There is usually a very real purpose, however useful or otherwise, for our doing things. There is always a stimulus for every action. Nothing we do ever happens just because. In fact, there are no ‘just becauses’ as far as our actions are concerned. If you have the patience to dig deep enough you will find a small root squirming at the bottom of every deed. The truth is, these days, you don’t even have to dig very much, everything is just below the surface; pathetically close to it actually. So there is little need to look very deep. Patience is usually where we fall short- then and now, this hasn’t changed much. But that is about actions.
Reactions are different. Quite often logic will abandon either a person or a situation or sometimes (if you are very unlucky) both and create a strange void. Little concerning absolutes, assurances or even limitation is present in such voids.
Where logic is absent much of everything becomes quite possible, reachable and attainable because the thought behind actions suddenly evaporates. There is no stimulus, no cause to do things. I suppose everything is in limbo, even people, because everything is possible. Childhood, the first days of love and the intoxication of success can most often turn everything into a crazed maze of one possibility after the next. There are days in all our lives when such overwhelming successes, especially those that come after much delay, deceive us into a trap of invincibility. And for a while everything really is possible, people really are invincible. But although invincibility may not be conquered, deception will be. That is the way of things.
The places we travel to after our invincibility fails us are alien in their sights and smells and sounds. But the sincerity of emotion that beckons us there, that comforts us after our glorious fall in those unknown places is always the same. For most, falling from grace leaves deep wounds and the feeling that comforts us there stings and heals like all good balms. It is the familiar feeling of ordinariness, of loss, of pity and pain; but mostly it is the familiar feeling of believing in abridged dreams and chances.
When Karuna fell asleep the plastic watch read 12:10. She had no idea of how tired or how late it was when she woke up. But when she did the little fluorescent colon blinked between 18 hours and 23 minutes. She began to fumble about, wanting to turn the key in the ignition but realized through her bleariness that she was already where she wanted to be. She rubbed her eyes and looked out at the thick clouds like stained, wispy cotton lowering over the supermarket parking lot and the sea beyond.
Everything was a thick dark grey, the clouds seemed to have lowered themselves far enough to seep into everything below them. The windows of her car were misty with her breath despite the small gap she had kept in the window. She wiped the side of her fist on a window, looked out and then breathed on it again. She watched her breath trickle down the window in little streams and suddenly wondered if the last ferry had left.
At about two in the afternoon Christian Mignot was in his dark room when his assistant asked him to take a call from his son Kramer’s school. Mignot, not a little annoyed at having been disturbed, took the call and found an admonishing voice inform him that Kramer’s mother had failed to pick him up and the child had been waiting for two hours but there was no sign of her. Christian asked to speak to the child but the woman just breathed into the receiver and asked him to come as soon as possible in a blunt huff. Before Christian could tell the woman of his circumstances, the state of his work, perhaps convince her of the nature of delays he was facing and the ire of magazine bosses before the fashion week and then plead with her to put Kramer in a taxi, or just drop him off herself, he heard the slow yet loud beep of a dead call.
Christian was under a lot of pressure already, he had said so to Karuna a thousand times over, and yet she left him to take care of such things. Why couldn’t she just pick the child up herself? Was that so difficult? Where was she? Christian felt somehow disabled, perhaps from the work, perhaps from the fear of losing his second lucrative commission, perhaps from guilt about the child and Karuna or perhaps because of the alcohol, he couldn’t be sure. He felt as if his fingers around the reins of everything were being slowly pried away. Not sure he could manage facing Kramer, Christian requested Michelle, his secretary, to pick him up as a final favour for the day and then shut the door of his dark room behind him.
Kramer, despite being only seven, had migraines fit for a forty-year old. It is an odd thing to see a child of seven writhing about on the back bench of a classroom full of seven year olds like a veteran alcoholic with a severe hangover. In fact, it is very distressing. His class teacher, M.elle Lassale, was petrified of Kramer when he moaned and writhed during one of his aches. Being a very devout woman, seeing so young a child in such obvious pain made her think, quite unwittingly, of very surreptitious hedonistic things. As a result she often gave little Kramer quick nervous looks from the corner of her eye. One can’t be sure what she expected to see or find missing. Perhaps she half expected a clear symptom of monstrosity in the child, perhaps a shadow or mark of some kind or perhaps she expected to find that the child had simply evaporated from amongst a classful of seven year olds.
Whatever it was that pretty M.elle Lassale expected never quite came about, thereby making her more nervous in Kramer’s presence. What came of her looks, however, was Kramer’s future at the small school right until the age of twelve. M.elle Lassale’s looks may not have yielded her the validation her pious mind sought for begrudging the young child his chronic aches, but they did chart Kramer’s journey through school. You see, although we adults tend to see little seven year olds as innocent little beings, harmless as a by-product of their innocence, in need of tutoring not only in the basics of mathematics, language and science but also in the ways of the world, we do not realise that there are some things they are quite capable of- such as very sharp observance, the best mimicry and a fantastic propensity for malice.
