Buyer's Market

It had been a supermarket car-park, and in the early weeks they queued there while there was still stock on the shelves to buy. Today the long lines were back, but they were made up only of young women and girls. The few men moving among them were big and armoured and armed, each shaven head a pale dome. At one end of the concourse vans were parked, their doors open.

How quickly it had come to this. All very well to talk about self-respect. It seemed that lasted only as long as you had toilet paper.

“You – you – you,” rapped out one of the men, pointing in turn. Three pretty twenty-year-olds, who less than a year ago might have been students, clambered gratefully into a van. They were pungent with perfume, long hair like slick silk, their lips glimmering thick with gloss. Never mind canned goods and kindling. Turned out cosmetics were the commodities to fight for, when the cabal offered central heating and running water. Live without those, even for a short stretch, and the price they were set at these days didn’t seem so high.

Unfortunately though, it wasn’t merely a matter of paying and having done. Not when so many were willing to offer the one thing cabal chiefs wanted.

Lucie knew from the man’s face, the moment he squared up to her, that it was hopeless. She’d hoped all the same though, and she’d tried. Hoarding the last scraps of her make-up, scrounging water to wash in, doing the absolute best she could…but even in that distant carefree age of nights out with the girls, her best had so seldom been enough. Nothing she could do about her weight, or her brown-blotched pale freckled face, or the square teeth she’d never been able to whiten. Nothing to do but hope and try. The cold and the endless going-without had made Lucie hope and try so hard. Now her heart sank, long before the man so much as spoke.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

And that was that.

Lucie’s first thought as he moved on was, so much for social media. That seemed a long time ago now. Post a selfie and all you got was likes and hearts and warm well-wishing. Sudden tears stung Lucie’s eyes. Online community codes of conduct were gone, and in their place only the law of the schoolyard held sway. Once again she was the flabby ginger girl about whom everything said was intended to hurt. And it hurt every bit as much as it had then.

Two other men had drawn up in front of Jenny. “Not enough lookers in this lot,” grumbled one. “Rest of her might do though. What do you reckon?”

Lucie watched as his mate poked a rough finger into Jenny’s breastbone, lifting the gold locket she wore.

“True love waits,” he read aloud from the engraved metal. “Deal-breaker?”

“She knows what she’s got coming if she’s shitting us,” the first decided. “Hotdog in a hallway and it’s her skull cracked, not ours.”

The mate dropped the locket and hiked his thumb at the nearest van. Jenny, flushed and choked, hurried over.

Steadily the gloomy vehicle-interiors filled. The more they did, the more Lucie saw that integration had gone the same way as social media. Inside the vans, alabaster skin and blonde hair, or at least the best efforts towards these that could be expected under the circumstances. Outside the vans, everyone else, including her. Female friends who’d shown up in groups of mixed ethnicity were rapidly starting to look like they hadn’t realised the world had changed. One of the men, apparently a leader, seemed to read as much in the angry looks glaring at him from a nearby rank of African faces.

“Yeah,” he said to the women, coldly amused. “You’ve got it. We don’t have to pretend anymore.”

The doors banged shut. One by one the vans rumbled slowly out of the car-park.