MARIA

Maria worked on the checkouts, she served me the day I had my interview. Her natural blonde hair highlighted by a coat of peroxide, like a picture within a painting. Her brown eyes and round suntanned face were scarred with a plaster just above the top left of her lip, covering a piercing deemed unacceptable by the management. She used to wear this perfume which made my nostrils anxious any time she wasn’t there.

We got talking one evening, when she was relieved from her till during a quiet hour and sent to assist me stacking the shelves. I knew I liked her as soon as we started talking, because my lips went from a state of being unable to form sentences to suddenly pebble-dashing words in desperate attempts to hold her attention and make me sound interesting. I just came across as a gibbering wreck, barely able to stand due to my knees wanting to give way, as my stomach was simulating the kind of sensations I’d only ever had riding the Vampire ride at Chessington. She told me she liked drum and bass, and hip-hop, and she wrote poetry! I told her I was an MC and I was trying to convey to her my frustrations about other MCs, who didn’t know when to stop rapping and let the music breathe, and that I wasn’t one of them, I knew when to stop, I weren’t no motormouth and I rapped at half the speed like hip-hop, but I lacked that confidence those rude boys had, that arrogant swagger, the type which attracted girls.

As an MC, every time I went to perform, or any time I tried to talk to a girl that I liked, it was like a pack of pit bulls were circling the perimeters of my fears whilst I sat on a carousel, repeatedly riding it round and round, wishing I could just jump off and make a break for it in some recurring fairground nightmare. I couldn’t concentrate on anything I was doing, my nerves were corrupting all reason, I placed a baked bean tin on a shelf full of shampoo and didn’t even notice until she corrected me, laughing.

These conversations continued over a period of weeks. I’d begin every shift with a wish that she was working too, savouring every second of speech, begging for minutes more. She was interesting. She read books, painted and wrote poems, and she was gorgeous. I didn’t know girls like this existed. She worked in the evenings and was the only part-timer who didn’t work Saturdays; she said she needed her Friday nights for raving.

Though we talked a lot, I wasn’t really getting the impression that she was into me and I was hopelessly floating into friendship, a fate that I’d suffered before, made even worse by the news she broke to me one evening that she was leaving to go to art college.

That night back at the bedsit, I was drinking a cup of tea, listening to music, thinking about points in the past where I thought I’d let myself down, and there were quite a few. I decided I weren’t gonna let this one slip away like all the others, I had to say something, I had to tell Maria I liked her, and ask her out. I could hear those pit bulls barking but I was prepared to risk getting bitten.

Something must have been right, because the next day I found out from my friend Anthony, who also worked on the checkouts, that her final shift coincided with the one day of the week I was working a late. On the final day, she wasn’t due in till four and would finish at seven; I was starting at twelve and working till eight. I knew my window of opportunity would be small, so I had to be ruthless. I worked out what I was gonna say the night before in the bedsit and this looped round my head all day long, disturbing the delicate network of needle-threads that was my nervous system, but I remained determined. I was gonna kick those pit bulls right in the balls and if they bit, then so be it. At least I would have tried.

I didn’t get to see Maria arrive that day. An unusual influx of customers kept both me and her busy for what would normally be a quiet evening, once the post-work rush was over. Any spare moment I got was spent hoping she’d come off her checkout and come and work with me filling up the freezers. Any quiet moment, though, was brief and was soon disturbed by queues of flippin’ customers.

When I checked the clock for the first time, it was already gone six. I knew time was running out and I was beginning to lose the plot when I likened myself to Keanu Reeves in Speed, on speed, as my behaviour started to become more frantic. At quarter to seven, fifteen minutes left, hauling a cage full of booze too fast around a corner I tipped it over and smashed a whole crate of beer on the shop floor! By the time I’d run upstairs to the warehouse to get a bucket, mop and dustpan, then dealt with a complaint from a customer and proceeded to unload the cage that I should have already dealt with, it was ten past seven! I went straight to the checkouts, then ran upstairs to the warehouse, the canteen and the office, but I just could not find her. An announcement then went up for her to return to the checkouts, but she never appeared; she was gone.

I went back to the aisle where the booze was and began filling the shelves like I was supposed to. I was never really one to skive off or break rules, and of course by now the shop had pretty much emptied and I was on my own. I’d missed my chance. Twenty-one and I’d still hadn’t cracked the code. I’d let a few go before without saying a thing and regretted it, but this one was gonna hurt. Maria was something else. I’d not met a girl like her before. She wore white and red Air Force 1s and liked hip-hop and drum and bass! I thought that I was probably punching above my weight anyway; most of the other guys who worked there fancied her. What was I thinking? Failure had become an all-too-reoccurring theme, as if it was prewritten in my DNA.

For no particular reason, probably just looking for some Dawson’s Creek moment of enlightenment, I stood looking at the expensive whiskeys in the glass cabinet, until I caught my own reflection. I saw that blue Sainsbury’s shirt with my orange name tag, a shaved head with a high-fade, complete with the eight-carat trimmings of a chain, earrings and a bracelet, all the exterior hallmarks of a small-town wide boy applied to an all-too-familiar face, and I quickly looked away.

I stayed standing, staring at the rest of the booze on the shelves, then turned round to the front of the store, where I could see past the checkouts, through the big glass windows, to the street drinkers outside, sat in the bus shelters and on the pavement, swigging on them big bottles of cheap cider and Tudor Rose, and I decided that I’d be better off if I just concentrated on getting the simple things right, like getting all the labels on the whiskey bottles aligned and facing front. I had to take this one on the chin. I was pretty sure it’s what my dad would have said.

The bottles on the top shelf took a bit of reaching to rearrange, so I had to get up on my tiptoes. After bringing my arms back down from a stretch, out of nowhere, my peripheral vision suddenly picked up movement to my left and my heart pitch shifted up a couple of beats. As I turned round to face the cage at the end of the aisle, it was like that very moment when the Vampire ride reaches the pinnacle of the incline and then drops! There she was! Standing next to the cage that only minutes ago I’d tipped over, wearing her own clothes, she’d changed out of the shapeless Sainsbury’s uniform and into a denim combo that kissed her curves. She’d let her blonde hair down, which was now brushing against her shoulders. She walked towards me and I could not move, stunned into silence. I remember noticing my mouth was wide open but there was nothing I could do. Before I could even contemplate producing a sound, she took the lead. She said she hadn’t seen me, and wanted to say goodbye and give me this, placing a piece of paper into my hand. Written on it was her name, her mobile number, and a kiss. She then backed away with a smile and said:

‘Ring me.’

The only words I managed were:

‘Er, alright.’

I stood there for God knows how long until I finished my shift. My friend Anthony came up to me just as I was leaving and asked me if Maria had spoken to me. I said:

‘Yeah! …Hold on, wait a minute, what, you knew?’

And he said to me:

‘Mate, everyone did.’

I walked back down London Road that night like there were fuel injections in my feet, a subwoofer in my stomach and a massive spoiler attached to the back of my shoulder blades. I bowled past the street drinkers and students, through the viaduct and back up to the bedsit. I felt fully in the moment. It might not have been me that did it, but those pit bulls were put to sleep.