MILKFACE

It was a Wednesday and time for my milk tub. but the light white liquid in angular packs – sucked from udders in farmyards, purloined from bovines, diversely digested from greenest grasses for calves, stirred and Pasteur’d and routinelydivested to dairies, then trucked off to supermarkets – that fluid was some distance insufficient to fill my bath. I fetched smetana and cream from the kitchen, and poured them on top of the nineteen litres coughed up through Melchior, the fridge. It gave the look of I’d have to shop for extra milk. however wherein? The stores had been all shut. So the 24-hour garage? I had money to burn – spent weeks whiting partitions and now had cash in stacks. And so off I went.

but earlier than I set out I prepared a headband.

My female friend Karen had dumped me 4 months in the past, taking the whole lot while she moved out: the sandwich maker, the excessive sleeper bed, Melchior’s predecessor… All but a fourteen-centimetre brass screw that had fixed the mattress to the wall, which I now poked via the headscarf and wrapped with duct tape in any such fashion that the erstwhile harmless ‘Nike’ became changed by using a horn. I positioned it on my head, grabbed my parka and headed for the wide world.

O, and out of doors, there… lindens in blossom! now not a flake left of snow at the roofs of the cars, shining matte and mute within the mild of the lamps, empty however unheavably heavy all alongside the pavement that bore me onwards – summer had come. Dashboards draped with tenderly devaluated tickets to reggae gigs, passenger seats peppered with polka-dot bikinis, flip-flops, snorkels, paper plates full of marble-cake crumbs, squashed cigarette packing containers, again seats with deflated inflatables and bottles devoided of beer, glassy drunk-up lemonade and juices, all labelled summer time meadowsome, proud possessors of hours to pluck apart like pulled beef.

Touched and unhappy that the birthday celebration regarded to be over, I stared into the usually fast-moving feretories, those Snow Whitish glass coffins inhabited through a summer became human. Had I been a prince I’d have kissed one unsleeping. I’d have damaged a pane and stolen a vehicle. Had I been a thief I’d have driven away, even further down south, to the palm wooded area of Menorcan emotions beginning up in my soul. I hearkened the swell of the lengthy-distance visitors, saw ‘the lake’ above the roofs, saw the intentioned crystal polished by the sanding belt of streets heading heavenwards. O, how unhappy, how sublime, how momentous and momentless that evening was, and guileless, and the way it introduced itself forth, snorting and nose-nudging pretty quietly in the midst of the town! (The bobbing hazel department, I imply.)

The garage become palpable from some distance off, a most cancers of sticks, a pulsing of gasoline in hoses, a turning of tummies, a vomit of snakes into tanks, a fear written on faces that money is probably tight, a cursing of sheikhs, a standingat lakes in which no longer one fish swam. A gentle wind tickled my nose, bristling with benzine. I sneezed. From a long way off i realized, in blazers and screaming shirts, the dudes ducked at the back of their beat-booming, door-slamming rides, threatening every different with pump pistols, jamming nozzles in brightly glossed orifices, crowned clowns of aggressive fuelling. Or perhaps it become just a succession of smoking and gasoline-guzzling nozzle-fiddlers, but thelanguage here, in my memory, stacks the whole lot up to a glistening simultaneity, assonance, and that i want to allow it roam loose, want to let it let me, here on this remaining sentence, step through a lightly sliding double glass door with the cry ‘There goes the closing of the unicorns!’ at my lower back, into the brilliant.

It’s just like it usually is. It’s like being pelted hard and shiny with items which can be in any other case true. difficult and vivid and hailing. A stoning or a cherrystone pillow fight, many in opposition to one, one small guy, no – gangly. The gangly man who is available in holds his fingers earlier than his face to defend himself from the packets of crisps, containers of cigarettes, cans of pink Bull, brochures of bosoms, bars of chocolate, bottles of wine, bottles of bubbly, bottles of beer, packets of chewing gum, racks of magazines, bags of wine gums, stares, snacks, slurpees and sweeties – all flying at him from all instructions. His call is virtually ‘Hannes’. He strategies the sales assistant. All he wishes from her is a grin and maybe a kiss. and she, black-haired, made-up, brushing him off from the beginning, draws a barcode on his brow with a pen (that’s not a lipstick), puts her infrared pistol to this chest earlier than his brain that may be a coronary heart, and pulls the cause. A laconic beep. Hannes learns he is well worth no more than ninety five cents, and earlier than the eyes of the sales assistant, her identification revealed with the aid of her nametag simply in time – ‘Carmen’ – he founders. Flounders, swallowed up by using the ground.

