Anorexic in Asda

This afternoon in Asda, I found myself on the confectionery aisle, which I usually try to avoid. I say I found myself there because often I go into a sort of trance in a supermarket and wheel the trolley aimlessly and obliviously. Looking at people and watching their behaviour is what I do and in particular I watch people with their children. Generally speaking, the younger the parents the more the child is yelled at. Today a child was told to 'Get 'ere now' or she would be shoved in a  fridge. She was then told that she was a 'little shit'.

Back to the confectionery aisle. Standing very close, so close that she couldn't have got any closer,  was a painfully thin woman, examining the bags of boiled sweets. She was quite tall, had excellent posture but was so, so skinny. She was wearing a striped jumper and a pair of white trousers which would easily have catered for three more people her size. Her hair was long and white and though I could only see her face in profile, it seemed as if the paper-thin skin was about to tear over the hollow cheekbone, on the side I could see. She looked middle-aged, but it's very often the case with anorexics that they look older than they appear to be. I'd have put this woman at about forty-eight, but she might well have been twenty-eight.
On first seeing her,  I was almost rooted to the spot, until I realised how odd my own behaviour was. So, I feigned great interest in a range of boiled sweets, positioning myself so that I could watch her unseen. This woman was picking up various bags of sweets and staring at them intensely. She was holding the packets in both skeletal hands, lifting them closer to her eyes and turning the bags over and over. She was completely focused on each bag of sweets that she picked up. I saw her isolate a single sweet by deft finger movements, find the clearest, most transparent part of the bag and manoeuvre the sweet to that area and stare at it some more. Her concentration was complete, absolute and compelling. I must have been watching her for a good five minutes.

Would she buy any of these sweets? She had a basket on the floor by her feet and of course I had a good look. There were tomatoes, a cucumber, some apples and a newspaper in the wire basket.

All of a sudden, she flung the bag currently under forensic examination back on the shelf, picked up the wire basket and headed off at quite a pace. My mind was crammed with questions.  Who was she?Who did she live with? Did she have family who cared about her? I hope that the answer to the last question was yes. I also hoped she was receiving the help that she so clearly and so desperately needed.

Standing in the queue at the check-out I was wondering what had brought her to this point in her life. My head was so full of her that I barely remember paying. Back in the car park, I realised that I had forgotten to buy the coffee that I had gone in for in the first place.