Chapter 14 – Catching Up Part 2
Joey and Ruth pulled up at the large Tesco and panicked slightly at the number of cars. Shopping on a Saturday afternoon was not Ruth’s idea of fun at a normal time, but with an *NSYNCer in tow, who was still overexcited at the thought of shopping in England, it could only end in disaster.
Joey insisted on getting two trolleys, one for drinks and one for food. Ruth was laughing, wondering how much drink he intended on getting, but saw the logic as they always put beer and pop at the end of the supermarket and your food and bread always ended up getting squished.
Joey was like a kid in a sweetshop, insisting on getting every “teen” magazine with Justin on the cover (about 6 of them) and then spotting JC on the cover of Q, decided to get that too so as to not make him feel left out. He then noticed that *NSYNC’s appearance at the Manchester concert on the Thursday had made it into Saturday’s papers, so decided to buy all those too. He found “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” on the discount stand and sulked for a few moments, before covering all the other ones with copies of that movie, first putting one in the cart as he’d noticed Ruth didn’t own it. “Way to not draw attention to yourself, Joey.” commented Ruth, as she watched the man now in the game aisle and shouting over to her if it was okay if he bought her some new Game Cube games as the boys had said that there was only so much Monkey Ball you can play and they didn’t really like the football game. “Sure, go ahead” replied Ruth, “Remember you’re only here for one more night though” watching Joey loading 4 new games into his trolley. “We might come back though” Joey replied, flashing Ruth a grin.
Ruth realised already that she was going to have no control over this shop. As long as they remembered what they DID need, Coffee, Tea, Milk, loo rolls! (hey, 7 people in one house go through loo roll pretty quickly), another big plate as she only had 6 and she’d ended up eating off a plastic one the night before, then she was just going to let Joey run riot. It seemed a lot easier that way.
Meanwhile, back at the house.
“Oh, my, I need coffee” complained Lance, it had been an hour since the last of the coffee had been made and the fact that there was none in the house was making the boys want it all the more.
Ray walked into the lounge from the garage and hearing the moans left again. 2 minutes later he came back with a small jar of Nescafe! “Oh, Go Ray” shouted Justin as Chris dived out of the room to put the kettle on.
“Camping box” explained Ray, to the puzzled looks as to where the coffee had come from. “Ruth doesn’t let me use it normally as she can’t stand the smell, it’s fine with me, cos it means I get to buy decent stuff for the filter machine”. He finished with a smile. Following Chris into the kitchen he proceeded to make coffee for all.
Ray and Chris leaned against the kitchen cupboards waiting for the kettle to boil. They were talking crap, as boys tend to do and being relativity similar in age, Ray was 28 to Chris’ 32, and with very similar senses of humour they’d got on well the night before. Chris was rooting through the cupboards trying to find snacks and cursing at the lack of them. Ray stood up and went to an end cupboard and on the top shelf was a packet of kitkats. “Don’t tell me” said Chris, rolling his eyes, “Another thing Ruth’s banned”
Ray laughed. “She’s just lost a whole load of weight, after having glandular fever she put on 4 stone. If there’s snacks in the house, she’ll eat them, so I hide them. She’s scared of heights so won’t climb up and is too short to reach them.” Chris laughed, “That’s just mean, Oh, God, what did we do, the girl doesn’t like snacks and we’ve just sent Joey, the snack king shopping with her. I’ll be surprised if they come back with any real food at all” “Don’t worry about Ruth, Chris, This is the girl who spent 20 minutes arguing with her housemates about what type of eggs to buy, she’ll keep Joey under control”. Said Ray, totally deadpan, thinking back about when Ruth’s best friends had told him about the egg story.
“Joey, we DO NOT need 6 different types of crisps.” Ruth hissed as loud as she could without drawing attention to themselves whilst trying to stop Joey from putting 6 different multipacks into the trolley as he couldn’t decide which of the “Funny English Chips” he wanted. “You lot aren’t gonna be here that long and it’s going to leave me with a whole load of junk I don’t eat, now, pick 2 and put the rest back”. “You’re mean” replied Joey. “I’m not mean, I’m just sensible” replied Ruth “We’ve already spent 20 minutes discussing the pros and cons of too much ice-cream, I’ve only got a little kitchen and I think we’ve already filled the car and we’ve not got to the biscuits, cereal or drinks aisles yet.” “We need cereal, you have Justin living with you”. Replied Joey. “That’s true then? All the Justin is a grumpy sod till he eats cereal. I wasn’t sure if it was just a fan fic thing or what” Ruth said, then blushed that she’d given the game away she was a fanficoholic. “You read the fan fics?” asked Joey, laughing at Ruth’s blushing. “Only the good ones” she replied. “You’ll have to show me some good ones then, cos the only ones we’ve ever seen are so cheesy it’s just funny” Joey was still laughing at Ruth, who was going redder and redder. “But yes,” he continued “It is true about Justin and his cereal, the kid is a little ass till he gets it” Joey finally stopped looking at the crisps in the cart and put back 3 of the packets. “I’m keeping these” he said, pointing at the hulahoops, Real McCoys and Walkers left in the trolley, “and I’m paying, so I get to call the shots, missy!”
