EDDIE FROM TESCO
Eddie, Eddie, Eddie from Tesco, shall I compare thee to a heavily discounted piece of meat on the reduced shelf at the end of the day? Thou art cheaper and, hopefully, fresher.
I smooth my skirt down – the denim is damp beneath my palms. I’m distinctly aware of a rash forming on the insides of my thighs, a combination of razor and friction burn exacerbated by sweat and the day’s heat. I squirm. I’ve gone without foundation today, knowing it would melt straight off my face. Sweat gathers on my forehead, melting my SPF.
I should have worn bike shorts under my skirt, but it’s almost thirty degrees outside, and it’d be another layer. I suck on my iced coffee, absently scrolling through some old photographs. I peer over the rim of my MacBook; no sign of him yet. We still have ten minutes, which means he’s just not an early bird. Will isn’t working today, which is a shame. I was hoping to ignore him, to rub another, shorter, man in his face.
Eddie from Tesco stumbles in, drawing my eye by tripping on the door frame, and going ‘Oopsy!’ as he enters the cafe.
He’s just as sweet outside of the supermarket. I make him five foot five （if he’s lucky） and nine stone （if he’s soaking wet）。 I wave, brightly, from my table, with a big, white smile so he knows I’m happy to see him. He waves back and shuffles over. He’s wearing a slightly-too-tight T-shirt and skinny jeans. He carries his weight on his tummy, his backside and his thighs, like a girl. His arms are like toothpicks, and his thick thighs taper into calves as thin as a bird’s. He has a high waist, and an effeminate swing to his hips. With the freckles, the curls and brown summer skin, I’m smitten. Dimples when he smiles, too, and a little chest hair peeping over the collar of his T-shirt.
‘Hi,’ he says. He can’t meet my eye. He’s looking back and forth from the chalkboard menu behind me to my tits. Still, he’s got this look on his face like he can’t believe his luck. He takes a seat, cheeks reddening, and hides his face in his hands. ‘Did you see me trip?’
He smells of baby powder.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a drink. Any particular milk preferences, or…’
‘Oh um. A latte? With full fat milk, if they… I mean, you don’t have to buy—’
I shush him and walk over to the counter. There’s a girl with dark hair and a lip ring arranging brownies on a wooden serving platter.
‘Will in today?’ I ask.
‘Nah. I’ll tell him you said hi, though.’
‘Hey, this is going to sound a little…’ I clear my throat, lower my voice. ‘Do you ever have any problems with him and female members of staff?’ Me and this barista chat sometimes – I think she invigilates at the Baltic at weekends. She has one of those haircuts, like she has a Tumblr and runs a feminist Etsy store; you know, those very short fringes? Like Betty Bangs but shorter, like she’s seven and she cut them herself.
‘He actually keeps, like… bothering one of the new waitresses. Texting her and stuff. Why?’ And then, ‘Aren’t you two friends?’
‘We were,’ I say, pointedly. ‘I’m not telling tales, but you know… Just keep an eye on him, babe.’
‘I will now. Thanks.’ She takes my order, and doesn’t charge me for Eddie’s drink, with a wink, murmuring something about solidarity.
I sit back down with Eddie from Tesco. He is fiddling with his curls, wrapping one dark lock around his middle finger, and letting it bounce back into place.
‘Did you used to work at the Tesco on Clayton Street, or something?’ I ask. He shakes his head.
‘Oh. No. I worked at one in Leeds, where I did my undergrad. I did my teaching qualification at Northumbria,’ he tells me, like I asked for his life story. ‘But um… then I worked at this little Tesco Express in High Heaton? Why do you ask?’
‘You just look really familiar,’ I say. ‘Maybe someone I’ve shot before, or something.’ He shrugs and doesn’t seem to know what to say. An awkward silence hangs between us, which I break. ‘So… your email said you teach primary school?’
‘Yeah… I really love kids. I just… This is so cliché, but I’m really just like a big kid myself, you know? Um… not in a weird way, though.’ He clears his throat, and trails off, staring down at the table, then back to my chest. ‘So, do you, um, do you like kids?’
I shrug. I actually fucking hate children. Teaching at a primary school is a personal nightmare. In Irina’s inferno, the seventh circle of hell is me doing potato prints with a room full of five-year-olds.
‘They’re fine. I’m probably not going to have any.’ I’ve been scraped twice: once when I was nineteen, and again when I was twenty-two. A couple of mishaps related directly to my latex allergy. Hormonal birth control makes me go a bit loopy, you see, and no one ever just has latex-free condoms. I have since learned that the pull-out method is not effective, and if one would like to avoid bareback accidents （barebaccidents, if you will） one must simply deal with carrying her own special condoms.
‘Yeah. I mean I love them, I just… I like being able to give them back at the end of the day? But… I mean, I do probably want them, just… not right now. Well. I don’t know. If I had a girlfriend – which I don’t – and she was pregnant, I’d be fine with it? I think?’
‘Cool,’ I say. Am I sneering? I scratch the top of my lip, knock it back down to a neutral position. But the damage is done, and the checkout boy has shrunk into his chair, flushed redder than before, with a thin film of sweat on his forehead. ‘I promise I don’t bite,’ I tell him. It doesn’t seem to help. ‘I know I’m quite intimidating—’
‘Oh, oh God, you aren’t! I’m sorry, I just don’t spend a lot of time with women outside of a customer service setting. I mean, on placement I talked to quite a lot of mums, and some of them were quite attractive, but…’ He trails off, and screws his face up like he’s just stubbed a toe.
‘Stop talking. I know I’m quite intimidating. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Just… answer my questions. Speak when spoken to, if it helps.’
‘Okay.’ He nods. ‘Speak when spoken to, okay.’
Men get like this with me, sometimes. I find it quite repulsive that anyone could so openly roll over and show their soft parts to a stranger. It’s so gross, it’s almost captivating – like when people cry on public transport. I’d literally rather die before I acted like this in front of someone. It feels like he’s expecting me to mate with him and bite off his head, or perform a backwards traumatic insemination ritual that’ll end with a load of ginger spiders bursting out of his chest.
Now we’ve established that he only speaks when spoken to, we can get on with things. I ask him if he’s seen much of my work, and he has. He went through my whole website – he really likes it. I let him go off on one about how great my work is: ooo the colours, ooo isn’t it so revolutionary to see the female gaze, ooo eroticised images of normal men by a woman. The phrasing is decidedly similar to a Vice write-up of a show I did during my MA. I think that article is still the third or fourth result when you google me, as well. But that’s fine. Forgivable. A little sweet, even, that he’d try and pass off a write-up from four years ago as his own clever observations. Maybe he thinks I don’t read my own reviews.