That March in which the heir took him on, he was in dire need of a role. Months of writing plays had been all bliss and blithe, so he hadn’t earned a cent, rendering fact those predictions of his former colleagues at the theatre bar. Not the kind of optimism he’d expected the arts community to confer. All talk of rent, bills, and, of course, debt. Such loiterers, he’d thought, having at last conjured uncompromising artistry from prior reverie – the ill-considered dream of a nourishing magnum opus long held before him, his sole purpose since age twelve, watching Joseph Fiennes wield frill, doublet, and quill from a shadowy classroom.
He’d found quills deceptively impractical.
Broke, this first place he interviewed with made an offer. What was it about that that didn’t sit well? Well, with good sense he didn’t turn it down, since soon there was no work to be found, even if this was a step further from the stage: a supermarket in the weathered town near his mother’s house, where he’d quietly returned. The duopoly had no presence there, so this independent could flail as it pleased, could fail without consequence. They wore suits and ties of the clip-on variety only, logoed. They addressed locals as ‘Mister’, and precariously ‘Miss’ or ‘Missus’. And soon the locals came to know him, greetings echoing over the creek he’d sit by on his break.
He supervised the ensemble, his underage colleagues, watching from a dais as they learned how to test counterfeits, rewarding them for shredding notes that sent locals running to the bank. These were mostly girls, the boys stuck unloading pallets in their sweat. He reported the girls he thought dim for misplacing cash, rather than covering for their mistakes: it was fair to the rest of the cast. The money was docked from their wages. When he got paid, he said it was going towards moving to New York, to orchestrating his magnum opus. When the kids from his alma mater got paid, they saved for festival tickets, video games, designer bags. And when the kids from the public school earned their per diem, they stoically handed money to their parents.
He found these kids irritatingly dull.
Vacant shops dominated their leaking complex; only the butchers and the bakers across the atrium kept them company. These competitors raised large specials posters, flapping flags visible from within supermarket aisles, a hostile upstaging. During lulls, the savvy mums staffing the deli peaked to compare prices themselves; the university students in liquor scribbled pointless notes. A troupe of survivors and dreamers, he noted.
The heir to the family business was only a few years his senior. He never met her father, since the heir ran things from day to day. In the daily appraisals of their corporate costumes, she forbade sitting when staff attended her office above the staff toilets, where the acoustics, he imagined, were unfit for the lead, tucked away in a cramped upper gallery. In his interview, as he stood, the heir said she was proud to see her surname on the town’s only billboard.
That’s when she called herself, the heir.
The heir’s favourite local was this stout widow. A sheep farmer, she’d bring in frozen lamb to exchange for bags of stale bread, and in fair weather they smoked rollies out at the loading bay. When city restaurants cancelled all their orders, she waited in the welfare queue with the rest of the town under the heir’s precious billboard, a backcloth to this most avant-garde performance.
Then, stock flew from the shelves faster than they could order it, bums on seats like never before. Kids worked through the night and the school day to replenish, lured into truancy by unlimited hours on offer. The WhatsApp group lit up endlessly with messages from the heir: 4pm–12am shift needed, tonight, boys only, and Need 10am–10pm, tomorrow, boys only. Aisles became schoolyards, pensioners throwing each other aside to secure vanishing soaps and toilet paper, dobbing in snifflers. As he dodged through the crowds with irritation, he asked himself if, three weeks in, it was best to quit.
The business couldn’t keep up. As he ignored her group messages, the heir texted him directly, The country is asking us to serve. Like the great Joseph Fiennes bowing before his queen.
At Her Majesty’s pleasure.
The heir launched home delivery just as he joined, conveying small orders herself to one or two farms per afternoon, scrunching boxes into the back of her station wagon. With customers afraid of human contact, with an instantly outdated guarantee still listed online, orders ballooned into the hundreds. The heir allowed select girls to pack them, granting brief respites from frenzied register queues, these few ticking their lists with scratchy pens and relief.
They hired the sheep farmer’s loud refrigerated van, logoed it without permission, and the heir banished him offstage with one of the girls he deemed chirpy. No delivery list, maps, tracking software. It was her job to rummage through the back and call out the closest location as he drove. He took them down access roads lined with harvested canola fields, up hills to modest viewpoints, dawdling. The first day they finished at 2 a.m., placing perishables quietly on verandas through the night.
The heir blamed the girl, since he’d blamed the girl, so he took her job, and the heir took his; understudies relinquishing the pressure. Everything else is on backorder, she said, there’s nothing for me to do inside. She showed interest in the theatre as they drove, in his grand Broadway dreams and student loans. While he unloaded boxes and bags at each house in a huff, the heir would knock and shake the customer’s hand, whether they were comfortable with that or not. She’d gift them organic cocktail mixers and high-end condiments, their overstock, having discovered panic buying didn’t extend to caviar. Though he may have been blind to it, the heir took a genuine satisfaction from each smiling customer, sensing that she’d played her part in bettering the world with each decadent gift.
Out in the wild while so many hibernated, he just delighted in the material, these characters better than any he’d ever conjured. It later opened dramaturgical doors, forming the basis of the sole works of genuine honesty that he’d pen in his lifetime.
After the world and he were back on their feet, some years later, his dear mother came upon the refrigerated van, still logoed, crumpled against a tree. She lost her breath and fainted flat, breaking an ankle. Of course, the person found inside was neither him nor the heir, but the sheep farmer, merely dizzy with a bloody nose. Together, the two widows waited in the dirt for help.
Why, he asked, of all my jobs, do you associate me with that place?
Back to shopping there most days, to greeting and bleating in the aisles, she said, It was just nice to see you so important.
Ned Lupson is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne. He is a co-founder of Varnish Literary Journal. This is his second piece of fiction added to the online gallery, after ‘Order’ in 2025. You can also read his interview with Madelaine Lucas in Varnish Online, and find Ned’s further works in other publications.