Audio by Jules Keohane
Saturday night I woke to shouting
A woman was crying and screaming.
‘I hate you, you cheating fuck!’
She was sobbing.
‘Fuck you! Fuck you! I want my stuff back.’
People were talking to her, but she was insensible to anything but her pain. Her pain, in fact, vibrated through the air, through the tree that obscured her from sight, and sent electrical quavers through me.
‘Fuck you, you cheating fuck!’
She was screaming and sobbing so hard, she was going to wake up not just with an emotional hangover but with a sandpaper throat.
‘Give me my shoe. I want my stuff!’
She sobbed and sobbed and walked down the road. I could see her now. Tall and straight and holding a water bottle and something in her other hand. Someone shorter with curly hair wearing dungarees, who didn’t seem to know her, ran after her saying ‘Wait, wait! You can’t walk alone!’
She ignored him.
He got to her and said, ‘Wait, where do you live?’ She hiccuped out, ‘Not far,’ and walked on with her shoulders shaking.
It was midnight. ‘Not far’ is far in the unsafe city.
The guy stood in the street watching her go with his hands clasped behind his head. He didn’t seem to know what to do next. A woman walked up behind him and they conferred. A security car pulled up. Someone in the road must have called them because of the ruckus. The two spoke to the driver. They asked him if he could follow her home to make sure she was safe.
He turned the car around and slowly drove behind her.
On Sunday nothing happened
I fetched Norton’s Anthology of Poetry to the bed and asked Sam if I could read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to him again.
I’ve loved that poem by TS Eliot since I was in high school and I still don’t know what it means. I don’t want to know what it means. Meaning is meaningless when your heart loves something.
I was maybe 15 years old and a drama group came to our school and performed ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.
I was one person when I sat down crosslegged on the floor of the school hall pushing my grey school dress down between my legs so that I didn’t flash my pants. I was a different one when I stood up and brushed the dust of the floor off the back of my dress.
I was stoned – in the middle of the day, at school – on the music of a poem.
Meaning is meaningless when your heart loves something.
Every so often now, I read the poem to Sam on a slow Sunday morning, and he listens because his heart loves me and meaning is meaningless in love.
On Monday there was drama again
A man in his seventies walking at a steady pace towards us down Main Road in Seapoint. He was wearing a long green anorak against the chill and his eyes were mostly downcast, lost in thought, maybe.
By a stall selling chips and cool drinks and cigarettes, a tall thin man lifted a long thin rod and made as though to hit the older man. The older man flinched. The younger man stopped himself. But he changed his mind and he whacked the old man hard on the side of his head anyway. Then he bolted across the busy street.
There was a flurry and shouting as a bunch of other men took after the hitter.
My friend and I rushed to the hittee. He had staggered but he was still standing. There was no blood. In a voice so quiet I had to lean in, he answered our questions about whether we could call someone or give him a lift.
I said I thought the hitter was not in his right mind. The man said softly, ‘That doesn’t make me feel better.’
The stall owner asked, ‘Are you okay, baba?’ and opened a bottle of water and gave it to the bewildered man. He took the water but he didn’t say thank you. Then he said, spluttering in a re-found voice, that he’d seen the guy who’d hit him before, ‘always hanging around here’.
A short, neat man with grey in his beard came along and said, ‘Don’t worry, they caught him. You are lucky that pipe was plastic.’ Ah, so the weapon was a length of plastic pipe electrical cables are fed into.
Soon a security officer and someone else were standing before us each holding the culprit by one of his arms. The tall hitter was sticking out between the two of them like a toothpick between two disapproving lips.
The man in the green coat lifted his left arm and pointed at his attacker standing two metres away and said theatrically, and somewhat unnecessarily, ‘Arrest the fuck!’
Annie and I slipped away.
On Tuesday there was no drama in my immediate vicinity
Three people said things to me independently that made me remember a promise I made myself years ago when a colleague I’d liked very much died in an accident: tell people the things you’d say at their funeral before you have to say those things at their funeral.
Tell people the things you’d say at their funeral before you have to say those things at their funeral.
On Wednesday I had to consider myself
Sometimes, some part of me gets highly activated and I say things I feel deeply and have thought about a lot even though I know they are not what most people think.
As I’m about to say them, I consider whether I’m with the right audience.
It happened on Wednesday.
My judgement of the audience-of-three’s rightness for my short impassioned speech was wrong.
I haven’t stopped worrying.
On Thursday the drama was internal
When someone patronises me, brushes off my questions, gives me lectures or advice I didn’t ask for, or explains obvious things to me, it’s like hot lava is bubbling up in my chest and will shortly explode out my ears.
I can see that these condescending actions often come from someone’s insecurities, but that doesn’t help the lava feeling.
I am trying to teach myself not to react to it, since all indications are that the older you get, the more it happens. I don’t want to put myself into hot-lava-induced cardiac arrest yet.
I’m in a new relationship with a service provider thirty years my junior who speaks to me as though I have never had a single coherent thought in my life and that my survival to this point is nothing short of miraculous.
I would end the relationship except that they’re really good at what they do, and I want their expertise.
They speak to me as though I have never had a single coherent thought in my life and that my survival to this point is nothing short of miraculous.
I am using every tiny skill I have, including staring hard into the middle distance, when this person speaks to me, to not have lava coming out of my ears. Or mouth.
Friday
I was drying dishes with a bunch of other women I dry dishes with on Friday mornings (it’s a long story) and I said, ‘You know how new-born babies are always so ugly?’
The sun had just come up. Maybe it was too early. They seemed shocked.
I said, ‘New born babies are ugly, don’t you think? They look like little aliens.’
Someone said, okay, yes, maybe, but they’d never heard a mother say that before. Frankly, she loved babies.
I love babies too. But they’re weird looking.
The point I meant to make was lost and the conversation moved on.
I felt again like I felt on Wednesday.
I really must try harder not to speak around people.
Mixed Media
I recently read these outstanding books:
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshenanthan
A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth by Daniel Mason
By The Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah (not yet reviewed)
You can read (or listen to) ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ here
With love, as always,
Karin
Karin, reading you is a bit like seeing a Banksy: personal yet universal: very funny yet not funny at all; really rather brilliant. Thank you - and also for the reminder to revisit that Love Song.
Your writing is so vivid, Karin. I appreciate it so much, I think, because I have a hard time visualising; your descriptions are always so creative and apt that I don’t need to make as much effort to “see the movie” in my head.
I love how you manage to conjure the most oblique but microsurgically accurate imagery so that with half a sentence I know the exact people you’re talking about, the exact expressions on their faces, their body language, maybe even the weather that afternoon or the ambient sounds. You have such a gift for succinct, highly creative prose and it’s obvious how being a poet has shaped the way you write in general. I’m guessing it’s because you see differently from the rest of us. Which brings me on to my final comment…
I hope you don’t talk less or more guardedly around people. If they responded that way to you, they’re just not on your wavelength and can’t think outside their social conditioning. “Babies are beautiful” seems such an odd thing to commit yourself to being deluded about, don’t you think? 😂 It’s not you; it’s them.