THE DAY I DID
“The day I did, I did it properly.”
“I didn’t exactly ask you that, Giles.”
“You asked me how many times I had done it, didn’t you?” responded Giles. “And my answer is simply once, because before that I hadn’t done it properly, and then having done it once, it was unnecessary to then have done it more than once. Once is enough.”
“Once is enough, you say? But was it \i{possible} to do it more than once if you had wished to do so?”
The questioner stared at the one she had addressed as Giles: a middle-aged man with a face over-coloured by embarrassment; a T-shirt bearing on its chest a transferred photograph of himself not dissimilar to how he looked today; cheap grey slacks ironed into knife-creases; and a posture that indicated he was about to depart the ribs of a park bench that had created an uncomfortable impression upon his spine. The voice of the woman was strident, creating its own unwelcome impression upon him. Her face, body and dress were far better suited towards a more general impression of beauty completely out of keeping with her ugly voice. Giles certainly felt under-dressed and under-toned by comparison. Nobody had warned him of any necessary formalities.
Replaced exactly where he had tried to leave – upon the bench – Giles stared up at the imposing woman, wondering if she really knew what she was asking. He found it difficult to talk to women at the best of times, and today was not the best of times. He was being accused of something, but as yet he had failed to understand that the accusation was of not understanding anything. To misunderstand something several times became irrelevant once it was understood and once it was understood it could never be understood again; there were no levels of understanding, simply an understanding via various levels of misunderstanding until it was understood for the first and only time; understanding something was merely that and once done, never to be done again, unless the thing that was understood itself changed in some way and, then, the process of misunderstanding and understanding would start again from scratch until the new thing was understood via a whole new set of misunderstandings leading to understanding.
An alchemy of understanding. You wander on leaving Giles and the woman still talking. Today was not the day for you to understand this, I suspect. Perhaps you should try again another day.
=========
"You've failed several times, and as far as I can see you have always failed. Including that day."
"The day I did, I did it properly," you answered.
"Are there degrees of failure, then?"
Today, you've brought someone else to help you understand. The question hung in the air as you both watched Giles and the woman talking on the park bench, unable to hear your conversation, while, paradoxically, you could hear theirs.
Identical conversations.
“No, if you fail, you fail. You can never partly succeed. It’s a bit like understanding. You either understand or fail completely to understand. There are no near misses.”
The woman laughed, having apparently understood Giles’ unintended joke. She eyed back at his T-shirt.
“Why do you wear such a ridiculous T-shirt?”
“Ridiculous?” He looked down at himself. “Why so ridiculous?”
“There are no degrees of ridiculousness. It is ridiculous plain and simple: not partly ridiculous, nor very ridiculous, just ridiculous.”
Having echoed their words word for word, you both shrug and decide to leave them to their ridiculous conversation. You are thankful that you had not been heard in the same way as they had been heard. Understanding would need to be left for another day. Empathy was never possible. A bit like alchemy. Do come back. I’m sure we shall defeat our lack of understanding together.
==========
She returned to the park bench expecting to see Giles sitting there. The man with the self-styled T-shirt. She was not disappointed. If this were fiction, there would have been some development, or organic change, so as to maintain interest in events or character development. All in fact on offer, however, was description and olique wordplay.
She knew in her heart the key to the whole situtaion: not 'The Day I Did' but 'The Day I Died'. So obvious. So expected. Again not to be disappointed in her expectations.
Although Giles was sitting on the park bench, it would have been truer to say that it was his body sitting there. Giles' corpse, if a corpse could be 'owned' in that way, was waiting to incriminate her in murder. A corpse being able to wait in such intimate intimidation of a victim-culprit was pehaps the organic change that we all needed. An alchemy of dross to gold. Reality to fiction. An empathy between anthropomorphisations of Plot and Truth.
We watched them from as far away as it was possible to watch them and be completely unseen. It is impossible to be partly unseen. We are either one or the other. Not well-read, but unread. Completely.
She was taken away in a black car. The ambulance took Giles away separately, later identification of whose body was only possible by examination of his only distinguishing mark: just the clothes he stood up in. You are what you wear.
"The day I did..."
"...I did it properly."
A conversation imitating conversation. Wearing away into narrative silence.
