The Man is adamant. He is not angry. “No, I am not angry,” he snorts. “How preposterous!”
The Boy looks at him with open contempt. Not because the statement is false – the Boy has long since ceased to be surprised by falsity – but because it is so obviously and lazily false. The Boy knows there are many ways of hurting people.
And skinning cats.
Vicky bristles in a room not a million miles away. Not so smug any more, are we, the Boy thinks as he kicks a ball against a wall for the trillionth time. “If not more,” he notes, for the record.
The Boy is the one who stood on football pitches with the extraordinary, almost holy certainty that he would fight anyone. Bigger boys, teachers, fathers, boys with mothers. He was not frightened of them. There is a kind of intoxication in righteous anger when you are young and full of humiliations too small and too frequent to describe. It provides an enemy.
The Man has spent much of his adult life pretending he had outgrown this. He learned the approved forms of civilisation. He learned to speak in complete sentences. More or less. He learned irony and politics and history and all the other adult batshit.
The Boy despises him for this.
There was the football match in a park, years later. A municipal pitch somewhere in Warsaw. The Man remembers feeling old and ridiculous and foreign and somehow cheated. Work not working, marriage not working, Poland not working.
The boy who injured him – or he says injured him, because even now he prefers the grammar in which things happen to him first – was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, all insolent ease, effortless swagger.
The tackle itself had been ordinary. A clipped ankle, a small sting of pain. The sort of thing that happens 200 times in a match. What the Man remembers with unbearable clarity is not the tackle but the seconds afterwards. The feeling rising inside him with extraordinary speed and purity. The old conviction. There is the enemy. There is the thing that has been making me feel this way. Young, careless, smug, unbroken.
Then the tackle back.
He tells himself, even now, that he did not mean it. This is perhaps true in a legal sense. He did not consciously decide to break the boy’s ankle. He went in late and hard. There was the horrible sound – not dramatic, not cinematic, simply the small, intimate crack of another person’s body – and then the cries afterwards and that dreadful collective intake of breath when everyone on the pitch understands at once what has happened and who has done it.
The Boy remembers feeling almost triumphant.
The Man remembers only shame.
But even now, if he is honest, beneath the shame there remains another feeling, darker and more difficult. Satisfaction. Not at the injury itself, which disgusts him, but at the fact that for one brief second the feeling inside him had become visible. The world had finally seen what he carried around. Not sadness. Not intelligence. Not sensitivity. Rage.
Lacan is driving the ambulance on to the field of play. Of course he is. “This is where enjoyment becomes ugly and excessive: jouissance. But, basically, you behaved like a total cunt,” he tells the Man while lifting the boy, one two, three, lift, into the back of the white van.
The same rage had already appeared elsewhere.
He told the story as if it were an accident, which it partly was. The mug hit the ceiling first. That matters enormously to him. It proves something. It proves he did not throw it at her. He threw it upwards, away, into the air, because he is not that kind of man. Except that this is precisely the sort of distinction made by men who desperately need not to be that kind of man.
She said something. He cannot remember what. He only remembers the feeling of being seen and diminished at the same moment, of hearing in her voice not merely criticism but judgment, and beneath judgment something even more intolerable: accuracy.
The mug left his hand before the sentence had finished.
The truth is that for a fraction of a second he wanted to throw something. Wanted the violence of the gesture. Wanted the room to register the size of the feeling. The mug hit the ceiling with a crack, changed direction and caught the side of her head. Not hard enough to injure her seriously. But hard enough.
The silence afterwards was worse than shouting would have been. O touching her head, looking at him with a mixture of disbelief and exhausted contempt. The children upstairs. The mug in pieces on the floor. And him, already rushing toward apology, explanation, self-hatred, as if the speed of his remorse might somehow erase the desire that had preceded it.
The Boy refuses this. He knows that shame is not innocence.
And then there is M.
He spent so long turning her into a love story, a tragedy, an encounter, a symptom, a fantasy, a question, that he has almost succeeded in hiding from himself one of the ugliest truths beneath it. The invitation to the house while O was away. The message sent into the empty space: come over, have a drink, just talk, nothing dramatic, nothing intended. He dressed it in all the usual language of innocence and complexity and feeling. But underneath the longing there was also fury. Fury at his marriage. Fury at being left. Fury at being unseen. Fury at O for withholding.
The Boy knows this. The Boy has always known. And the terrible thing, the thing the Man still cannot entirely accept, is that the Boy is right.
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