Free A Commonplace Killing by Siân Busby

the authorised economy standards. It made you sick.
    Her back was killing her, and so were her feet, and she longed to remove her girdle and high heels. She was still just outside of the shade of the baker’s awning; it was still hot. Her blouse was irredeemably stained with perspiration under the arms and when she moved she could feel a cooling patch of damp between her skin and her girdle. She wished she could take off her jacket.
    Queuing is simply not fair, she thought; she had said as much all through the war. Why couldn’t the government introduce some sort of distribution system so that everybody got what they needed – all the same? People shouldn’t have to stand about all day. The woman in front of her was saying: “I knew I should have gone to the ABC on Camden Road”, and she wondered if she’d be better off going there now; then it came to her that the ABC had two women behind the counter and she was probably better off with the baker.
    She couldn’t understand why it was taking so long. A person could die in the time it takes to get served. It was impossible to see inside the shop because the windows had been boarded up since a V-weapon had taken every single pane of glass more than a year ago. A lot of the other shops in the row had been obliterated. She wished she hadn’t remembered that, trying to push away the memory of the greengrocer and his wife scrabbling frantically in the ruins of their shop for the body of their little girl. Pat Kirkwood has such lovely skin, she thought: I wonder how much a pot of vanishing cream goes for on the black market? The advertisements mocked you with the lure of things you couldn’t get hold of even if you had the money and the points. Vanishing cream, Heinz Tomato Soup, French girdles. The list was endless. She supposed that there must be people who had these things in abundance; people who knew other people. It was all luck when you came down to it.
    Across the road another Number 43 came and went. Friern Barnet via Muswell Hill. The sight of it made her nervy. She was a bundle of nerves and in a bath of perspiration. She hoped it wasn’t the Change. She didn’t want any more kiddies – she’d almost died having Douglas – but she was not ready for the Change. Her sex appeal was the only thing keeping her from a shrivelled existence in a dingy bed-sitting room. When she thought of all the things other people got away with, all the things other people had, it made her feel ill. Pat Kirkwood and her bloody vanishing cream. She reckoned she had five years left before the Change aged her irrevocably, and after that no man would ever look at her again.
    She rummaged in the pigskin handbag for a gold-coloured compact, dabbing at the line of perspiration on her top lip.
    “Tut! Look at Lady Muck,” said one of the women in the queue behind her, “making herself cheap.”
    She lingered unnecessarily over the blonde curls protruding artfully from beneath the front of her turban. The face-powder sat on her damp skin like a grotesque mask; the mingling of perspiration and rubber filled her nose. She felt queasy, as if she might faint. It was only the tiredness that was stopping her from crossing the road and starting over again. Somewhere nice; somewhere the war hadn’t touched. Who could blame her for that? You had only to look at what her life had come to. Nobody would blame her. Nobody. Not even Mavis.
    Another woman left the baker’s and the whole line moved up one more space and she found herself, at long last, standing in the shade of the awning. She would buy the bread, she would take it home and then she would set about changing her life. Buying the bread would be the last thing she ever did for any of them.
    The thought made her panic; then it made her sad.
    The woman who had just left the baker’s was holding out her basket.
    “’Ere, look at that. Gorn. Look at that.”
    She was a big fat Cockney woman, the sort you used to see in the newsreels