You are what you eat (I)

Amanda was first drawn to the delicatessen she passed on her way home, because she loved Christmas decorations. One of her first memories was of gazing into a bauble at herself gazing back; the reflected face was speckled by a wintry scene, picked out in raised points of white paint. Every time she conjured up the memory it would unfold behind the decoration to encompass an enormous tinsel tree (unashamedly fake), hundreds of ornaments, tiny strings of lights hung from the branches and a tiny, Barbie-perfect fairy doll so far away from her toddler hands as to be in heaven with the angels.

For nearly ten years, probably following that ecstatic moment, she had insisted on having fairy lights in her room all year round. Her parents had only agreed because her window looked out over fields and sheep and (usually) pouring rain; had the neighbours been able to see then the idea would have been scotched immediately. Practical right up to the moment he left, Dad had bought her a reasonably expensive set: not particularly attractive, but made for commercial use and hence unlikely to catch fire after being mauled by a romantic child. Amanda had wound them in between the hooks on the curtains, letting the two ends droop down to touch the radiator below the sill. From her bed, nestled in the corner opposite the window, she could now see a magical portal, filling every night with adventures and excitement. Every morning she woke to find they had been switched off, long after she had gone to sleep.

The front window of the delicatessen on Wall Street had at one time been festooned with Christmas lights, and they had never been removed. Unlike its namesake, the bombastic powerhouse, this road rarely saw any visitors. Sixty years ago it had been a route into the working-class district that had breached the old city boundaries centuries ago, and each of its shops had hummed and ker-chinged with sales. Now, as the terraces retreated and desirable residences bore down upon them, Wall Street was melancholic and lonely, fighting off the grim and empty future it sensed for itself like one might struggle with the first symptoms of a cold.

Some recent, slim period of prosperity (or a desperate resort to the showy) had spurred the shop owner to line the inside shelf and all four sides of the frame with lights. They were unimpressive, static and primary-coloured, but Amanda didn't care. The first time she saw them, when she took a different route home from the station, she realized immediately that they were the dead spit of the set she had hung as an eight-year-old from her curtain rails. After that she walked home the same way every night, although always on the opposite side of the street, refusing to entirely sacrifice the convenience of an established route to her romantic streak.

One evening, with winter approaching and almost providing an excuse for the state of the shop window, Amanda looked across as she always did. Looking at the lights, especially now at the dark end of the new year and with the holidays long forgotten, made her feel like... like looking in the shop window, at any rate. She crossed over and peered in.

Beyond the lights, it all looked rather jolly, in that way that all such establishments manage to suggest. Jars of preserves and pickles lined the shelves. A solid man with a white apron and a wide face was busy serving a customer; he lifted an equally solid block of some sort of cheese out from under Amanda's nose, and her attention followed the block back into the display. The fairy lights looped in between foodstuffs, trailed over stacks of tins and jars, and directed their warm trail away from the chilled produce. It was clearly warm inside, a hint of condensation creeping up the bottom edge of the pane of glass and clinging to the colour of the lights that shone through it.

She was about to look away when she noticed the piccalilli: one of the squat pyramids of jars bore, on each of its bricks, the label she remembered, perennial at the back of her sauces shelf, their sauces shelf, all those years ago. She hadn't even thought of him for months, certainly not of his eating habits; the tastebuds of a student, she'd always thought and eventually said, all spice and hidden sugar. But fancy: in amongst the Tate & Lyle and the Green & Black there was hidden a little hint of Devlin & Amanda. The idea made her want to both stay and turn away; but the scent memories, not to mention thoughts of Devlin himself and his bloody temper, pushed her from the window and broke the spell.