Fragments
of a conversation involving the pavement cafe’s adjacent patrons, both voices
both audible and not on account of table service, passing traffic, and general
ambient noise:
cog:
She’s the youngest?
cog
(smiling): Yes, she’s my youngest. She’s, well, she’s about to become a
midwife, she graduates at the end of next month
cog:
God that’s, I can’t believe it.
cog:
My aunt was a, well, this was my mum’s sister, except we didn’t, for a long
time we didn’t know she was her sister, we were told they were just friends,
but she was a midwife. Actually, that’s... Even that’s not strictly
true, I think she just helped them out, but she was... God, that’s going back
now...
cog:
No, no no no, she ehm, she, there was a... God it’s awful this is, but there
was a
lifting
her cup, but not drinking from it
cog:
an... incident at the hospital, this is
cog:
You don’t, do you mean the shootings? She was
cog
(frowning, nodding): How do you know about that?
and
then more quietly
cog:
Yeah, that was ehm, she was there, that was, she was actually in the
room when that happened, yeah. Just...
cog:
Oh God no, I mean, I don’t even think I was born at that point, but my
mum told me about it later. She she would go and visit her, but we weren’t
allowed to go, well, we, I met her a few times and then, but, and we
knew there was something, we didn’t know what it was, we just knew she was
Mum’s... friend that was a bit weird.
cog:
And then of course if you think about it you can imagine there was that whole
thing of why did she survive? I think there may well have been en- an enormous
sense of guilt that she, and also that feeling that if you survive something
like that you should be, you can’t just live um um, you can’t just be wasting
your life like everyone else who maybe takes it more for granted, you know what
I mean? Watching tv, and whatever... You should be doing something,
anything, that
cog:
No, I mean at that point I remember she didn’t have any of her own kids, and
not... There was a guy at one point, and they came to... Huh, that’s,
name’s gone completely. God what was his name? I remember he was really,
I was going to say really tall but when you’re that age everyone seems
really tall.
Laughs.
cog:
How would you, how could you live after something like that?
cog
(shrugs): But people do though. People do. I mean, people have gone off
to war and witnessed, just... unspeakable atrocities, and that’s um,
that’s like a way of life, something, a daily thing. And they come back
and
cog:
Yeah but don’t you think, aren’t those people in some way fundamentally broken?
You can’t ever unsee that sor-, well, anything actually.
cog:
Hypnosis?
cog
(snapping fingers): Point!
cog:
And what about the eh, whatever happened to the mother? The woman who
cog:
No idea, I’ve no idea, she never, well, it’s not like she never said, she never
said anything. Everything I got I got from Mum, and what she knew she
knew only, she only knew because the police had to tell the family what had
happened, I mean, they couldn’t not explain the trauma. But eh, even
then, she was told, she wasn’t told everything, it was just um...
Starting
again,
cog:
I think the whole thing was sort of buried, the the the police didn’t want the,
I don’t know. Whatever it was, the reason anyway, it was disappeared,
completely.
cog:
The mother was
