This happened months ago, but I've been saving it up. You know the post office I mean. It's the main one for the district - these days, the only one. It's located at the back end of a long, narrow shop (gifts, cards, stationery) and brings to my mind the term "corridor of misery". When queueing there - there's always a queue - a kind of speculative bleakness envelops me. Seeing the staff at work behind those thick glass screens gets me wondering if the glass would stop a bullet. A brightly-sprightly robo-voice that calls people forward - "Cashier number 3!" - serves only to throw into sharper relief the tiredness of the rest of the scene.
Tired, tired, tired.
The furnishings are tired. What colour are they? Let's say white, with a hint of tiredness.
The envelopes are tired. I refer to that handful of end-of-range kind of envelopes that have been fading for ever in some sort of display case against those white-with-a hint-of-tiredness furnishings.
The customers seem tired. Mostly they seem tired of queuing. Maybe they are particularly tired of the brightly-sprightly robo-voice - "Cashier number 6!" - creating a sort of pretence that the queue is not composed of people who look tired of anything you care to mention. Maybe, like me, they find the mismatch vaguely amusing.
So there I was. The queue was long. My fellow customers were queueing with their usual tiredness, but on this occasion one was queueing with a hint of rage.
Right behind me was a teenage girl. She shouted suddenly, "Hey, you pushed in!"
She wasn't talking to me. I didn't know at first who she was talking to, only that her voice was very loud.
"That woman, she pushed in!" the teenage girl elaborated to someone else in the queue. The queue ahead did not stir. It looked at its toes. The girl addressed her next remark to the alleged queue-jumper.
"Cashing your Giro for your dealer, innit darling?" the girl called out. "Need your fix, innit?"
She broke off to giggle. I felt her close behind me, agitated; hopping about. I still couldn't see who she was accusing. There must have been nearly 30 people ahead and many of them were female. None responded in any way. The girl escalated her assault.
"How much you give your pimp?"
The queue shuffled on a bit.
"Gonna get cracked up, innit?"
At this stage I hadn't really looked at the girl: although she moved forward in front of me to unleash her tirades I only saw a rear view of her because when she turned back I, like everyone else, turned away. I did notice, however, that after each foray she returned piously to her place in the queue. I still didn't know at whom she was directing her ire.
I decided to act. Looking round, I softly inquired. "Who is the person who pushed in?"
The girl looked at me and smiled. She had a beautiful face: angelic cheekbones; laughing brown eyes. "It's that lady over there," she replied in a sweet, low tone. "The one with the lightened hair." She pointed to a young black woman, with long, blonde-ish braids cascading down her back who had just been called to a counter: ("Cashier number 4!").
"I didn't notice her push in," I offered, mildly. But my words went unheard. The teenage girl was already striding forward. Now she stood right behind the young woman's back.
"Got your Giro, bleach-out girl? I don't need no Giro. I got my exams. Off to your dealer, yeah?"
The young woman ignored her completely, as did everyone else. She commenced her transaction as the teenage girl's goading turned to a challenge to a fight: "Come on, show me what you got. What thing you got? Bleach-out bitch, show me your thing!"
Was this the same charming child I'd spoken to just one minute ago?
The young women with lightened hair tucked her purse back into her bag, stepped away from the counter and for the first time acknowledged the raging child. She looked completely unphased.
"I didn't push in," she said, and walked calmly back out to the Narrow Way.
Comments