And so there I stood, on the 24-hour garage, decorated in my attack plumage, and concept dark thoughts of my flat. How deserted it regarded now. How distant and vacant and furnished simplest with Melchior and a single chair. and the wayvery plenty my front-door key lay on that chair and how the three of them were whispering soundlessly approximatelywherein I might be. Touched through this know-how, I began to look around a touch in the store that changed into that of the 24-hour storage. I flicked thru or three of the mags. baggage of crisps proved rather rugged. I sniffed on the O of a Pringles tin and studied cans of fat and hydrates and ingredients with a wail. tested windscreen wipers for intactity. attempted out a bouncing ball – till it fell to the Milky approaches, at the shelf underneath the counter. after which I knew yet again what i used to be there for. I desired milk!



O, that they had milk! properly, not my preferred emblem but as a minimum seventeen litres – inside the strongly – too strongly! – refrigerated 24-hour-garage fridge, so I envisaged myself, making distinctive feature out of necessity, status in the kitchen and boxing effervescent milk to beautiful bathtub foam… I asked a man with muscle mass rummaging in a transparent hemisphere filled with pink Bull cans to, as I put it, ‘do me a completely unexpected favour’. First he lookedme within the eyes. Then at my horn. Then at my shoes. Then at my face. Then at its expression after which he stated‘Oh…’ after which ‘kaay…’ I led him over (to the refrigerator) and defined what and how. I held my fingers out so that he ought to area the milk cartons – like logs – within the bend of my elbows, first clenching my debit card among my teeth. He loaded and loaded. His gold chain slid backward and forward on his bullish neck, and his sweating turned into piggish.

Now and then I gave him a slight kick in the shin with my springy shoe-pointers to power him on, rammed my knee in his stomach place to encourage him to pile faster, gave him – impossible, loaded down as i was, and so didn’t supply him – ‘a slap spherical the ear’ole’ to maintain things shifting. It changed into about 5 mins till we have been performed. As he moved far from me, his face going through me, strolling backwards, it appeared we had recognized each other for hours. I dismissed him with a form of dignified nod.

Caro, so the sales assistant changed into called this time, had watched us labouring. We ought to have given the influenceof two boy scouts volunteering to fetch wooden on arriving in a mountain hut. That form of element – male difficulty for a fire, fetching timber, chopping wooden, skilfully positioning timber within the flames – always goes down properly with the lasciviously shivering girls pressing their knees collectively all a-jitter, wearing sexily utilitarian woolly shuddering jumpers, staring longingly on the embers and humming quietly to themselves, too shy to sing, too became directly to be silent. As I joined the queue I notion I made out the flickering mirrored image of flames and remote starlight on Caro’s brightening face.

Rizla clients had been in advance of me. Then Caro reached for one of the packs from my wobbly mountain. She allow it beep, counted up after which entered the algorithm instances seventeen. while she told me the entire, a horrendous sum, I raised my brows in criticism (my headscarf nearly slipping off!) and then stretched my neck in her route, entire with the pinnacle in whose mouth the card became clenched.

Caro removed the cardboard from me with her fingertips, giving me an opportunity to mention ‘thanks’, and inserted it into the tool’s slit. ‘Pin code please and then green to affirm,’ Caro stated. I drew the milk greater firmly to my chest and leaned forward. My horn sped right down to the small, quietly beeping buttons. A receipt become printed. It and the cardboard in my mouth, I left the 24-hour storage.

With my white freight I galloped thru the night time.