Januariad

Chloe works the automatic checkout with a practiced hand. Her sidekick passes her an enormous yellow bag of bags of crisps, then two slabs of milky chocolate, a selection of sugar sweets. Each package bleeps as it crosses the lasers. The machine offers helpful, ignored interjections at timed intervals. The final tally remains modestly unannounced, but appears at the bottom of an itemised bill on-screen. Chloe pulls handfuls of change from the pockets of her pink, velour tracksuit and flings them into the coin chute, where they rattle away before accumulating slowly on the screen. She and her friend alternate between dramatic focus and helpless laughter as they work. The two gather their haul and exit the shop, filling the echoing spaces with yells and laughter. They are ten years old, whippet-thin, raw nervy energy. Chloe’s house can be seen through the front glass of the supermarket doors, and they light towards it, leaning into one another in strange, stumbling, intimate embrace. Chloe holds the crisps over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Their discussions are endless and chaotic, always high-stakes. A couple of blagged euro pays for the banquet, and a couple of euro can always be blagged.