"Where've they put the suet?" asked Sharon, indignantly. "It used to be here. Now it's all canned fish and noodles."
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"What do you want suet for?" asked Danny.
"To make dumplings, of course. What else would I want it for?"
There were other options, but Danny didn't state them. It was a stupid question to have asked in the first place. "It looks like they've shifted things around. I saw washing powder was on a different aisle."
Sharon stopped pushing her trolley and looked at Danny rather than the supermarket shelves. "Two shopping expeditions in a week.
I'm honoured."
"As I said, I actually enjoyed the last time."
Sharon returned to her commercial foraging, looking no more convinced this time than when she'd heard the same explanation half an hour ago, back at the house.
The truth was that he didn't like the idea of her going out alone right now, not after Frank's outrageous proposal. He kept looking up at the ceiling, checking how many video cameras could see them. He'd never realised there were so many in the average supermarket. Pity the poor shoplifter.
"Don't you just hate that when they move stuff?" said Sharon. "You get used to where it is
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and then they shift it, hoping you'll see things you haven't seen before and buy them."
"I do hate that. Yes."
Sharon gave up with suet and looked for shampoo, which had also been moved to a different aisle, but close enough to the old one to irritate her less. She picked up a white plastic bottle and shook her head. "Just look at this.
Orange and wild-lime shampoo. Now, I ask you, just how wild is this lime? Is it free-range? Does it have access to the outdoors? If they've gone to the trouble of hunting wild limes, why not wild oranges? Do they think consumers care more about the lives of limes than oranges? Poor oranges, cooped up in an orchard all day."
She was in that urban huntress mood, Boadicea with a knife-wheeled trolley, and anything Danny said would make things worse, so he said nothing.
Sharon had equal disappointment at the meat section, where she could buy spare ribs in Chinese sauce or barbecue sauce, but not without sauce, which was what she wanted. "Jesus! What is this? Cooking for morons?"
As they turned sharply at the end of the aisle, they passed close to the tills. Danny watched the assistants passing customers' goods in front of laser bar code readers and wondered if
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they knew they were destined for redundancy.
Soon every product would have a penny microchip in its packaging, read at the checkout by a radio scanner. Customers would roll up to the radio scanner and put their trolley over the yellow patch on the floor, wait for the bill to appear on screen, insert their credit card and type in a PIN, then go home, no human interaction involved.
As he watched, a scanner failed to read a leg of pork and the assistant typed in the barcode.
Sharon continued filling her trolley with things that were close to but not quite what she wanted, until she finally lost her grip in the toothbrush section.
"They've run out," she said.
There were hundreds of toothbrushes on display.
"What about all these?" asked Danny.
"They've run out of own-brand."
"There are plenty of others."
Sharon looked down and tapped the handle of her trolley. "You know a thing or two about manufacturing. How much do you think it costs to make a toothbrush?"
This was no time to lie. "Maybe fifteen pence. Something like that."
"And what do they sell them for?"
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Danny looked at the toothbrushes on offer. From over four pounds at eye level down to one-pound fifty for the cheapest on the bottom shelf, where the elderly and infirm wouldn't be able to reach them. Right now he'd pay fifty pounds for a toothbrush if that would make Sharon happy, though he suspected it might have the opposite effect.
"Two for a pound - I can deal with that,"
said Sharon. "But if I buy one of these, I'm being ripped off." She let go of the trolley and raised her arms. "I don't want to be ripped off. It's not the shopping experience I'm looking for."
Danny inspected the floor. There was no way out of this.
"Fuck 'em," said Sharon. She abandoned her trolley and started to walk away. Danny followed. He didn't touch the trolley. "This isn't business," continued Sharon. "I know what business is and it's good for both parties. This is a rip-off. Tell me, what good is technology if it produces a toothbrush for fifteen pence but it costs me, the punter, two pounds? Technology works for the supermarket, sure. But what does it do for me?"
