Blush

By Cáitríona Murphy

Ruby could smell the cold off her bomber jacket as she shifted from one foot to the other trying to get blood circulating to her toes. It crept up her trouser legs and down the collar of her shirt. She wished she had listened to her mam when she told her to wear a second pair of socks today but Ruby’s mam did not approve of her working as a security guard so Ruby could never show how much the cold got to her. Her mam did not approve because she didn’t think it was a job for a girl to do or a ‘young woman’ as her mother referred to her as now. Ruby’s mam said the uniform made her look ‘mannish’ but Ruby liked the uniform. She liked how it wasn’t too tight and it didn’t accentuate anything in particular, and she liked how comfortable it was and how strong it made her feel, confident even.

Ruby has spent 1280 hours working in the shop so far this year, that’s four 8-hour shifts per week for 40 weeks excluding the one day off she had in June for a root canal. She does between 130 and 144 laps of the shop in a 8 hour shift. She walks on average 22,000 steps per shift, including the 300 steps she walks to and from work. She has caught 42 people stealing this year. An increase on last year, probably the cost of living crisis and all that she thought. When she catches people stealing she brings them to the manager who reports them to the gardaí. That’s the protocol so that’s what she does. If people just didn’t have to pay for the chewing gum they sneaked into their pocket, the extra pepper they threw into their bag, or the pack of tampons they tried to hide under their arm then things would just be chaos. We’d all like free chewing gum and peppers and tampons, but that’s just not how the world works. Needless to say Ruby does not like thieves. She acknowledges that she wouldn’t have a job without them but that doesn’t mean that she has to like them.

After finishing her 112th lap of the day Ruby goes to her post at the front of the shop to have a look at the security cameras for a birdseye view of her domain. As she scanned the live footage on the new HD monitors she insisted the manager buy last month, she noticed something suspicious happening at the back of the store in between the ‘T aste of Asia’ aisle and the ‘Canned Food and Pasta’ aisle. There was a woman there who appeared to be putting several packs of tofu into her jacket pockets, of which there were many. Ruby hurried towards the woman, skirting past the queue of lunchtime shoppers, down the ‘Cereals and Baking’ aisle, taking a right at the ‘Hummus and Dips’ fridge, and finally approaching the woman just as she was leaving the aisle.

‘Excuse me Miss’ , Ruby said.

The woman kept walking. This annoyed Ruby, so she repeated it louder following the woman until she stopped and turned. Ruby’s breath caught in her throat, and she could feel her cheeks redden. Ruby had never experienced this before with a man or woman, this level of attraction.

Ruby traced the woman’s face with her eyes from her dimpled chin, up her cheekbones to her eyes that were now glaring at her.

‘Yes?’ the woman said insolently.

‘I, uhm, I…’ Ruby stammered. The woman looked at her curiously and let out a small smile, which made Ruby’s cheeks redden even more.

‘I… I saw you in the cameras’, she finally blurted out. The woman’s smile broadened and now Ruby felt as if her whole face was on fire. Finally, Ruby got control of her thoughts and said calmly but with a slight edge to her voice,

‘I saw you stealing on the cameras. I saw you take the tofu’, glancing down at the woman’s bulging pockets

The woman continued to smile as she started to rummage in her pockets. But instead of pulling out the tofu as Ruby had expected she took out a piece of paper, wrote something on it and handed it to Ruby before walking away. Ruby looked down at the piece of paper and saw a 10-digit number written on it. She wanted to go after the woman and tell her that she had to return the tofu, and that stealing was illegal, and that Ruby needed to report her to the Guards, and that she was banned from the shop… but she couldn’t. She could barely move, she just stood there looking at the piece of paper with the mobile number on it and smiled.