People spoke of spring coming early, but in reality it was always summer. Or perhaps there were now only two seasons: a breathable summer and an unbreathable summer. The seasons we knew had not gone out of whack or become dislocated, but had rather disappeared altogether. Seasons had become contingent events.
When I got home from work I lay in bed with the book I was reading splayed open beside my pillow. Almost everyone I have worked with had lived a childhood distorted by unsupportable weights, cruelties enacted in secret. Speaking of these things was, in effect, to speak the thoughts of the children who had been so brutalised.
Their thoughts were often surprisingly clear, and could be frightening in their dissection of adult life. It was like discovering that the butchers in an abattoir were five years old, armed with bloody flensing knives and possessed of a gaze that accurately assesses one’s mercantile value down to the last ounce of fat.
Those that confide in me have this unnerving capacity to spot the slightest deviation in my attention, the merest shadow of expression, continually reading me reading them, and offering commentary as if I were a palimpsest whose subject matter was their interior life.
The child in distress is very often calling for help on behalf of everyone else in the family. In the same way, I began to think of those who have experienced violence and abuse as calling for help on behalf of the rest of us, using whatever materials they have to hand, all the bits of junk from which they feel their life is built.
But the person who has experienced an unbearable trauma lives at the heart of our life, because violence, dispossession, alienation and abandonment are the true markers of our history. There is no-one who is not touched by them and no-one who can avoid or deny them. And those who believe they can are often the most violent and disturbed of us all like the relentless summer refusing to come to an end. It lingered, refusing to die, becoming something a little rachitic, but still baleful.
