"If you were a fruit, what kind of fruit would you be?" Alexa asks the woman dressed like she’s going to a funeral.
For an instant, it works as planned - the woman slows and glances at Alexa, startled. But Alexa takes a second to adjust her smile before she launches into her spiel and the woman hurries on. She's wearing kitten heels. One of the ex-prime ministers liked wearing them, Alexa remembers. They clack furiously as the woman flees, unaffected by the heat, despite her heavy-looking dress – navy, Alexa realises, rather than black. Rosa from the agency said they all had to provide their own black trousers, to wear with their T-shirts. Alexa's got away with wearing black jeans. They're sticky with sweat under the bare and pitiless sun above her and she's been here less than an hour. At least she doesn't have to get up early for this job. No one will stop on their way to work, so there’s no point in patrolling the pavement then. They try to get the mid-morning crowd.
Alexa and Mart’s bedroom is a mattress, covering almost all the bare floorboards in a space the landlord fenced off with a curtain. They went to bed late last night. The other housemates ordered curry and since she hadn’t paid for it Alexa ate as much as she could when no one was looking. Mart played his guitar for them. She sleeps naked because of the heat, but Mart was exhausted when they finally got to bed and it didn’t entice him into sex. He’s taken to sleeping wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt. His body was like a furnace, pressed against her. The music and voices carried on late into the night. When she heard those who had jobs leave the next morning, she reluctantly got up, defeated after hours of trying to sleep. She whispered Mart’s name and he grunted as if he was awake, but he wasn’t up when she left.
Alexa follows the woman for a few steps, but she outpaces her rapidly, so she gives up and returns to her original patch. Claire’s opposite, hovering by one of the skinny little trees in wire cages as if it has a generous canopy and is casting her in merciful shade, or at least hiding her from potential clients. She meets Alexa's eye and smiles at her. "Good line," she says.
"Didn't work," Alexa says.
There are six of them, spread out in the pedestrian zone as if they have nothing to do with each other, despite the fact that they're all wearing the same T-shirt - bright orange and bearing the charity's logo, an outline of two hands clasping in front of Planet Earth. If a client rejects one of them, the rest also leave them alone – nothing makes the clients more furious than being pestered again and again - so the most desirable patch is by the turn-off from the street, where you get first pick.
Alexa’s on the worst spot, near the mouth of the shopping centre that most of the pedestrians are heading towards. The pedestrian zone was probably intended to be capacious and welcoming, like some Italian town square, but instead it’s just a stretch of grey pavement, flecked with pieces of rubbish lying limp in the heat and blotches of chewing gum like a leper’s skin. There are electric advertising boards between the little trees. Alexa’s got familiar with the different ads as they flick past - Any two bottles of wine for under £10, Take a break and fly to Bali, Unbeatable fibre-optic broadband. Some of the shops around them have closed down, and the ones that are left are generally cheap and unenticing looking - a Tesco’s, a pharmacy, a greasy spoon. There’s a beggar, dirt ground into his wrinkled face, eyes blank, sitting against a wall. Alexa sees him every day. His hand is held out but he barely bothers to ask for money. She resents him being there, because the more people there are pestering the passers-by, the more on edge they are. Then she feels guilty.
Sam and Megan have the prime spots by the street. Alexa doesn’t want to wish they weren’t together, but she does. Jordan and Jay-Lydia are in the middle. With the air hot and still and few people around, she can hear what they say. Sam opts for doing it directly, to an old man with a walking stick: “Excuse me, sir, do you have a minute to find out how you can help support communities in Africa?” The voice Sam adopts while talking to clients isn’t his real voice, it’s smoothed into something else. In his normal voice, he calls his other voice smarmy. The old man shuffles slowly past him, as if he was silent and invisible. Most clients do. If they get six names in a week, they get a bonus. This is Alexa’s fourth week at the job. Last week was the first time she got one name, from a white-haired and frail-looking woman whose palpable desperation to talk to Alexa - “Ooh, that’s a lovely name. How old are you, dear? Have you been to university? I’d have liked to but girls didn’t really get the chance when I was your age…” - made her feel vaguely guilty as she steered the woman towards putting down her bank account details on the clipboard. Still, she tells herself, she was clear about what the woman was signing up for, and she didn’t appear to actually have Alzheimer’s. It was an example of what she’s often been told - that you have to build a relationship with them, make them feel like you’re friends. It’s what she’s trying now, with the fruit gimmick. More clients pass, are engaged by one of the others and ignored. They swerve away from them if they can. One man snaps at Sam - “Fuck off, mate. Stop bothering people in the fucking street” - but Sam just keeps smiling at him and he storms away.
