|
20. car on a dark street
As often as he has sat out on the dark street inside his car, I have sat behind the locked wooden front door. Desolate but getting stronger by the minute, I had a small prayer for him and myself. At other times he will be trash, and I wait behind the door with the loaded pistol. Even when I wasn't home, his monster came down the receiver to trash the answering machine. 'She's trying to destroy me! Search and destroy!' His cycles of rage continued without my participation. His monsters were eating him alive. I have reluctantly left him to rot away up in his room or out in his car on the dark streets, where one day he will probably be found dead. I have realised that there is no fit or healthy love left in him that is accessible, and no courage to leave his situation. I still hope he will come out into the sun, and breathe in air rather than cigarette smoke. But these days my hard work and dreams are planted elsewhere, where they can grow without trampling and suffocation. Through loving him, I have realised that as you will have to eventually leave everything, you will have to leave these heartfelt things behind. Barbs spoke to my hurting, with a cigarette balanced in the ashtray, dealing herself a deck of cards. I was a chair sitting in the corner. Her words touched my wood but it was better than no words at all. Even a forest gets lonely. I had run straight into her headlights like a startled animal. For now the night without Frazer's hate was too big and empty for me to leap into. I needed something to replace that which had played such a big part in my life. The hatred had cloaked me and sheltered me from experiencing the outside world. With that heavy garment removed I felt suddenly fearful and naked. Nigel and Stuart were away on business in Adelaide and Barbs was lonely. She was a gin drinker and didn't trust easily. It didn't matter that I admired her. She was too hardened inside for anything to matter much except for Nigel. Nigel was her whole horizon. Tonight in his absence I knew that she was depressed. There was a small ladder running down the ankle of her stocking. It must be terrible to be such a solid forceful type of woman, and to find yourself suddenly horizonless. I hoped that I could keep her company as a chair. It was a time for listening to her sad and husky inner-city voice, and for not talking or moving, - so that all energies were spent rebuilding my strength. 'That's the trouble with blokes like this,' she said. 'They don't just want you for your body, they want your soul. They want your career, your money, everything that they think you've got to offer. They want the lot but they don't know how to recognise it, so they crush it with ignorance. They're like the thieves who don't just rip off your video, but who clean the entire house out. Photographs, the kids' toys, curtains, crockery-the lot. But then they don't know what to do with it so they shit in your bed sheets. And that's the problem with women like us, Crystal. The problem is that we give it and give it, and each time they abuse us, we reward them with love. Mind you, it isn't that we want to be abused, but that we love indiscriminately. We loved what abused us and what didn't, because we had both read the great spiritual teachers who taught us to love everything regardless. But they were all assassinated. It's also because the society helped us to fulfil these roles. It sets the abusers up to be loved by the abused like us.' I realise that we live in a society that sets the victim up to take the brunt of the abuse, as well as to accept responsibility for it. Not only for allowing the abuse to occur in the first place, but for being the abuser themselves. The abuser is always innocent and someone must be in the wrong. So they pick the down and injured because they are easier to kick when the society is a coward, because like kids and animals they don't fight back. I didn't know about Barbs, but I was never a victim. Instead I had lived like a wild storm. This had been my only protection. When I had fled, no one had followed my trail across those landscapes. I had done the wrong thing by playing the game of abused and abuser, where positions could be switched as quick as a flick-knife blade. I had been misinformed by the great spiritual teachers, who, living in mythology and utopia, had been able to reach out and touch everything with love indiscriminately. I'm afraid that trying to love everything in human-orientated societies equally, is not respecting the level of acceptance that people are at. I found out that I couldn't give someone something that they didn't want or weren't prepared to accept. Trying to love Frazer was like trying to hug a fire-breathing monster as it went up in a puff of smoke. |
