Friday 29 March 2013

Stoned.

"I WAS going to call you but...but then.....a man in a car stopped to ask if I was Ok.... and my friends gave me tissues, and...and..  the bleeding stopped, and they bought me an ice-cream and I knew...I knew  like  if I called you I'd have to like come home."  The boss has returned from town, her sister in anxious attendance, with a bruised and lacerated lip, some little beast from a gang of  beasts having stoned herself and her two little girl friends in the Park. Why?  No particular reason. They were just  there. The police  assure me that there would be little  point in making a complaint  the beasts being  juveniles etc etc. I don't agree. The boss is reluctant to make a complaint,  name names. I tell her she is not a punch bag for anyone's low-grade craziness. And that her days of roaming free in town with her  girls pals are over. She must content herself with the village till she is much much older.(At least twenty five) The boss is dauntless, and will get about, but she is still a child. Mine.


Afterwards I think of three young  girls,  the spinning stone,  finding only her.   She has a history. She it was who might have lost an eye last year in a bizarre swimming pool incident, a wave maker incompetently managed, and she collected shivering and shocked from school before that,  mugged by a flying fire extinguisher. And so and so forth  back to  when she was pinned underneath the car wheel,  two years old,  in a driveway car reversal nightmare.We were lucky then, a broken leg the outcome. And back back yet  when she was five weeks old, a foot slip as I began to ascend the stairs, and  flying  from my  flailing arms she bounced on every step down.down  before  my  agonized gaze. "Yeah I think we got away with it just about, this time", the doc told me later  in Outpatients,

The thing is, some folks are always in the frame, first up in the firing line. . One of my brothers, a bright and open hearted child, was such. He it was who caught the flying yard fork carelessly tossed,  in his face, the falling bricks from the outhouse on his sweet  head,  and he who waited  in  the path of the car wheel when the brake slipped, and later still  his fingers smashed by  the threshing bullock. No one else. Him, her,. such folk..

Good Friday. No work.  My husbands comes to me having  left the fearsome three to the train station..  A special day.  The holy  space,  the break from the world.  I keep  my childhood memories of church, much and many  mass, the sonorous chanting  procession around the stations of the cross, the arrest before each dark and bloody  picture.  I light a metaphorical candle to the break out in my dizzy twenties, the frantic  house parties devoted to drinking, the pubs being closed. For the whole day.

I think of the gnostic principle; as within,  so it is without.  Took me years to get that.  Now I  get it fleetingly.  What happens to you in the world being  neither random or  punishment,  but reflecting an inner  interpretation,  unconscious, implacable. An old  role tacitly given and accepted, playing out. . I think of the boss, the brother, the Catholic notion  of Christ crucified on the cross  for the sins of the world. Another mystery in enigma wrapped as we see through a glass darkly having sucked up those Lethe waters good. Stoned.

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