Claire only approaches one client. The rest of the time she fidgets her feet and glances about her like a tourist. Alexa has to swallow to moisten her throat, fix her smile in place, and even then she’s scared to speak to people. She tries out a few variations - “If you were a colour, what colour would you be? If you were an animal, what animal would you be?” She cringes at how she sounds. She used to be good at making friends, but this turned-up version, more cheerful and quirky than she ever is in real life, comes across as so fake and grating, and they all walk past her.
Alexa has been to university, as it happens, and while the fact that she did a philosophy degree, with multiple terms where she was confined to her room in halls and watching her tutors on Zoom, is the reason she’s now standing on this street to make money, one thing she did learn is the idea of solipsism. The only thing she knows for certain is that she has a mind; she can’t be sure that the world around her and the minds of others really exist. She wishes she could be sure. She wishes she could read their thoughts. Then she’d know how to get them to sign up. She really needs the bonus. The basic wage isn’t enough. She can’t think beyond paying rent on their room at the end of the month. Mart keeps saying he’ll go busking, or do more Deliveroo shifts on his motorbike, or sign up to teach guitar lessons, but he never brings in any money.
Her phone itches in her backpack - she’s not really meant to check it on shift, but she wants to know if Mart’s got up yet, let alone left the house. It’s also her watch, and she doesn’t know how much time has passed. It’s always less than she thinks. Realistically, Mart’s still asleep. Or else he’s… No. She squashes that worry down. He’s been clean for three months and two days. The month in rehab paid for by his parents and the two months they’ve been living in the city together.
Megan says, “Hello there, how are you?” to a client – a professorial kind of Dad-type, with thinning brown hair and rectangular glasses. She’s good at making her voice sound warm, as if she already knows him and is just saying hi. Although that might not be why he stops, and is soon putting his name down. Megan always has the first sign-up and has got the bonus twice. All her sign-ups are men, young and old and in-between. Megan is such a basic version of pretty - long blonde hair, heavy make-up even in this heat - but it works. She keeps on smiling, leaning towards the man in a perfect diagonal. Her hand lightly rests on his arm once, twice, even though they're not meant to touch the clients, and when he finally leaves he turns his head to look back at her before resuming his pace as he strides past Jordan and Jay-Lydia and then Claire and Alexa, who still has her eyes fixed on Megan and Sam. They’re facing each other but from here she can’t tell if they’re smiling, talking, celebrating the sign-up.
The next one of them to get a client to stop is, unsurprisingly, Jordan, who always comes second to Megan and has got the bonus once. He goes for, “Bit of a scorcher, isn’t it?” to a woman with a linen sundress and enormous shades. Expensive-looking clothes, Alexa thinks, which means she has the money but she’s less likely to give it, and the shades make it hard to see if she’s meeting Jordan’s eye. But the woman says, “Are you fundraising for something?” An opening.
“Yes, I am,” Jordan says. “So we are Global Connection. We’re a charity that funds projects that really make a difference in villages in Africa. We’ve funded wells, medical clinics, and schools. We’re looking for lovely people like you to give just five pounds a month and help us continue our mission.” Alexa doesn't like strange men calling women lovely, although Jordan's camp enough that it doesn't seem like a threat. But the woman says, "Have you been there? Them villages in Africa?"
"Yes," Jordan says. "It was incredible. I was there when they opened a school and I got to do a lesson with the children, teaching them their ABCs. It was just the most moving experience."
After the woman has filled in his clipboard and left, the six of them drift towards each other. They all seem to have decided to move at once, which she supposes is evidence against solipsism, proof that the others have minds of their own driving their movements. Sam smiles at Alexa. His smile is brief and sudden, like a glimpse of sunlight between clouds. It gives her that cold fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach. She tries to ignore it, thinking of Mart.
“Have you ever actually been to Africa?” she asks Jordan. She doesn’t actually know which countries Global Connection works in – they just say Africa, as if it’s all one place.
“‘No,” he says, as if it’s obvious. “But now Iiii’ve got a naaame.”
“Never mind her name,” Jay-Lydia says, “did you get her age? Because if she fell for that I’m not sure she’s old enough to have her own bank account.”
“Oh, come on,” Jordan says. “It’s just sales.”
“Yeah,” Megan says, “you’ve got to say anything that makes them listen.”
