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Frank GoodmanCARE She takes hold of my arm as I’m about to cross the road, it’s a gentle touch, almost like a lover’s, a mother’s. There’s something in that gentleness stops me from walking on. Even though I know what’s coming next. Around us the busy, West End junction is angry with cars. It’s a brutal junction, the one where Shaftesbury Avenue joins High Holborn, one that goes about its rush hour function with considerable vigour, so that you can taste the aggression in the leaded air. I try to think if I’ve seen her there before but I’m not sure. There have been so many at that corner over the many mornings of my passing, angry, despairing, asleep. Sometimes diffidently waving battered copies of last week’s Big Issue, sometimes just slumped against the wall. “Do you know what epilepsy is?” she asks. And I do, Janet taught me all about that. Janet was my girlfriend of some six months duration, some twenty five years ago. Going out with Janet was like walking around with an unexploded bomb on your arm. The countdown to the next fit had always begun. I could never relax in her company. Her very laughter seemed to contain the beginnings of the shrieks that would be the herald for an eye-rolling, teeth gnashing petit mal. I’m only brave short-term, “petit courage’”show me something that can’t be resolved in that particular period and I’m a coward. ‘Well I’ve just had an attack,’ the girl continues, “and I need to get home – but - I haven’t got any money. I need £5.80 to get home. Can you help?” Money. What other help could she possibly have wanted? We move back onto familiar ground. I’m thinking about asking her how she became so impoverished, while living in Guildford and all, but know that would just be me acting like a smart ass. I look at her face then. She’s lying of course, not about the attack perhaps, but about the need to get home, about the fact she has a home. That look at her face tells me that despite her panhandler’s cunning she’s in a bad way, thin hollow cheeks, rotting teeth, yellow sickly skin. Her slight shivering could be post epileptic fit, but could also be early drug withdrawal. She’s probably only about 22-23 but it’s hard to tell, though something in her speaks clearly of being in early youth, and there are mournful traces of one-time attractiveness of a now lost pretty girl. My city-hardened heart is un-typically softened. She still thinks she’s going to be ok, I realise, thinks this is just a phase on the way to somewhere else, somewhere better. Probably the last thing this girl really needs is £5.80, but I’m in no position to give her anything else, anything more. A secure future, A regular job, A lesson in living – me? I think not. It’s that or nothing. We make eye contact then, and somehow I see myself through her eyes. See myself with a terrible clarity. She looks startled, as if she has felt something too. I reach into my pocket. “Here’s £5.00,” I say. Too much, not quite enough, but I’m not giving it to get her off my back. It won’t make me feel any better. “Guildford is £5.80,” she reminds me. Perhaps she did live there once, perhaps even in poncey, stockbroker Merrow or maybe its that she’s just not ready to give up on the chance of another 80p. Nonetheless I have my own wily ego positions to defend. “It’s all I’ve got on me,” I lie. She takes the note from my hand with a rueful smile, she knows I don’t believe her, she doesn’t believe me. So we lie - but there’s strange honesty in our deceit, for all that. We are not only the sum of all our failures but of everyone else’s failures too, whether we like it or not. So we’d better get used to it, I guess. Then she leans forward and kisses me, lightly on the cheek, it’s a disarming gesture, something beautifully absurd. ‘Take care," I say. Realising how ridiculous, how inadequate the phrase is. Then I walk, I don’t look back.  Frank Goodman is a playwright and author. A short story of Frank’s appears in Tales of the Decongested Vol 1, alongside stories by Ali Smith and Nicholas Royle. Frank will be appearing with fellow writers at Foyles on June 30th at 7.00pm on the Second Floor, and at The Cella Bar in the Sanctuary Café in Brighton on July 10th. 10:16 PM - 4/6/2006 - post comment
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