THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF PERSPECTIVE TAKING
How to get out of your main character syndrome
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It takes 13 minutes, through a small village of council houses, past the flagpole with the St George’s Cross racists and the camper van and with packing tape on its windows serial killer, turn right, down the A20: tall hedges carved into the shape of passing lorries; a flattened pink Calippo wrapper on the tarmac; a bedsheet in a bramble bush what the? and, on the distant edge of a beautiful wheat field, the railway that carries trains between London and the coastal towns of Dover, Folkestone, Margate and Broadstairs. Second exit off the large roundabout, right up alongside growling long-distance trucks if I ever get divorced, I could definitely do that coated in the dust of Spain, Estonia, Poland, France and onto the road to Big Sainsbury’s.
As I drive, I feel a low-level anxiety: it’s Thursday, just gone midday, and I’m not at my desk. Every driver going slightly below the speed limit triggers another lurch of that feeling, a jabbing knuckle in my stomach, and the voice in my head becomes a voice that I mutter, alright, alright, it’s ok, you’ll get there, fucking, it’s – you’ll be home before you know it.
Just before the turn into the retail park, a queue of cars. I pull up directly beside a Burger King advert on a bus stop. ‘Plant Based’. In America, when I was researching <Selfie, I met a woman who worked for a startup called Impossible Foods, who’d told me, “A cow is a machine for converting grass into meat. We’re developing an actual machine that can be a stand-in for the cow.”Be a stand in for the cow? It was better than that. Replace the cow? She was a Christian. I had this safe, friendly feeling towards her. The marrying type.
The light turns green. You can’t say that. The marrying type. Fucking indicate left, accelerate slowly patronising. She was a computer scientist, something like that. Turn the steering wheel left. Yeah well. It’s still true.
I always stop at the far edge of the Big Sainsbury’s car park, where it’s emptier, and then walk in, even when it’s raining. I enjoy the stroll alone and prefer being away from the rest of the cars. Slamming the door as I get out, I press the keyfob button and hear the lock beep shut. Be the cow? Something like that. A machine to be the cow. My trainers are muddy and my black cargo trousers have a mark from a paw print above the knee, where Jones tried to get my attention, and there’s a white-ish food mark on the right upper thigh that looks like oh god, oh shit. I scratch at it with my thumbnail. Why does it always? I scratch again. It’s okay, it’s just Sainsbury’s. I once saw an elderly neighbour, right here by the entrance, and she blanked me and hurried off with her chin in the air, gripping her little black handbag like a life-preserver. <She’ll be dead soon. No, don’t say that. Those hands, though. Bundles of twigs. As I pull a trolley from the stack, I avoid my reflection in the supermarket window. It’s all the sugar. Chocolate. I’ve got to – and pasta. We’ve been eating a lot of pasta. That lamb ragu, oh my god.
Inside the large supermarket doors, the change in air and the sudden slamming arrival of bright colours and displays lift my feelings. I dip into my pocket for my wallet and pull out my Nectar card to activate the self-scan machine. They want you to scan the barcode on the back of the card, but mine rubbed off years ago and the one time I tried to get into my Nectar account online to get a new one, something went wrong, I can’t remember what. I swipe my card. I swipe it again. It doesn’t work. I swipe it again and again. Slow down! Jesus! You’re going too fast. A screen tells me it’s looking for a scanner. A handset lights up, in the second row from the bottom, flashing green, WELCOME BACK, WILL. I bend down to pick it up <nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day. Grab one, two, three orange Bags for Life 30p! and push my trolley into the fruit and veg aisle. What did Farrah want? Curly Kale. You know, it is, actually. The nicest thing.
A twenty-something man in light grey shorts and a baseball shirt stands between me and the Curly Kale. He’s handsome. He looks vague and confused. Tch. A few years ago, just after I moved to Ashford, I think I saw a woman I went to school with right about here. Anne was one of the cool girls and widely fancied and I think I saw her here in the veg section, and she hadn’t changed at all. She was a PE teacher now, so I’d heard, and when I saw her, I looked like this, scruffy, with my freelance clothes on, nose hairs, ear hairs, head-hair in crazy angles, stains, <oh god, was that really Anne? Christ. Another school friend, who I saw last year, who I told this story to, said, “it probably was her - she lives in Ashford”; another school friend, laughing at me, but not cruelly, at least I don’t think cruelly, when I said how self-conscious I’d felt when I saw her, said “nothing changes.” Wanting to look good in front of the girls, she’d meant. The cool girls, anyway. Trying and failing.
Is that what she’d meant? He’s just standing there, staring at the curly kales. Come on, mate, for fuck’s sake. I push my trolley slightly too close to his trolley. Our trolleys touch. Oh no. God. Aggressive. Idiot. I pull my trolley back and smile “Oooh, sorry!” My voice comes out too high, with a little laugh at the end. Jesus. You’re such a prick, Will. He looks back at me glassily. I don’t think he noticed. I take his place at the kale bucket. Finally. I pick up a packet it’ll go off anyway. She never eats it and throw it in my trolley.
A woman walks past me with a dog toy in her basket that I’ve not seen before. It’s an apple with a face on it, and it looks like it’s got a squeaker and is in that soft kind of plastic that Jones loves. A tide of love rushes up my torso; it feels warm and liquid, like wetting my pants. Going to get one. Better not have run out. You know, one day you’ll come in here and it’ll be the first time since he’s died and you’ll see all the toys and then what will you do? The warm love feeling becomes granite heaviness. As I push my trolley toward those Jazz apples that I like, I carry a palpable weight inside my gut, chest and throat. I pick up a plastic packet and examine its contents. They’re always fucking bruised, these apples.
This is how my shopping gets done. From the outside, I’m effectively invisible: a middle-aged man, slightly unkempt, pushing a shopping trolley, surrounded by others – some younger, some older, some less scruffy, some more. I’m mostly wordless and unremarkable, a coloured-in shadow going about the ordinary business of an ordinary day. But that’s not the reality of who I am. Inside my head I’m singular and strange, a tumult of feelings and talk. In the space of just a few minutes I experience excitement, amusement, regret, frustration, pride, self-doubt, fear, grief, self-hate and love. A voice I can hear-but-not-hear recounts memories of the past and visions of the future; it offers commentaries and corrections that nudge me in the direction of being a more heroic, less villainous character in the unfolding narrative of the present.
As I moved around the aisles of Sainsbury’s, I saw dozens of other unremarkable souls. They dressed in predictable ways and behaved in predictable ways, smiling at cashiers and saying sorry when they got in the way. There was one human squinting at a chorizo, another weighing a pear, another asking her daughter if she wanted blueberry or strawberry yoghurts. The only thing in their heads appeared to be shopping. That was all they were to me: anonymous shopping things. If every one of them died tomorrow, I wouldn’t have cared. To my brain, they weren’t fully alive, as I was fully alive. They were a crowd scene, extras in the story of my life. And that, of course, is who I was to them.