They’re not listening to you, they’re looking at you, Alexa thinks, and then feels ashamed. That’s internalised misogyny. She can’t resist glancing at Sam to see if he’s looking at Megan, but he’s looking at Jay-Lydia who’s saying: “Only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” The others look at them blankly, and they say: “Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s a film. It’s really good. It’s got Kevin Spacey in it, though, so I can’t really bear to watch it now. And Alec Baldwin.”
“Is Alec Baldwin, like, bad?” Claire says.
“Well, they dropped the charges against him,” Sam says. “I’d feel really bad for him if it was a complete accident. That’s a horrible thing to live with.”
“We should watch it at my place,” Megan says. “You all come over and we can have a marathon of cancelled people’s films.”
“Your Dad would get way too into that,” Sam says.
Alexa risks another sideways glance at Sam. He’s met Megan’s Dad? Or at least she’s described him to her. When? And why? He’s said in the past that he thinks the whole concept of cancel culture is overblown. Why is he going along with it when Megan talks about it?
Back on the job, she gives in, opens her backpack and pulls out her phone. She types a message to Mart - Hey, how’s your day going? - then adds If you want to busk, come down here. We can hang out while I’m meant to be working! For a moment, she imagines Mart playing his guitar and singing, the others on the team gathering round and listening. His voice is dark and rough, Bob Dylanesque. He puts it on in the same way as he removed the second syllable of his name, wanting to wipe away all traces of his education at the choir school. But early on in their relationship he’d told her about it while they were lying in bed, getting out his phone and pulling up the anthems he knew on YouTube, pieces with beautiful names she didn’t understand - Ave verum corpus, Misere mei – a waterfall of voices overlapping with his explanations of why this one had a difficult key change and on that one you couldn’t afford to go too lento. He sang snatches of the music, not in his Bob Dylan voice but in a sweet, light voice, complaining about how much better it sounded before puberty.
Mart and Sam have never met. She tries to imagine the contrast between them - Sam’s light hair and Mart’s dark, Sam’s steady gaze and Mart’s fidgety glances at the ground, Mart’s rapid monologues and Sam’s fair-minded judgements. She wonders if they’d like each other. She deletes the last two sentences of the message. She doesn’t want to sound like she’s nagging him to make money. She double-checks the time. It’s past eleven o’clock. Surely Mart must be up by now. She presses send.
She worries that she smells of sweat, that she can’t speak with her dry throat. She lets more clients pass out of fear. She’s never going to get to six names at this rate. If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be? She can’t believe in it anymore. She was already tired and now she has a headache. She remembers her mother, when she was little, making her put on a hat before she went outside in the summer, rubbing sun cream into her skin while she squirmed and tried to get away. The sun wasn’t even that fierce then. What she wouldn’t give for someone to take that kind of care of her now. She wonders if she’s getting sunburnt.
She half-hears Jay-Lydia scoring a sign-up, a woman with a football shirt stretched across enormous breasts.
“I’m a bit short this month,” she’s saying. “I’m meant to be starting my new job on the first.”
“It kicks in after six to eight weeks, madam,” Jay-Lydia says. “If you’d just put your name on the dotted line…” It shocks Alexa for a moment - she knows that that’s not true, the payments start straight away. Rosa specifically said that they shouldn’t say the payments start in six to eight weeks, although she was the one who mentioned that number. The woman fills her name in and says, “Thank you” and Jay-Lydia says, “No, thank you.” When the woman is far enough away Alexa tries to meet Jay-Lydia’s eye, wondering if they’ll look ashamed or defiant, but they stare into the middle distance.
Alexa opens Instagram. She pretends she’s just checking it, but then goes to Mart’s page, hoping he’s posted something to show he’s out of bed. His most recent post is still from two weeks ago, just another random night in the house share. Everyone’s crowded around the living room coffee table, which is overflowing with takeaway boxes and beer cans and spliffs. The picture is blurry and dark, taken late at night. Half Alexa’s face is cut off. That was the night they fought about Mart smoking weed. He said it wasn’t like it was smack and she needed to get off his case.
She scrolls further back, to a video she’s always loved - Mart with his guitar, singing the song he wrote for her. When she smiles the sun shines bright, She makes me think everything’s gonna be alright.
“Hello, how are you?” Jordan says to a client, and then makes a faint Oh sound when she ignores him, as if they’re friends and she’s genuinely hurt his feelings. Alexa thinks that’s the lowest trick any of them do. It makes her stomach sink.
She searches for Sam’s Instagram account. He’s posted a new picture, of a plate with a cupcake with a bite taken out of it and the discarded wrapper of another. They look homemade. The kitchen looks big and cleaned with care, the type you’d find in a proper home. Sam lives with housemates. Megan lives with her parents. Was he eating her baking?
