Okay we can make time for one quick question
the week in brief
It happened. This week I had my first in-person event since little scratch published in January. It was a lovely event, well-attended, the audience questions had ended and my interviewer was finishing up. But then a man in a shiny suit spread his legs, shoes still touching, like a cross-section of a concertina, and raised his hand. He waved it, luxuriating in the gesture, and my interviewer said, Oh, okay then, very quick, because we have to wrap up.
Here we go, I thought.
Some context.
During the event there were readings performed by an actress. One passage from little scratch that she read included this moment:
The man in the audience – over a duration of 40 seconds with more clauses than was necessary and in such a way that even though I was being asked the question it still took a while to seize the opportunity to answer – asked:
Surely a man can say to a woman ‘nice shoes’ and not mean anything by it? Surely a man can say nice shoes to a woman and only mean that she has nice shoes?
Sometimes, in the writing of little scratch, I’d imagine these questions, the eyebrows raised to the hairline, the reflex. The extract that was read by the actress goes on to explain more; to infer the problems of nuance, the ways in which something seemingly innocent can be foggy. But it didn't matter, because some people wouldn't hear that part. All they would hear is the fear: a man cannot do this, a man cannot do this, a man cannot do this. They hear a hypothetical sacrifice of power. And they will carry it with them until at the last moment they will raise their hand with a question they don’t believe they actually need the answer to, affronted by what they have decided they heard.
So it happened. The questioner I had imagined. The sort of question that often in the writing of little scratch I would make my protagonist field. And internally my reaction wasn't Fuck off or Fuck's sake but Here we go: practice. It’ll happen again, but now it has happened and I know I can answer1.
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If you live in the UK may I offer my sympathies for the kind of weather that feels like a practical joke. Yes the English like to talk about the weather but maybe that’s because English weather has a genuine mood: and it forces itself on you.
The pandemic has caused me to be online more which in turn has caused me to read more tweets which in turn has caused me to learn more about bougie aspirational living which in turn has caused me to learn the names of more flowers which in turn has meant that since this time last year I have known about the existence of peonies, a flower that allows you to witness a life cycle. A tightly wrapped gobstopper unfurls into layers of tissue paper, ordered deeply-perfumed chaos with raspberry ripple edging.
During the pandemic, when time can feel stuck, I've relied on watching the changing of seasons, the trees, the birdsong, growth and loss. I've felt at times dependent on that. But now, with the weather pretending to be November, a bad November, I've instead been watching these magic-trick flowers, sitting in a jug on our table. And that is why Twitter isn’t all bad.
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This week I came across a piece by Bruce Nauman from 1966, entitled ‘Self-portrait as a fountain’.
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I wrote a short story for The Fence and it is now online. It’s in print in their issue 7, which is available to buy here. It’s called ‘The Nothing Game’.
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On Tuesday I am doing an online event on writing trauma and the body with Daye (a female health platform on a ‘mission to bridge the gender pain gap in medical research and product innovation’). It’ll be a general session, for those interested in writing and those not. I’ll give a couple of writing prompts in the second half. This is not an #ad, but yes, you can call me an influencer.
And what did I say? I told him yes, a man can say nice shoes, of course they can, as it says in the passage. The problem is that though we like to draw lines around behaviour, intention and action are separate, and innocent action can be used as a front. In short, ‘nice shoes’ can be a cover. It's not the compliment that is at fault, it's the man wielding it for the wrong reason. [The trouble is, I don’t think he was listening.] [I didn’t point out that he was performing a comparable language exercise: he asked a simple question, but it wasn’t asked simply, it wasn’t asked for the answer. It was a cover.]