Ms Ice Sandwich

two-hundred-thirteen to Florida, three-hundred-twenty
to polite, three-hundred-eighty to church medicine,
four-hundred-fifteen to choco skip, four-hundred-
thirty to your forties, vegetable boots is always
five-hundred. Five-hundred-twelve is a gravestone for
rain; the big cat bench where all the girls like to hang
out in the evenings is six-hundred-seven.
If someone speaks to me I lose count, so I keep my
head down and try not to catch anyone’s eye. Sometimes
there’s a crack in the white line I’m following, and
sometimes it breaks off for a bit, but I keep my concentration,
and the soles of my trainers land spot-on the
line and I do it with a steady rhythm. Seven-hundred-thirty-
one is souvenirs, eight-hundred-twenty, wait a
minute, wait a minute, eight-hundred-eighty a famous
writer, and nine-hundred-twelve a French person. At
this point it’s suddenly crowded, full of people, and
bicycles are lined up like mechanical goats.
The automatic doors open and out pour people
holding white plastic shopping bags stuffed with food.
I guess they’re on their way home. Most of them are
grown-ups. One in five has bought those leeks with
their green tops poking out, and the bags look like
they’re about to burst. Just as I’m thinking how most
of the stuff they’ve bought is going to be put in their
mouths, I’m surprised by people saying hello, good evening
to me. I say it back. Then, careful not to bump into
anyone, on to the potato zone, nine-hundred-thirty.
And then always, without fail, it’s nine-hundred-fifty
exactly to Ms Ice Sandwich.
The cheapest sandwich you can buy there is the egg
sandwich. There are two to a pack, but they’re superthin,
and I come every day, or every other day, to buy
them. If Mum sends me to the supermarket, I can pay
for my sandwich with her money, so I like to hang
around the house hoping she’ll ask me to go shopping
for her, but sometimes I have to use my own pocket
money. I get one hundred yen a day five times a week,
Monday to Friday, and I make sure I put half of it in
my coin purse. My sandwich money. To tell the truth,
I don’t even like sandwiches that much; in fact, for
meals I definitely like rice instead of bread, and for
a snack it’s much better to buy a big bag of crisps or
something, and eat them really slowly one piece at a
time, and anyway, I never really get that hungry. I get
full after I’ve eaten about half of my school lunch, and
that might be why I’m so skinny and I don’t seem to be
getting any taller. But I can’t help it if I don’t like what
they serve. Mum got so worried she came to school
and showed my teacher how skinny my arms were for
a boy, but now that I think about it, that was ages ago,
and it seems like she’s forgotten all about it by now,
or maybe she’s just given up, or maybe the moment’s
passed, or that’s what it feels like.
Around the train station, there’s only the chemist’s
and the level crossing and the supermarket that are lit
up at night. But to be honest there’s not much there
in the daytime either—this town is really just made
up of houses, and the top floor of that two-storey
supermarket is full of laundry detergent and buckets
and dishes and toilet paper, all those things that’s not
food, and the meat and the vegetables and yogurt and
fish and stuff is all on the ground floor, and everyone
in the town comes here nearly every day to buy what
they need. I watch Ms Ice Sandwich from the only door
in and out of the supermarket; she’s always standing
behind a big round glass case, just to the left and a
little bit behind the cash registers, with that look on
her face that’s like a mixture of surprise and boredom,
as she’s selling sandwiches and salads and bread and
things like that.
“Ms Ice Sandwich” is a name I made up; of course,
I thought of it the minute I first saw her. Ms Ice
Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick
layer of a kind of electric blue, exactly the same colour
as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting in our
freezer since last summer. There’s one more awesome
thing about her—if you watch when she looks down,
there’s a sharp dark line above her eyes, as if when
she closed her eyes, someone started to draw on two
extra eyes with a felt-tip pen but stopped halfway. It’s
the coolest thing. And then when she looks straight
at me, she has these enormous eyes which are so big I
feel like I get swallowed up in them. They look exactly
like the great big eyes of the dogs that I read about in
a storybook long ago… What is the title of that book?
Well, it’s not only the title that I’ve forgotten, I can’t
even remember what happens in the story, but I do
remember the faces of the dogs with their gigantic
eyes; it must have been a children’s picture book or
something… Anyway, Ms Ice Sandwich has eyes just
like those dogs do in that story, which has a soldier in it,
and a castle, and there’s a princess—that story. The dogs
with the giant eyes run around like crazy everywhere.
Where was it they came from? And then someone got
married to someone else, or they didn’t get married, I
forget what the story was about.
The day I first saw Ms Ice Sandwich, I was with Mum,
but when I said out loud in surprise, Look at her eyes!,
Mum pretended not to hear me and started talking
about something totally different, and it wasn’t until
we’d paid for our shopping and got completely outside
the supermarket that she started in on me. You have to
stop that! You cannot say things like that out loud, she can
hear you, it’s rude. Mum’s face is awesome whenever
she gets annoyed, if there was an animal that didn’t
know what being annoyed meant, then just one look
at my mum’s face and they’d get the idea. You could
make a rubber stamp of Mum’s face as a demo. I say,
Why can’t I talk out loud about her eyes? They’re huge,
they’re amazing! Mum says, It doesn’t matter what they
are, it’s not proper to talk about other people’s faces. Me:
Why? Her: Because! All the way home I keep asking
Mum why, but now she’s busy playing with her mobile
phone and just keeps nodding and saying yeah every
so often. Well, I’m kind of getting used to her being
like that these days, not paying attention to me, but
the more we walk the more it bugs me, so I stop and
say, If video games make you stupid, then what do mobile
phones do to you? (This is me being real extreme to her.)
She answers, What?, not stopping, I’m not playing a
game, I’m updating something. It’s work. It’s hot, can we
walk faster? And of course she hasn’t taken her eyes
off the screen for a second, madly pressing buttons,
keeps on walking.