A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

I really am being too loud.

Jon was making what his mother would have called a spectacle of himself — and she should know — and strangers were finding him more difficult to ignore than perhaps they’d have preferred.

So then, listen. Although I can’t guarantee you’ll understand.

‘And the woman … she does, absolutely, have one of those thin corner-shop carrier bags with her and in it there is a fairly new pair of shoes and some less new shoes and some kind of winter hat and I don’t want shoes or a hat. I have nothing I can say to her. I have never knowingly met someone who cannot feed their own child.’

Milner let out a derisive little huff of breath which Jon answered, ‘Or else, she was — of course, because the poor are always wicked — conducting some fabulously profitable business which involved having to tell strangers humiliating lies.’ Jon leaned in towards Britain’s last remaining Real Journalist.

He calls John Pilger a dizzy blond who’s up himself and says Greg Palast is a wanker in a hat …

‘I decide to give her some money. Less money than I could afford. Enough money for some milk, or some heroin, or some food … but not enough, because she’ll need milk, or heroin, or food for a very long time. And I tell her that I’m fine for shoes and hats and then she reaches one hand into her top — this thin top she’s wearing — and she brings out her breast — small breast … She’s not drug-thin, but she is thin. This flawless skin … Wiry little woman on her own in the street, showing her breast to a stranger and she’s telling me that I’m a good man and that she thanks me.’

Jon glowered across at one rugby man who is staring at him, or perhaps only pondering thin air. It’s not as if I have much substance. And Jon didn’t say aloud that the woman had much the same build as his mother — the figure of a slim fighter, of someone who is slim because she has to fight. But he does feel that he should continue — go right to the end — hit the buffers. ‘And she squeezed out milk from her breast. You understand me? There, in the street, she is explaining to me that she is expressing milk in the street to prove she has a kid. She wants me to know she’s not lying. She has a kid and the kid needs milk when she can’t give it, needs the follow-on stuff and also needs all of the other things kids need. Her flow of milk is proof she isn’t lying. As if this is always demanded and indignity is necessary at all times, in all places.’ And Jon paused and then — being overly audible again — said, ‘Fuck.’

And Meg would have said that with me, before me — she would have held my hand through this, all of this, and it would have been not so bad, not quite so bad.

Jon coughs while the male escort of the cake celebrity glowers across at him for sullying the hearing of a woman whose fondant rose petals were pure as an anchorite’s prayer.

He has an eloquent glower and it does seem to imply all that and slightly more.

Jon lowered his chin and prepared to continue softly, while being of the opinion that purity was something which no longer truly existed and perhaps never had.

No. Wrong. It exists. So many people wouldn’t be so pleased they could destroy it, if it didn’t initially exist.

Purity exists, the problem exists … People like me — any people, just people who are people — we all suppose that purity and the problem always stay apart.

‘And the woman’s crying and I’m apparently a good man again — better than I was when she first said it — and she’s lifting up her arms like a girl, wanting to be hugged and I can’t hug her because she has her breast still there, still naked, and if I hug her like that … I can’t, can I? If I held her, half-naked in the fucking street, as if that’s OK and I have the right … That can’t happen. And it looks as if maybe she’ll cry because I won’t touch her and it would only be the kind of hug I’d give my daughter … That’s what she wants, that level of acceptance … But then she sort of works out what’s wrong and straightens her top and covers herself … She looks like a kid remembering something obvious and being that bit clumsy about it and … then I do … I do hug her. Of course.’

If somebody will hug you, will hold you, then you’re not as unclean as you think, or as you are being led to believe … You’re not completely done for — you’re a going concern.

Jon stood up suddenly, almost lurched up, while the floor objected, fluctuated — one, two, three — like an uneasy heart and then agreed to be flat again, under his feet. ‘And I didn’t want to know what actual trouble she was in — the detail — it was none of my business. She seemed to be a refugee from somewhere softer … from somewhere that hadn’t required degradation … She seemed to be waiting to wake up still, and to find that she was OK and her kid was OK and food in the house and heat and … objects, toys … Comfort. I suppose. That could have been nonsense. I was only guessing. I often guess wrong, am wrong — I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong for years, I’ve been off course … ’ He shook his head back and forth and was surprised he didn’t hear a noise — something like wet matter, or maybe the silly rattle of a stick running down along a fence. ‘My point would be that there is no world within which you don’t give money to that woman. No matter what. There are no other considerations that matter. You give her the money.’

Christ I’m tired.

And wrong and condemned and infectious.

Jon cleared his throat — I sound raw — and pushed himself on, his tongue heavy under and over the words: ‘There is no world …’ And then the air around him got simply too clotted, too unbearable. ‘Milner … I take no further interest. I’m done.’ And he turned and began what was now a long and sagging and weirdly angled walk across the few yards between him and the door. At his back there was an outburst of half-serious cheering that blurred into laughter and a few bangs at a tabletop. It had nothing to do with him.

I take no further interest, because everything is over now.

It’s all done.

He released himself into the little shock of darkness, night. There was a languid straggle of smokers loitering outside at the foot of the steps, murmuring in bands and clouds of conversation and carcinogenic breath.

When I walked away from the woman, there was this guy sitting on the wall beside the jerk chicken place. He was smoking. Off duty from the kitchen. I knew him — he’s called Samson, he’s a nice person. We chat. I’ve tried his chicken. But that evening he sucked his teeth at me and laid this long stare down against me and he said, ‘Ought to be ashamed.’

And I couldn’t tell who he meant should be ashamed.

I didn’t know who he meant.

I’m out there in my ex-council bedsit at the Junction, because that is where I chose to be, but I don’t have to stay … I have access to other possibilities and could leave at any time. But living in the Junction — really living there — has to do with having no access to choice, about having only frailties in most directions; it’s about mildew and noise and lousy window frames and botched repairs and no repairs and policemen giving out crime numbers, so that victims can keep an eye on their ongoing crimes, this daily cascade of smaller and larger risk. I am not unaware of this. And at any time I can step away and leave it. So I don’t really live in the Junction. I’m playing a game, acting out some kind of purposeless mortification in a scruffy patch of SW9 — tough enough, but not so very tough, not too harsh an imposition …