Waiting for Rain
More even than operating the till, Greta hates to sweep the floor. Her legs are feeble after long hot hours of sitting. She feels degraded. Even the kind supervisor will mercilessly switch off the till when the store is quiet and ask her to “Give us a sweep.” This reminds Greta that she is the lowest of the low. She is filled with slavish rebellion as she drives the tide of receipts and wrappers before her wide brush. She thinks of Spartacus, of Che Guevara. She will topple the system, she thinks with an inscrutable smile.
She watches the clock as it slowly peels off its hours. Every fifteen minutes make eighty pence. Fifteen minutes have never seemed so long.
The heat has begun to take on a life of its own. It has acquired the nature of an epic: people are aware that they are living through something momentous. There is talk of standpipes, of the dry beds of reservoirs, of deaths.
Now it is as if there has never been a time before this drought, nor will there ever be an end. Even the cautious northerners have discarded their chunky clothes and step out, blinking, into the natural warmth. They walk in a new way. They no longer care. If a road has to be crossed, the cars will stop all right. And if it isn’t done today it can be done tomorrow, for the days are endlessly long.
Everything that is sinister or threatening in the town is lured out like lizards from under rocks. This sort of weather gives people illusions. They imagine they can get away with anything. The night streets crawl with restless youths looking to prove themselves, even if it is only by breaking a window or scaling a wall. There is an imminence of chaos, the breakdown of structure, and then? State of emergency, looting, burning, rioting, the end of the world, and what does it matter? In this heat, what does anything matter?
An elderly man with a shock of long white hair, a frayed waistcoat and an enormous paunch, always chooses her checkout for his groceries. He reads her name from the badge and teases her to know its origin. Her shyness only encourages him. Before long he greets her by name, like a friend.
She can tell from his basket that he lives alone: the box of eggs, the packet of biscuits, the sliced white bread. He does not take care of himself. He is a lonely eccentric, a sort of troglodyte. Perhaps he is drawn to her by their similarity.
Laughingly, she even tells him about her tooth. He is sympathetic. “I promise you it will not hurt,” he says, in his threadbare, academic voice.
She has comforted herself that the extraction will not hurt, because of the anaesthetic, and that has given her a kind of courage during the limbo-time of waiting. The old man’s promise cheers her. It is only when she is seating herself with fragile bravery on Mr. Cowan’s chair that she remembers: when the anaesthetic wears off, then it will begin to hurt. She regards the promise as a betrayal.
It is then that she resigns herself completely. Let everything be done to her. She thought that she had come here through choice, in order to be rid of pain, but in fact it was only a choice between one pain and another (and she has to pay for this!). Since it was not to be avoided, she may as well offer herself up to it entirely, without protest.
To Greta, pain is not a matter of degree. Once it starts, it may as well take over.
The supervisor with the heavy eyebrows is holding a till roll under Greta’s nose. She runs it through her long, manicured fingers, stopping it every so often with an impatient tug.
