All Washed Up

 

I so rarely go into the town centre, but I did today.

I sign the petition, I don’t stand to listen to the preacher with his, ‘So he died for us, right? The flash cards on his board. I hate the way he cheats those that listen of choice by his slick words, ‘Right?’ knowing that they are boxed in and can not say, ‘Wrong’ because he’s given them no choice.

The police are burly, not from good dinners, but are fat with stab vests and bright yellow jackets beneath black buckles and straps. And I wonder when they changed. The policemen in my childhood didn’t look so. It now looks a scary job to patrol the streets and when I look from them to the people the people look scary too.

There is a young boy being led away. He looks rough. His clothes greys and thin with hints of blue. And then, this is false memory now, a boy with a graze to his chin who looks as if he’s been in a fight. Was he the one being held by the two police as he were a trophy cup? Later I see that he is limping, but his face says that he can still only think of walking back in the direction of more even trouble like that.

Everyone is ugly.

They are squat or fat or flabby. They sit on rough seats on the main street their skin holding too much flesh; and they eat bread rolls too big for human mouths, but which might have made a nice lunch for a giant.

The library is perhaps the most frightening place.

I rarely go there.

There is someone who is not quite right somewhere telling his life story to the air. The book which was there when I went on line, is not there upon the shelves; and when I check the computer’s catalogue it seems it was never there.

The person behind the desk is harassed.

He dashes first this way and then that. Too quick. Too rushed. Overloaded with queries and the accusations of the malcontents. The library seems to have lost most of its books together with its peace and slow, slow ways. It is now too many things. And people are impatient. Impatient with computers. I am just about to use one when I’m turned away.

The librarian has to go here first to do this, and then rushes there to do that, and the people he is dealing with are becoming ruder and unkind. As the mad man who is not quite right recounts his life story as if we are all his counsellors. A man rips a child away from a computer and roughly dangles him by the arm. He does the same thing later dragging him away from a keyboard and screen. The librarian who is there laudably says there is no need to shout at him. But the man ignores him and later ignores the child, no more than four, who is soon back again touching the keyboard.

And I want to rescue all the children I see from their smoking pushchair moms and their rough, stupid dads, but I know I would already be too late. And I think we’ve bred an ugly generation of people with worse still to come. When I see them they seem ungovernable and unreachable worse than the Elizabethan crowds that gaped at Tyburn.

There is no library card in the books any more, and of course when I try to use the machine to check out a book, it just does not work. And someone has to show me that first it’s this bar code and then it is that bar code. And I miss the person who once stamped the books and slipped the cards.

It’s all too busy and too stressed. It’s going to get worse I’m told. And even in the street I hear people talking about the cuts.

I buy a melon, bananas, avocado, strawberries and then find the music shop to buy an electric top E guitar string.

There is such peace in the music shop. Such quietude. It is an oasis. I tell him so, but he doesn’t seem to understand that beyond his door the world has become crazier and mad.

That there is a tide of people who will only wash up against his door.