...having recently endured a painful journey to the bowels of a cold, industrial, shopping mall, I thought it a wise thing to remind myself of how we once went shopping. So here's a FREE chapter from the novella, Two Feet, which roughly illustrates the days before malls, supermarkets and on-line shopping.
...about the size of it! |
SHOPPING IN THE WIND
But they did come and repossess the car. It
was a red Mini-Imp, and the men that came were from a large, prosperous city
across the border, and they didn't even stay for coffee. They just drove it off
down the thin, corrugated and eroded dirt road that led down the hill onto the
main road.
We stood and watched it go. “Shit,” is what
my mother said.
We were left with a black bicycle, and on
this bicycle I would pedal on the tarmac road to the local General Dealer every
day. It was a long road bordered by pineapple fields, and the labourers working
in those fields wore old, plastic fertilizer bags tied to their legs to avoid
the sharpness of the pineapple leaves. They were like human scarecrows.
This was a good road. It had a few hills
and a few potholes, but pedalling was easy especially on the way to the Store.
I’d park the bike outside the Store where the hulking overhead diesel drum was
positioned, and then walk across the dry patch of red earth where the chickens
fed, and climb the few concrete steps onto the porch of the building. Here, a
Cobbler and a tailor worked. The tailor had a milky eye and his left leg would
furiously pump the plate on the floor to make the sewing machine rattle. He
looked as though he was riding a bicycle to nowhere. The Cobbler, who wore a
white shirt and a tie, had a tiny anvil and a mouthful of little black tacks
that protruded from his lips like snakes’ tongues. Beside him were heaps of
shoes that I thought would never cover a person’s feet or tread on a road
again. But they did.
There is always a group of people gathered
on the porch. A mother feeding her baby on her bosom, her head bent low over
the infant to keep away the flies, an old man leaning on his cane peering from
beneath the brim of his recently purchased hat, and another woman tying up her
cash in a piece of cloth that she would thrust down her blouse for safe
keeping.
The business of shopping was a muted,
respected affair by customers in the Store. An aisle was approached with
caution, almost in awe, bare feet scuffing on the concrete floor. Canned goods
were held carefully in both hands, and the picture on the label was studied
with the intensity of an art scholar. A bar of wrapped, Lux soap was sniffed
and smiled at, and the bulky bag of Hullett’s refined, white sugar, stroked and
prodded.
At the rear of the store, alongside
gardening implements and paraffin lamps, shoes for men and women, made in
Taiwan, beckoned. The shoes were never tried on for size but measured against
the foot, the brightness of the shoe’s plastic alluring. The appearance of high
heeled shoes would cause much stifled giggling.
The weighing of maize meal, sugar or flour
by the Store’s owner was a solemn affair, the customer having ordered it, not
by weight, but by what he or she could afford. As the grocer’s scale shifted on
its fulcrum, so would the head of the customer, as if mentally trying to
balance the brass contraption by telepathy. When the scale righted itself, the
customer would do likewise with his or her head. Then the maize or flour would
be poured into a paper bag and fastened with cello-tape. Whatever money the
customer had was offered to the store owner as payment. It was accepted that the store owner would count out what was needed, and the balance be returned. A
sticky sweet or two always concluded the transaction.
If a can of paraffin was listed on my
mother’s shopping list, the road and the ride home was a challenge. Paraffin
was an essential fuel. It kept the deep freeze and the fridge cold and the
hurricane lamps alight when there was a power failure. The bag of meagre
groceries I could hang on the handlebars, but a five-gallon metal container
filled with paraffin was heavy and cumbersome, and the only place for it was
between my legs on the hard saddle so I’d peddle off with knees and elbows wide
like a frog in mid-flight and my backside almost touching the rear tyre.
The road I travelled was often shared with
one or two eighteen-wheeler railway trucks. Red, monstrous and loud, they
travelled across the country transporting cattle, timber and sugar cane. Long
before they came into sight the tarmac beneath the bicycle’s front wheel would
vibrate, and as fate would have it, we’d meet on the downhill, so there was no
time or place for stopping. Feet would start pumping wildly on the pedals and
my backside would take to the air and the paraffin would begin sloshing left
and right as the grocery bag began to scream and tear against the spokes of the
front tyre.
To this day I don’t have a clue why I
thought going faster would save me from the metallic beast that was coming up
behind me. It is what boys do.
The driver of the monster would
purposefully sound his foghorn as he neared. The sound of the tyres and the
metal was ferocious as the vehicle passed, like a freight train coming out of a
tunnel and crossing a steel bridge. It felt endless. It was a red blur out of
the corner of your eye. The handlebars of the bicycle shuddered like a jack hammer in your hands. The tarmac was a dark blur, and the yellow grass on
the verge becomes a spray of colour without shape.
Then the wind, the gale, the blizzard, the
hurricane hit.
It came off the passing vehicle and slammed
into you as you quickly tensed your flailing knees, and sphincter muscle,
around the five-gallon paraffin can. You try to turn the bicycle’s juddering
wheel into the wind with no success. You bend your head so low you are just
short of chewing the metal of the handlebars.
Then you are in the ditch, and you are
being watched by a group of labourers that work in a pineapple field dressed
like human scarecrows. The bag of sugar you bought has exploded on the hot
tarmac, and the bar of Lifebuoy soap has disintegrated against the fence-pole,
and the bicycle has curled up some twenty feet away shaped like a modern
sculpture.
But you are still holding the five-gallons
of paraffin to your chest as if it were liquid gold.
Which it was.
*****
Mabuza once told me that when travelling on
any road and there is a fear of being struck from behind by an ill wind, get
off the road.
*****
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