Despite the invention of online banking and the telephone, Mum still preferred to go into the bank and pay bills at the cash desk. We stood in the queue when the lady in front of us banged on the table. The cashier looked rattled.
‘The cheque did not bounce! It did not! Check again! Check!’
Mum said nothing. She looked at the queue, looked at the cashier and then looked at me. She saw what I saw. She saw the woman’s broken acrylics, she saw the weave tracks desperately hanging onto her dirty cornrows, she saw the filthy sliders, she saw the lip piercing. Apart from the lady, me and her, everyone was white. The lady continued banging on the table.
‘Excuse me,’ Mum said calmly. ‘The lady said what she said. You’re holding the queue.’
‘Yeah? So?’
‘Listen, you’re screaming and shouting like this. Can you not respect yourself?’
I thought of Amelia. Just last week she had had a screaming fit about respectability politics or something.
The queue, confident now the other black lady had spoken, began to jeer at the woman.
Annoyed, she left, throwing curses over her shoulder.
As we left, Mum turned to me. ‘You ever behave like that in public and I’ll kill you.’
Zippy's World 