The Real Thing by Doris Lessing

note, forcing it into the check-out girl’s hand. By the time the girl he had been following understood what he was doing it was too late. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s fight outside.’ She looked angrily at him, and at the check-out girl, who was already busy with the next customer. Then she followed him to the pavement. She was not looking at him to find what he was like, but how to quarrel with him. In fact he was a man of perhaps forty, with nothing particular about him, and dressed as casually as she was. But he had all the carelessness of confidence. Her clothes were ordinary, that is to say jeans and a sweater, but she had a drab appearance, not so much dirty as stale. Her hands were nicotine-stained.
    ‘Look,’ he said, taking all this in, ‘I know what you want to say, but why don’t we have a cup of coffee?’
    She just stood there. She was frozen … it was with suspicion. She looked trapped. A few yards away a couple of tables with chairs around them stood outside a cafe.
    ‘Come on,’ said he, with a jerk of his head towards the tables. He sat down at one, and she did too, in a helpless, lethargic way, but as if she was about to leap up again. At once she started peering into the carrier bags forjust-bought cigarettes. She lit a cigarette and sat with her eyes closed, and smoked as if trying to drown in smoke, pulling breaths of it deep into her lungs. He said, ‘I’m going to order. Coffee?’ No movement from her. ‘I’ll get coffee then. And I know you are hungry. What do you want to eat?’ No response. She went on drawing in smoke from the cigarette held to her lips in a childish grubby hand.
    He went into the cafe. His quick glance back showed he was afraid she would be off. But when he came back with two cups of coffee she had not moved. He sat down, putting the cups on the table, and she at once pulled one towards her, piled in sugar and drank it in big gulps. Before she had finished it, he went back in and returned with another cup which he put down before her.
    ‘Don’t think you’re going to get something out of this because you won’t,’ she said angrily.
    ‘I know that,’ he said, in a voice kept reasonable. He was sorry for her and could not keep this out of his face and eyes. But she had not once looked at him properly.
    There arrived before them a large plate of sandwiches.
    ‘Go on, eat,’ he said.
    She took up a sandwich without enthusiasm, sat with it in her hand, and at last did look at him. A rapid once-over, expecting the worst: her face seemed forever set in sarcastic rage.
    ‘Well, then, what’s all this for?’ she asked, cold.
    ‘I used to work in a D.H.S.S. office,’ he said, as if it were an explanation. Her face-if this was possible-got even harder and angrier. Her eyes narrowed and shot out beams of hate. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I know what you want to say.’
    ‘No you don’t. You don’t know anything about me.’
    ‘I’m making a fair old guess,’ he said, with deliberate humour, but she wasn’t going to have that.
    ‘You don’t know a bloody thing about me and you’re not going to.’
    ‘I know you haven’t got the money to feed your kids.’
    ‘How do you know I’ve got kids?’
    He smiled, mildly impatient. ‘I wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. And I’m sure you wouldn’t be begging if you didn’t need it for your kids.’
    This froze her up. She had not known, it seemed, that she had been observed begging. Then she decided not to care. She crammed in a big bite of the sandwich, holding her cigarette at the ready in the other hand. ‘I suppose you’re full of remorse about being on strike,’ she jeered, as soon as her mouth was empty.
    ‘I told you, I used to work there. I don’t now. I left a year ago. I left because I couldn’t stand it.’
    It was evident he needed to go on telling her, but she shook her head to say she wasn’t interested.
    ‘I’d like to kill them,’ she said, meaning it. ‘I would if I could.