It was a beautiful day, hot and sunny, big blue sky
and my first impulse was to say, wow, aren't you hot in that tracksuit? Zipped
up to the chin, sleeves rolled down, but I understood somehow that this hiding
away of their body meant something that in the moment i didn’t really have time
to register.
At that time I was working in an International
school in Greenwich trying to get disinterested Chinese kids English level up
enough to get them into British Universities. If you presented me with a
miserable teenager I instinctively did my best to try and make them feel
valued. And so when they began their rehearsed speech about how they were part
of a programme for young people and how the money went to charity to support them
I listened patiently all the while with the sinking feeling that I had no cash
in my wallet.
Just give me a second I said as Jay finished and
stood looking uncertain, embarrassed, resigned, ready to move to the next
house. Five pounds. Something.
Well now, I said. Let me see and begin picking over
their wares, asking what they thought I should buy, what a particular item was
good for, I only had a fiver, how should i spend it best? I made some kind of
weak joke halfway through about shoe polish and could I try it out on the blue
Converse trainers I was wearing, see if it worked, and they laughed, laughed
and half clapped their hands together and twisted their thin frame around
inside that baggy tracksuit as though the laugh had taken them by surprise,
like a small jolt of something unexpected their body couldn’t quite process.
That laugh was all the more affecting for how close to a giggle it was and how,
after all they were just a kid really.
Well, I bought my useless scouring pads and tea
towels and and went back inside, sat back at the table and suddenly I was on
the verge of tears. Probably lots of things welled up in that moment, recent
losses, larger and longer senses of things having gone wrong, self-pity no
doubt, but also pity
for what was obviously a good person, possibly sweet-natured, probably bright.
No doubt I projected things from my own background
onto them, how I knew that had I been born twenty years later many of the
opportunities I’d had would have been denied me, how if my family background had
been less stable I might have gone badly astray in my teens or early twenties,
so that even if I had nothing, relatively, still, I was educated, had a modicum
of self respect, I could command something in the world.
Motherfucker, motherfucker, I started saying over and over to myself, breathing raggedly. I have no idea why I was using an Americanism, but it was the first word that came to me. I had been struck a blow, something had come up out of the deep past, balled up, fist-like and hit me right in the gut, winded me. Time forked then as I sat in my chair. An existential moment. I’d had a few of them, moments when my life could have turned dramatically one way or the other; as someone with all those failed relationships behind me I knew when the moment of decision came and a certain possible future was closed off, closed down and an empty, fearful space loomed in to occupy it.
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