, next to the toilets. I doubt anyone dreamed of this sort of thing as a boy – not that working on a checkout is the stuff of which dreams are made, either.
He sits behind his desk and cathedrals his fingers into one another to form a triangle. The room is cold and it’s hard not to shiver as I sit.
‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’ he says.
My stomach knots. The money from the envelope is his and now he wants it back. How can I explain everything I’ve spent?
‘Like what?’ I reply, somehow keeping my voice level.
He twists his monitor around and taps the space bar. A video starts to play and it now seems so stupid, so obvious, that I can’t believe I did it in the first place.
The dirty-haired girl from the other day steps around the security barrier at the small door by the magazines and leaves the store. She cradles her baby in one arm and the stolen shopping in the other. There’s a second in which she gazes back to the camera and then time is frozen.
‘Like this,’ Jonathan says.
Chapter Fourteen
It’s stick or twist time, I guess.
‘I don’t know what you’re asking,’ I say. I’m like a kid with chocolate around her mouth, telling her mum that she hasn’t raided the Easter Eggs hidden under the bed.
‘Three bags of nappies,’ Jonathan begins, ‘four packets of noodles, a bag of oats, a bottle of lotion, formula and rusks. That’s what she carried out of the store, and yet her receipt shows something quite different from that. Would you care to explain?’
There is no explanation, of course. There will be footage of me passing items over the scanner while covering the barcode, more still of the girl wheeling the nappies past me on her trolley and then moving them, unpaid, into her shopping bag.
‘It’s not the first time, is it?’ Jonathan adds.
He’s watching me, trying to make eye contact, but I can’t match him. I stare at the floor and my throat has swelled to such a degree that it feels like I’m trying to gulp down a whole melon. There’s no point in arguing because he knows. Of course he knows. I try to speak, but all that emerges is a croak.
‘You can continue to lie,’ he says, ‘and I’ll call the police right now.’
He reaches for the phone on his desk, but I get there first, grabbing for the receiver and accidentally knocking it off the desk. There’s a clatter of plastic and wire as it tumbles and Jonathan reaches to pick it up.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Please don’t call them.’
