Wound Detail
Ocean waves are said to ‘break’ in a particular direction, and humans do much the same. Under stress or trauma, each of us comes apart in our own way. Depression, anxiety, psychosis? Rage? Gibbering passivity? We all have our favourites. Consequently, you never know how people will react to something like two armed and masked men bursting in and demanding money. Our meeting had not yet started, so the only members present were the Secretary, our Treasurer and myself.
Alfred is thin and older, tightly bound and unable to sit still. He is the founder of the Superview Support Group and, as Secretary, our very own wriggling Podiatrist. It’s hard to say how Alfred ‘breaks’ under pressure as I fear it already happened, and long ago. He glances at the first man, the one who had spoken the demand, and suddenly is on his feet.
‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘It must be excruciating.’
The eyes above the face mask blink once. ‘The money!’ he says. His mask puffs out as he speaks.
‘Have you received treatment?’ our Secretary asks, forceful, yet concerned.
‘Shut up!’ And then again, ‘Give me the money!’
Alfred inhales. A shotgun is pointing at his face. ’Sir,’ he begins. ‘You are suffering from Plantar Fasciitis (his emphasis) in the arch of your left foot. It’s already quite advanced, and this is why you get pain while walking. Does it tighten up at night or have you figured out how to deal with that?’
Silence. I love Alfred. Whenever the Superviewers try to help him stop, we hug him in a big pile. Though an excellent podiatrist - or perhaps because of it - his life is full of other people’s pain. To walk down the street with him is to enter a world of broken toes and tight Achilles, lives blighted, slow walkers, cane-users, limpers, wincers and dangerous shoes. Sometimes he weeps at the suffering - all so easily avoided. If only they knew! If only they could see! Poor Alfred sees feet everywhere. He has taught us a lot.
‘That lockbox. There.’ The man has shaken off his jammed cognition and it’s moving again. ‘Robbie. Get it over here.’
The second man, ‘Robbie’, steps forward as instructed and moves the grey metal box. Then he jabs in Janice, our Treasurer’s, face. He says the word ‘bitch,’ over and over, eyes wild. ‘Open the damn thing. Bitch.’
I was beginning to feel sick. Alfred was indestructible - as a scientist, he knew he was right - but this young man? One-on-one with our Treasurer?
‘I am a woman,’ says Janice from behind the table.
‘Make her open it.’
‘I am!’
‘Go on then!’
‘Open it, bitch.’
With our Treasurer, you get commentary, so Janice gives a long-suffering ‘Ok,’ as if, ‘you’ll be sorry!’ and then, ‘The key is in my left pocket because I placed it there on purpose. Sometimes there are SO many pockets, and I get the lanyards for my keys tangled up with the headphone wires!’
We all nod, including both assailants. She’s very engaging, and it makes me smile. On her head is a flat cap with a red feather, which nods as she digs into her huge multi-coloured coat - tunnelling through two orange scarves to finally arrive at the purple layer beneath. Her shoes are a wild green; though passed as ‘sensible’ by Alfred.
‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Where are my glasses? Probably in the same pocket!’ Then she stops. ‘Young man,’ she says flatly, her voice full and then dropping. ‘You poor young man.’ She shakes her head. ‘Have you hurt many women?’
We watch young Robert search for meaning.
‘Shut it!’ says the older man at last ‘Robbie. Don’t listen. Just get the key.’
‘I am!’ But Robbie is stalling, scrambling, and then the wheels slowly move again. ‘Bitch,’ he says as if to steady himself.
Janice taught me something, and now I see it everywhere. When she first joined the Club, she trusted no one. Eventually, she came to value our collective expertise and enlightened us with stories of her life-long struggle with men. Booming, bursting with words and of large dimension, she told of being confined to little pink dresses, of gaining weight to avoid her father’s growing interest and then losing it to escape with an alcoholic boyfriend. Grabbing, kissing, grasping men, ‘willies on legs’, intimidators laughing, vicious, small-minded little toxic torturers as they bluster and hunt and show their desperate conformity. Janice revealed this and shared it with the Club. How could I not have seen it before?!
Alfred is holding up his hands, imploring the older man to get proper treatment - none of this ‘sports medicine nonsense!’ - and I see the man half listening, half afraid he will fail again.
But now Janice has begun. ‘Let me ask about your bathroom door.’
Count the beats… ’What?’
‘Has your bathroom lock ever been broken or forced? Have you ever hit a woman and then apologised? I see that you have. They grow quieter after that, don’t they? Further away. Harder to hold.’
Silence. I covered my eyes. Janice once let me hug her when she was crying. Her coat of many colours covered my face. Then she quickly pulled back, and in all her finery, burst out laughing.