At that moment, Mart messages back. She jumps inside with joy and guilt, and it takes a moment to bring herself to open the message.
Can you lend me £50? I need to get the bike fixed.
She stares at it for a moment, unable to write her reply. She knows the exact balance in her bank account. £50 would leave it stretched precariously far to cover food for the rest of the month and then rent on the first. She could say no, but what would that mean? Would Mart get angry, stop loving her? She could say yes, but then what would she do for the rent? And what if the money's not for his bike… No. No.
She's lost track of what the others are doing, so she doesn't know Claire has approached a client until his raised voice cuts into her thoughts. "Africa!" He says it with such anger, such disgust, that she can predict the next words before they come: "You bugger off back to Africa then." Rather than just spitting it at her and walking away, he looms over her while she shrinks, getting into a flow of hatred - “They shouldn’t let you lot in in the first place…" Alexa freezes, not knowing what to do, her phone still in her hand.
And then Sam is there, crossing the pedestrian zone in a few bounds, grabbing the man's arm so he turns to look at him, saying, "Leave her alone". He’s using his normal voice, but for the first time since Alexa’s known him, he sounds angry. The man tries to change tactic to yelling at Sam - "What're you doing, eh, just bothering people to scam them out of money" - but when Sam stares at him immovably he loses steam and turns and is swallowed into the crowd. Alexa's still standing there.
The others gather and Megan takes it upon herself to hug Claire. They all share their outrage, not caring if the clients hear them. Claire says, “I don’t care, he’s an idiot”, but her voice is shaking a bit.
Sam takes a step backwards, near Alexa. He’s close enough to her that she can see the fine blond hairs on his forearms.
“Are you alright?” she asks, regretting how stupid she sounds. She just stood and watched. She was the closest and she didn’t do anything to stop it.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Not fine about the fact that there are so many racists on our streets, but what can you do about it?” He stares at the advert for holidays to Bali. She can see the Adam’s apple move in his throat as he swallows. “Listen, Alexa, I wanted to talk to you.” Her heart starts turning somersaults. “Do you fancy getting a drink or something after work? My mate’s band is playing at this bar.”
“I -” her voice is really dried up now. She doesn’t think she can speak. She doesn’t know what to say. Then she says, “Sorry - there’s a client -”
She’s just spotted a woman bending down to pick something off the ground. She’s wearing military fatigues that hang off her skinny body. She has a worn face and long, knotty-looking dark hair. Alexa dives after her like a goalkeeper trying to save a penalty and blurts out, “If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?”
The woman looks up at her. “Sorry?” Alexa sees what she’s just picked up – a used cigarette butt between her fingers.
“I -” she’s embarrassed, but she doesn’t stop. She can feel her face stretching painfully into a smile. “Ma’am, do you have a moment to talk about poverty in Africa?” The woman doesn’t say anything. “We are Global Connection. We’re a charity that funds projects that really make a difference in villages in Africa, like wells, medical clinics, schools...”
“Schools?” the woman says. She smiles, which creases the wrinkles in her face and makes her look even more pinched and pained. Her teeth are brown and crooked. “That sounds nice.”
“It is.” Alexa smiles harder than ever.
“That must make a difference.”
Alexa nods, nods, nods her head.
“Yeah, OK,” the woman says. Her eyes are so dark you can’t tell the difference between her pupils and irises, and she’s not blinking. “I’ll give you some money.” She tucks the cigarette stub carefully into her pocket. Moving like a robot following her programming, hardly able to believe that this is working, Alexa holds out the clipboard. Behind her, Sam has rejoined the others, who are all watching her. The woman sniffs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “Is this just the once, or a, a -” she dithers “- standing order!” She’s triumphant at being able to remember the phrase.
And Alexa says, brightly, “Just the once.” It’s a monthly donation, don’t tell them it’s a one-off was another of Rosa’s rules. Another thing she specifically told them not to say.
“Good,” the woman says. “I don’t have much money at the moment.” She takes Alexa’s cheap worn-down Biro and carefully inks her name and bank account details on the form before stumbling away.
When she’s gone, Alexa ignores the others, takes out her phone, and sends Mart the £50 on PayPal. Five names to go.
Author: Rosemary Collins is a writer and journalist living in Bristol. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Alliterati, Glitterwolf and The View from Here, and been shortlisted for the 2019 Exeter Short Story Prize. She is currently working on a novel and a memoir.
Discover the inspiration for this story in the Author Insight
This story gave me such a horrible sense of dread, given Alexa's precarious situation, and the awfulness of this job. It still doesn't make me want to stop for chuggers, though...