They told her it was going to be easy.
‘Simple,’ they said, ‘like riding a bike.’
She’d only nodded at the time and didn’t dare tell them of her memories of pedalling while her dad held onto the back of her new two-wheeler bike with the pink plastic streamers flying at the handlebars, and him letting go, and her hitting the gutter and banging her pelvic bone hard on the bike bar.
That had hurt.
They talk about boys having tender nether regions, but no one talked about how the impact would make her eyes water and how she couldn’t tell her dad where it hurt because, well, all of a sudden she just couldn’t. Her underarms had gone all sticky and hot, and she’d refused to cry.
This was going to be straightforward then, was it? She wanted to believe it would be.
Everything had come kind of easily to her, she supposed, and this was just another challenge, or a setback, nothing permanent. Looking around the bustle of people in the cold, clean room who looked like they knew what they were doing, she felt a familiar sensation settle in her stomach like she was lying underneath three folded wet wool blankets.
She didn’t like the smile of that starched young woman. It was a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and she was holding her paperwork to her chest, marking it with a pen now and again. That concerned her, the pen marking. All of a sudden she felt old. Frail. Fallible.
But people go through worse everyday, she told herself as she ran her hand over her chestbone and breathed slowly through the panic. We all have to learn new ways of living and simply being. We are perennial survivors, she told herself. Doesn’t matter what you chuck at the human race, we still come through it like some nasty infection, just feeding off something or someone different.
The lights of the machine were coolly blinking, awaiting their instruction.
She noted her aged hand and clicked.
“Thank you for using internet banking,” the screen read. “Would you like to make another transaction?”
