Joe-Nathan turned back to the soup cans and hummed along to the piped music that could – if he chose to focus on it – distract him from the other noises in the store. They were playing one of the happy songs; so happy that Joe could stop thinking about any bad feelings when he heard it.
Stacking cans was a soothing and utterly engrossing exercise, interrupted only once in a while by customers asking for help (and half the time they too told him not to bother, before he had a chance to find out what they were looking for), and by customers trying to take one of the cans that he was stacking (which Joe did not mind – people were here to shop after all, and he could always fill the space with another can).
‘Hey, loser, what are you doing?’
Joe snapped out of his stacking-trance and looked towards the voice. It was Chloe: cool, black clothes, black boots, dark, bobbed hair, red lips, gap in teeth. She strolled towards him, her green tabard looking like a mistake, her hands thrust into her pockets.
Joe stumbled to start talking. ‘I’ve nearly finished stacking the soup,’ he said.
‘Not you,’ said Chloe, her expression softening as her eyes shifted slightly, so that she was looking straight at him. Joe realised now that when she first spoke, she hadn’t been looking at him. ‘You’re not a loser, Joe.’ Her eyes shifted again, looking past him.
‘I’m talking to you, fucker. What are you doing?’
Joe turned 180 degrees to see who she was talking to, only to be surprised at how close Mean Charlie was. While Chloe waited for Charlie to answer, Joe’s peripheral vision was alerted to an anomaly in his soup cans: some had been poked in towards the back of the shelf, so that they were out of line, while others had been turned so that their labels were higgledy-piggledy.
‘Oh,’ said Joe, suddenly feeling as though he were spinning. ‘What’s that doing there?’ He was staring at a tin of Heinz baked beans among the Campbell’s soups.
‘What’s your problem?’ Chloe demanded, and again, for a moment, Joe thought she was addressing him.
Charlie lowered his voice conspiratorially and tilted his chin towards Joe. ‘I don’t think I’m the one with the problem here, know what I mean?’
‘I absolutely don’t know what you mean, Charlie. Now fuck off.’
Chloe glared at Charlie until he took his hand from the shelf and moved away. She patted Joe on the arm and headed back to where she’d come from. But Charlie changed his mind and casually walked back again, calling out, ‘Hey, Chloe, I’ve noticed something.’ Chloe turned back like she was tired. She pushed her sleeves up her arms (Joe saw a mark – the tip of a tattoo) and came to stand beside Joe again. Charlie talked to her as if Joe were invisible. ‘I’ve noticed you always get really fiery when you’re around me. It’s like this undirected passion. So, I’m going to make this easy for you.’
Chloe folded her arms and Charlie went on. ‘I can tell you find me hard to resist. I’m betting a psychologist would say that you like to scold me because you find it tough to start a normal conversation with me. So, let me let you off the hook. I’d like to take you out for a drink.’
Joe knew from watching a lot of Friends that Charlie was asking Chloe out on a date and that a date (especially a first date) was an exciting thing, full of prospect. He smiled at Chloe, waiting to hear what she would say.
She squinted hard. ‘You know what, Charlie? The hardest part of working with someone like you is that I have to be polite in front of customers, when what I really want to do is punch you in the face. I’m not sure what gave you the idea that I would ever want to go for a drink with you, but I’m going to guess that you’ve mistaken me for someone else. So let me be clear: if you were the last man on earth, I wouldn’t join you for a drink.’
Charlie scoffed. ‘’S’okay, I can wait. I catch your drift: you’re hard to get. I like that. And I know for a fact that if this dude here was the last man on earth…’ Charlie flipped his thumb at Joe, ‘then you wouldn’t join him for a drink either. So, your insult is a little lame. Maybe you should work on it.’ He winked.
Chloe turned to Joe. ‘Do you drink?’ she asked, with the breeziest smile.
Joe wavered. Conversation was like traffic, and he needed more time to change lanes. Charlie was doing one of his quiet laughs and Joe was prompted into action.
‘My mum takes me to the pub every Friday night at six o’clock.’
‘That sounds wonderful!’ said Chloe. ‘I’d love to join you!’
She flicked a sneer at Charlie, grinned at Joe, and shot off westward. Joe looked at Charlie, who grunted, elbowed the Campbell’s cans so that now every single one of them was out of kilter, and headed in the opposite direction.
Joe looked east at Charlie and west at Chloe. It would probably be best if he went to the toilet for a few minutes, so that nobody could speak to him while he tried to work out what had just happened, or until he had at least come to terms with not understanding. He told the cans he would be back shortly and went to the mosaic, to get a better sense of where he was in the world. He followed the arrow to the southern toilets and took time out. His mum and his manager had both advised him to do this when he was stressed or confused, and he was definitely confused. His mum would be able to explain things when he got home, and in the sure knowledge that she would enlighten him, he carefully washed his hands and steadied his thoughts. Then he returned to the soup display and started over again, helping the cans to be the best that they could be.