He reminds me of Dickens character, though of course the clothes are wrong. He wears a hoodie, in Dickens’s time it would have been a great coat of some kind of a cloak. The colours are right though, grey on grey. We don’t know his name, or indeed anything about him. He lives in the top flat opposite us, above no. 1. We have surmised that he’s a Phd student. Sometimes we see him sitting in what I call ‘The Courtyard’ with several other twenty thirty somethings, mostly a woman and another man, sitting in his fold-up chair holding what looks like a seminar. Come rain, wind or shine he invariably has his hood up. He is rake thin and pale skinned. Sometimes there is a child with him, a boy, possibly about 5 or 6. He looks earnest, serious. He is awake at all hours. When I leave for my walk at 3.30 am his lights are often on. And sometimes he is outside smoking. We call him The Smoker. He smokes and skulks, his attention held by his phone.
How could he do it? Holding him down like that for 9 minutes. A living death, followed by a real death. How could he not know the human being he was killing? Was he so brutalised? It is shattering. One event out of countless that go on all the time. A killing of the other. We all do it in our small or big ways. In thought if not deed. It shakes me. Can there not be peace, acceptance, love? Are we not the same underneath? Where must it start? Where must it start? Inside ourselves?
A day of layers showing the cruelty. I cry out of frustration, out of compassion and a desire to know their pain and to see some way forward. The nurse washing her face as a child over and over to make it white. And then in fiction, Cadfael finding a son he didn’t know he had and then letting him go without claiming him. There is much to learn. And what of my peace? Can I ask for it if I don’t feel it inside? So much battling and I pick and snap as a result. It is fear, fear of not being good enough, always. Forgive me.
Beginning the biography of Mrs Gaskell was a pleasant escape with all its images of dear Knutsford. And last night the recaptured joy of To Walk Invisible with the feral Emily (so tall) and the pugnacious, cross Charlotte (so small) and the house, so barren, so beautifully empty and the landscape. Ah, my soul is lifted. But I want it for real. Sometimes.
