But some small relief was at hand when I bumped into Lucy in
Ashbourne. Lucy is the woman I’ve mentioned quite a few times over the years,
the ex-dental nurse who made that splendid joke about teaching me the corpse
pose when we were discussing the issue of my cancer shortly after the
operation.
What’s interesting about Lucy is that she manages somehow to
divide my reaction to meeting her into conflicting states. Part of me feels an
involuntary attraction to her presence, while another part feels an odd reluctance
to get too close. I’ve attempted a coherent rationale to this curious condition and come
to a tentative explanation:
Lucy seems to know me better than she has right or reason so to do.
The evidence of things she’s said suggests that she’s an unusually
perceptive person who gets into your mind with almost preternatural speed and incisiveness.
Being so well known is, on the one hand, flattering. On the other hand, however,
I’m not at all sure that I want to be so well observed.
There’s also the fact that she seems to command the space in
which we’re talking. She stands confident and unmoving, while I fidget
nervously around her. I don’t, of course, not physically at least, but it feels
as though I am. And this is a perception of relationship with which I’m almost
totally unfamiliar. I sometimes wonder whether Lucy really exists, or whether
she’s a phantasm made manifest by a fevered imagination.
Today’s other little bright spot was provided by the manager
of the Costa Coffee ladies. She blew me a kiss when she discovered that I’d
left a little gift in recognition of their consideration and general niceness.
I was so grateful for the distance between us. Any closer encounter than that
would have caused me some disquiet, a fact which can be traced to an unfortunate
incident when I was around age 10. More on that another time, perhaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment