By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
29) Shopping
Alice is having a game of reaching forward from her pushchair and putting both hands against a black bollard; then, with a shove, sending the pushchair back against Paul's legs. He flexes his knee to send Alice back within reaching distance of the bollard.
Inside the charity shop, at the back, Michael patiently waits, stepping forward occasionally to let Julie measure jackets against him. Michael knows, logic has him say, that some of his clothes have to be bought in charity shops. He and Julie, together with a pocket calculator, have gone through their family finances. Michael left the exercise surprised that they were able to afford even secondhand clothes. (Some of the town's charity shops are indeed priced too high for them.)
Logical acceptance is one thing, being seen buying clothes in a charity shop is offensive to his eight year old sensibilities. So he positions himself where he is least likely to be seen from the street.
Paul is hungry, the rumblegut below him vast in its echoes. The ice cream has stirred up his digestive juices, has made him realise that he hasn't eaten this day.
"D'you know," he says to Alice, "the ancient Egyptians considered their internal organs divine? Because they continued their functions during sleep?"
Alice is not interested in him or in his stomach noises. His knee pushes Alice back within reach of the bollard.
The night and the day have left him with a headache that wants only to lose itself in sleep. To be alone. But this street now is crowded with shoppers, people breathing his air, people moving through his space, all strung out and twitchy, most of them unknown to and afraid of each other. Gawping, gaping, greedy for sensation, mouths clacking open, they walk splayfooted, leaning forward from the hips, their eyes fixed singlemindedly on their next acquisitive objective. Or they turn aside from the object on window display, lean back from it, view it with sidelong measuring glances, flirting with ownership, wary of being owned, to not be trapped into a rash purchase.... They are still buying something. Still have money to spend.
The lads come running on a shout.
Paul sees the first three round the corner from the library. All are wearing long baggy shorts and trainers. The shorts are pink and green, zigzaggy orange and black. The trainers have fat white tongues. More come shouting, voices hoarse, in among the Fore Street shoppers. Some of the lads have sweatshirts knotted around their waists. All are up on their toes, convinced of their corporate invincibility.
About ten or twelve of them now; they are jumping onto each other's backs, shoving each other, careering off walls and stumbling between shoppers. One has on a small round black hat. He stops in front of women, waggles his tongue and screams at them. A slim boy sprays lager from a can over two old men, who bending duck. He then sprays it white over a shop window and, shouting, he runs.
A rat-faced boy, his jowls abristle, is coming towards Paul. He has fixed eyes with Paul. Paul's tattoos and bruises are making him one of them, a legitimate tribal target. Paul tries to edge aside, to become an invisible part of the crowd. But Alice has hold of the bollard. The boy has registered Paul's awareness of him, is coming faster.
Paul tries to pull Alice past the bollard. The boy's arm is up. He has a short blade in his hand. Alice is between them. Seeing that the boy may under-reach himself and hit Alice on the downward stroke Paul steps around the pushchair and stumbles on a back wheel.
He feels the hit on his shoulder, sees his shirt is cut through and the skin beneath, sees the browneyed boy jigging excitedly still here in front of him, the blade slicing back across his midriff, but missing, then coming back again and tearing into and along his bare arm down through the blue tattoo.
Another boy is coming running, slaps the browneyed boy on the shoulder. Shouting together they go running up Fore Street.
Paul looks down to Alice. She is looking blue-eyed up at his shoulder. The slashed blue shirt is red with his blood. He looks back to Alice's round blue eyes, sees the bright red blood running from his pink fingers and spotting on the dark bricks. He hears Julie shout. He turns towards her.
"She's alright," he says. Julie screams. The blue sky flees from him.
commentary.... The young have to fight to be recognised. To conform to the past is to fail. Conformists, besides, are confused. There are no communities to conform to anymore, only some people who know some other people. And a moral code is difficult to impose on a mobile society, where one's imagined peers can be left rapidly behind and one's behaviour is adapted always to the normative immediate, to what is tolerable to those present and which those out of sight need never know about.
Nor can we expect the young to willingly participate in a system that is designed to subjugate them. Yet their oppressor is amorphous, their fight for freedom not clean cut. When indifference and apathy are enemies the weapon is to unsettle, to defy, to disrupt. So do the invincible young revenge themselves with vandalism and cavort rudely among the defeated old.
