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The shopping list
The first one came to her rather inadvertently, as a driven leaf. It was quite short –basic, in the lexicon she developed a month later- but categorically inclusive at the same time. Eggs. Milk. Sugar. Butter. Self Rising Flour. Muriel picked it up pestered, annoyed, almost furious: she hated the view of a dirty trolley but what she hated even more was the idea of placing new articles into a cubicle occupied by little used disposable things of others (unused but scrunched plastic bags, old receipts, bottle lids -if not the bottles themselves!-, humid, infectious tissues, a lost baby sock). The shopping experience was for her a ritual and as such had to be performed in immaculate conditions. This time, however, for a reason only the gods know, Muriel did not place the little shopping list in the rubbish bin. This time, automatically -as if unconsciously guessing future consequences- she carefully read the list twice, folded it in three and slipped it into one of her two pockets. The left one.
She walked through the aisles following her usual routine: frozen products first, then cereals and muesli bars, followed by all sort of canned fruit and vegetables, beans and soups; then fresh fruit, then poultry and meat, then dairy products and finally crackers, bread and sweets. Not one day did Muriel fail to follow these calculated steps, with the same devotion one would walk to the altar of a nineteenth century church. She religiously discharged articles from the first row of the shelves because of her convincement that people who accidentally dropped them, kept putting them back again in their places without updating the staff about possible leaking bottles, dented cans, smashed loafs of bread or cracked biscuits, all consequence of the involuntary accident. If people were more honest, she sighed, or even more cautious. But she knew them well, and she knew them all. No possible redemption for the ordinary shoppers at that busy supermarket would come from her lips, neither from her thoughts. Muriel was a woman of principles. And deeply, secretly, desperately bored.
It must have been this unconfessed boredom that guided her right hand into her left pocket in a rather unnatural act with the little folded shopping list in it. And it must have been her curiosity rather than her discipline (humans are curious creatures, on the first place, curious creatures more than anything else. Routinely curious) it must have been her curiosity, I repeat, what made her search the pocket once again at home -after having placed every bought item in its correspondent labelled destination- and read it carefully. Eggs. Milk. Sugar. Butter. Self Rising Flour. A cake, muttered Muriel, she´s going to bake a cake. Muriel put the paper on the fridge door, under a big magnet, without knowing why.
The following morning the sun was particularly orange, with a green shadow all around. An absolute unusual view, but not impossible in that isolated little town in the middle of the country. Muriel entered the supermarket at eight thirty two, as usual, and by eight thirty three she was inserting a one dollar coin in the slot to release the first of a long, slightly curved chain of silvered trolleys. In her unconscious mind she compared herself to that trolley, dependant and chained and systematically performing the same chores again and again and once again. But only in her remotely accessed mind, because Muriel would never think of her life as being boring on a conscious level. She could not emotionally afford that discovery -she would never know what to do with it-.
Pushing the trolley towards her with a short but firm tug, the first thing that her eyes could not avoid to notice was the list. Her hands rushed to pick it up. Tomato sauce. Apple cider vinegar. Beef stock. Rubbish bags. Powder. Cottage cheese. Carrots. Turnips. Potatoes. Celery. Muriel folded the list in three and slipped it into her left pocket using her right hand with the same unnatural movement as last time. She then continued her routine through the aisles as usual, carrying someone else´s shopping list in the left pocket of her strictly black zipped jacket. The sun, by the time she left, was entirely yellow.
Once at home Muriel unpacked and tidied up, following the self-imposed method of from-big- to- small. Big sized items first, medium ones to follow, little ones to finish. This part of the ritual was so special that she found it particularly annoying if an article was neither big nor medium or small. When was she to put it away, in first, second or third place? It was a disgrace. This time, fortunately, all the articles fitted the criteria and she finished in only twelve minutes. On the wooden stool by the bench she sat down and searched her pocket. The list was obviously still there. Muriel read it carefully. A soup, she concluded. A winter soup, said loudly, as if passing a sentence. Then, automatically, without even thinking of any plan –unusual for her- she placed the new shopping list underneath the other, attached with the big magnet to the fridge door. She had a cake and a winter soup. So far.