"Ice cream, frozen peas, wine that can be opened and keeps for days, tinned beans, cabbages in summer, strawberries in winter…"
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"What did the Romans ever do for us?"
Sharon giggled to herself.
They slalomed through the narrow confines of a checkout, past the obstacles of customers who'd survived the process of selecting goods and now wanted to put an end to the trauma and pay for them, and marched out through the exit door. The wind was strong, but at least it kept the London air fresh.
"The mere fact that toothbrushes exist,"
protested Danny.
"And that they're needed. We've learned to refine sugar from plants so we can rot our teeth and have to buy toothbrushes. Must have been a real problem in the Stone Age, lack of toothbrushes. You can imagine the inventor of the wheel, can't you - a big crowd of villagers in front of him pointing at their rotting teeth going
'Ugh, ugh,' meaning 'OK, smartarse, that's the transport sorted out, now how about these?'"
This wasn't a battle he stood any chance of winning, decided Danny. They'd have a Chinese takeaway tonight, there was a fine one on Dover Road. Sharon could use his toothbrush before she went to bed and he'd be pleased with the taste afterwards, just like when they first met.
After fifty yards, at the junction with Chapel Market, he stopped her and turned her by
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the elbow, so they faced each other. "You're right, it's all bullshit, I admit it. You're right, it's the bullshit of life that we all suppress and never talk about, because nobody else ever talks about it."
He hugged her, feeling sad that she was feeling sad and wanting to do the only things he could do about it - tell her he understand the weirdness going through her brain and that it wasn't really nonsense, just taboo, and comfort her.
"Should…" began Sharon, and they were taken over by a litter-storm, the equivalent of a dust-devil in the desert, but made up of twirling market debris, of McDonald's wrappers, long strips of plastic with green writing in Spanish, brown paper bags, bits of blue polystyrene tit-moulds that separated fruit on the market stalls, pages from Hello! magazine (was that Anthea Turner?), all spiralling around their pavement embrace, some of it above their heads
"I think I'm not coping," said Sharon. She pulled them out of the storm and crossed to the other side of the market road. The narrow pavement there was packed with shuffling people, one line towards Islington High Street, one away from it, children and wheelchairs and panhandlers creating irregularities in the system
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and slowing the flow. Sharon got caught up in the High Street line and impatiently dawdled along with it in front of Danny, her walk lacking its normal grace, until she passed the magazine stand at the junction and finished up on the broad pavement of the High Street close to the traffic lights, by two telephone booths. Danny caught up and put his arm around her waist.
"That was painful," she said, her eyes downcast. "All those people."
"All those toothbrush consumers."
"What's toothpaste made of, anyway?"
"I really don't know."
"Astonishing!"
Sharon sighed and laid her head against his shoulder. "Sorry, that wasn't called for." She stayed there a full minute. Shoppers passed by them in all directions, not seeing them. The telephone booths created a small eddy in the swirling mass of people, in the river of bodies, so they weren't really in the way.
"It's like, I manage to cope with the crap most of the time, but when one little bit of the wall falls down, the whole lot comes away."
This happened from time to time, that Sharon lost her grip. It was the downside of her independence of mind, and Danny felt that if he liked the positive side, then he should cope with
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the negative when it occasionally came through.
She couldn't take a normal view of marketing, the bullshit game that everybody else accepted and played. She wasn't a good consumer. Sometimes that was fun, like it had been last time, collecting shopping from checkout discards, and sometimes it wasn't.
She stayed at his shoulder a while longer, recharging. Finally she separated, looking a lot calmer. She watched pedestrians crossing the wide main road at the lights. "Do you ever wonder if you've been born into the wrong era, that you would have been happier two hundred years ago?"
This was something Danny had thought about before. Two hundred years ago, computer programming hadn't existed, so he would definitely have been following a different career.
He fondly imagined he might have been a romantic poet, wandering through fields with a notebook and pen, coughing consumptively. But there lay the rub. Slowly he shook his head. "The opposite. I'd go for two hundred years into the future."
