Eric, Daisy and Max

i. Eric

It’s ten to two on a Saturday afternoon and although the community centre remains mostly closed due to lockdown restrictions, for the last few months we’ve been running a weekly food bank. Every Saturday the same faces appear, most of them queuing for an hour beforehand, waiting patiently for us to set things up on the patio and open the gate.

Eric, first in the queue today and most weeks, never misses an opportunity to complain about one of his many physical ailments and drop a vaguely racist slur about other food-bank users. Today it’s references to his varicose veins and the woman who was behind him in the queue.

“You see her,” he says.

“Who?” I ask.

“That Egyptian woman.”

“What about her?”

He leans in conspiratorially to catch my ear and no one else’s. “She goes to every food bank in town, ” he tells me. “Her husband works at Morrisons as a security guard and her father works as well, but we caught on to her,” he continues. “She’d come in and take seven or eight puddings…seven or eight!” I look suitably appalled. “So what we did,” he says, “we’d come in before her, get all the puddings ourselves so she couldn’t get her hands on them and then we’d dish them out to people. You know Jim?” he asks. I tell him that I don’t. “Jim saw her at some charity event, turning up covered in gold; rings, bracelets, necklaces…” Eric stops short of saying overtly that this Egyptian woman is undeserving of charity, but he strongly implies it. “These days, when she turns up at one of those other food banks, they tell her to fuck off,” he says. “I’m just saying, you need to be on the lookout.”

Last week he told a similar tale about the young Asian men who are also regulars. “They’re all language students,” he told me. “Haven’t you noticed? Every week there’s more of them turn up?”

Eric’s subtext is that these other people – that he is forced to be regarded as ‘one of’ – are ‘other’, not just in terms of race, but morality. Unlike him, they are undeserving of the charity that feeds them. Maybe he’s right. We don’t live in the same world that Eric does. We don’t experience what he experiences or see what he sees. But for the most part, the occasional pudding aside, I don’t believe that he’s being deprived by the other people that he complains about. If anything, because he’s always first in line, he’s more likely depriving them. The way Eric voices his concerns, however, isn’t about how he‘s being cheated, it’s how we are; that other people, who are unlike him, are taking advantage of the charity offered to them by us.

“You get what I’m saying?” he asks me, loading the panniers of his high-end electric bicycle, looking over his shoulder, making sure that no one else is listening.

“I do,” I tell him.

ii. Daisy

After Eric’s departure I see Daisy making her way slowly up the street, pushing her empty shopping basket. I go and fetch a plastic chair for her from the foyer and let her in the side gate; everyone else has to go around the corner to queue at the main gate. Because of her age – I’d guess she’s somewhere in her eighties – Daisy gets special privileges.

“Can I get you anything?” I ask her once she’s sat herself down.

“Perhaps a glass of water?” She says, breathlessly. It’s a warm day. I was expecting her to go straight for the cup of tea but she’s obviously working up to that. When I return with a cold glass of water, she’s putting on her glasses and cracking open a thick paperback, settling herself in.

“I was expecting to meet a friend,” she tells me, “but she’s not here yet. Perhaps she’s not coming. She’s probably watching the funeral. I’ll wait a while to see if she turns up.”

Daisy isn’t a community centre regular. She’s a new face that has been appearing since the food-bank started. The funeral she’s talking about is for Prince Philip. It’s being televised this afternoon. I’ve already been asked by one of the church-going food-bank volunteers to let her know when it’s three o’clock as she wants us all to observe a minute’s silence.

“You didn’t want to watch the funeral yourself?” I ask Daisy.

“No,” she says, scornfully, peering up at me over the top her glasses. “They’ll show all the highlights on the news later. What do I want to sit through all that for? I don’t like funerals.”

I’m called away for other things but I ask her again, when I return, if there’s anything I can get for her.

“Perhaps a cup of tea?” she says.

“Weak, no sugar, lots of milk?”

“Yes, please,” she says, “thank you.”

How you like your tea is important. I make Daisy hers, just the way she likes it, and also manage to find a couple of chocolate digestives. I know they’re her favourite.

Daisy’s friend does eventually turn up and after I get out another plastic chair so that she and Daisy can sit beside one another, I make her a cup of tea too: strong, no sugar. She’s not as frail as Daisy, in fact she seems quite capable and robust. Nonetheless, as Daisy and her friend sit together, talking over cups of tea, I feel as though I’m helping to facilitate something important. After an hour or so, once Daisy and her friend have both taken their turns at the food bank, Daisy’s friend declares she needs to go now and as she gets up, Daisy follows.

