acne practised impressive dance moves with his arms. At the pick-and-mix candy bins two blonde women with ponytails tonged hearts into a plastic bag, one by one. A pale tabby cat slunk a figure eight through Dot’s ankles. The baking soda was nowhere to be seen. A young man in a blue store jacket passed her carrying a box of long-life milk cartons, and Dot followed him to the shelf where he was stacking them. He wore a nametag but the lettering was too small for Dot to read. She asked him where she might find the baking soda but he seemed unable to understand, or perhaps to hear her. There was nothing in his ears. She patted his arm and he turned to face her, and she asked him again, and he leaned in, but she may as well have been speaking Martian. She mimed measuring baking soda into a teaspoon and stirring a cake, then cleaning her teeth, then sprinkling baking soda on the windowsill to keep the pigeons away. She mimed being a pigeon, pecking at the baking soda and hopping back in fright. The man was apparently an imbecile. Disgusted, Dot walked away and over to the biscuit aisle where she threw the packet of digestives into her bag. She didn’t even like them, the way they fell apart into the bottom of a cup of tea, but her teeth couldn’t handle the old crackers any more.
The mistake was in stopping at the checkout to pay for a magazine that specialised in arts and crafts, which she wanted to use for work, and staring the checkout girl down when she glanced at the biscuits glowing radioactively on top of the book and spare jumper in Dot’s bag. Dorothy got cold easily in springtime. Feeling the cold was what you called it once you were her age, oh yes, I feel the cold. But the sun was lighting up the street outside with its whiteness, and she walked out the door and towards that light, and was a few paces out of the store when there was a hand on her upper arm and someone said, ‘Excuse me.’ It was the lady from the shop with the blue sweatshirt and the wrinkles.
‘Yes?’ Dot thought perhaps she was going to ask for directions. She had one of those faces. I’m not from around here – I just have one of those faces, she prepared to say.
‘Did you pay for those biscuits?’
‘What biscuits?’ Pure coldness thumped through her body.
‘Those.’ The woman pointed a coral-nailed finger towards the bag.
Dot faked a double take. ‘Oh my god. Where did they come from?’
‘You put them in your bag in there.’ She gestured towards the store. ‘Could you come with me, please?’
‘Well, I could. But truly, this was a mistake, I must have put them there by accident. Are you sure I wasn’t charged for them?’ Dot made a show of fumbling in her jacket pocket for the receipt. It was Diego’s jacket, cut like a suit jacket, but made of denim, with deep pockets. He left it at the apartment last time he came to fix the microwave, and Dorothy wore it everywhere now. There were black grease stains down the sides and it smelled of a man’s sweat, which was quite frankly a tonic. They should bottle that stuff. Dot pulled out some gum and her bus pass, but seemed to have done something else with the receipt.
‘Please, madam. Come with me.’
And just like that they were back inside the shop. The blonde ponytails stood and stared as the woman put her gnarled hand on Dorothy’s shoulder and marched her towards the mysterious door in the back of the store, and Dot kept her chin in the air. The dancing boy was gone. A small key from a plastic chain that was connected to the woman’s sweatshirt pocket opened the door. Through the door was a short corridor, with a fire door at its end, a horizontal metal safety bar across it. On the left-hand side of the corridor was an open cleaning cupboard, and the smell of bleach burned the air. There was another door to the right, and the blue sweatshirt knocked on it.
A man sat behind a desk. Much younger guy. His hair was cut short, neat, and he had a sort of pubic beard that was trimmed thinly around his jaw line and up towards the corners of his mouth. The shaved skin in the middle was