"We'll have evolved one short arm by then, held up naturally to an ear."
It took a moment for Danny to realise she meant for mobile phones. The two telephone
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kiosks nearby were empty, rarely used, already relics of a bygone era.
The traffic lights changed, against the pedestrians and in favour of the traffic. Two lanes of vehicles set off as fast as they could go, the noise of their accelerating engines putting a stop to all conversation. People continued to pass by Sharon and Danny to join the new crowd building up at the crossing.
When the noise had died down, Sharon said, "Hardly anything would have been the same two hundred years ago. No lights, no tarmac, McDonald's wrappers, training shoes, no motorised robots on four wheels. What about the buildings?"
Danny scanned the street on both sides.
On the other side of the wide street was the Angel Centre, a commercial structure barely ten years old, but on their side of the road was a hotchpotch of white and grey stone and red brick, showing pretty much every architectural style from the last two hundred years.
"I don't think any of these are over two hundred, though there might be one or two. But you're taking a rosy view of the past, missing out important stuff. Lice in every item of clothing you own, millions of fleas, smoke from the all those coal fires, no central heating, sewage
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thrown out of windows, tuberculosis, the roads inches deep in horse and cattle dung. Can you imagine the smell? And hardly anybody over fifty because they were all dead by then."
"And what about in two hundred years time?"
"I don't know, any more than somebody in 1800 could have guessed what things would be like now. Not possible. A lot more old people, I guess. Most of the population sitting at home plugged into some electronic version of life that beats the hell out of opium, so not going out a lot.
And if we've still got cars, they'll be silent.
Imagine that. No traffic noise. You'd be stood here in silence."
"Oh dear. If you can't hear them, a lot more people will get run over."
"Ok. Silence with the occasional scream."
Oops, that was border-line, with Sharon's parents killed in a road accident and Danielle still in hospital. Danny told himself to be more careful.
They joined the crowd waiting at the crossing for the lights to change. Cars, buses and taxis flashed by at thirty or more, honking when they felt their territory was invaded. All those powerful robots guided by human beings, all those human drivers that Danny and Sharon
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trusted not to foul up, not to mount the pavement, all those pedestrians the drivers trusted not to walk out in front of them, to remember their basic training as children and avoid straying onto the flat blue robot tracks, apart from a few necessary sacrifices to the God of the private motor vehicle. Half of one percent of the entire population reached that sacrificial altar every year, though the majority were merely damaged and allowed to go on their way. Presumably society felt this level was acceptable, otherwise it would have banned these robots a long time ago.
An exceptionally large robot drove by, a refrigerated meat truck, empty, returning to the northern land of cattle. On its side were the words, 'McIntosh Donald, quality beef and lamb from Aberdeen, Scotland'.
"You're optimistic about the future, aren't you?" said Sharon. "And I think we're already going wrong, that we've already lost too much."
The lights changed and they set off across the road with the crowd of strangers.
"There are losses," admitted Danny. "But we still take on the changes because we gain more than we lose. Cars are noisy, but horses were messy. Medicine keeps everybody alive, yet the planet becomes overcrowded because we all survive. The shops are packed and hardly
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anything ever runs out, but we're hassled by advertising to buy it all."
Sharon took hold of his hand. "I never cared whether Daz or Persil washes whiter. I just want to know which works best when I press my pelvis against the machine."
On the far side of the crossing by the Angel Centre, drunks in the tramp-seats next to Angel tube station were beginning to enjoy the day, having survived the shock of waking up sober in the morning. One of them stood and danced to a silent beat, a tall Celt with fantastic hair, flaxen but shaped into an extraordinary pattern like reeds flattened by a vortex of wind.
He was surprisingly good-looking. The others, more weathered, stayed seated while they swung to his beat and toasted him with their cans. His dancing kept strict time with the unheard rhythm.
Their movements had a random fluidity, a seated ballet without choreography on an earthquake floor.
"What about madness?" asked Sharon.
