Sweet Agony. Charlotte Stein

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СКАЧАТЬ That thing at the door where I got to say all the things I was never able to before. All of these insane leaps in logic just bound right out of me, so utterly ridiculous that he is rendered speechless.

      God, I love rendering him speechless.

      ‘Did you really just accuse me of having a foot for a hand?’

      ‘I think “accuse” is a little strong. I have nothing but sympathy for your plight.’

      ‘There is no plight, you ridiculous creature. My hands and feet are where they are supposed to be, I can assure you.’

      ‘So the problem is your face.’

      ‘I see what you are clumsily attempting.’

      ‘I thought I was attempting it quite well, actually.’

      ‘Then allow me to disillusion you immediately. Your technique is that of a sixteen-year-old boy fumbling at the underwear of my mind.’

      ‘I could try harder. Probe more deeply.’

      ‘You believe I wish to be probed? No, dear me, no, that won’t do at all. See, it is exactly as I predicted: you are in every way unsuitable for this position. I cannot possibly have some snooping reprobate rummaging through my life,’ he says, at which point I know I should be insulted or annoyed. He said I was a teenage boy. He called me clumsy. He thinks I am some criminal who snoops.

      Yet somehow all I can think is:

      He said ‘reprobate’.

      He said ‘disillusion’.

      He uses the sorts of words I’ve waited all my life to hear spoken aloud – words I barely know how to pronounce because the only time I’ve ever encountered them has been in books. I had no idea that ‘reprobate’ curled that way, or that ‘disillusion’ sounded so small to begin with and then so big at the end. Though, granted, part of that might be down to the way he talks. His tongue practically makes love to each syllable.

      I feel like his sentence should smoke a cigarette, directly after the full stop.

      I think I might need to smoke a cigarette, directly after the full stop. Something is sure happening to me. I seem to be sweating just about everywhere and my breaths are coming hard and high, like he is a hill and I just ran up him.

      Only that sounds agonising, and this is the opposite.

      This is so sweet I would do anything for another taste.

      ‘Do you think you could say that word again?’

      ‘You honestly want me to repeat one of the things I just said, despite the fact that most of them were sneering insults?’

      ‘Are you kidding? The sneering insults were the best parts.’

      ‘Well, that settles it. I can’t hire you. You are quite mad.’

      ‘You cannot possibly decide that, based on me enjoying you saying the word “reprobate”. You turned the letter R into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. People will probably be playing that letter O at funerals. There is nothing unreasonable about enjoying how the whole thing sounded – not to mention the fact that you said it at all. I mean, who says “reprobate” these days?’ I ask, and again there follows a silence. A big one, that he seems very bitter about once he finally responds. How dare I make him momentarily speechless, I think, and what he says bears that out.

      ‘People who have read these things called books – you might have heard of them, papery things with lots of squiggles inside,’ he says, and I attempt to hate him here, I really do. I stiffen at the implication, and when I speak my voice is cold.

      ‘Oh, you mean the things I used to hide under my floorboards so no one would take them away from me?’ I tell him.

      But then he goes and says this:

      ‘Are you suggesting that you had books stolen from you? That these books were somehow forbidden you? By whom? Tell me at once who this monstrous individual is so that I can immediately have them arrested,’ he says.

      And I think he actually means it. There isn’t so much as a whiff of facetiousness about his words. He honestly thinks my parents were monstrous, just because they hated me reading. No one has ever thought they were monstrous because they hated me reading. A teacher once shouted at them for forcing me into shoes three sizes too small, and occasionally an official-looking person would come around and write things down about my bruises and the spoiled food and the constant cans of Carling everywhere.

      But that was about it, when it came to outrage over their behaviour.

      A fact that I then point out to him, in a roundabout way.

      ‘You can’t have someone arrested for flushing books down a toilet.’

      ‘Well, that just speaks volumes about our current justice system. If I had my way I would not only arrest this miscreant but have them flogged in the town square,’ he says, and I feel sure he means that too. So much so that the urge to look at him again is suddenly too keen to withstand. I have to take deep breaths just to stop myself doing it.

      Then sublimate it into something else.

      ‘Tell me honestly: did you time-travel here from 1865?’

      ‘I wish I had. And possessed the means to travel back.’

      ‘Even though people bathed a lot less then.’

      ‘I could accept body odour in exchange for a bit of peace.’

      ‘You think being alive in 1865 would give you peace?’

      ‘I think at the very least I would fit in more than I do here,’ he says, though I don’t think he means to. At least I don’t think he means to sound so despairing about it. After the words pop out he seems to make a little tutting noise, and it isn’t aimed at me. It’s aimed at himself. He let out some dark hint of who he is, and it irritates him.

      It irritates him so much that he immediately tries to get rid of me in what may be the most ludicrous way possible. ‘Well, it was nice meeting you, farewell,’ he says, as though we just finished on a pleasant note and he is now up and shaking my hand.

      Despite the fact that we are both still seated.

      And he hasn’t asked me a damned thing.

      ‘But you haven’t even interviewed me yet.’

      ‘Of course I have – I enquired about your reading habits.’

      ‘That hardly constitutes an interview.’

      ‘Very well then, tell me what you would expect of an interview.’

      ‘You should ask me my name.’

      ‘Assume that I have.’

      ‘Molly Parker.’

      ‘I see. And then…?’ he asks, and here’s the best thing:

      I СКАЧАТЬ