The word came out before there was time to censor it. Top shelf hardcore. A full frontal wrapped in plastic. A grotesque horror show.
“Fucking hell,” the Editor said.
The Editor, whose entire professional dignity rested on his ability to arrive before anything improper became irrevocable, was hiding under the table, huddled next to the Boy, Lacan, the cat and whoever else happened to be passing.
“Fuck off, you Polish cunt, I said,” the Man said.
“Yes, we heard that. Probably the whole street did too,” the Editor said.
The body froze. No insight followed. Nothing in the room stepped forward with a clipboard: ah yes, the breakthrough. No chapter entitled ‘catharsis.’ Only the sentence itself. Said. Not original, not even particularly satisfying. But said. Made public.
He is talking to himself again, looking in a mirror, a brief foray into psychosis. A weak, sad, rather pathetic figure stares back. “Happy now?” it says.
Travis Bickle pops up over his shoulder in the mirror. “Yes, I am looking at you,” he says, casually.
O watches him as if a dybbuk had entered the body of her erstwhile English husband.
But.
What usually happened next did not happen. For once he did not immediately make a public appeal, demand rescue through shame, justification evaporated. The ‘it-wasn’t-me’ game that people play. Or what his stepmother might call ‘look-what-you-made-me-do’ syndrome.
The time he punched his – English – father in the face appeared now. Then was immediate apology, backtracking. Followed by exit. Excommunicated, for good. Banished.
The Editor at last got up from under the table, assessed the situation with professional disgust and said the only thing he could honestly say.
“That’s not usable. We cut, hope no one remembers and move on,” he says.
A pause.
The Boy, still unable to breathe properly, answers with surprising clarity, still under the table.
“I don’t care if it’s usable. It happened.”
O is in the hands of Klaudyna now. Stitches not needed. Blood mopped.
Outside, a nation continues. Poles had been called worse. A dog barked. Somewhere a leaf blower started blowing leaves.
At the same time, in a shop not so far far away, a shop assistant assisted a foreigner in excellent English. As his British customer leaves, the assistant mutters under his breath:
“Spierdalaj, pizdu.”
The man who doesn’t speak hears.
Fuck off, cunt.
So, there it is, Lacan says. The Other – the enemy, the thing we can’t handle internally externalised.
“Not racism exactly. Not even hatred. Something smaller, pettier and more embarrassing: the fantasy that one could take all the chaos inside oneself and staple it to a nation.”
The Man looks again at the mirror. “If it’s out there, in a mass form, there is no culprit,” he says to himself. The lake, the mirror, and the squirrels are unmoved.
“I am becoming Trump,” the Man whispers. “The horror, the horror.”
Build the wall. Deport the neighbours. Ban the language.
The Boy looked at him with genuine alarm.
“You know you sound mental, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said the Man.
This was perhaps the lowest point. Because it was ridiculous. The Man had become one of those men in pubs and comment sections constructing an entire political philosophy out of the fact that he had not been loved properly and could not pay his bills.
He had always despised populism and thought it belonged to other people. Stupid people. Provincial people. Men with flags and theories about migrants.
And here it was.
In him.
“You see,” Lacan said. “It does not want understanding. It wants an object.”
Not strength. Not masculinity. Not authority.
Pain wanting an object.
He remembered golf with Karl. Karl, who believed feelings should be approached the way an army approaches unexploded munitions.
“Never let a woman see uncertainty,” Karl had said once while missing a three-foot putt with catastrophic aggression.
The word cunt returned to the Man now with fresh ugliness.
A revenge fantasy against dependence, female judgment, against the humiliating fact of needing tenderness while despising oneself for needing it.
And that was the real humiliation.
The toads heard movement. Their ears pricked up. Or would have had they had any.
At last.
At long bloody last.
The right to feel hard done by. The right to stop understanding.
One toad leaned over to the Man.
“And what have the Romans ever done for us?” he says.
The Man looked around.
Poland. The actual Poland. Not the allegorical one.
And suddenly the list became impossible to maintain.
Children. Friends. Work. Language. Books. Lakes. Journalism. Conversations. Kindnesses. Rescues.
Poland had given him almost everything, the Man realises with shame. A language he still spoke badly but which had nevertheless let him speak.
The Man looked embarrassed.
The toads became uneasy. One cleared its throat. Another adjusted a tiny Union Jack.
This was not in the script.
The Man looked out toward the lake.
The Boy looked up.
“So what now?”
The Man looked at the lake. For a long time.
Then said: “I am an English cunt and increasingly less proud of that fact.” And for once nobody had anything clever to add.
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