Jon paused while Milner’s attention did indeed wander — he had a fumbling, furtive expression.
The prospect of telling truth to power round the back of the bike sheds — he can’t wait … He wants to call Harcourt, probably, and get things under way. He’s itchy but he won’t scratch while I’m watching, while I’m here.
Jon dug in and kept on with his anecdote, no matter how unwelcome.
The political pub bore. There’s always one.
But he felt the need to explain himself, even if neither of the people he might pray could understand him were actually here to listen. ‘The thing was, I didn’t expect that a slightly frail middle-aged lady would attack me — St Kitts accent, that very gentle-sounding St Kitts accent — and she asked me, this breakable-looking black lady, she asked me, ‘What size are your feet? No, your girl’s feet. Your wife’s feet?’ And she wanted to know because she said she needed money so she could buy milk for her child, but she didn’t want to just take it, just have me give her money. She said that she wanted to sell me something and that she had shoes with her — women’s shoes, her shoes — and I could buy them. She said she’d been asking and asking all day, but had got nowhere. The Junction is certainly nowhere … Oh yes — and she had a hat.’ Jon was aware that he was lightly damping the pub’s glee and chatter.
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.