An Old Knife Next to Half a Lemon

I was concerned that we were walking too quickly through the furniture superstore, that if it took a few hours to drive there & back then we should spend at least three hours inside, wandering around, taking in the dioramas of kitchens, a child’s bedroom, offices, master bedroom, ensuites, bathrooms, when in fact time was passing quicker than it seemed. As well as not feeling I was making the most of the shopping trip, it was my opinion that I was not putting enough into the trolley, so would sometimes lift a number of items from the Swedish shelves, put them into my trolley, then take them out of the trolley and put them back onto the shelf, one by one, exactly as I had found them. The smells were curious, they were local to each scene. The temperature indoors was pleasant, perhaps, I asked myself, different in each area? There was the scent of wood, paled by time beneath the detection of human senses so that the pumped air itself – Thurrock and brutal – was perfumed artificially. Vats of woodsmelling perfume shipped internationally, from Sweden to wherever it is needed most. Everyone follows a path, side-by-side, phasing in & out of step with one another. At first, in the land of living rooms, children are peaceful but by the time we are at the Marketplace, then they are impatient and loud, squealing on the vinyl flooring, fighting amongst themselves. If the company gets too much, then I linger or speed up to evade them, maybe I take a shortcut back to the office chairs, sit in them, get swallowed up, finger the price ticket, get swallowed up some more, my limbs, fat and muscle disappeared, my eyes looking up & out.

    The line for the tills wound to remind me of the customs desk at Orlando, FL airport, sticky, families with a cart, dressed for humidity, shuffling, cottonmouth’d, and it is late summer so there are denim shorts and tanned skin. There are young people with their parents; you have only to look at the contents of their trolley and the date to figure they are preparing for university. What about the shape of their face? I do not see that they are particularly emotional, that the expectation or occasion weighs heavily on them. Maybe they hide it away? The youth is in-bloom. It is the form of them halfway between mother & father, in silence, their nose in a mobile phone. Each child is an equation of their parents. I smile at the mathematics: these babes destined for the mortarboard were born the year I graduated university myself and took full-time employment. It does not seem so long ago, not a lifetime, and yet there it is, a lifetime ago. Had any of them been conceived during a final year’s study-break? It was possible that tensions arose and were sated during the twitchy hours of a black-coffee-fuelled all-nighter. I was asked whether it made me feel old, just five days after turning thirty-nine. Our car spun in the quietest edge of the park; loose gravel could be heard, a cool buckle, the afternoon settling down. It did not, strangely, no; not even thirty-nine felt old. Some things make me feel old, but those young people in the furniture superstore were not it. In fact, I might even say I felt a tender excitement enter me by osmosis just from my proximity to them and their tupperware, frying pans, unorthodox bedsheet dimensions and laundry basket.

    There was a point during that day, though, when I remembered I am in my fortieth year. To feel old would be the start of one moment and the ending of another. To run my hand over the rings of time! Throughout my life I have felt old against some metric or other. A young boy on the cusp of his eleventh birthday clung to a single duvet and wept for fear of growing old. I do not know what to make of myself at the age I am now, after all the ages I have been and before all the ages I will be. My mother gave me a chef’s knife on the twenty-fifth for my thirty-ninth, exquisitely sharp and easy to handle. I cooked dinner for twenty people, her brothers & sisters, her niece’s family; we all ate together in a noise-filled room around some tables. My niece’s son had three servings. I beamed and kept it modestly concealed behind my lips. On the work-surface, my mother’s adopted knife rested next to half a lemon, Ikea printed on the warped blade, the tip missing from when I drunkenly stabbed it into the wall of my university accommodation. I lifted it up to my eye and ran my thumb along its dull edge, trying to entice a nip, but nothing, just an old knife next to half a lemon.