Story. On a French Market.

The streets are bordered with enscarved gypsy women, men, children, stalls, rubbish, people, pushchairs and noise. ‘Avocados!’ ‘Peaches!’

I wander through, gently jostled by the sometimes accommodating, sometimes pushing crowd. My baby is tied to me, tightly secured to my belly by my red-yellow scarf. As I reach for an avocado and it is knocked out of my grasp, a man, he pleads to me- ‘Buy us some cherries!’

So I do. I buy him some cherries.

‘No!’

‘One kilogram of cherries!’

I balk. One kilogram of cherries is 15 euros! This I cannot spare. Why is he shouting at me?

‘Why can’t my family eat like your family!’ he demands, following me. My senses are already overwhelmed, I am on the other side of the world, and my baby is only freshly born.

I am ready to cry…why can’t his family eat like mine? I don’t know. A mixture of chance, biology, circumstance and social prejudice? Shitty luck? Less intelligence or the wrong kind in our systematically exclusive world? Generations of bad decisions by his people, my people, your people, everybody? Colonialism, genocide?

How can I answer that, we’ve never met before, I don’t know you, and you know nothing of me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry my heart burns and my eyes water.

Am I doing this to you? I will buy you food, why must you ask for cherries!

And his baby, she shouldn’t be here begging, not now, not ever.

A question is pounding in my mind, often coming to mind in the face of poverty- I don’t want to be cruel, but, why, why do people without so much as a roof to shelter them, why do they have so many children? How can I ask this of somebody? As he demands from me, shall I question him in return? The street is crowded, tumultuous with the sounds of abundance, and yet the edges of this sound are rounded with the fullness of the spaces taken up by bodies and eyes asking.

Fruit rolls off plentiful stands.

Eyes sum up the contents of my basket, my purse. See the health in my round cheeked child. I see inequality but I can’t quite grasp it. I can’t ignore it, and I don’t want to- never accuse me of this! But this inequality is more than my purse can carry.

I am grateful, for my child, for my basket. I am ashamed, for my relative wealth, for my selfish need to feed myself and my family first.

I am assaulted, both with offers of produce, and pleas for coins. I buy produce, I give coins, to sellers and beggars alike. My purse empties, and I go home, where later I will have to explain why my trips to the market are so expensive.

I buy from each stall, loyal to no-one and everyone. My insides ache with a (disproportionate?) sadness when sellers pack up their drooping vegetables, loading them all back up, box by box, the weight of them seems infinite.

A girl- 11 years old, maybe? She accosts me, once the stalls are packed up, every week. I give her money, I offer her food. I’ve seen her searching through dumpsters. I know nothing else of her, other than her dumpster diving in place of school. I try to connect with her, I try to reach beyond this paltry offering of mine and her endless need. My French is pretty good now, but she doesn’t seem to understand a word I say. Bread, I ask/demand, do you want some bread? Bread?

Nothing but a vacant confusion and a vague air of wanting to get away from me- I suspect she hasn’t any French herself. I haven’t any idea of her race, her nationality, she is likely here illegally, travelling through the country, dumpster to dumpster. How can I help her? I can’t make myself understood. I thrust food and money toward her and now I will leave her.

The market is finished. There remains nobody, other than her and I.

And my baby. And the gently wafting piles of plastic- bags, wrapping, packets and more bags.

Traders, producers, gone. Beggars gone. Just her and I. And the plastic. She wanders off.

I stand still amongst the plastic with an odd sensation of miscomprehension. Is there something missing from my understanding here?

Nothing makes sense to me. Has nobody else felt the impact of this congregation of human life, and it’s produce, it’s waste…? This suddenly dispersed amalgam of full and empty, of wealthy bellies and hunger, this giving and receiving, of lives interdependent and then their relationship so dramatically ruptured.

An abrupt ending.