Quite early on the morning of the reunion sports events, Pearly went with Helen to the supermarket to help with the main weekly shop. He wasn’t a regular assistant, and his role was to push the trolley while Helen made selections from the shelves. Occasionally he was given brief authority and permitted to range after milk or bread — items of fixed identification for which no special expertise was required: ‘Light blue top, Pearly, remember’ — while she shrewdly compared brands and prices of a wide array of commodities that for him offered no differentiation. Pearly’s simple rule was to choose the largest amount at the cheapest price, but that guide wasn’t followed when they shopped together. Helen could distinguish between tomatoes in diced, whole, peeled and puréed form while to him they were just canned tomatoes. While she chose, Pearly would idle with the trolley, swinging the front slightly, arranging the contents, obligingly moving aside to allow other shoppers to pass. Some were people they knew, and conversations would take place in the aisles about the weather, council policy, doctor’s visits or the contents of the shopping trolleys, all topics treated as being of equal significance. Most meetings were a pleasant diversion; there were a few people deftly avoided by a switch of aisle.

At the laundry powders, where Pearly had made errors when shopping by himself — why a top-loader had a different requirement to any other washing machine he couldn’t fathom — he heard the distinctive voice of the obscene phone caller: high, slightly nasal and querulous. It startled him to hear that voice with its closet malicious associations in such an open, neutral place. It came from the soups and condiments one aisle away. Pearly left his trolley and walked to the corner. The voice continued, and Pearly had the back view of a thickset man with sparse hair and a new red-striped shirt. He held a supermarket basket containing just a few items and was talking to another man who faced Pearly and who also held a basket, but at his stomach and with two hands as if it were a baby. ‘Bloody hell,’ Pearly’s assumed caller said, ‘I mean, what sort of a wanker would do that? Why would you even think about it? Jesus.’ The companion’s answer was a laugh that was more deflection than agreement. Pearly walked past them both, stood before a line of flip-top spices, then turned so that he could see the speaker’s face and be seen himself.