You are what you eat (III)

She'd never rung her sister. There was little point ringing her these days. A quick e-mail—"on nites til sat week may be ring then? Cxx"—or an even more garbled text would deflect conversation for another month or two. It was an ongoing game, with the last round indefinitely postponed. Who would crack first, and lose by going to visit the other? For a week or two, Amanda kept her sister's name on a mental list, but eventually it was swept away by the day-to-day and forgotten.

When she next looked into the window of the delicatessen, little had changed and she had a brief flash again of Charlotte. Amanda had crossed Wall Street to avoid a tear in the pavement surrounded by tartrazine-coloured barriers. She had gently tutted to herself at the inconvenience, but underneath she was vaguely happy for the chance to look again at what was on offer. All was in an early twilight that hid, for a moment, the fairy lights. Amanda realized with a blink that they had been switched off.

The shop was still having a SALE, and the theme was still a mix of salty snacks and olde worlde glass jars of crystallized food colouring, that no longer had a hold on Amanda. The days were growing longer and the dark pull of nostalgia was, she was sure, abating, melting with the early March frosts.

Those fairy lights were off now, but was that it? Had nothing else changed? Well, someone else was pickling those capers, according to the jars: would the shopkeeper ever learn not to buy capers? The nuts had all gone, and things had been tidied up, spring-cleaned. There were also cakes made from wholegrain flour, advertised as a dietary aid, arranged like toy skyscrapers around the outskirts of the display.

Eventually, though, something else caught Amanda's eye. Miserly packaged, its colours were not bright enough to be easily noticed. Someone in marketing had made these decisions, and unwittingly had steered this flagship product into a quiet harbour. Delicatessens and curiosity shops such as this now kept the brand safe from the rough seas of consumption and commerce. It was a type of carbolic soap, wrapped in coated paper and stamped with a logo that couldn't have changed in a hundred years. It certainly was the same thirty years ago, when he'd insisted on using it, to the distraction of his wife, Amanda's mum.

"Daddy," she thought; and said, quietly.

She suddenly wanted to smell the soap. That would unlock him, deep inside her, and she'd feel, just briefly, like when he had dandled her on his knee, one summer in Blackpool, a fat sun shining like the face of God and ice-creams begging to be dropped on the hot tarmac of the promenade. She'd see, in her mind's eye, his face before it had any lines; before his hair had swept backwards, away from the eyes, greyed to its roots and then disappeared; before he too had gone away.

She pushed across the threshold into the shop, the door closing without a bell behind her. Inside was disappointing, more bare than the display had been. The big man in the apron was sweaty and impatient. She asked him for a bar of the soap and, on an impulse, a packet of flour cakes. It wouldn't hurt to return, once again, to her now tarnished New Year's resolutions. She paid: that much? Really? She tried hard not to let it show. It was worth it.

She hurried home with her purchases, faster now as she remembered: it was Thursday, and Grandpa would be waiting by the telephone for her to ring. God, she thought. Grandpa. Once she had kept him waiting an hour, and he'd pretended that he thought he just hadn't been able to hear the ring. "I wasn't sure," he'd shouted into the receiver once, "whether I'd been suddenly struck deaf. So I thought I'd better ring you and that way I'd know. Charlotte always rings me bang on time, you see. Bang. On. Time." That had been a lie, of course, unless he'd moved out of his flat into the intensive care unit, where he'd see plenty of her on the hour, every three hours.

But Amanda didn't need his sense of humour tonight, and the plainer and more normal the phone call (and its timing), the simpler and quicker the conversation would be, and the sooner she could put the receiver down. Maybe she wouldn't ring him at all. The old swine, he'd only put her in a mood. No, she'd go home, unwrap the carbolic soap, wash with it, and think of her daddy.