Mini Sally Dally

It has been a month since my father’s funeral and I can’t stop going shopping. I don’t buy anything. I just sort of edge myself to the moment right before purchase. Two weeks ago, I was doing this in Kinnick’s, a department store I frequented in the city. As I fantasised about a bag’s future place in my life, the shop assistant lowered it onto the glass between us. ‘This will be with you for a lifetime. It’s the Mini Sally Dally Picto bag. Ethically constructed from the Niloticus crocodile.’ It was dark pink and shining, like the wet gums of a mouth. Its gold hardware caught the lights. But it was not to my taste. ‘What about this one?’ My finger flicked to a black satchel crouching on a velvet cushion. The assistant placed the Mini Sally Dally Picto back with great care, like a surgeon at work on a heart. 

She lifted the other satchel onto the glass, ‘this is the Rannel Maxy Tally Shopping Tote.’ I pictured it beside me on my morning commute. My leather companion, holding my notepad, my pencil, my dad’s ashes in its cushioned depths. Feigning serious interest, I asked how much the bag was. My friend Robyn looked alarmed.  ‘What the fuck is your budget? That’s a literal Rannel bag.’ The shop assistant pursed her lips and caressed it with her manicured hands. To my annoyance, Robyn had exposed my buying power, but I wanted to save face with the bag. ‘I’m going to take a turn around the store to think about it.’ 

Robyn is scrupulous when it comes to buying anything. She doesn’t buy things because she needs them. Instead, things need her. It works the same way with people too. She is not swayed by fantasy or fiction, but I will follow people around like an itch if I admire them. I worshiped a man once and saw a big toe nail clipping hiding in his carpet. Anticipating it would be significant down the line, I took the clipping. After he broke up with me, I carried it around in my wallet, a little talisman of his DNA. I know, objectively, this is creepy, but the clipping’s use was this: there is a touch of the mystical about keeping a nail. It transformed the romantic hiccup to something else entirely. 

We left the bag section, ambling along the iridescent promenade as an auto-tuned voice sang, Ice Matcha Latte, I like to Par Party, Iced Matcha Latte. Diverting from the throng of shoppers, we stopped by the designer perfume counter: Dom Lord. Robyn scanned the rows of modular bottles as I read the names, Memoriam, Pleasure Principle, Cherry Rage, Esoteric Marrow, Coffee Gore. 

‘It’s a bit intense isn’t it, this environment, for grief?’ Robyn said, her green eyes fixed on the bottles. Her face patronising with concern. I replied, ‘Shopping is distracting me.’ This was true. Browsing items in the rippling field of a shop was soothing. Particularly the multi-story ones where the ceilings are like bordered skies and one is contained inside their climate. Though, I admit, I was ashamed of how I was processing my father’s death. I hadn’t cried yet. In the days before the funeral, the choice between wearing his pinstripe suit or his black linen suit became overwhelming. Somewhere, behind some wall, I felt his absence like a third-degree burn. But this particular wall displayed thousands of things I could aim to buy. Sometimes, I’d dwell on an object for hours, walking between shop floors until I got tired and my feet blistered and security was suspicious. Yet, the items always returned to the doomscroll of other items from which they came. 

I lifted a transparent green bottle and said its name, Verdant Action. It had notes of my dad’s leather jacket, which he wore at Christmas for no clear reason, but musty, like it was calcifying under a sink. ‘This has top notes of peppermint and pine,’ the shop assistant offered. I spritzed it on my wrist, collarbone, and denim jacket. I lifted my arm to Robyn’s nose, she scrunched her mouth and took my hand. She wove us past the glowing image of an actress holding lipgloss, another holding a mascara to her temple, and between tired assistants stationed with testers. Robyn pushed open the gold doors of Kinnick’s and pulled us onto the street. The morning was filled with scuds of sunlight and the air was surprisingly fresh. ‘I think we should do something else.’ She gestured to the shock bright sky, ‘I know a great café in the park and we can talk properly in there.’ 

She’d taken me away from that scent. I snatched my hand away, ‘You’re not fucking getting it.’ As people left the shop, another auto-tuned voice fell onto the street, I’m squat, squat, squatting till I’m burning for you. I spoke again, ‘I knew you’d act like this whole day was below you. Typical you.’ Robyn’s eyes turned wet. She was being kind and I could see she was full of a desire for things to be good and I was not. Before she could say anything I turned around and rushed into the shop. She called me twice before she likely cycled back home. I stayed until Kinnick's closed, pangs of guilt pressing into the corners of my mouth. 

This incident made it abundantly clear I had to do my next shopping excursion alone. I knew I needed a bag. A vessel to contain all this. The bag would, inevitably, be roomy enough to fit my dad, my diary, and a lipstick rattling alongside him. To have what Ursula K. Le Guin called, a leaf a gourd shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. I quote her because I once cared about things like that and some lines still float around my head. Now, my hobbies have drained to dregs. But I do remember, Ursula K. Le Guin conceived of stories as a carrier bag. A story can hold what’s closest, keep it levitating off the ground, as meaning sloshes about inside. 

Soon enough, I put aside the day to tackle the mothership: Salivafield shopping centre. I was searching for a bag of sturdy material which could expand and collapse with whatever it needed to contain. After hours of looking, I bought an Iced Spice Pumpkin Latte. Sitting on a plastic chair outside the café, I dropped my head back. There was real blue above the glass ceiling of Salivafield and sunlight streamed in hard angles across the interior. The air-con cooled my scalp. I felt exhausted for the first time in a long while. I was sure I’d seen every handbag there. Amidst a sea of bags, there were none. 

Opposite the café was a shop window. Creamy light illuminated a green handbag the size of a thumb. A shopper stood in front of the object, perhaps considering what to put in it: a hair clip, a mouldy scroll of text written by her sibling, the back of an earring, dust. She moved off. I reached into my coat pocket and wrapped my fingers around a plastic sandwich bag holding a clump of my dad’s ashes. It probably equated to one of his hands. At home, I put all of him in an urn.