Dido’s Lament

Lynette was on Oxford Street, which was a stupid place to be at any time, and especially at five o’clock on a winter afternoon. It was her own fault. She’d gone into John Lewis after work for a few things she needed, and then she’d tried on some clothes, which she hadn’t meant to, and now she was stuck in a crowd of other shoppers and workers, fuming inwardly and shuffling in half steps, funnelling into the entrance to the Underground. Everybody was shapeless, muffled in down coats, hooded. Sleet was blowing in their faces—no one looked up at the Christmas lights. Lynette had heard someone say that one of the shops was pumping artificial snow into the street, which made the idea of even real snow somehow disgusting. Lynette was tall, anxious, original, in her late thirties, with coffee-colored freckled skin; her hair was shaved above her ears, and the rest of it, dyed bronze and pink, was piled up in a striking bird’s-nest mess, into which soft spatters of sleet blew and melted. She was wearing a red tartan scarf with a wool coat she’d found in a charity shop—bright pink, with a big shawl collar—and believed that she despised the kind of clothes you could buy in department stores like John Lewis. It humiliated her to be caught out in this queue, branded with her own plastic carrier, stupid like everyone else.