Each to their own
The TV is on, blaring in the background, but Elizabeth is looking
down at her phone. She is scrolling through her newsfeed: perusing the photos
of couples embracing and people at nightclubs wearing their going-out clothes
and family snaps involving children with soppy captions; reading statuses about
how happy people are to be in love and how appalling it is that a certain establishment treated them in a certain way and how draconian (what does that word mean?)
the recent decision of the government to institute laws limiting press freedom is;
judging all the things that her friends have liked – purposely appalling,
anti-humorous memes that can make you laugh if you really force yourself to, the
inane posts of famous comedians or celebrities, the ‘funny’, usually incredibly
sexist pictures and posts from ‘genuine humour’ pages, the pictures of very
thin women typically posing in underpants or leggings with their ass or tits the
clear focus, and Dan Bilzerian’s photos of himself surrounded by a host of
scantily clad women in provocative poses, all captioned with a vile, sexist
phrase. None of these things are interesting in the slightest, but she keeps scrolling
down her newsfeed. If she were to stop and think about why she is doing it, she
would stop doing it. As it is, she knows she is going to keep doing it until she reaches something she has seen before, and
then she is going to reply to some texts, and then she is going to check out
Snapchat, and then she is going to watch TV with her full attention. Or maybe
she isn’t, coz there doesn’t seem to be anything on. Maybe she is going to
watch a DVD. In any case, she is going to do something. Of course she is going
to do something.
In the kitchen, Julie is making
the salad component of the steak meal the family always has on Friday nights. Her
laptop is sitting on the bench about half a metre in front of the big, white
ceramic salad bowl already carrying an abundance of cos lettuce leaves, some
chunks of avocado and some finely sliced Spanish onion. She stares down at the
laptop as she adds the slices of tomato she has just chopped up. She is
watching the British crime drama she missed last night on ABC iview. A man is
getting beaten. His face is covered in blood and his nose is crooked and globs
of blood plop out of it. His nose has clearly been fractured by the previous
punch. The assailant suddenly flees down the alleyway. As he dissolves into the
darkness, Julie goes to the pantry to fetch the oil and balsamic vinegar for the
dressing. When she retrieves them and returns to the bench, she makes up the
dressing with an expert deftness and pours it onto the salad. On the screen,
they are back at the police station, and the two female protagonists are
chatting at the front of the shot about their utterly different perspectives on
the nervous woman they interviewed about ten minutes before in the show, and in
the background people are hurrying here and there, and a phone rings and then
gets picked up by a black officer sitting at his desk. Then out of right of
screen comes the middle-aged, balding boss with his usual sour expression: “Peter
Jones is in a critical condition at hospital. Apparently, he was found in an
alleyway with a broken nose and a gash in the back of his head from which he was haemorrhaging blood.” She tosses the salad with two big salad spoons as the two
female protagonists voice their reactions. Up, up, up.
In the same general area of the
house, John is sitting in front of the family’s big Mac computer watching an
episode of Grand Designs on Youtube, using headphones so that its audio does
not have to compete with his wife’s. It is about half way through the build,
which has been delayed by terrible weather and trouble in getting loans from
the bank, and the couple, who are living in a caravan next to the muddy
construction site in a field somewhere in the North of England, are saying it
has been hard to cope and then the man, whose name is George, mentions his
wife, whose name is Katie, has fallen pregnant since Kevin’s last visit. Kevin
congratulates them. Now Kevin is walking in front of the house, explaining what
still needs to be done and how they are still yet to import the double glass
from France. John shifts in his chair slightly, without moving his eyes.
So what am I doing? Typing this up of course. And as I do, I am staring at my
computer screen and listening to Sufjan Stevens through my headphones.
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