‘You are a little boy,’ she continued to the young assailant. ‘Just like the soldiers lying wounded on the battlefield, desperately calling for their mothers and wives. You know what they want, don’t you?”
‘Take it easy, Janice.’
‘Remember your breathing.’
‘Just little boys pretending,’ she continues to the younger man. ‘And then, suddenly: Big boy! Dumb and inarticulate, tone-deaf and blindly cruel to women.’
No key emerges from her fumblings, but instead, Janice unbuttons her final layer and selects just one of her fulsome pink breasts, which she places on the table, shaping it with her hands. ‘The key!’ she declares, triumphant.
Our two assailants stop functioning. You could have waved your hand in front of their face and received no reaction. We stand around for a while, awkward and in silence; like strangers waiting for a bus.
I address them in the round. ‘Let’s conclude,’ I suggest, ‘that this, tonight, has - for all of us here - been slightly traumatic. Frankly, you frightened us. You must admit that it was you who walked into our Group Meeting, waving your guns and your mental health problems.’
Nothing. Not a word.
Needing to soothe, I continued. ‘But we all have sudden revelations; our very own ‘Damascene Road’s: times when learning cracks you open. After that, you find yourself surrounded by what was previously invisible. So seeing other points of view is a good thing and you need not be unduly alarmed.’
Everyone stares at me until Janice says, ‘Don’t waste your time. They can’t understand. It’s arrested development.’
‘Do they need to understand?’
‘I think they do,’ says Alfred. ‘Most problems can be worked on.’
Our assailants are watching what looks to them like a tennis match.
‘No. I meant they do not need to know because they do it naturally, beneath awareness. They can’t stop.’
‘Ha!’ declares Janice. ‘Who can?’
I turn and point at the older man. ‘You, for example, do most things wrong. That’s what you were told, and you expect the same with this burglary thing. This is why you speak roughly to your younger accomplice. You were injured, so now you injure. Perhaps no one cared, and you are angry, so you lie there at night, foot aching, wondering what you did wrong; fearing arbitrary punishment and cold rejection. Just this is in your voice. And I see that you could beat us to the floor to rid yourself, to mend yourself, so that every blow helped you.’
‘Don’t go there,’ suggests Janice. She is returning her ‘key’ to the layers beneath her multicoloured coat.
‘When I walk down the street I see injured selves everywhere; hungry narcissistic pain trailed out across people’s lives like the debris from a crash, wounds passed down generations, but undercover; weak points beneath a strutting stride; hurt little sensitive feelings. But it’s not only the injured self!’ I tumble on, breaking like a wave. ‘It’s the defence of that early wound (emphasis mine), the ongoing sensitivity to anything that tweaks the original deficit. Sensitive spots. Prickling pride. Boasting bullies. Constant demands for respect and ‘don’t call me stupid’; people that ‘only hear what hurts’.
‘Here we go.’
‘Shut up! All of you just shut up!’
‘Speaking frankly…’
‘Must we?’
‘… speaking frankly, both of you - can we call you robbers? - both of you are, to me, transparent.’ Pompously, I surveyed the room. ‘All of us, on the street outside, in institutions, even in governments! All the way down to this pathetic boy with his tough talk and unkind words. All of you trading crumbs of recognition in a teeming hierarchy of longing: upwards to mummy and daddy and bullies and bosses and tyrants; downwards to children and whatever group you have managed - or been told - to despise. It’s a Global Economy of Narcissism! You lack, so you take. And each time you take, each time you thoughtlessly injure another to fill yourself, you reveal your original wound! I see wounds everywhere. I cannot stop.’
The older assailant shot me in the stomach, and I can’t blame him. It felt like I had been kicked by Tuppence, the pony at the end of my road; but louder. I heard voices and could tell they were moving me. The robbers had fled, leaving Janice to staunch my bleeding with orange scarfs. Alfred called the ambulance and, helpfully, removed my shoes, so that by the time I arrived at the hospital, hands slipped me easily into a warm morphine bed. Smooth notions looped around, like tigers slowly chasing. A flash of light. Bubbling revelations. Pain surging back and…
‘There, there.’ It’s an empty nurse; not looking at me. She is pinched and exhausted, worried; a shell of a person that covers up and holds me away, just as she learned to do. I try to say ‘I’m sorry,’ but nothing comes out.
The nurse left, and Janice held my hand. ‘The fools! Surely the world’s worst robbers! Their boyish fixation with the lockbox meant they got nowhere near the Fund.’
‘Thank God,’ I manage.
She may have said, ‘So we’re still millionaires.’
Alfred is there too and leans over me for a closer inspection. ‘Lucky we weren’t quorate,’ he mutters. ‘Ten minutes later and we’d all have been there. Can you imagine?!’ Then he points at the door. ‘I do need to speak to that nurse though; just for a moment.’