Sugar

25 March 2004

She works in a building with no natural light. A converted warehouse compartmentalised into chicken-coop desks for office drones. The air is cold conditioned, and the conditioners spit out dirt onto the keyboards. When she steps out into the sunlight she blinks her mole-eyes and rummages in her bag for her sunglasses.

She can think of nothing but food. It's the height of summer and the air is pregnant with pollen, tree fluff, little flies and the sounds of aeroplanes yawning lazily overhead. She knows she is hungry because she can't concentrate on her work anymore. Her belly is quiescent. The hunger is in her head, a cowl descending around her eyes, shutting off her peripheral vision, focussing everything in a blur on the centre of the monitor. Pay attention to me, says the monitor, I have you hypnotized, you are my slave.

The air is so warm out here she just stands, eyes closed, breathing and not caring if her allergies start up. She feels dizzy and has to steady herself against the door. The sunlight is like oxygen. Standing after sitting all morning has sent the blood to her feet and for a moment there are spots. Okay, she decides. Let's go.

Clip clop, clip clop. Who's that trip-trapping over my bridge? She hates wearing heels and doesn't know why she does it. Yes she does - to look like a career girl. Same reason she shaves her legs and buys new clothes. Everything is about fitting in. The hundred yard walk out of the industrial estate tires her, and she starts to sneeze. Between breathing, sneezing and wheezing, she manages to find a bit of tissue paper to blow her nose. She must look like an idiot, her face watering everywhere. She tries to hold her breath.

A car cruises down the quiet industrial road, too fast for her to cross without running, and too slow for her patience not to run out. Hurry up! She throws an annoyed glance and crosses immediately behind it. Now we're at the edge of the Sainsbury's car park. Only twenty yards more to go, but obstacles in her path all the way. Shunting cars, buggies, and noise. She wishes the mother with the screaming child would get out of her way. Shut them out, fill your head with silence.

The door blows hot and cold air over her. The interior is the same ice-cold as the warehouse-office where she works. Most people here are hot, sweating from the summer sun, but she doesn't like the cold and the summer has been wasted, shielded from her beyond the anti-allergenic corrugated walls of the chicken coop. She doesn't even notice the sweating people, because she doesn't look. She almost walks into a trolley, and the owner tries to engage her with an apology. She smiles thinly and avoids his eyes.

Now she's forgotten her basket and has to turn around and go back to the entrance. Nothing is going her way, all these stupid people, blocking her path. Clip-clop, trip-trap. Old goat legs is going to spike someone with a heel, if she doesn't fall over first. Who'd think it was possible to be so debilitated by hunger, when there are fat rolls aplenty to live on going spare around her waist?

Got the basket. Stick close to the wall. The light in here is too bright. What's in front of us? Fresh fruit. An unappetising selection of sterile fresh fruit and vegetables from every corner of the world. She works with a pretty girl who eats packaged carrots and sweetcorn for lunch. The pretty girl is on a diet, but isn't bright enough to realise she needs to stop drinking so much Lucozade to lose weight.

She can't stand salad and fresh fruit. The ready meal curries are more tempting, as are the bags of pasta. If only she could eat plain pasta with a dollop of butter for lunch. Seventy percent pure carbohydrate. If only there was a hob in the office kitchen. What will it be today? The fresh bread smell is nice, but she never could eat sandwiches, not since being a little girl, getting a packed lunch for school every day that made her want to puke. She used to throw the crusts of her bread under the table, until the dinner ladies caught her. Then she just went on hunger strike instead, ate so slowly she'd have to stay through two sittings. Slow coach.

See saw, Marjorie Daw. The bright light and colours are overwhelming her senses. She swings her basket back and forth in one hand as she examines the Pot Noodle shelf. Everything is making her feel sick today. She's so hungry she's shaking but she doesn't know if she can stomach anything. She's breathing slowly and heavily. Can she manage the walk up and down another aisle? Every lunchtime she thinks she'll faint, making this same tortuous walk around the supermarket. Maybe she should faint. Maybe if someone saw her, they'd send her home. But she knows her own reserves, and knows even when she thinks she's reached the last drop of energy, there's still more adrenaline left to compensate.

