The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘If you’d just given it to me I would have been out of here by now.’

‘You’ll have to wait your turn.’

‘You’ll have to wait your turn,’ he imitates, exaggerating my accent. ‘Come on, bitch.’ His smile broadens, as though it’s a joke. Maybe he thinks he can talk to me like that because I’m a woman, I’m in a low-paid job, an immigrant with a different skin colour from his chalky white. Maybe he’s borrowing from a tribal language he thinks I speak. Or maybe he’s being ironic and this is his parody of being a bad boy. After a closer look at him I reject this last possibility. It’s too complex for him.

‘Move aside,’ I say.

‘I’ve got a train to catch. Come on.’

‘Maybe if you’d asked the person in front of you if it was OK?’

‘My train...’

‘The trains run all day,’ I say to the accompaniment of the steady rumbling from the metro two staircases below. When I started working here my little sister asked if I wasn’t worried about terrorists and sarin. In the civil war, before we got out, sarin was what everyone was afraid of. Afraid that the guerrillas would release the poison gas the way we’d heard a Japanese sect had done in the Tokyo underground sometime back in the nineties. My sister was nine years old and had nightmares every night about poison gas and underground stations.

‘There’s only one every fifteen minutes on my line,’ he hisses. ‘I’ve got a meeting, OK?’

‘All the more reason to ask her nicely,’ I say, with a nod in the direction of the lady behind him who has finally found her credit card and is ready to pay for the three items lying on the counter in front of me. The boy — I’d put his age in the mid-twenties and guess he’s a regular at the training centre, mostly weights and explosive workouts — loses the patience he clearly feels he’s been showing.

‘Now, you nignog!’

My heart starts beating faster, but not so much because he’s trying to offend me. I don’t know whether the guy’s a racist or is just trying to get at me in the way he thinks will hurt and provoke me most, the way he would have called me dwarf if I was short, or porkie if I was fat. I don’t care what his prejudices are; my heart is beating faster because I’m afraid. Because in the course of just a few seconds this overgrown child standing in my shop has crossed a line, meaning probably he has problems with his self-control. I can’t see anything in his pupils or his body language to indicate that he’s high on something, the way the soldiers often were, although of course anabolic steroids could be in there somewhere. My ex-husband says that, because I’m a chemist, I’m always trying to explain the world by reference to chemistry. Like that proverb about the man with the hammer who sees every problem in terms of nails.

So, yes, I’m scared, but I’ve been more scared. And I’m angry, but I’ve been angrier.

‘No,’ I say calmly.

‘You sure?’

He takes something from the pocket of his nice, warm Moncler jacket.

A red Swiss Army knife. Flips out the big blade. No, it’s the nail file. Raises his hand, sticks his middle finger up in the air and starts to file a nail, laughing in my direction. One of his front teeth has a big dark stain on it. Could be from methamphetamine, which contains chemicals such as anhydrous ammonia and red phosphorous that eat up the enamel. But of course it could just be a case of bad dental hygiene.

He turns to the woman behind him. ‘Hey, missus — OK by you if I do a bit of shopping?’

The woman stares open-mouthed at the knife and looks as though she’s trying to say something, but not a sound comes out. Instead she nods, quick as a woodpecker, and makes noises like she’s having trouble breathing. Above the mask her glasses mist over.

The boy turns back to me. ‘There, see? Come on.’

I take a deep breath. Maybe I’ve underestimated the boy. At least he’s street-smart enough to know that the CCTV cameras in 7-Eleven shops record pictures but not sound, so that in a court case there would be no indisputable proof that he’d actually said ‘nignog’ or anything like it that could be called hate speech. Unless the elderly lady behind him has better hearing than I think. And there’s no law against filing your nails.

I turn slowly and take down the packet of snuff, thinking the situation over.