10 minute read
RECENT EVENTS by AJ Concannon
Recent Events by AJ Concannon
I’m wondering if I should risk a shower, but I can’t decide, see it’s the people next door, this dog outside, barking, they keep it tied up outside and it barks just keeps barking morning noon and night, rowf rowf rowf, drive you absolutely mental. I would say something but one look at you and they panic, bloody foreigner at the door, saying something about the dog in his mangled Japanese, I think he wants to take it for a walk or something and I probably would, you know, take the thing for a walk, I’m that much of a pushover. Walking with the yapping Shiba, it would become a regular event, you know, I would go round to shoot the bloody thing and end up taking it for a walk and picking up its poo.
I put the TV on to drown out the dog and Hiroshi Kume is in full flow, incredulous, something about the little boy, the head on the school gates, and after the sarin gas and the earthquake these recent events have him stunned.
And I am getting wound up by the barking as well as thinking about recent events with herself and the phone goes. I don’t snatch at it because then you’re too keen, and she knows, you see, she can tell you’ve been sitting by the phone waiting for her to call. So I let it ring a couple times and answer very nonchalant, you know, very me answering the phone as a regular event, you know, which it certainly is not, not in this house.
It’s a woman but not her. I can’t hear who it is over the yapping and Kume’s outraged tones but I know it’s not her. And I’m really wound up now. Then I realize it’s this company who phone me up now and again, to check their English tests, all these tests they send out to hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, to rearrange these bizarre sentences; ‘You‘re right, we don’t have enough tangerines’, and they pay me seriously daft money to tell them it’s grammatically correct but nobody would say it. And they hate when I tell them that, but it’s true. They tell me I should comment only on structure, but I just happen to come from a land where we speak English, you know, they want to ask real teachers about that. And even if I could tell them they wouldn’t get it, they are all History and Literature graduates and stuff, you know, except the one who is on the phone just now competing with the Shiba and Kume for my attention, she graduated in Life & Culture or some such nonsense. They did have one who spoke good English for a while, but they moved her to Domestic Science.
And we’ve done the preliminaries and she’s asking me about ‘acceptable.’ I love this acceptable, I argued for hours about it once with them, ‘Acceptable to who?’ I kept asking but they just agreed and kept repeating my own questions to me. “’She is honest’ is acceptable?” she says. And I’m wondering if this is some kind of ironic comment on my private life and recent events but I let it pass, my persecution complex acting up again.
“Acceptable.”
“And ‘She is honesty’ is acceptable?”
“Not acceptable.”
“But honesty is a noun,” she says.
And I’m thinking to tell her that shite is brown but what’s that got to do with the price of mince? But she never met my granny and probably wouldn’t comprehend her profound sense of irony. “It is,” I tell her, confident. The nouns I am good at, the doing words and describers I tend to struggle on.
And there is a silence. Even the dog. But Kume’s still talking. He’s going on about the age of the boy, the fact that he was only fourteen. I thought he was eight, but no.
“So, ‘She is just’ is acceptable?”
And again the reply ‘not in my book’ forms in my head, based on recent events.
“Okay,” I tell her.
“So ‘She is justice.’ Acceptable?”
“Only in a kind of abstract, superhero sense, you know, like if she is Wonder Woman, you know?”
I’m feeling quite proud of that answer. The mutt disagrees and starts up again.
“Sorry?”
“Not acceptable,” I tell her.
And again, there is a silence.
“Thank you,” she says, and thanks me three or four more times, and apologizes for bothering me, and by the time we hang up the Shiba is in lung-bursting form, really howling at the heavens now, and I want a shower, but it would be my luck for her to ring while I’m in there. The flex is long but when I try taking the phone to the shower it doesn’t stretch anywhere close to the bathroom door. And it’s cold, I’m not wanting to be on the phone in the hall wet from the shower, and freezing cold, you know.
But I really need a shower, it's been four days, and I put the hot water on so the shower fills up with steam and it's not so cold when you go in. And I'm in, but the towel is outside so I open the door to get it and the blast of cold air cuts right through you. I hang the towel up and start soaping up. The water pressure is not great, it's an old building and the shower head holder is level with my shoulder, put in when even the natives were smaller, although they sit down in the shower, so perhaps not. And I've got a plastic holder glued on the tiles above. I had to get my brother to send over the superglue specially. “All they hi-fis and computers and they can't make superglue?” he said. “A mystery right enough.”
See I shave in the shower but there is no mirror in there. I had a great wee disposable razor, single blade, shaved with it for three months. It's great how that happens sometimes, you'll go months using razors that cut you to pieces, then you'll get one you can just keep on using. I had to stop because I let the growth go for three days, and it was too blunt to handle it, hurt like hell. I had to go half-shaved to the convenience store at Sannomiya Center Gai for a new packet. And they only had these twin blades, I'm not keen on them, but it worked fine. I threw the other one out but that was stupid I should have kept it and went back to it after the twin blade handled the three-day stuff.
Standing there naked with the hot water coming down, you get all worked up, you know, and I'm thinking of her naked in here beside me, it's been a while, but the recent events come to mind and I calm down a wee bit and start shaving. Like I say I don't like the twin blade, and they are worse the second day. And the only thing worse than a second day twin blade is a second day twin blade on a swivel head. Whoever thought that up should be shot. Fits the contours of your face? Only if your face looks like the side of a cliff, and if it doesn't it soon will after the swivel head has a go at it. Before you know it, I've cut my throat. Pretty bad. The blood running down the razor onto my fingers and dripping onto the floor. Bloodshed and recent events. I am seeing signs everywhere. The facecloth is red so the stains don't show up. But the bleeding won't stop. And I've got grazes and cuts on my legs from recent events that start to hurt now they are being washed, and the bleeding won't stop, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to say to her on this bloody phone, she won't meet me, she loves that phone, and we talk, and what do we say we talk about this and we talk about that we just talk talk talk and we get nothing, it leads nowhere.
So I dry off but I forget the blood and the white towel has got blotches of red, it's streaked through with it, and it's a good one, the big fluffy Sailor Moon job. And with the water off I can hear the yapping Shiba and something else, I'm pulling the t-shirt over my head, trying to keep it away from the blood on my neck, and the towel tied round the waist, and I can hear, under the dog, the phone going, and I'm out and across the kitchen floor, but the answering machine is on and it's my voice followed by another, and Kume is saying that the killer was fourteen, I thought it was the victim, but no, my Japanese isn’t great but I’m sure he’s saying they’ve arrested a 14-year-old boy, the head on the school gates, he was only eight right enough, and Kume’s outraged, going on about children killing children, trembling earth, sarin gas attacks and children killing children, what have we come to he asks, and I’m thinking about this as I'm running past the fridge and the fridge cartwheels into the air, but then I realize it's me, and I land on my backside but my leg shoots out and my ankle cracks the corner of the door jamb, crushes the bloody thing, the wood splinters, and there is a wee blank in time and then pain, the leg broken, lying there, wanting to touch it, but scared to, and my throat bleeding on the tatami now, and I pick up the phone, she hasn't hung up, she's still talking. And she realizes the machine is gone and it's me now, a person, she's talking to a real person.
“’She is right’ is acceptable?” she says.
I'm on my back and the leg, dear God, twitching now, the damp towel in the cold, the blood streaking the towel, throat like a butcher's dustbin, and the yapping Shiba going bananas next door, and Kume is, I think, crying, sobbing on live TV, but I'm elsewhere, on recent events, and I want to say “She's always right, that's the problem.” And then I think I have, you know, said it, kind of spoken the words out loud.
And there is a silence.