Rolling her eyes and pushing her trolley out of the crisps and into the biscuit aisle she nearly had to hold Joey down as he spotted Oreo’s on the shelf. “Oh Man, you English have WAY too many types of cookie” he said, looking up and down the aisle. “Biscuits, my dear Joey, the word is biscuit. We’re in England, so do as the English do please, only cookies are called cookies, and Maryland do the best ones of those, so we do need them.”
10 minutes later and restricting Joey to Oreo’s (because he wanted some American cookies), Jaffa Cakes, Maryland Original Cookies, Garbindines (because they had a stupid name and so he wanted them), Custard Creams and Rich Tea (milk chocolate coated) (because they are so English), they finally moved into the cereal. Leaving Joey to it, other than ensuring there was some weetabix for her, 5 boxes of cereal, all sugar coated and brightly packed made it into the trolley.
Joey ran wild again when they got to the alcohol. They’d always loved Europe and the UK anyway as Justin could drink (1 – our drinking age is 18, and 2 – they are useless at checking Ids – hence Lucy was drinking earlier in the story), but now, being in the supermarket Ruth had introduced Joey to the Real Ale stand and he was entranced. “Waggle Dance is a good one, so is 1844, and this one, pointing at a purple bottle, is chocolate flavoured” Ruth was explaining whilst putting a couple of 1844s in the trolley for Ray. There was already lots of Becks, Bud, and wine in there and the two trolleys were just about overflowing. Ruth had managed to get some real food in there, chicken, prawns, mince, steaks, sausages, vegetables, amongst the hotdogs, crisps and biscuits. But the crap certainly outweighed the food.
“£420.54 please” said the lady at the counter. Luckily they’d managed to get an aisle with a bag packer so they’d got through pretty quickly. Joey had insisted on going to the aisle with the “Hot lady”, even with Ruth warning him that she’d likely recognise the name on his card. Needless to say, as he flashed his plastic recognition shone all over her face.
“oh my, oh my, oh my” she started, as she gave Joey the card slip to sign. Joey smiled and happily signed both the credit card slip and the piece of paper she nervously offered him.
Joey and Ruth left the shop as quickly as they could, relived that that was the only person who’d recognised them and started trying to load all of the food into Ray’s Focus.
Back at the house, Ruth and Joey had been gone over 2 hours. Ray had gone back out to the garage, leaving the group alone in the house. Justin’s mom had been calling his mobile repeatedly, he had it turned on, but on silent so he could screen his phonecalls without pissing everyone off. “Justin, Maybe you should just talk to her, tell her you don’t want her as manager anymore and tell her that if she doesn’t stop what she’s doing now, and goes back to being a proper parent, you’ll have her in court for blackmail and extortion quicker than, than, than a really quick thing” said Chris, sick of the sign of Justin’s phone vibrating next to him.
The guys were all watching MTV, out of boredom really, It was nearly time for MTV news and they wanted to see if there was any more breaking stories about Justin as a backlash for his disappearance. In a way, having a news story would back up Justin’s story. It wasn’t that the boys didn’t believe him, although it was pretty unbelievable, but a story would just confirm everything and repair the last of the broken bridges Justin had been so desperately trying to rebuild in the past hours.
He’d talked to Lance about his relationship with Paul. He’d spent a good hour talking to JC about his album, he’d not made it to the launch party because of “commitments” and JC had just found out that he’d been locked in a hotel room with his cell phone taken off him and the hotel phone taken out, because his Mom didn’t want him going. JC was happy to know that Justin had got the copy JC had sent him and really liked it. The two of them had quickly started discussing how to get the styles of both albums into the new *NSYNC one. Chris had joined in, he’d been doing a lot of writing during the hiatus too and Lance, well he was just happy that everything seemed to be getting back to normal. Writing wasn’t his thing really, management was.
^Next on MTV News^ The TV announced and everyone suddenly leant forward a little bit and shut up. ^As Justin Timberlake’s Winter tour comes to the end of the first leg, new revelations about his increasingly strange habits come to light. What next, in the world of Justin. Find out after the break.
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