The drinker

She shuffles through the small-town, ‘new generation’ supermarket on a chilly October day.  The scruffy, flaccid black, red and white balloons proclaim another seasonal in-store fete du vin; cartons of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone; six bottles for the price of four; five cartons for the price of two…

She drags the scratched, clacking plastic trolley towards the shelves of stacked-up boxes and bottles.

A tired, dejected, ghostly skin bag of fragile, jumbled bones loosely wrapped in sweat-soured, gaudy clothes.

Plastic sandals fit like buckets on her boney feet. Brittle and bent cherry lacquer-gashed toes try to grip the soles, but they slip painfully; tired straps straining to contain rough, cast-blue-with cold, dirt-dark heels as they push onto the yellow-stained, mottled-grey floor.

Posters of chateaux in forever-summer vineyards. Unbroken streams of garnet-red and ruby slipping like satin into the generous bowls of skinny-stemmed glasses cradled by elegant hands. Clutches of perfect, swollen-fleshed grapes lying on perfect, polished green vine leaves.

She jabs her knitting-needle fingers at a bottle on the shelf; tries to flip up the plastic strip to read the price. Her aubergine-coloured knuckles are swollen; grotesque, baroque rings of cankerous cartilage and bone.

She pokes the tendrils that hang from her boiled-wool mess of hair. Dull, gravy powder-brown stains her scalp, casts dark-berry shadows across her sallow, chalky face; pushes her dead eyes into even deeper hollows.

At the check-out she offers a stained, crumpled note, a shaking, curled-up palm of centimes – exactly enough for the discounted pastis; her escape into the liquorice-flavoured dreams where summer never ends, winter never descends.

She pushes the bottle into a flapping, flabby plastic bag; shuffles through the ‘out’ doors. Another shambling, isolated soul: another ‘lost’ citizen numbed by the coldness, the poverty, the grinding loneliness that, for many, is the reality of French rural life.