Free Dinner at Mine by Chris Smyth Page B

the printout she had made minutes before leaving the office. Flour next.
Where the hell was that? Why couldn’t they put all the cake ingredients next to each other?
    Charlotte moved quickly down the end aisle of the supermarket, barging roughly past a woman comforting a screaming toddler, and swerving to avoid knocking over an old lady.
    It wasn’t supposed to be this rushed. Charlotte had worked out that if she arrived at Matt’s by six thirty there would be plenty of time to prepare the cake, and she could put it in
the oven as soon as the main course came out. Shopping wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes so, really, there was nothing wrong with sneaking in a quick drink after work.
    The second had been the problem – it quickly led to a third. So here she was, standing in Tesco fifteen minutes before she was meant to be serving dinner, staring at fifteen different
types of flour. She looked at her list. She had written ‘flour’. Plain, self-raising, sourdough, brown or spelt flour? What the hell was the difference? Why was there always so much
fucking choice about tiny little things like this? Why didn’t they just write on the packet which one you used for what?
    Charlotte grabbed the cheapest packet and threw it into the trolley. Sod it. What was next? She looked at the list. Sugar. That was probably around here somewhere. Charlotte wheeled her trolley
to the end of the aisle, looking up at the boards hanging from the ceiling. There was no mention of sugar. An attendant in a blue tunic directed her to Aisle 6, and Charlotte trudged back half the
length of the supermarket swearing, mostly under her breath, at the shoppers in her way.
    What next? Eggs. Fuck, they were back by the flour. There had to be a better way of doing this. Charlotte spun her trolley round, clipping the frame of a cart carrying another small toddler in
the fold-out seat. The child started crying. Its mother looked round to see what the problem was, but Charlotte was already gone.
    As she accelerated again towards the far end of the supermarket, Charlotte looked longingly down the dessert aisle. Rows of cakes, chocolate éclairs, tarts and pies stretched away towards
the tills, their cardboard packaging glistening with chiller-cabinet condensation. What was the point of doing it yourself at all? It just wasn’t efficient. Teams of dedicated people had put
years of effort into doing it for you. This whole competition was ridiculous.
    Right, eggs. Six was enough. Organic? Free-range? Cheap? Fuck it, they were only bloody chickens. OK, what was the time now? Twenty past. Fuck.
    Never mind the coffee. Matt would have some of that. So just chocolate to go. Don’t say that’s back at the other end . . .
    But another man in a blue tunic told her that it was. She followed him past the bakery, past rows of wines, breakfast cereals and toilet paper to the aisle next to the glistening desserts.
    ‘There you are, madam,’ the man said with proprietorial pride, indicating a shelf of thin, foil-wrapped bars. ‘Which kind were you after? Milk, plain, white, organic, Mexican
chilli . . . ?’
    ‘For a cake.’
    The man stared at her blankly.
    ‘Thanks anyway.’ Charlotte reached past him and grabbed a couple of bars of something with the word ‘Belgian’ on the front. Right, that was everything. How long did she
have to get back to Matt’s and bake the thing? Seven minutes. Hmm.
    She made for the tills. The ones nearest the doors were a crush of quarrelling families with trolleys groaning under the weight of junk food. Charlotte squeezed round them, but the checkouts
beyond had long queues of giggling students with six-packs of own-brand lager and double-size bottles of Bulgarian wine. They’d probably all pay with cards, wouldn’t they?
    She pushed on towards the far wall again, scanning the tills as she went. But the queues started to get longer towards the household goods sections and then stopped. The last five tills were