Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

— OK, I said.

I wasn’t sure. It was very possible, I thought, that I was more scared than she was, and I wanted to make some kind of conversation. It’s what I do when I’m nervous, like when I’m talking to our cleaner or to children. On the counter was a small wood carving of a saint or holy woman, and suddenly this was all I wanted to think about — it was one of those oubliettes of slowness like when you’re on amphetamine and it suddenly becomes very very important to be refolding the clothes in your wardrobe in a particular order, or copying out the to-do notes in one notebook which are now a bit scratched out and tatty into a new notebook with the scratched-out notes no longer there, even though really you should be going to a funeral, or your lawyer for a divorce hearing. They are ways in which your attention is suddenly diverted, but whether or not it truly is diverted, it’s difficult to say — for in my case what I was also considering was a moment when I was very young and had come to this very same parade and my mother bought me a book about the greatest football tournament in the world, and I was thinking how happy the book had made me and also thinking that that smaller version of me could never have imagined that one day he would still be here, with friends with guns.

— That’s nice, I said.

— She protects me, she said.

— OK, I said.

— You believe in horoscopes? she said.

— So-so, I said.

— She protects me, she said.

— Can I look? I said.

The woman in the carving had a halo that was multicoloured and her clothes were multicoloured too. It was carved on a piece of wood that looked like some chess piece or intricate element of a fantastical building, by which I mean it had these arabesques and curlicues.

— Can I keep it? I said.

— You’re asking? she said.

And I think it was at that moment that I really did understand that what we were doing was so much more violent than the usual world that she was absolutely correct to find this frightening. Because however much this crime might have seemed just very fun to us its perpetrators, totally I could see that to other people, I mean the people forced to act as bystanders or spectators or unwilling participants, like they are in the most upsetting piece of performance art and also against their will, it was something frightening and unusual. In movies there is so much violence that maybe it then doesn’t occur to people how violent just the smallest alteration to reality really is, in fact it’s very fearful just to see another person raise their voice, like if some holy man outside a pub is shouting at you and then decides to follow you as you walk towards a bus, it’s hard not to feel just very threatened and alone. So that to introduce a gun, even if it was only fake or invented, was to introduce a much more unstable element than I had ever considered. This heist was swarming with sad particulars that I found difficult to react to in the appropriately violent way, or anticipate when they occurred at all. Instead I did just feel very gentle and bemused, so that softly I put the saint or holy person back.

— I’m sorry, I said.

— It’s OK, she said.

with doubts of the inner life

I wonder if maybe in the end this is all about the whole pop concept of nice . The nice thing is the major problem. Because I totally do look nice. I wear teeshirts and jeans and sneakers like everyone else in the history of the multiverse. My hair is gently spiky. That’s what I look like on the street or in the canteen. Also my eyes are manga large and my voice is soft. I pay attention to the way I speak which I hope is audible. And yet also for example I get way up high watching very bright pornography, where a girl’s choking on a penis and her saliva’s hanging down in strands like spaghetti or maybe more precisely spaghettini. I suppose eventually it does make me sad or ashamed or disgusted so I look away, but for at least a few hours, totally not. So looks , I’m just saying, are no guide to the inner life: it’s no joke , to use a favoured phrase of my mother, as if only my mother understands the full seriousness of the world. Everyone I have ever met, their looks were nice — that’s all I mean. If the looks were everything, then no evil could ever happen. But it obviously definitely does.

and large financial results

For slowly the girl at the counter was offering me all the soft notes from the cash register. And it was very light, the way this felt — like I had maybe imagined that money in such quantities was going to weigh me down like the swag sacks of the illustrated burglars in my children’s stories, but no, it was about as heavy as a very light handbag, or not even. I marvel now at this ability the world has to sometimes arrange itself into scenes, to just pause there and coalesce the way a sorbet might, or crystal. That’s the difference between things happening and not happening, and since so much of our time is spent arguing that nothing happens, that an event is basically impossible, I still think it’s possible to see some lives as like the lives of the saints, where everything that happens, all the missed appointments and back problems and small mood swings, are really all fine details that form a wider pattern. For instance, just the weight of some old banknotes in your hand — that can mark a giant moment. Although at the time I did not think so. At the time I was not so sure that anything had really happened, as we ran outside, and I don’t think this reluctance to believe in events is indefensible or even unusual at all — for in general people do tend to believe that life is just this overall foliage, like as dense and thickly populated as the tree canopy out in the Amazon, or one of those collages with a crazy sense of offness, where everything is just minutely unrelated. That’s the general matte surface people think they live inside, like how the parties of this world keep on going, on and on they go, the fiestas, and it’s the same people with the same drinks or with minute variations, Campari one day, Aperol the next, and you just think that this horizontal vibe will continue for ever — with no dramatics or splits or fissurings, yes you think that the whole concept of the dramatic scene , I guess I mean, is overplayed. I definitely tended to think so. I more believed that what was happening always was just the ongoing process of my thinking, and its difficult moods. But then something vertical does happen, after all. I can’t deny it. We ran out into the quiet rain — back down into the noise of the normal life, and it was difficult, like the way it must be difficult for an astronaut when suddenly he’s no longer in zero gravity, and oh the tortures it must be just to keep your neck supporting your head, or lifting your fork when you eat your longed-for messy plate of carbonara.

which improves his unstable mood

It was a time of many fiestas. They happened at picnics or other locations, in the parks where the trees hid statues of generals and renowned pharmacologists, or busts of the great explorers, with pink filtered light and daisies everywhere, and then at night in disused factories or small houses. We were at them all — because however much in reality you only want to be in bed and delirious with another person, still, you will leave the apartment and go to every party to which you’re invited, it’s one of those strange mysteries, why constraints are so constraining. Even the fact that I worried for our dog did not stop me, although definitely it made me sad to leave our dog behind, since unfortunately you cannot take dogs everywhere, they are not tolerated in society. Presumably he would have liked to live in a pack, with other dogs, but he was forced to live alone, dependent on us and without the language that we used among ourselves, at these swarays, where we talked gossip and the daily topics. But fiestas do have many moods. For me, I was upbeat absolutely but also I tended to have this haunted gaze. At unappointed moments my hands would suddenly start shaking, and I think it had a lot to do with the trauma of my recent escapades. This transformation into macho and crime scene expert, I did not totally take it with aplomb. And yet, I did want to believe that I could be equal to this career, with its possible revenges and temptations. I tried to think that although the life ahead of me certainly was frightening, still, since every career made me fearful, this new fear felt like a test I needed to surmount… It’s very difficult, after all, to make yourself proud of your own achievements. To pass exams is not enough. And so meanwhile I would interrupt these reflections with stand-up conversations.