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7. barbs and the dogs
I learnt early that you had to be tough to get respect, and if you got sick or tired then look out. Like Barbs, the semi-sadistic wife of Nigel. I had once caught her smiling when I got caught beneath this pack of fighting dogs. I had been trying to prevent Tammy from being torn apart. Later I emerged, my arms ripped open and hair matted with blood, carrying my whimpering dog. Her smile had departed as if it hadn't ever been there. There was not a look of concern to replace it, as she couldn't go that far. There was just this look of simple blankness where the smile had been. It was like the wind had swept a towering forest away and left nothing in its place but the backdrop of sky. I never asked her what it had been all about or what had possessed her, as if I had hoped something had and that now she was back to normal. Of course I wished that I had never seen that particular smile. So when does a person smile? I would smile at an oval of star shaped flowers that a pack of dogs were running through. I'd stop smiling when the flowers were splattered by the blood of a serious dog fight or a suffering animal. The question being: can these kinds of people smile at both the flowers growing and the dogs fighting? And the horrifying answer is, yes. If they only smiled their way through bloodshed, they would be easy to dismiss. But I had seen Barbs smile at flowers and really mean it. The world of human nature had not been as simple and clean-cut as I had hoped. After the dogfight incident I saw Barbs in a different light. I knew that behind that smiling for pleasure there must be something haunting her, in the way that she also felt the need to smile at suffering. In this world it seemed that some people just couldn't stop smiling. So I lived in a world of silent numbers. It depended on whether I could give my number out, or whether I couldn't. I applied this to my emotional relationship with Frazer. He was a Jekyll and Hyde character. He could turn in a split second from someone I trusted and adored, to someone that I felt downright terrified of. I had often felt this silly sense of relief in his good phases. Then why should I be relieved at all? A pathetic and foolish hope drove me to be relieved. The dual nature of his character broke down trust at the same time that it built it. He was the sculptor and I was an art piece before him, continually being smashed and repaired. This sculpting and building served to break down self-esteem. Each time I was smashed down a little part of me ended up blowing away in the dust at his shoes. This part was dead and gone forever, in that it was no longer connected to the piece as a whole. Then each time I got built back up, I was becoming not what I wanted to be, but what he wanted me to be. Frazer was trying to build me into a replica of himself, with this frantic intention to take all the goodness out of me. He wanted to build an army like himself to face to world, as he was too afraid to face it on his own. Frazer was in the process of destruction and reconstruction. He picked me as his victim. I had been a bright star shining alone, down in a dingy sewerage pipe. It did not know that it was shining out because it had never seen the night sky. It had only seen the sewerage that moved past endlessly beneath itself. Frazer reached down with his hand and offered me a boost up into the bright night of the city. He showed me a world of artificial stars, but they were brighter than anything I had seen. I thought that I was one of them, that I had found a world in which to hang my light. He said, 'See those stars shining out there? Well, they were all created by me'. I believed that all those lights were him and his private army. But still I resisted each time he battered me down, as little parts of me died and went out like a universe of candles. But ultimately he was too weak to snuff out all of them. Even the retarded sexually abused women that he chose to hang out with after I left him eventually gave him the flick. Frazer wanted to make me part of his army of artificial lights, but still he became no stronger. He was charred and singed for trying to reconstruct hot white stars. Even if I had grown a little dull after years of being underground, inside I was eternal and unaware of my emanation. |
