I steer the three of us into the Cancer Research charity shop, because the week before their display window had held a series of commemorative cat plates that I thought would be perfect for my flatmate’s birthday. The shop is decked out in pink: ribbons, balloons, posters.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’ The hunched woman at the counter asks.
‘No thanks, I’ve only brushed my teeth.’
‘How about if you donate a pound for breast cancer? You can pick a balloon and maybe win five pounds, you can name a duck, or you can guess how many sweets in the jar.’
I give her a pound, saying I wouldn’t need any sweets.
‘Why don’t you pick a baloon? You could win five pounds.’
‘Some people have already won five pounds,’ another shop keeper chimes in. ‘They’re really in there.’
My friend gives a pound a picks a balloon. The woman asks me to pull it down for her, and the thumb tack pinning it to the ceiling falls as well. My friend winces and looks away as I’m pushing the tack into the balloon, and it disappears from her hands. Picking up the rolled up paper on the floor, the finds she hasn’t won anything.
I pick the one just above my head. Bursting the balloon, the dark roll I’d seen inside is simply gone. We look on the floor, the table, it’s not there. As my friend’s boyfriend begins his choice, the woman finds a thin strip of pink membrane, a small bit of paper hanging from, dangling off a miniature column on the side of the decorated table dedicated to breast cancer fund raising goodies. I haven’t won anything either.
Greg, however, has two lumps of paper in his balloon, and the larger one turns out to be ‘£5′, written in pink. He immediately says, ‘Ah, I’ll just donate that money.’
‘Are you sure?’ The woman asks incredulously. ‘That’s very nice of you.’ I had just been thinking we could get a fiver off if we bought anything.
Later, we are walking down Turnpike Lane.
‘Isn’t there any real food?’ My friend asks under her breath. She’d just turned down a samosa from the store we just left. I remember a small sandwich deli around the corner that I believe she’ll be comfortable with, so we begin trekking that way. I’m relieved that it is there, that it is open. The woman running the shop is sitting at the one table in the long room that makes up the ‘Sandwich Cabin’, talking in a language I don’t recognize to a grey haired gentleman. His sandwich is grilled, I can see tomatoes. Greg orders his: chicken, salad, nothing else. My friend gets the same, I think. She seems so sullen and serious faced, I can’t tell if she’s relieved to be getting a sandwich, unhappy about the choices, doesn’t like the woman making her food, or if my neighborhood has scarred her in some way. I turn over my shoulder, looking out onto the road, just in time to see a rat scamper in the doorway, following the wall into the Cabin.
The man looks up from the table to me, then back at the door way.
‘Was that…?’ He says it quietly.
‘Yes.’ I say, smiling uncertainly and raising my eyebrows. He looks surprised, sits down again occasionally glancing at the corner past the display counter. I decide not to tell my friends.