During several identically sunny days Muriel kept going to the only supermarket in the area wearing without any reasonable explanation the same black jacket. She changed dresses, skirts and pants, but not the black jacket with the zipper. It must have been because of the pocket. The one that started shipping an unanimous short shopping list and ended up treasuring more than half a dozen a week. As it can only happen in real life –because we all know that fiction is real life´s little brother, its broken mirror, its distorted shadow- Muriel continued to find other people´s shopping list every day since she kept the first one. They were lying there either scrunched or flat, scratched or immaculate, but always there, waiting for her with their inviting variety of characters and colours.
-Eighty two altogether. Do you have Flybuys?
Muriel nodded and obediently handed her two cards over to the cashier, signed the receipt and left feeling unusually excited. On the way home her hand did not leave the warm, somehow humid hollowness of her left pocket even for one second, the tips of her fingers rubbing the new shopping list impatiently. She started to love her evenings and her lists. They provided Muriel with a new entertainment: she had started to classify them. Or should we say Classify them. A big job. An enterprise. A perfectly designed classification method as only a very lonely person can bear to follow and practice. The first lists were catalogued according to their length: long (more than twenty items), medium (between twenty and twelve) and small. However, Muriel soon discovered the multiplicity of options: should she sort them out according to the type of paper on which they were written? Scrap, lined, white, coloured. Full page or ripped ones. Should she classify them according to the font used in them? Upper case, lower case, print, script. Language? English, Mandarin, Hindi, Italian. Memory elicitors? Crossed out ones versus non crossed out ones. Maybe a more complex method would give her even more satisfaction. She reshuffled the lists one evening of desperate boredom while on TV the local news talked about a man who died from a severe allergy attack in a matter of minutes, the ambulance could barely recognize a normal shape of a human being in that extraordinarily unusual swollen body. Muriel smiled without malice, just because something had finally happened in her neighbourhood. Shrugging her shoulders she then spread all the shopping lists on the bench and started to engineer a refined system of cataloguing, the final result being a combination of multiple entrances that categorized the lists according to a variety of aspects. The level of sophistication was reaching limits beyond any possible imagination: the daily, automatic act of writing a shopping list –as normal, average human beings always do- was then dissected by the expert hands of Muriel and her quasi- scientific classifying method. Penne. Coconut milk. Jelly. Shoelaces. Pesticide. Garlic powder. Disposable plates. Pink Lady apples. Lettuce. Nesquik. Light Sour cream. Skinny milk. Waxing strips. Tofu. Muesli bars (footy-Bratz).
-A woman (waxing strips). In her thirties. Children in school age, more than one (footy/bratz muesli bars, for the lunch box, one boy one girl). On a diet (hence the skinny milk, the light spread, the tofu). Working full time (hence the disposable plates, the frozen meals. And the waxing strips: no time for a waxing at a salon).
Beer. Bleach. Detergent. Serviettes. Mob (large). Ajax (green). Beef stock. Garbage bags (large). Omo matic. Shower Power. Coke.
-A man (no woman writes beer in the first place) moving houses (numerous cleaning articles to clean the new house. New house, I repeat, new house: otherwise he wouldn´t have written “large” next to the garbage bags, that´s something you know, unless it´s new. Just a new rubbish bin (instead of a whole new house) is ruled out by the mention of the other cleaning articles and particularly the Coke: it is well known that Coke can clean the rustiest of the surfaces.
