John Butleron the perils of taking vouchers at face value
I was standing near the top of the line at the checkout of a large department store recently, trying to pay for a scarf. These are the things that we will choose to do, of our own free will, during the existential vortex that is January. I had already been waiting for half an hour, and by now the line was snaking back from where I stood, around a corner and out of view. I was glancing back to congratulate myself on how far I had come without breaking down when I noticed a man in his 70s showing a piece of paper to a well-dressed woman in her 50s, way back in the queue, back by the corner.
The man was wearing a beige overcoat of the kind that Inspector Clouseau favours, and clearly it was now raining outside. The overcoat was soaked through, two-tone from the weather. On his head, a baby-blue fishing hat with a three-colour ribbon band dripped copiously onto his face, trousers and the shop floor. The man in the coat was red in the face, either from rushing to escape the rain, from wearing a jacket indoors or from asking a stranger for help. The woman looked at the piece of paper, then shook her head sharply, as if offended, and turned away.
The man moved on, and the rubbing-hands way in which he moved reminded me of Jack Lemmon, particularly the delinquent father he played in Short Cuts. His manner was charged with false cheer and a kind of nervous energy that suggested he wasn't at all comfortable doing what he was doing. His eyes darted around as he skipped past a stocky, tough-looking eastern European guy standing next in line, and moved on up.
In front of the eastern European guy a fake-tanned blonde in her early 20s texted dextrously on a pink phone with some kind of tassle on the aerial, clinging to the arm of her boyfriend with the other hand. She was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a pair of Uggs. The man tapped her on the arm. She glanced up, appraising him as if he were a creature from the deep. The man said his few words, then she looked at her boyfriend, who took the paper from the man's hand and studied it. He said something to the man, who grimaced, then replied with a frown. Hearing the reply, the boyfriend tossed the paper back at the man, landing it in the crook of his arm.
He had my attention now. I took off my headphones. Within a few minutes the man was within earshot. He was three people back from me in the queue, in front of a comfortably dressed American couple in their 50s. They wore expensive multicoloured hiking jackets and beanies. I had guessed he was asking for a handout or looking to cut in line, both of which would make me feel sorry for him, neither of which would make me be the person to help him. If that sounds selfish, blame it on January, not me.
In fact the man was trying to sell department- store vouchers for cash. As I listened he related, in a polite and low, embarrassed tone, that his brother's wife posted these vouchers to him this year, as she did every year, but that there was nothing he wanted to buy here. Every year he told his sister-in-law that he was grateful but that this store just wasn't his speed, and every year she ignored him or forgot. What he really wanted this year was a golf bag, but they didn't stock them here. They stocked them at another place, 100 metres down the street. It was poignant to think that his brother, or sister-in-law, had never noticed his tattered golf bag.
I had dreaded his reaching me, but now it was a matter of paying him €80 for €100 in vouchers, which was his discounted offer, and using them to buy the scarf, I could not wait for him to beg the favour of me. It wasn't about the deal, either. I wanted to give him the money in full view of every tightwad behind me in the line. I wanted to make everyone else feel bad and make me feel really good, which is one of the unspoken ancillary benefits of charity.
I never got the chance. The American man took the €100 voucher in exchange for cash, the old man thanked him and shuffled off on his way, and those who had declined him avoided his gaze as he went, some texting intently, others focusing on hitherto un-noticed ceiling designs and problematic nails.
I reached the top of the queue and paid for my scarf. Bidding the Americans a nice holiday, I took my bag and walked past the tightwads, throwing them scornful looks and condemning them in a way they could hardly have understood. I left the shop and went to meet a friend in a pub on a side street. We took a table in a smaller side room beside the lounge bar.
It can be nice to get a voucher for Christmas. You can buy what you want, and it's thoughtful, yet it doesn't cost the giver too much time. But sometimes people give vouchers to other people because they don't trust them with cash. When I went to the bar for drinks the man from the shop was sitting at the counter with another man, drinking a pint and a ball of malt, a small pile of notes and coins on the counter in front of him, at the ready. There was no evidence of a golf bag whatsoever; nor would there be the following Christmas, or the January after that.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com