Making A Scene

The line in the London bookshop was several customers deep and I was the last one in it: I had been silently congratulating myself on my Brit-like patience in enduring it when, at the very last minute, a young man pushed in front of me.

(Photo by César Viteri)

“Excuse me,” I said politely, thinking he had failed to notice me. “There’s a line here.”

He bestowed on me the sort of boyishly irresistible wink that undoubtedly melted his dear old Mum’s heart to a puddle.

“It’s all right, darlin’,” he said. “I’m not buying anything.”

I was not his dear old Mum and, having spent my formative years afflicted with younger brothers, am on the whole immune to boyish irresistibility; but if he needed directions to the biography section, I could certainly wait a moment or two more.

Instead, he turned to the sales assistant and began a conversation. A long and quite complicated conversation about a piece of computer software, that had the assistant nodding and stroking his chin thoughtfully, and talking about stepping away from the counter and disappearing into the back office to consult a manual.

“Excuse me,” I said again, and in what I felt to be an appropriately less friendly tone.

The young man turned back to me, visibly annoyed: I am a woman of a certain age with a nice middle-class English accent, and women like me, in his world, are expected to know their place.

“It’s all right, darlin’,” he repeated, with exaggerated patience. “Like I said, I’m not buying anything.”

I do not claim to be an expert in the niceties of retail customer relations, but even I could see that the question of whether or not money were about to change hands here was beside the point.

“You’re taking up time,” I said, “that could be used to attend to me. I was next in the line.”

The young man snickered. For someone like me even to consider challenging someone like him, I must clearly be pre-menstrual, menopausal, or celibate, and therefore, by any one of those definitions, an authorized figure of fun.

“Well, you’re not any more, are you?” he said, and returned to his conversation, satisfied that he had settled the issue. Nice middle-class Englishwomen, after all, are neither expected nor encouraged to pursue an expression of complaint. They are expected to be … well … nice: to speak softly and smile gently no matter what; to exhibit a sweetly deferential manner to all; and most essentially, for some curious but immutable reason, they are expected to show particular politeness to people who are being actively unpleasant to them. In fact – such is the bizarre requirement of the English social code – the more unpleasantly the other person is behaving, the more graciously the nice middle-class Englishwoman is given to take pride in crafting her response.

I, on the other hand, am not a nice middle-class Englishwoman.

“The reason I’m not next in line,” I said, “is that you pushed in front of me. And I’m not happy about that.”

This had gone beyond a joke. The young man, who had not hesitated to inconvenience me because he had been unwilling to wait for his turn, sighed heavily and rolled his eyes at the petty egocentricity of my own world view.

“It must be killing you,” he snorted.

“You were the one who thought it was worth creating bad feeling about,” I said.

The young man had had enough. He glowered, reached down and down again into his arsenal of insults, and drew from its lowest depths the blackest and most bitter words that a nice middle-class Englishwoman could ever tremble to hear, those that would reduce her instantly and fatally to a cowering heap of humiliation and shame, the executioner’s blade to her Anne Boleyn, the dreaded kryptonite to her nicely middle-class Superwoman.

“You,” he hissed, viciously, his eyes glittering with venomous triumph as he delivered the death blow, “are … making a scene.”

He nodded imposingly, and stood back to watch me crumble before him to a pile of whimpering dust.

Just call me Rasputin holding The Great British Bake-Off Cookbook.

“If you didn’t want me to make a scene,” I said, “you shouldn’t have pushed in front of me.”

As comments go, I would not have thought this to be one that offered either cutting wit or startling originality, or indeed anything at all but a simple observation of cause and effect; nevertheless, it proved too much for the young man. He uttered a strangled cry in a world gone altogether mad, abandoned the conversation with the sales assistant during which he was not buying anything, glared briefly around the nightmare cabinet of Doctor Caligari on the tranquil London high street that had thrown before him so monstrous an aberration of the natural order of things, and stormed furiously from it in search of a more salubrious surrounding.

The assistant, who had watched the exchange with mounting disapproval, shook his head in disgust as he rang up my order.

“Some people,” he muttered to himself.

I am still unsure which of the two of us he was referring to.