Page 26 of 59 Minutes
FRANKIE
‘Otis,’ Frankie shouts, elbowing her way inside the shop.
He has already been swallowed by the liquid flow of people that is filling up every space.
Some have multiple bags, shoving anything they can into them, even bread and milk which will spoil in days.
Others jostle for what’s left of the long-life supplies, hands clawing around tins of fruit and jars of Marmite.
There’s a new vibration in here, a fevered look in people’s eyes.
She feels a thud against her legs from behind, an elderly woman with a wheeled tartan shopping bag nearly knocks her flat.
Frankie stumbles to the side. ‘Out of my bloody way,’ the woman growls.
Otis was right, this is dangerous. Frankie fights her way back out, covering her stomach with one arm and leading with the other elbow.
Even as she stands on the pavement, she’s knocked out of the way by new arrivals, a hand managing to strike her lower belly. She wraps her arms around herself protectively.
Find somewhere safe on the way to the car , that’s what he said.
She looks around the square, a movement to her left catching her eye.
A middle-aged man, swinging a golf club at the window of a fancy little cheese shop.
Behind her, she hears glass smashing and turns to see a woman in a wax jacket reaching through the smashed glass pane of a tiny greengrocer’s shop.
Frankie jogs away from the square, past the shuttered pub and a pretty wine shop.
Will that soon be looted? Maybe getting leathered and passing out is the wisest move.
Next to it is an intact bakery, no use taking bread that will mould over in days.
Next to the bakery is an archway and an alley.
She looks along it but it’s empty, no one there, just a big blue dumpster at the top.
She spins to look behind her but Otis isn’t out yet.
Realising she still needs to pee, she shuffles up towards the bin, slipping behind it.
She dries herself with a bit of pocket tissue and pulls everything up, then stumbles back out of her alley and towards the main square. She emerges carefully, looking to the left at the Spar shop a few doors down. Still, people are approaching it, but is anyone able to move in there?
In the doorway, a man with an empty bag is howling, Frankie doesn’t know who he’s shouting at or what he’s looking for.
The old man who hates Russians nudges the howling man out of the doorway, and is now telling the people arriving that they can’t come in, it’s too crowded.
They move him out of the way like he’s made of paper and he drops his bags.
Fig Rolls and boxes of chocolate tumble out as he stoops to gather them, getting trampled as he tries.
As she heads up the slight hill away from the shop, she can hear people behind her, others yelling from upstairs in the pub. There is no one ahead of her as she walks in the direction of the church. It’s not so much a ghost town as a film set, the crew behind the scenes, the actors out of shot.
She follows the mild slope away from the village square.
The cars have thinned out now and the air feels cool and clean, Frankie gulps it while she can.
Behind her, she hears footsteps. Otis? She turns but it’s two shell-shocked young women, running in the other direction with splitting Spar bags in their arms.
Another pretty pub now, leadlight windows with curtains and blinds drawn inside.
How many people will spend the next … god knows …
however long they have to spend, sheltering in that pub?
There must be people for whom that was a fantasy.
Her dad in his younger days, for one. A perennial lock-in.
But how long until the beer runs out? The patience?
She thinks of her dad at the end of a bender, imagines others like him stuck in close quarters. No thank you.
The churchyard is on the left. And after this comes the narrowing road, the sharp corner and then Otis’s car and then back to shelter at the cottage. And the burns, the fires, the radiation, the … What the fuck is that sound?