“See you next time,” I tell them, opening the gate as wide as it will go, so they can exit side by side.

They both smile and thank me by name. Whether it’s remembered or because I have it written on a sticky label stuck to my chest, it’s hard to say.

iii. Max

The last person to turn up for the food bank is Max. He’s either a bit drunk or high on something or both. Quite a few of the men who use the food-bank live alone in hostels, Max is one of these men. He’s not so out of it that he doesn’t know where he is, but he’s far enough gone for some basic common levels of social decorum to be absent.

He sways his way along the line of tables stacked with food, filling up a crumpled bag-for-life that we’ve given him. He’s half-way down the line, joking in that uncomfortable, impenetrable way of people completely off their face, when the minute’s silence in remembrance of Prince Philip falls and all the ladies of the food-bank abruptly turn into statues; as in they don’t just go silent, they freeze like mannequins. It’s very disturbing. Even I’m creeped out and I had an idea it was coming. Max is oblivious. He doesn’t seem to register that anything strange is happening at all. It’s almost as if he’s used to this response from people toward him. He continues to riff out loud, sharing snippets of his own internal monologue. At one point he mimics one of the women, the only one who dares move, when she puts a finger to her lips to suggest silence. Max puts a finger to his own lips and salutes her. Then he carries on down the line until he reaches the gate I’m guarding, by which time the minute has passed and the women of the food bank have resumed their animated chatting as before.

“Well that was surreal,” I remark as I let him back out onto the street. He sways on the spot and regards me, a box of cornflakes held aloft in one hand. Then he grins.

“I’d be fucking dead if it wasn’t for this,” he says, “I’d have starved.” He sizes up the box of cornflakes he’s holding with an expression that I can only interpret as ‘Now, what the fuck am I supposed to do with these?’

“All you need now,” I tell him “is a bowl and some milk and you’re sorted.”

He laughs. Then stops. “I’ve got bowls,” he says earnestly, and then the humour returns. “And she’ll bring some milk round later.” I don’t ask him who she is. He frowns again. “I can’t walk down the road carrying these,” he says, meaning the cornflakes, “someone’ll have them out my hand.”

“Put them in your bag,” I tell him. His bag-for-life is now slung over his shoulder and he can’t co-ordinate enough to open it up and put them in himself so I give him a hand. “Your backpack’s open too,” I say, zipping that up for him as well.

“I’ve had it all done to me,” he says, turning around, bowing his head and showing me a raised pink scar running down the back of his neck, following his spine, from the base of his skull to below his collar. “That was Iraq,” he says. Then he pulls back the cuffs of his coat sleeves and shows me similar scars on each wrist. “Iran,” he tells me. He lifts his shirt and shows me a fourth scar above his left hip. He goes to pull up a trouser legs to show me a fifth but his trousers are too tight and he loses his balance. “No one’ll give you respect as a vet,” he says. “I’ve seen it all,” he adds, regaining a semblance of composure. He squints at my response. “It’ll do that,” he tells me.

“Do what?” I ask.

“What you just did.”

“What did I do?” I honestly have no idea.

“It’ll open your eyes,” he tells me, placing his forefingers and thumbs above and below his own, spreading them apart until his own eyes are two brown-spotted cue balls. “Yup,” he says, his focus on me slipping in and out woozily, like a drunken sailor…or the ancient mariner himself, returned. “I’ll never set foot in one of these places,” he says, the corners of his mouth pulling down as if tasting something unpleasant. He motions over my shoulder to the church behind us. “I’ve built churches. I’ve lived all over the world.”

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

“Staff Sergeant,” he says. “Staff Sergeant, that’s what they called me. What’s your name?”

I tell him, pointing to the sticky label spelling it out on my chest.

“Staff Sergeant,” he says again, jutting out his elbow to make my acquaintance.

“Staff Sergeant, that’s what you want me to call you?”

“Max,” he says. “It’s Max. And if you ever need anything,” he adds, walking away, “I’m your man. If you can find me.”

“If I can find you?”

“Remember the A-Team?” he says. “If you’re in trouble and you need help, if you can find them…”

“You can hire the A-Team.”

“Exactly,” he says. “If you can find them. If you can find me. I’ll be, what’s-his-name, B.A. Baracus. Mr T. Who will you be?”

“I quite liked Hannibal…”

“No,” he says, screwing up his face, shaking his head side to side, “no….”

“He always had that cigar…”

“No….”

He’s right. I’m no Hannibal. “Murdoch?”

“That’s more like it. We can’t both be Murdoch though. Can you fly a helicopter?”

“No,” I tell him.

“I can,” he says and though I’m not quite sure whether to believe him or not, I want to.