funny how
walloped
I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.
Needless to say, I no longer love him.
It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.
The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?
Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.
Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.
He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.
We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.
I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.
I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.
When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.
This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.
Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.
The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?
My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”
You’re sweating.
“Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”
The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.
There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”
Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.
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That story was fantastic and so relatable in feeling. The doctor seemed the worst part of it! How awful! Lots of love
That is kind! thank you, Angela. Yes, he really somehow was. I felt despairing, in a hollow, dulled kind of way that someone who’s entirely a stranger can feel entitled to predate on a patient who has turned up with distressing news. His opportunism seemed so thorough.
The doctor! I’m glad his assistant was there at least, even if not very assisting. The rest…well anger is a form of madness, and anger towards the ones we love seems the most extreme kind… I’m sorry this happened to you.
Thank you, Jamila. I yearn for the kind of anger – in myself – that would awake at last, that is, or seems to me to be, a flame of searing sanity. “No more of this – no more.”
Yes, she was comforting, if compliant. I’m glad of your compassion.
I couldn’t read it all. I felt sick.
Sorry, Jane. I know it’s a distressing story. Glad we are both of us away from all that, now. Sorry for triggering you.
Gripping, fascinating, voyeuristic, disturbing, very real, and a close facsimile of events in my own home over time. Goaded to physically respond to my 15-minutes-long shouting-out-of-control partner, which I didn’t. Instead I’ve slept in my car, in my office, and in a motel. The temper, the raw violent raging energy you perfectly describe I think would be common in a lot of homes from time to time, I hope with non-violent results. Thanks for bravely sharing your story. I’d happily buy your writings!
Thank you, Martin. I’m sorry and also glad to hear of your not dissimilar experience. Once we get into the terrain of trying deliberately to bait each other, feels like something deep inside really needs to come out, and be heard – safely. I am glad you made the more difficult choice for you: sleeping in the car and in your office – rather than the more difficult for her: responding to anger with violence.
This raw violent raging energy. Think if we can only open it and harness it. A Swedish friend very perfectly renders this in his own English ‘the atomic family.’
(((((Cathoel))))))
The things we do to those we loved in order that they may too feel our pain and rage. I am so sorry. And yes – the doctor?
That really is why we do some of the most terrible things. I hadn’t realised. Now a parade of furious tragedies is before my eyes. The pilot whose girlfriend left him so he felt entitled to plough 200 adults and three newborn babies into the ground. The man who flings acid saying, if I can’t have you, no one will. So dangerous.
Thank you, fellow writer for your kindness. Glad of the hug.
My darling, Cathoel. At last I know the whole sad story, while I am glad in one sense, it fills me with great sadness that you had to have had to experience that seering horror of how relationships can self-destruct, but your later writings show me how resilient and self reliant you are. The doctor sure was creepy by the sounds of it, almost like the start of a scene in a 60s porn film. Stay strong, as i know you will. Know you will always have my distant but constant love.
A 60s porns film! that really is what it reminds me of – him in his white coat, his tray of trembling fifty-year-old instruments each carrying a tiny, convex reflection of our two faces – thank you, Brendan.
Thanks for your generous empathy. I appreciate your supportive, unjudging friendship. So constant and true. It is a gift.
And thanks for reading the other stories, the trio I wrote two years ago when this break-up first happened. I was too ashamed at the time to admit this part of it.
I’m glad you smashed his computer. He deserved it. I’m sorry you got hurt emotionally and physically. I hope you are better off now without him. Love is difficult and complicated. So is anger. It can be a traumatic emotion to live with. We all have to find healthier ways to express it so we don’t end up getting hurt.
Priya thank you. I felt, too, that he deserved it. When I did it, and afterwards. It took me far too long to work out how much better of I am without him, and since I broke the tie entirely, I am surprised – d’oh! – how much more confident, how much happier I feel.
We don’t have a safe passage for anger in our world, I think. We have this darkly mythologised ‘explosiveness’ story, which in Hollywooden terms is often told as the making of a reluctant hero. So I think as with their guns, ‘everyday Americans’ especially men might tend to cherish and brood over their rage, as the fuel that’s going to revenge them on their lifetime of being kicked to the curb and overlooked and taken for granted, or just not dated by the pretty girl they liked best.