It's amazing how tired staring at a computer screen can make her. Even when she can't focus, can't get anything done, she feels tired. In the evening, when she gets home, she's tired. She just sits in front of the television. Can't be bothered to do anything else. A trip to the vending machine half way through the morning and again halfway through the afternoon, gives her a fix that lasts ten, maybe twenty minutes at most. Then back to that sleepy, spaced-out dormouse personality. The weight she's piling on is a big price to pay for that twenty-minute wakefulness. Sometimes she's so glassy-eyed she doesn't understand questions. She always jokingly said she was an aural dyslexic. Words didn't always make sense in her head. Questions were sometimes confusing, irritating, or both. Sometimes, mid-afternoon, she'd be so tired from all of the sitting and typing and staring, that when she spoke, she'd slur her words like a drunk.

The weight is a problem. She started going to the gym, but she can't keep it up. No willpower, that's what she's been told. But she's so tired. She spends half an hour on the treadmill and the bike and the step machine, and when she gets outside, she has the shakes again. She has to go and eat something, before she faints. She always ends up in the McDonalds up the street.

Okay. Back up the aisle. She's had a brain wave and figured out what she needs. This shakiness – surely – she needs sugar. Screw healthy eating. Screw nutritional requirements, counting calories, balanced meals, and all the rest of it. Sugar.

She's standing in front of the mini-cereal packets trying to decide. Sometimes it's so hard to make simple decisions. She doesn't know how long she's been standing there, except someone shoves across in front of her and grabs a box of cheerios. How rude. How fucking rude. This place is full of scum; it's always a bun-fight of fat women and whiny kids. She flashes with anger again, and lets it show on her face. She's been getting more and more of these flashes recently, these anger-flashes. Maybe it's hormones. For the stupidest reasons too, the most insignificant things like pen tapping in the office, people hovering too close to her screen. Stupid things.

Okay. Cheerios it is. Honey nut cheerios. No. How about frosties? She stands there for another five minutes feeling glassy, and eventually puts both multi-packs in her basket. She's solved lunch for the next two weeks. What a relief. Deciding what to eat is always such a chore. The fresh milk is right on the other side of the supermarket. She sighs. Okay. Just walk. Don't look at anyone, try and concentrate and stay out of the way of the trolleys. She swings her basket in time with the clip-clop of her heels. One two one two, concentrate on the sound of your feet and it won't take so long. At the end of the aisle, a little kid runs around the corner and almost smacks his face into her basket. She lifts the basket out of the way and swears to herself. The mother apologises by way of screaming at the kid. She does her routine: she smiles dryly in no particular direction, sighs, and moves away as fast as possible.

Shit. What is she going to eat cereal out of? She stops dead, and tries to figure out what to do. She really doesn't want to walk all the way back to the cereal shelf to put her cereal back. In fact, she really has her heart set on the cereal. She needs sugar. Cereal is her favourite meal of the day. When she goes to bed at night, she's already looking forward to cereal in the morning. She can never wait for cereal. Sometimes if she feels hungry in the evenings, she'll use it as an excuse to have a bowl of cereal. Nothing else satisfies her. She doesn't feel good without it, and she can't leave for work in the morning if she doesn't have any.

When they run out of milk at home, she's always furious. It meant an agonising wait on the bus through the rush hour jams into town, in order to get a McMuffin from McDonalds. It never satisfied her in the same way. If they had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon at home at the weekend, she'd be shaking by 10:30am. The shakes were not fun. She joked she was getting withdrawal symptoms from cereal, like an alcoholic. She'd stand in the queue at McDonalds and every person in the queue would annoy her in some way. Fat cow. Ugly bitch. Scruffy bastard. Annoying kid. It's so hot in here I think I'm going to faint. Please hurry up I really will faint.

Surely they sell bowls in here? Yes. Plastic ones. She's seen them before. Okay, concentrate. They're around here somewhere. She blinks to try to clear her blurred vision. The neon lights reflect on the shiny floor and hum in her brain. This is just a migraine. Get some more paracetamol while you're here. Can you be bothered to make the walk?

The self-lengthening trip around the supermarket feels as if it will stretch out to swallow her whole lunch hour. She imagines she'll never escape. She's surprised when she finds herself in front of the bowls, faced with another impossible decision. Do I get a pack of six? Or pay more for this single one that I don't like as much? She finds herself staring at the bowl wondering where she will put it without a set of drawers under her desk.