Muriel had a new life thanks to the laziness of the people that lead them to leave their mobile memories behind once they had used them successfully. She got so much involved in her lists that she decided to take a short course on graphology. This would allow her to not only vaguely guess who the shopping lists belonged to but to understand their personalities, their inner traits, their hidden characteristics. Muriel started to file the lists in a thick folder once the fridge door revealed her limited space to her, the magnet became weak, the clip too narrow to hold the growing thickness of her treasures. We should say folders, in plural. That day, when she walked back home feeling particularly excited, she sat on the wooden stool next to the bench as usual and opened the new list, ready to read, analyse, classify and finally file it accordingly. Thickened cream. Garlic. Olive oil. Mortar and pestle. Chicken stock. Crushed tomatoes. Well, sighed Muriel, a simple dressing. Too easy, too boring. She was ready to place the list back on the bench when she suddenly noticed two words at the back of the paper. The writing was so small Muriel could barely see it. Was that also part of the list? Something written at the last minute, in a rush? But why at the back? And why so small? Curiosity grew inside Muriel. She stood up, went to her room and opened the wide drawer of her bedside table. An incredible variety of objects jumped to her eyes. A 1975 one dollar coin. A comb. A used tissue. Two broken pairs of glasses. A stamp from Greece. A pacifier (Muriel had no children). And right there, what she was looking for: a magnifying glass. Her right hand was quick to grab it before it disappears into the tangle of other multiple things that have been living in the big drawer for who knows how long. Muriel went back to her wooden stool and lifted the list. She placed the magnifying glass at the right distance –not too close, not too far from the illegible writing- and focused her eyes intensely.
-Aha – nodded Muriel, her lips repeating silently the two words now deciphered. She decided to have a second look at the list. The handwriting was so familiar. The graphology course made her more aware of curves, dots, the inclination of the “L´s”, the thickness of the stroke. She knew that handwriting; she had definitely seen it before. But when? And where? Muriel read the shopping list again and again. And the two words at the back as well, which she now knew were part of the list. Thickened cream. Garlic. Olive oil... Thickened cream. Garlic, Olive oil, repeated Muriel to herself, as a mantra. Thickened cream, garlic... A letter! She saw that handwriting in a letter. The letter was sent to her and other landowners in her street. There was a dangerous electricity cable hanging loosely across the trees. The woman who sent the letter wanted all the proprietors, herself included, to sign a petition to the Town Hall authorities to fix the problem immediately. She wanted the whole electricity cabling system to be replaced, no matter the cost. Muriel had kept the letter to read it carefully some other day, because she didn´t want to sign carelessly. She looked for the letter and found it in the fridge door -where else?-. She proceeded to compare both pieces of paper. The p from proprietor and the p from pestle: identical. The c from cable and the c from thickened: identical. And the exaggerated, energetic roundness of all the “C´s”, circular and defiantly looking like the innocent letter o. There was no doubt about it: the shopping list and the letter were written by the same person. Muriel read the envelope aloud:
- Mrs Anne Marie Taylor. 24 Tree Road. 3100.
She smiled. This coincidence just added a new ingredient to her newly acquired entertainment. Opening the red folder she filed the shopping list thinking of the array of possibilities that this little discovery presented to her. She smiled again, feeling a little less bored and much more excited. She went to bed earlier than usual. She couldn´t sleep well that night. Something was trying to keep her awake. Muriel finally fell asleep at two, only to wake up again at three thirty, her heart racing, sweating like a teenager during her first kiss. 24 Tree Road. The man who died from a severe allergy attack. His body dramatically swollen as never seen before. 24 Tree Road: she remembered having heard the address in the news and having smiled out of excitement, because something had finally happened in her neighbourhood. She remembered it well because of the guiltiness felt after having smiled at such a disgrace. 24 Tree Road, just a few meters from her house. And from the supermarket.
Muriel could hardly wait for the morning to come. She was the first one in the queue of the post office when they opened at eight. She bought a stamp and an envelope. With trembling hands she put two things in it: the letter Mrs Anne Taylor had written to all proprietors in her street a few days ago, and Mrs Taylor´s shopping list, in which Muriel had carefully highlighted the two hardly legible words at the back. She sent the letter to the local police and went shopping.
The following day, as Muriel made her way to the supermarket, she was not surprised to see the police arresting Anne Marie Taylor accused of murdering her allergic husband of thirty years with a home-made dressing full of finely “crushed nuts” (as finely as only a mortar and a pestle can crush). As finely as the fine handwriting they were written in, thought Muriel).
She smiled and sighed. A long, scrunched shopping list was waiting for her in the first available trolley at the supermarket. She picked it up with her right hand and put it in her left pocket, knowing this one was going to be hard work: it contained no less than fifty items. In Cantonese.
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