Page 89 of 56 Days
She joins the line, making sure to stand right on the strip of yellow tape stuck to the floor. No one else in the line is wearing a mask so she doesn’t take hers out of her pocket. There is a little table by the door offering customers complimentary plastic gloves—the clear, cheap, baggy kind that are surely a total pain in the arse to wear—but no one seems to be taking up the offer.
From behind her, a woman calls out, “Sir?Sir?”
When Ciara turns, she sees a tall man in a duffle coat striding into the store without stopping, leaving the two staff members glaring murderously at the back of his head.
He’s wearingnoise-cancelingheadphones and the kind of rigid, ridged face mask that she’s seen tradesmen on TV wear when they’re stripping lead paint or working in plumes of dust. Every pore in his body is emitting a mix ofself-importanceand impatience. He’s ignored the women, it seems, mustn’t have heard them calling after him with those headphones on. But there’s no excuse for his not seeing the line waiting to descend to the basement, which he blithely strides past now.
As Ciara watches thismasked-upman earn a look of pure disgust from everyone standing patiently, spaced two meters apart, on strips of yellow tape, she can’t help but note the strangeness of the scene and what she would have made of it a month ago. Today is the eighth of April. On the eighth of March, she was stilltwenty-fourhours from her first date with Oliver, the night they ended up in the Westbury.
She doesn’t know what’s more terrifying: how much has changed in such a short space of time, or how little time it’s taken for people to adapt to this situation.
How easilyshehas, to hers.
When it’s her turn, Ciara steps onto the escalator, childishly excited about getting to walk around a grocery store by herself.
But the feeling quickly fades. Despite the store controlling the numbers of customers, enough of them have been allowed in to create a bustle and there seems to be no “shop alone” rule in place here. Couples are ten a penny and there are even some full family units: pairs of parents with variously sized children attached to them with little hands, moving in convoy through the aisles. Shopping carts choke open spaces and all of the checkout lanes look swamped by lines. A member of staff is doing his best to spray and wipe theself-servicecheckout screens after each use, but the ratio of screens to customers is making it look like a losing game ofWhack-a-Mole.
Ciara has just stepped off the elevator when she begins to feel the first wave of unease. It’s nothing more than a faraway train on approach to begin with: a quickening pulse and a sudden, cold sweat in the small of her back.
But she knows exactly what it means, what’s coming. It may have been a while, but the feeling is unmistakable.
She’s going to have a panic attack.
Ciara takes a deep breath, tells herself that she’s fine, repeats this. She drifts into the fresh produce section, unsure of what she’s actually looking for or where she’s heading to, forgetting now why she’s even come in here at all. She can’t really get anything to bring back home without revealing to Oliver that she’s gone in somewhere, but at the same time she’s paranoid she’ll be pegged as a shoplifter if she comes in and goes out again without buying a thing.
Who would bother doing such a thing with things the way they are?Onlyshoplifters, she’s sure the store security will think.
Which makes her heart beat faster.
She’ll buy a bottle of wine, she decides. Something she can pretend she got in a local shop when she gets back to the apartment. She starts toward the alcohol section, or at least where she thinks it might be, pretending she doesn’t feel thesped-upthumping in her chest.
A woman with a basket stops right in front of her, forcing Ciara to stop too, and reaches out to snatch something from the shelf beside Ciara. This movement releases a cloud of sickly floral perfume into the air and as Ciara turns her head away to avoid taking a breath in, she sees—
A flash of a familiar face at the end of the aisle, stepping out of sight.
“Excuseme,” Cheap Perfume says pointedly.
Ciara steps out of the way and absently collides with the front end of someone else’s cart.
Her balance is off, as if her head isn’t quite connected to her body. The store seems even busier now, bodies and breath around her on all sides. She sees people touching things, calling to each other across the aisles, brushing each other as they pass.
And then all of a sudden there is not only a lack of air but no space, no space at all, only other people and their hot,germ-filledbreath, and the danger that floats out of it and sticks to Ciara’s skin, and she knows—she’ssure—that in the next few moments, if she doesn’t get out of here, she will faint.
She swings right, then left, desperately searching for a sign pointing to or sight of an escalator that will carry her out of here and back into the open air outside.
She can’t find either.
A gray blur is encroaching on her vision from all sides and her chest is tightening.
Someone comes close, too close, right up to her. Ciara wants to push them away and almost does until she spots the black uniform of the store and, above it, the sheen of a plastic visor.
“Are you okay, love?” A woman withtoo-darkeyebrows andbright-red, sticky lips is peering into her face through the plastic. “Are you all right?”
People are looking, Ciara can feel it.
“How do I—” Her mouth is dry, her tongue uncooperative. She tries again. “How do I get out?”
“Here.”