"All the noise, the cars, the pressure. No place to go that isn't owned by somebody, no wood to burn that isn't somebody's tree. Surely we must be cracking up more than we used to."
"Yes, I suppose when the horse is galloping faster it's easier to fall off. But how
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about the lead in old water pipes and dissolved in old cider presses? Half the people in the country lost their minds to lead poisoning before we knew better. That's madness too."
Danny liked Islington for its drunks and lunatics. There were always plenty to see, plenty of actors in this theatre of the street, the drunks gently surfing from one handhold to another, waist-deep in invisible waves, the loons lolloping, darting and bouncing along, all given away by their motion. Some of the better-dressed ones with a haircut could blend into a crowd when stationary - at a zebra crossing or shop window. But hey ho, off they'd eventually go, with exotic footwork and unnatural arm movements, proclaiming their out-of-balance nature to the world.
And he knew he wasn't the only one who appreciated them. Islington had once been famous for its lunatics. Europe's first psychiatric hospital was built in the borough at Finsbury Circus, replacing a lunatic asylum burned down during the fire of London, and continuing its name - Bedlam. A couple of decades later, Bedlam became London's most popular tourist attraction after The Tower, Westminster Abbey and the original London Bridge. Thousands of people travelled long distances to pay for the
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privilege of seeing Islington's lunatics. Hogarth visited, they were the inspiration for his painting
'The Rake's Progress', the same Hogarth who painted 'Evening', showing Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Hugh Middleton together in the window of an Islington inn.
Sharon moved at a pace. A beggar sat on a carpet tile by the Bank of Scotland cash machines, stroking the neck of his Doberman mutt. The dog looked in better shape than its owner.
"Spare change?"
"Why not?" Sharon let go of Danny's hand and reached into her bag for a pound.
"Ta, luv."
She came back to Danny and grasped his hand. She twisted to stand in front of him, blocking his path, and kissed him on the mouth.
"You are so nice."
This was turning into a hugging day, which he hadn't expected, but was very pleasant.
They were close to the bus-shelters for southbound travellers into central London, and although they'd been ignored when they hugged on the other side of the street, the people in the bus queues, having no other priorities right now, were more attentive.
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"So nice," repeated Sharon. "I really lost it there, and now I'm back. Thank you."
"I don't think I did a lot, did I?"
"You're very good at standing still and being hugged. Very professional."
It was curious that while they held this audible conversation, their hands were holding a separate discussion, assessing the other body's interest in sex. This kind of discussion could be conducted in many ways, through body language signals, through conversational subtext, through a lingering kiss, but right now it was straightforwardly by touch.
Danny stroked Sharon's waist at the side, below her lowest rib, finding the few inches of skin between her jeans and her top. She was very sensitive at the sides. She had her hand on his shoulder, and her middle finger gently pressed on his shoulder blade. This was a sign from when they'd first become lovers. In foreplay, when the time was right she'd turn and reach across to his shoulder and pull it hard, meaning come here, move your shoulders above mine, your pelvis above mine, I'm ready. Now all that remained was this vestigial signal, a light touch always in the same place, a 'ready' button when they had no clothes on, and a 'could soon be ready' button when they were dressed.
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Danny had a theory about communication between his hands and Sharon, that her skin talked to his hands through touch, not always but often and whenever she was feeling sexual.
Something electric or vibrational or maybe even completely undiscovered yet, but it was definitely there. Her skin recognised his hands, logged them on, sent back masses of data saying touch here, move here, slower, faster, more intimate please, sent messages that travelled up his arm and reached his cortex, took over his movements in a natural loop that barely needed thought, maybe only for the first few strokes, before taking over completely, automating his muscles, his movements, in a way that gave Sharon the maximum of pleasure, maximum arousal, without work or conscious knowledge of technique, just two bodies talking physically to each other through the give and take of touch, a silent and almost perfect communication, like his entire body was programmed for Sharon's pleasure.
"I think we'd better go home," he said.
"The people in the bus queue are beginning to stare."