Whenever Kramer suffered from a migraine M.elle Lassale, an eternal sunny presence at the head of class in her curly bob of blonde hair and tweedy skirts, politely asked him to move to the back bench. Since Kramer’s aches had become quite regular since the odd disappearance of his mother (which, to M.elle Lassale’s eyes, only lent further credence to her fears) Kramer’s painful moans from the back of the class had become an almost predictable event in the class schedule. Ridiculously enough, the child was never administered a pain-killer. In fact, Kramer’s migraines plagued him until the age of forty, when they abruptly, and ironically, stopped.
Following M.elle Lassale’s example, the children too had become unnecessarily fearful of Kramer, headache or no headache. Their behaviour only proves what we loathe and know best about ourselves. There are few moments during our lives when our vociferous claims of being individuals are discounted more ridiculously than when we follow each other’s leads and turn into sheep. It only shows that as we learn this at so young an age, we almost cannot help but make it a way of life, almost. There are fewer moments when individuals feel better about themselves and their beliefs than when they are part of a large herd, and especially when the herd loves or loathes something as a collective.
And the herd of seven year olds loathed Kramer. They would shuffle around him, whisper through sly smiles, hiss through their milk teeth. They even made a game of it- they would challenge each other to poke him in the back and run before he could hit the culprit. When Kramer moved to the back of the class, the ones sitting nearest to the back bench would move away very obviously. A while later when they learnt how to tut, they would accompany their shuffling away with odd clacking and tutting, like little hens.
In a sense this was quite comedic. You may think that it is terrible to think of little Kramer’s suffering as a comedy, but a comedy it was, not despite the child but because of him. See, that is the thing about Kramer. Even at age seven what set him apart most from the other children wasn’t just the fact that he was the illicit prodigal son of a fashion photographer and model, or that he could speak three languages fluently while the rest struggled with one, or that he had strange black hair that poked out of his scalp like the end of a broomstick, or that he suffered violent migraines fit for a forty year old, but that he could see what a tremendous joke it was. At age seven, Kramer had a mind, but what’s more, he retained it through everything.
Kramer had recovered almost completely from his migraine when he saw Michelle, his father’s secretary, in the school foyer. Michelle, like most people within and on the periphery of Kramer’s small world, was beautiful. While Kramer waited in the school office he saw her walk into the foyer and make enquiries. Michelle was tall and had very long brown hair which she often wore loose. She had a long face and most prominent on it were very thick eyebrows over very thin eyes and big red lips. On that day, she was dressed in a yellow shirt, long black trousers and a black jacket. She wore a thick red bangle, like she had cored an apple and worn it around her wrist.
This was Kramer’s first active memory. Of course, there were singular disjointed images in his head that dated before this memory of Michelle, but this, the image of beautiful, tall, yellow black red Michelle waiting in the school foyer was the first memory Kramer could recall in all its subdued vibrancy.
Kramer joked later that having this as his first memory left bitter sweet tastes on the state of his conscience. On the one hand, he found the idea of having beautiful, tall, yellow black red Michelle as his first memory not a little exotic and just a little erotic; on the other, having Michelle load the film roll in his brain, so to speak, meant that Kramer remembered close to nothing of his mother. He told a friend once that he sometimes felt relief at not having his parents shape his early memories, since most of his memories after the one with Michelle involved other beautiful people, cameras, some animals and very bright lights. Kramer explained that he felt he had thus been unburdened from that which makes most of us wild and unstable with things like love, sex and ageing- the shadows of our parents imprinted on the images of our constant memory.
From the slats of the office door Kramer looked at Michelle talk to the woman at the foyer desk and then make her way toward him. The foyer and office had a glass roof and it being an early summer day, Michelle walked in the warm light towards the office door made of blue slats. She couldn’t see him of course and perhaps this only sweetened Kramer’s first memory further. Kramer and Michelle walked through the Parisian streets. They walked past warm scented cafés, a busker playing an old violin, a tabac where Michelle left Kramer at the door and later emerged with newspapers under her arm and a cigarette between her lips. Kramer didn’t remember asking Michelle about his mother during that walk, neither like most other times, did he feel any faint premonition of any unsettling happening moving closer to him. It was just a beautiful early summer day scented with peppermint, cigarette smoke and barbecues that played itself out like the first, gentle strains of a long, tumultuous, beautiful music as it walked the streets of Paris clutching the finger of a woman called Michelle.
