I am not registered in Panama
Repulsing the repulsive
I’m serious. I couldn’t, in the moment, remember the fellow’s name, even though he’d invented a buzzword that had echoed around the world ever since he’d coined it.
“Philip?”
“No, Anthony, actually. (I’ve changed his name to avoid him … unnecessary embarrassment. Nice, eh?) Don’t you remember, we acted in a play together?” said he, ebulliently.
“It was quite a few years ago.”
“Coriolanus, you remember!”
“I know that one of the two of us could remember his lines.”
And, with that, the conversation was ended. I have a talent for repulsing people, and they rarely are wrong when they twig they’re being repulsed. If they went away and thought about it as much as they think about supposed good times from years gone by, so clever, smart and intelligent as they are, they would tumble to the reason why they were repulsed.
I’d sat at this man’s lunch table on two occasions. And I’d flat-sat his wife’s cat over Christmas and New Year a few years back. The lady wife had directed a play for which I’d auditioned and for which I was turned down because of my lack of homogeneity with the rest of the cast. As she put it, I was too good for them.
I’d asked her to contribute to an appeal I had raised. She said she would think about it. Either she’s a slow thinker or she stopped thinking about it. Ten quid was all I wanted.
The year previous to the homogenous play, I had got embroiled in a heated argument with the proprietor of a theatre where a play was being put on by a Spanish theatre group. Not for myself, but because I felt injustice was being wreaked upon the Spanish director of this Spanish play.
I had designed, built and delivered to the theatre four scenery whirly-gigs: ingenious, safe, beautifully painted by a Romanian genius of the arts, who’d unfortunately painted the wrong side of one piece of timber in which a door was inserted. When I went to paint the correct side, the theatre proprietor forbade it. So I told her what I thought of her great contribution to amateur dramatics: overbearing hegemony. Several years later, the council turfed her out and I was vindicated, but everyone had long since forgotten that incident.
Except the play director, the wife of Anthony. Who not only turned me down for the part but, because the play was to be performed at the self-same theatre, I was prohibited from even buying a ticket. How difficult it was to refrain from that act.
Said lady separately approached me yesterday with a Covid mask over her face. She was ill and didn’t want to spread germs. My conversation with her husband was short enough to not permit me to issue the interrogative to him: how come he wasn’t wearing a mask as well? It is not enough to simply stay at home in order not to communicate communicable diseases: one must mask up and show the world one’s virtue at protecting it from the communicable diseases that the mask probably doesn’t prevent the spread of one iota.
The man who presides over the group that put on the play I was in with Anthony and the play that Anthony’s wife put on without me was also there. He had recently, via a third-party intervention, returned to me a salad bowl that he had taken possession of a full 12 months ago. He’d photographed it (he photographs everything) and e-mailed the pic to me with the simple enquiry “Is this yours?” I felt like I felt in the school’s Martin Hall when I was munching some messy candy looking at the rugby results when I was 15. The stentorian voice of the bursar, indicating a dropped candy: “They’re yours!” Army colonel, wouldn’t you know.
“Yes,” I’d replied (in relation to the bowl). I’d asked for it when at his home in June and he’d told me to go into his cupboard and find it. To be honest, I’d considered that infra dig, but if he’d had any lead crystal in there, I might just have laid claim to it, for his sass. Anyhow, he finally set to and looked for the bowl he’d commandeered the previous December. “I can’t think how I came to have it!” he said.
“You didn’t come to have it; you requested it, with the salad that was in it to boot. For your damned party. Where are the salad servers?”
“Salad servers? What are salad servers?” You do groan, sometimes, don’t you?
He used to head up a major corporation and work for a government, so I know he’s got a head on his shoulders. So, if he ever reads this, he’ll be able to figure out why he got repulsed. Not because of a salad bowl, or salad servers or even for having a slip of the memory. But because all that tends to point to a friendship of convenience. And I’m not registered in Panama.