Buying it

Fiction, about an adult over 18. Nothing in fifteen years of thinking about this had prepared her for the administrative indignity of actually owning something.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I spent two weeks browsing before I bought anything, and I did all of it in a private window, which tells you where my head was. Thirty-eight years old, my own flat, my own money, nobody in the building who cares what I do, and there I am at half past eleven opening an incognito tab like a burglar.

Nobody prepares you for how bad the shopping is.

I had imagined, in whatever vague way I had imagined it at all, something tasteful. What there actually is, is a great deal of black plastic photographed on a red satin sheet, with product descriptions written by somebody for whom English is a third language and enthusiasm is a substitute for punctuation. One of them promised me a lifetime of unforgettable moments. Another had a five-star review that said only: "Arrived quickly. Wife pleased."

So I did what I imagine a lot of women do, which is retreat to the ordinary internet and buy something that has a cover story.

A wooden hairbrush. Oval, beech, made in Germany, fourteen pounds ninety-nine, sold by a company that also sells nail scissors and shoe horns and has a photograph of a family firm outside a factory in 1951. Four hundred reviews, every one of them about hair.

I told myself I was being sensible. I was being a coward, and the coward and the sensible woman happened to want the same thing, which is the most comfortable kind of decision there is.

Then the delivery address, which I had not thought about at all and which stopped me for a full ten minutes.

Not work. Obviously not work. I had a brief, insane thought about my sister's house, which I discarded on the grounds that I would then have to go and collect a parcel from my sister.

Which left my own building, and my own building has a shared hallway and a woman on the ground floor called Pat who takes everybody's parcels in and keeps a list. Pat is eighty-one and lovely and reads the labels. Not out of nosiness. Out of a filing instinct, which is worse.

I stood in my kitchen having a genuine internal argument about whether a hairbrush is a suspicious object to receive in the post, and eventually said out loud, to nobody, "It is a hairbrush," and clicked buy.

I tracked it four times a day. Out for delivery at 07:12. I have not felt anything like that since waiting to hear about a job.

Pat had it, of course. I came in from work and she was at her door with it under her arm, and she said, "Something for you, love, it came about eleven," and then, turning it over to check the label she had already read, "Ooh, is it a brush?"

I said it was. She said she used to have one like it, boar bristle, wonderful for the scalp, and that they do not make them like that any more, and I stood in the hallway for four minutes agreeing with a very kind old woman about hairbrushes while holding one I had bought to be hit with.

That is the bit I did not see coming. Not shame exactly. A kind of vertigo, standing in two rooms at once.

The packaging was worse than the parcel. Brown card, no branding, a plastic sleeve, and inside a printed invoice with the item description in capitals and a handwritten "Thank you!" in biro at the bottom. Somebody in a warehouse in Lincolnshire had written that. It was so friendly that I had to sit down.

Then the thing itself, which was the first surprise of the evening.

It was heavier than I expected. Properly heavy, dense in the hand, the wood warm-coloured and smooth with a slight ridge round the edge of the back, and it smelled faintly of something between varnish and a wooden spoon. It looked entirely innocent and entirely purposeful at the same time, which I later decided is exactly why people use them.

I tapped it once against my own palm and jumped at the sound.

Then, the storage problem, which nobody writes about anywhere.

I live in a one-bedroom flat. There is a drawer in the bedside table containing a phone charger and a passport, a bathroom cabinet my friends open when they are looking for paracetamol, and a wardrobe with a shelf my mother has been known to put clean towels on.

The obvious answer was the bathroom, on the shelf, in plain view, because a hairbrush in a bathroom is the least remarkable object in England. I put it there. It looked wrong immediately, sitting in the light next to the toothpaste like a spy with a bad accent, and after ten minutes I took it back into the bedroom.

It is now in the bedside drawer under the passport, which is not clever, and which I have decided is fine.

At eleven that night I was sitting on the end of my bed with it on my knees, doing nothing at all.

Fifteen years, roughly, of thinking about this. Two or three times a month at least, since my twenties. In none of those fifteen years had there been an object. There was a situation, and a feeling, and somebody who was never quite given a face, and it all took place in a location my mind had never bothered to furnish.

Now there was a thing. It had a weight and a grain and a price and a courier and an eighty-one-year-old woman downstairs who thought it was for my scalp. It had moved out of the part of my head where I keep the things I think about, and into the part of the flat where I keep the passport.

I did not feel the way I expected to feel. I had assumed excitement, or shame, or the two of them at once, and what I actually felt was closer to the day I picked up the keys to the flat: a slightly stunned sense of having done something that could not be undone by deciding differently tomorrow.

I said, out loud again, to nobody, "Well. There you are then."

I did not use it for three weeks. It sat under the passport and I knew it was there every single time I plugged my phone in.

What I did in the end was small, and dressing it up would be silly: I took it out one Sunday afternoon and used it on the outside of my own thigh, twice, experimentally, in daylight, with my jeans on. It stung more than I expected through denim and I put it straight back in the drawer and went and did the washing up with my heart going.

That was nine months ago. A good deal has happened since, most of it not in this flat, and the hairbrush is still in the drawer under the passport because it turns out I am sentimental about the first thing I ever bought myself for this.

Pat still asks after my hair.