What Doesn’t Kill Us by Close Ajay

Author:Close, Ajay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2024-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Charmaine

That was the first of the rampage nights. Charmaine had missed the window smashing at Christmas, so the euphoria was new to her. Running down the middle of the road in a pack, forcing the drivers to brake and turn and head the other way. The apprehension in the eyes of the men they passed, the outrage of the BBC commissionaire in his ridiculous peaked cap. The damage they did was minimal, a few cracked windows, the cinema toilets, porn magazines filched from WH Smith and burned on the pavement, the door of the register office sprayed with YBA WIFE? At worst, these gestures gave some lowly (probably female) employee a morning’s inconvenience ringing a plumber or locksmith or scrubbing at the graffiti. But as Rowena said, they weren’t trying to bring patriarchy to its knees, merely to purge the submissive little women in themselves. The trick was to remain alert to the first quiver of reluctance or embarrassment, and then to do precisely what you shrank from, meeting the fear head-on.

‘And what are you afraid of?’ Charmaine asked later. ‘Apart from running out of Rizlas. Oh, I know. Consciousness raising.’

Unnerved by the silence, she said, ‘I’m joking.’

Rowena gave her an unfriendly look. ‘Don’t push your luck.’

They went out once a week, mostly to the Cardigan Arms or a pub by the river run by a pair of big-bottomed ex-prison officers who bullied their male customers in a joshing way Rowena enjoyed. At the white-walled wine bar Charmaine preferred, she was always twitchy and glowering. ‘Too many pseuds and poseurs.’ Being seen by pseuds and poseurs was precisely what appealed to Charmaine, but she didn’t really mind where they went, as long as they put on a show for each other.

Monday evenings in Rowena’s room offered a different kind of excitement. Sprawled on the bed or the settee, talking about music or films or books or – frequently – sex. Why men were so excited by the idea that touching another human being was dirty. How crudely capitalist sex was in the west. The more off-putting women found the activity, the more avidly it was craved by men – a whole tariff of perversions ranked by the law of supply and demand. And if sometimes these discussions tipped into a lecture, Charmaine could pull back to her mind’s eye and see the room and the two of them so intimate together, Rowena’s feet in her lap, while Nina Simone muttered and crooned her way through that Janis Ian song she was going to use in an installation one day. Janis’s rhymes so whimsical and throwaway and suddenly, joltingly, heartfelt. Nina’s voice like a shrug with tears in its eyes. Eventually Rowena would run out of things to say, and then they would kiss.

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