An Unfortunate Mishearing.

A girl of about 10 approaches the till; she has a girlish freckled face and is wearing a baggy light blue hoody:

‘Excuse me; have you seen my mum leave the shop?’

As someone who works in a busy train station shop this does seem like an absurd question, considering the constant flow of bodies in and out of the two big doors, let’s just say it was like looking for a long metal pricky thing in a pile of yellow poky sticky things; it would have been wholly unlikely. However, anyone that has ever worked in a shop, or with the general public, will know absurdity, idiocy or even insanity becomes so frequent and tedious that it no longer has the same meaning; it’s merely banal, so I didn’t dismiss her with the flip of a hand but said:

 ‘Erm, well I’m not sure, what does she look like?’

‘Oh, she has long curly hair...’, she mimes the long curly hair, wiggling her fingers and lowering them down beside her face, ‘...and she’s blacked up’.

OK... now, yes she did just say ‘...and she’s blacked up’ and I have to admit my previous statement on my inability to be shocked by the public somewhat melted along with my jaw to congregate on the shop-soiled floor. The image in my head at this point rather defies explanation and certainly starts to attack that staunch bourgeois myrmidon that is stuck somewhere in my being like a stubborn stain. I guess it did make her initial question seem slightly less bizarre, I mean who wouldn’t notice ‘that sort of thing’. 

‘What!...she’s blacked up?’ I found myself doing a weird mime of someone rubbing boot polish on their face, performing a circular hand motion just above my cheeks. In all fairness to me, technically, this awkward and vaguely inappropriate gesture was her fault for starting the whole physical byplay thing with the curly hair.

There was a beat where her eyes looked off to the right and her facial expression initiated a subtle change and twisted a little.

‘Errr yeah, she’s wearing a black top’.

Right, so now I felt a little silly, I’m pretty sure she had no concept of what blacking up was, anyone who has freckles is universally sweet and innocent and unable to tolerate such vulgar, racist notions. I may well have said ‘there’s a goat on the toilet’ and wow who knows what was going on in my unconscious to hear/mishear such a thing?

 ‘Oooooh’, I rear back and subject her to my overly maniacal laugh. ‘Err no sorry I haven’t seen her’.

She thanks me and leaves the shop still looking back and forth for her lost mother as she goes. I stand and watch her exist simultaneously contemplating a situation where the elusive Mother is found and the girl asks her ‘Mummy, what is blacking up’. She replies, ‘Where did you hear that?’ ‘The man in the bookshop said it’. 

An unfortunate statement inevitably leading to a scene where the mother comes back in the shop for a confrontation ending either with us all laughing as the credits roll or with me homeless and depressed begging on the street contemplating the big D as we fade to black.