Testing The Site

Miriam gently tapped the side of the glass bottle to keep the three items in a perfect rectangle, admiring her freshly painted
nails, just as the checkout conveyor moved forward. She always used self checkout except when buying alcohol, they're all so young at this store and it takes so long to confirm what she knows, that she's well over eighteen. Of course anyone interrogating her shopping would jump to conclusions. But what they couldn't know was that she had perfected this, maximum pleasure with a cast iron guarantee that it fell short of making her sick. She had a phobia about that physical act, had done ever since her sixteenth birthday.

There was a symmetry to how the items filled the carrier bag too, so when the checkout girl put the crisps in first she involuntarily pushed her hand forward. Wine first, she wasn't fussy, but someone had advised her that six pounds was the perfect compromise between quality and price. It looked French. Then the ice cream. Always the one where you knew the couple were going to have sex back in the nineties. Vanilla. In the space that remained, crisps, but only paprika flavoured. Why were these so hard to find in England?

The film was always the same, the Breakfast Club. She knew all the words. She knew that she would follow the dance around the library with only her arms, her body warm under the green blanket that was already a year or two beyond its useful life. She knew that at the end she would raise her - ah but she always wanted that final scene to be a surprise.

Only then, filled with the four things that gave her the greatest pleasure in life, would she allow herself to check the site - she used only one - to see if her new photo had elicited any messages. It wasn't as if she were trying to be misleading, she just wondered whether she would get more replies if she used her younger sister's photo. Everyone told her they looked the same.

Miriam checked the clock on the dashboard and worked out that she could log on at five to eleven. She pressed her foot hard against the accelerator pedal.