It worries me that we tend to take out our anger on the safest object – the most defenseless. A kind person who won’t hit back; a woman; a child. I so deeply agree with you about the essential usefulness of rage. It needs a clean form of expression, to do its good. Hmm.
Brilliant, painful, beautiful. I know that scene. It is destined to end in physical contact. The laying of a hand on a face. The velocity and force of that hand’s landing is the variable.
I’m so thankful for this. I expected to be ostracised, even pilloried, for having put myself in such a situation, for not having seen it coming, for having allowed myself to become that seemingly loathsome and devalued thing: a struck woman. Now I am wondering how deep the internalised misogyny and self-blame really goes. I am wondering how many women in heterosexual relationships have never been struck by a man.
So powerful. Thank you.
I noticed that you had passed this story on to your own networks: the most beautiful testimony. Thank you, Steve.
Dear Cathoel, I remember when you wrote as this unfolded and his staggering outrage at your creative response to this ‘affair’. As usual, it was difficult to reconcile the couple I’d met not long before with this man in your writing. It’s always this way. They walk amongst us. Not long before you hosted that dinner, I’d been brutalised for the first and last time in my life by a man. In ways I’d always stated with absolute confidence I’d NEVER allow…how naive and innocent I was. 5 years on and the rage and violence perpetrated upon me has changed who I am. For a long time, for years after, I thought I’d died back then. The fieriness and feistiness that is part of my personality, my passion, was cauterized. It has to be in these situations, because anything other than complete submissiveness and passiveness can get you killed. As strong women, we aim to be neither passive nor aggressive, but assertive. The DV ‘industry’ is the one sphere you will hear strong women tell other women they must at all costs NEVER be assertive. And to get out. Being ‘victimised’ in this manner throws you into an upside down universe. there’s no logic in it and none of your experience and history can prepare your soul for this assault. I know my experience is tangential but connected to this night you have described. What chimes with me most, and I see it more and more every day now, is people searching and yearning for any outlet for justified rage, for righteous indignation. I rarely engage in social media these days, because it seems to be so prevalent, this need for people to vent their fury at something. Why are we so angry? It is our zeitgeist and I find this so sad. I sometimes think that in the Western world, there was a crossroads in the 60s, where new possibilities for human relations emerged: that spirit of love and peace and the search for equality. We’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in a place where pornography fuels sexual violence and hate speech is being fought for as freedom of expression and the gap between the haves and have nots is sickening and ever widening. Where no one reads and everyone consumes and the truth is ruthlessly suppressed. What happened to me (I had no agency, except to finally flee) will always be with me and I hate that, like a tumour. At the time, you have no ability to step back and see clearly. I recognised this with you when this outrageous ‘affair’ was happening. This chimed with me also, that there are some unpalatable experiences in our human lives that can only be lived through and processed in their own time, often solitarily. I’m very glad for you now, Cathoel. I’m happy that you are free and strong and continue to write about this pain and indignity. Thankyou.
Dear Jen, I so treasure this thoughtful, honest response from you. I had no idea you were going through all this, the night you came round looking so luscious and gorgeous. I will think some more about all that you are saying here, and get back to you. Cx
Cathoel, thank you. I applaud your honesty and courage in writing this. We need to open up more of this kind of dialogue, to understand the nature of all that it means to be human. I have been experiencing anger in recent months, such an anger I didn’t know I was capable of, with a strong sense of injustice fuelling it. My release has so far been in writing. I’m glad of the energising side of the anger – you know some of the story, which is still unfolding. The situation has been a lesson for me in trusting too readily, giving away what matters to me too quickly on the assumption that another will respect in the way I do. It’s always astonishing to me when others don’t think or act as I would.
Thank you.
You are welcome, thank you for reading, Megan.
A troubling story that reeks of a raw experience. It will always be a scar on your psyche but wounds like this heal, whatever that means, if someone is able to turn around the ‘I will never forgive you..’ to ‘forgiveness will free me’
Thank you for reading, Therese. I have had trouble smelting ‘forgiveness’ into ‘release’ because I have often been in situations where abusive people insisted their actions were forgivable or understandable, which meant they would be repeated. It is clean, I think, to picture forgiveness as a letting go of rather than a cementing of the likelihood of vindictive harm.
I’m sorry about that doctor that’s terrible feel better