cold snap - part 1

A shopping bag was enough to disappear.

Monday 13th April 2020

He started carrying groceries with him because it made life easier.

Milk, bread, toilet roll. Just enough to give the bag a shape that wasn’t suspicious. A visual alibi, that’s all it was. People didn’t stop you if you looked useful. They didn’t ask questions if your hands were full.

It was a damp morning when the first thing happened. He was walking into the flats, both hands occupied: one with a four-pack of toilet rolls, the other holding a bag with bread, teabags, and two red onions.

The man was leaving as he entered — older, maybe seventy, wearing a long coat and a clear plastic visor that caught the light like a soap bubble. He stood aside in the doorway and said, “Go on, son. You’re doing the real work. It’s people like you holding the country together.”

He said it kindly, and patted him on the shoulder as he passed.

He kept walking. Didn’t reply. But as the lift doors closed, he looked down at the shopping bag and something clicked. The milk. The onions. The man thought he was delivering them. Like for a food bank, or one of those NHS volunteer schemes.

He almost laughed. A small exhale through the nose. Then forgot about it.

The deliveries — the real ones — were just routine. Same flats, same transactions. A knock, a word, a small ziplock or wrap pressed into a palm. No one talked much. Diazepam, pregabs, bags of brown. Heroin mostly. Sometimes white. He didn’t deal in weed — too bulky.

Some of them looked worse lately. Pale, twitchy, drawn thin around the mouth. One lad — Ben — had started waiting by the door before he even buzzed. Shirt off, skin grey, lips cracked. Once he opened the door and vomited right out into the corridor.

He stepped around it. Not his business.

He was never late. Not then. He had a route, a rhythm. Quiet shoes on worn steps. Glances exchanged. Money passed, his fingers — always steady, never cold — trading wraps for crumpled notes. It felt like admin. He might as well have been delivering pizzas.

But after that morning, people started watching him differently. Not the ones he sold to — they stayed the same: impatient, abrupt, always needing something. But other people. Neighbours. Parents. The man with the visor must have said something, because someone else thanked him the next day. Then another, holding open the front door, saying, “Bless you for what you’re doing.”

He didn’t correct them.

By the end of the week, someone had left a thank-you card in the stairwell. A rainbow on the front, marker pens bleeding into the paper. “To our local lockdown hero.”

He kept the card.

His customers weren’t impressed.

One of them, Mike — skinny bloke from 6E — started sending messages like:

“Where are you?”

“You said twenty minutes.”

“You getting sloppy, man. Don’t go saint on me.”

He read the texts while picking up paracetamol and digestive biscuits from the shop around the corner. He could still make the round. He had time.

Later that day, he knocked at a new door. A woman he didn’t recognise opened it, wide-eyed, holding her phone.

“Are you — are you the one who’s been doing the deliveries?” she asked.

He paused, still holding the carrier bag, still thinking of the other deliveries he hadn’t made yet.

He just smiled back.

She nodded quickly, like she was nervous. “My dad’s in 3B. If you’re going that way. He’s shielding.”

She handed him a list. Six items, written in tiny, careful print.

He folded the list slowly, pressing the crease with his thumb. Slipped it into the same pocket as the others. It didn’t cost him anything.

And the next morning, someone waved at him from a balcony. Said, “You’re doing something good, mate. That’s rare these days.”