Just take the damned single bowl. No – yes. Take it. Milk. Get the milk. Her clip-clop walk becomes an irritated charge. Goat-legs is going to butt someone. She makes it across the supermarket and grabs the first milk she gets hold of. A two pint bottle, she'll drink the rest. Now find the shortest queue.

Clip-clop, clip-clop. The aisle lengthens out in front of her, booby-trapped with pedestrian obstacles. She gets to the queue and realises she's forgotten to get paracetamol. Her memory is shot to pieces. She used to have such a perfect memory. At school she could remember figures and numbers and the exact phrases people said. She had a grip on time, a diary she wrote things in. She knew exactly what she did last weekend, and what she ate the day before last. Now it's like every day blends into the next, in the same routine of dark grey light grey dark. Maybe that's all adulthood was going to be: the inevitable decay of what little brilliance you had as a child. One ready meal after the next, one minor problem after the next, each minor problem becoming an insurmountable mountain out of a molehill, a reason to panic, another meaningless and hateful way to spend time. Breakfast was what she looked forward to most. Television came in a close second.

Clip-clop trip-trap. She teeters around the corners as she walks. So many kinds of paracetamol. She hates choice when she's hungry more than anything else. Pointless capitalism. Choice is so difficult to cut through. Smooth sugar coated capsules, round hard to swallow tablets, caplets, and ones with added caffeine, double action formulas. Get the no-brand thirty pence ones. That was her formula. Faced with insurmountable choice, get either the cheapest, or the prettiest, at least that narrowed down the decision making to a choice of two. She hovers, picks up both, rediscovers herself staring, blinking, trying to read the blurred writing on the back of the packet. Get the cheapest.

Back to the queue. Two are the same length, and she's standing equidistant between them. Which way should she jump? She hovers uncertainly until another mother-and-brat combination makes the decision for her, and then turns in the opposite direction to them. She closes her eyes, waiting. She realises she's swaying, and makes herself stop. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. The checkout is an endless noise of irritating voices and machinery. Please hurry up, I'm going to faint. Nearly there. Still nearly there. Still going nowhere. Why did this bitch have to buy so much stuff?

She feels stupid buying nothing but cereal, a bowl and some milk. Like she's done something to give herself away. She smiles falsely and says thank you politely to the checkout lady, who she doesn't even look in the face. If you asked her what the lady looked like, she wouldn't have been able to tell you.

Outside, she gasps in the warm sunlight like she's come up for air, blinking, blinded, and panics when she can't find her sunglasses. They're on top of her head, and she feels like a fool. Come on. We're on the home straight now. Clip-clop. Back across the car park. Clip-clop, she starts crossing the road even though there's a car coming, fuck it, he can slow down. Clip-clop. Goat-legs is trip-trapping over her bridge.

There's a piece of waste grassland next to the warehouse. She stumbles across it, finds a flat spot where no one can see her. Here she sits, takes off her shoes and fumbles with the mini cereal selection until the honey nut cheerios come free. With dismay, she realises she doesn't have a spoon, and the bowl she's bought is shop-dirty, but now she's sat down, she can't be bothered to get back up again. She swallows two paracetamol with some milk, and pours the rest in with her torn-open cheerios. She eats by holding the bowl up and drinking.

When she's finished, the shakes have gone and the head rush starts. Dizzy, giddy. She wants to laugh. She's drunk now, and blinks around with double vision at the tall grass, starts to sneeze again and finds this funny.

After a while, the whole effect wears off. She sits feeling at first content, then mildly depressed, and then just empty again. She wonders how she'll hide the fact she's eaten cereal for lunch. The bowl will need to be washed; the bag with the cereal in it will have to be hidden under her desk. She wonders how long she can spin lunch hour out – ten minutes extra, fifteen? Will anyone notice?

The sun is warm. She grabs strands of grass with her fingers. For a moment she imagines she doesn't work at all, that maybe it's ten thousand years ago, there are no computers, warehouses, supermarkets, high-heels. She imagines life without sugar, and wonders if she would have been able to survive at all.

Copyright © 25 March 2004

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