These young, though, are not heroes, and they are far from brave. They too all want to belong: so do they all follow fashion, and the weakest seek to bond together by creating a common enemy.
Fore Street that day was, like any war, mediocrity taken to extremes. Eccentrics don't need to do violence to establish their own existence. But for the faceless unheroic, once behind a flag, once inside a uniform, once under a label, they can do anything. Drunk, and showing their contempt for themselves, for those like them, for the kind of life they are expected to lead, they can savour their own rottenness and they can, at the same time, have absolute licence.
Paul then often condemned Bridgwater men as types, when he himself was viewed as a type — of the type who aspired to be semi-invisible, who didn't want to stand out from a crowd....
There are just too many people in this crowded world for all of us to be known as individuals. All of us, therefore, must be recognisable as types.
We consequently proclaim our part-identity by our choice of styles. Which is why these mobile days style is so socially important — so that you can be instantly categorised as type A, B, C, or an aspirant to type D. By your haircut and hair colour, by your choice of clothes, by your bearing and demeanour, so shall ye be identified. And, in the case of Paul that day, stricken.
We know those who are like us, know enough of them to make them our enemies. Other types are strangers to us, their lives distant and superficial. We don't know what homes they return to nor venture from; nor their daily gripes and complaints, nor what each aspires to. Not having lived it we do not know the substance of their lives; and, therefore, all their actions are surface actions and are, to us strangers, incomprehensible and unpredictable.
So we attack only those we know, whose responses we can predict. Paul, that afternoon, was marked safely down as one of them and, therefore, as a safe enemy. They could know and easily despise him. Tattoos, open shirt, muscles, bruises.... And it was all in part Paul's own doing. Because we all have to go by appearances. All too often that is all we've got to go on. And people are often only what they want to appear to be.
Although it may then have wrung its hands over casual violence such as this, the establishment was reaping only what it had sown. Because, in an inherently violent society, people think first of violent solutions for whatever ails them, even if it is only boredom, if it is only in giving vent to all their resentments of being looked upon with contempt.
Extreme places and extreme policies breed extreme reactions. Every society creates its own crimes. The world doesn't need warriors anymore. But still we're brutalising young men with the philosophies of belligerence, the language of fighting, the idea of loyalty right or wrong. And if the law is the arm of justice then, as there is no justice, there is no law now. Any law now is applied according to the status of the individual and not the severity of the crime. The young and scruffy are consequently pursued, picked on, provoked; and the destitute and deranged moved on. The only moral, the only law now, is not getting caught.
There are some people, however, no matter what the age, no matter what their age, who are always ready to join a mob. These are the people for whom there are no excuses, for whom there are no extenuating circumstances. These people are neither unintelligent nor uneducated. (Not, though, that anyone has to be educated to be aware of injustice, to feel injustice, or to create, to perpetuate, injustice.)
Likewise the saboteur too only fails if he gets caught. Any excess can be justified if it can be gotten away with, if the perpetrator is in a position of power to make it respectable.
True Stories
In July 1985, shortly before midnight, Kenneth Stanley Thomas Smith threw 2 stones at a neighbour's window. He caused £8.84 worth of criminal damage, for which Sedgemoor Magistrates gave him 100 hours community service. 20 year old Kenneth Stanley Thomas Smith told the police that he had done it to get his own back on the neighbour who had some time previously told him to get back in prison where he belonged.
On April 12th 1989 Timothy Andrew Ash, who was then living in Hembdon Road, Bridgwater, went to the house of his ex-girlfiend, Teresa Weller. Not finding her there he went to her current boyfriend's house. He asked to see her and she spoke to him outside the door. Timothy Andrew Ash then pushed Teresa Weller to the ground. When she got up Timothy Andrew Ash grabbed hold of her tee shirt and punched her in the face. Timothy Andrew Ash was conditionally discharged by Sedgemoor Magistrates.
In May 1989 Hilda May Kitch, of York Road, Bridgwater, stole cheese and meat worth £18 from the Safeways supermarket in Angel Place. When stopped outside the supermarket by a store detective 73 year old Hilda May Kitch had £33.63 on her person. Hilda May Kitch said that she had planned to give the goods away to neighbours as a way of making friends. Hilda May Kitch lives alone. Sedgemoor Magistrates fined her £20 and ordered her to pay £21 costs.
