Purity

Every time I approach a car on a bend I imagine us colliding head-on. It's either me, veering over to the left-hand side of the road, or the approaching car - whose driver has fallen asleep or is drunk or is trying to commit suicide - that veers over to the right. Then, regardless of how fast I've been driving, I slow down so I'm going at just under eighty kilometres an hour, because I once heard a science journalist interviewing a researcher who said that the chance of surviving a head-on collision is violently reduced if the vehicle is travelling at a rate of over eighty kilometres an hour. Violently reduced. Could she really have said that? Or did she use the word violently to describe the slope of the curve in the graph that correlated death and head-on collisions? Or was it maybe survival and head-on collisions? I don't recall, but I often think about it, as I'm rounding the bend, preparing myself for a crash, for a head-on collision, for either death or survival, and wonder if this applies to both vehicles or just one of them, because if it applies to both it's over regardless, since no one, or at least as good as no one, only half-blind ninety-five-year-olds and anally retentive pedants, sticks to the speed limit on these seventy-kilometre-an-hour roads. Not even me, at the mercy of these thoughts and images every time I meet another car on a bend. On the straight sections I drive as fast as I can, and then I slow down again on the bends. I slow down and speed up, and slow down and speed up, and so it goes on, as though I were waging a battle, a low-key battle with myself. Then sometimes I think about my brother.

My brother, a critic and lecturer in literary studies, working in a field that, despite his anxious assertions, can only be described as an obscure part of an increasingly irrelevant, castle-in-the-clouds area of public life. He always says that all people, whether or not they are conscious of it, understand life as a battle between two sides. Between rich and poor, for example. Between men and women, labour and capital. Between reality and illusion, between devout and unbelieving. Or, in the case of intellectuals, between those who think and those who are incapable of mental activity. The ranks of the affected. Those who remain stuck in, as he says, ressentiment and reaction.

His words touch upon a discussion we've been having since our teens. Back then, it was a recurring ritual in which we playfully fell into traditional gender roles - probably a way for us to deal with the fact that we both, in various ways, transgressed these roles. Me as a mouthy, taekwondo-training 'tomboy'; him with his slender-limbed awkwardness and cerebral air.

'Hey,' I say then to my brother, since I'm not particularly interested in that game any more, 'the only battle that interests me is the struggle of common sense and good against idiocy and evil. Or, if you prefer different terminology, I might say the struggle of truth and compassion, or maybe of restraint and silence, of reverence and circumspection, of contemplation and prayer, of humility or even the savagely resigned grin, against the torrential and cascading verbal diarrhoea that pours forth whenever intellectuals set up their soap-boxes.'

And we go on like this, squabbling. But afterwards I often regret the harsh words. Because I know his superior attitude is just a role he slips into to hide his insecurity, his fear of dying alone, in some dingy room he's renting temporarily or in some equally dingy apartment he lives in alone, an apartment that reminds him of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, when our dad lived in a so-called bachelor's hostel. Dad's neighbours made a big impression on us. They were all friendly, smiling and (in our eyes) big men. Most were alcoholics, addicts, mentally ill or troubled in some way or another. And since then I've thought of all these tramps you see around as my family members, on some inaccessible, hidden level. I know it sounds pathetic and empty, but that's how I think and feel. It's not something I'm in the habit of talking about. Just like with those compulsive thoughts on the bends. My brother, on the other hand, he seems to harbour some kind of hatred for these fallen people. A hatred which is also self-contempt, of course. And fear that he too will fall, in spite of his academy and his World Literature.

'Don't be so afraid,' I say to him. 'What are you afraid of? Loneliness? Death? Or is it survival?'

My brother and I are sitting in my Volvo estate. Me behind the wheel, him in the passenger seat. We're talking. Nice and calm. Our relationship can be like this too. Kind, sensitive, empathetic. We're remembering our childhood, telling each other things.

OK, listen. Here's another weird story, he tells me. Remember I worked for a summer as an animal-handler's assistant? So, we were sitting there in his office. Some kind of basement place. I was sitting on this messed-up leather sofa and he was on the other side of the coffee table, on an office chair.

'Most people,' the animal-handler said, 'believe they're opposed to violence. But they're not. Not really. Really, there are hardly any pacifists. Most people are pro the monopoly of violence. That's the thing. Only the state is allowed to be violent, only the state can kill. And so on.'

We'd both finished our roast beef baguette with remoulade, and drunk a cup of coffee in the office. Lunchtime was almost over. It was my first day and he'd been going on like this since seven in the morning. He waved a pen in front of him as he talked. I sat on the sofa and listened to him. I had no choice. Like, he was my boss.

'And slaughterhouses, of course,' he went on. 'But that's just animals, some dude always says. Well, well. You could say that. Sure. But I'd say to you: what is an animal? What separates you and me from a chicken, a dog, a horse, or for that matter, a cat from a pig? I promise, you start pondering these things a lot when you spend as much time with animals as I do. These days a lot of people have opinions on this and that when it comes to animals. Should you eat them or not? Should we keep them in, quote, slavery, and.'

He dislodged a bit of roast beef from between his teeth with his little fingernail as he talked.

'Well. take their. er. progeny, eggs, milk, and so forth. But that makes me wonder what they would say about people? It's almost impossible to buy an item of clothing today without a person having been exploited in some horrendous way, or electronics, do you have any idea how those damn gadgets are made? What people are forced to do so those metals can be extracted? You'd be terrified. But you can't say that. There are many things you can't say these days, in this country. well. you wouldn't believe it was true if I said it. if I told you what I've seen, and been involved in. You have no idea what people are capable of.'

'What do you mean?' I asked.

He looked at me like I'd insulted him.

'Nothing,' he replied. 'Never mind.'

'Have you ever hurt the animals?' I asked then. I don't really know where it came from.

'Are you thick in the head?' he said. 'The fuck you talking about?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Have you ever hit them, or cut. you know, tortured them. I don't know. Or maybe not you, but maybe you've seen it? You hear about things, you know.'

'Alright, stop,' he said. 'One thing: I've been an angel, I really have. A patron. And them: my little heroes. My main characters. Every single one. Bull and mouse. Goat and canary. The whole bundle, yeah. The whole fucking menagerie. So shut your mouth.'

'OK,' I say. 'Apologies.'

Break time was over. We got up. He filled the water bottles and I carried his bags to the van. It was hot as hell.

When we got onto the motorway he started talking again.

'Sorry I lost my rag,' he said, 'but it was a bloody weird question.'

'Yeah, sorry,' I said. 'I didn't mean anything by it.'

'But you see, beasts.' he said. 'We're all beasts. Regardless of. composition. or whatever you'd call it. form.'

I nodded. Then something weird happened. I heard his voice inside my head and I looked at his lips but they weren't moving. This is what I heard:

'I think about animals more than people, I'll admit that. That's how it is. In various ways. I'll give you an example. Imagine I'm eating a pear. I'm standing there, over the sink, eating an overripe pear. A bit of the pear seems to be rotten. The rotten flesh, the taste of rotten fruit, makes me think of horses. Horses getting drunk, wild horses eating rotten, fermenting fruit and getting drunk.

'Wild, drunk horses, do they exist somewhere? I think, over by the sink.

'When would they have existed?

'Have they ever existed?

'I've forgotten everything I've learned. I'm standing there, bent over the sink so as not to drip on the ground, with the pear which is ripe and has started rotting, and the taste is full, rich, and insistent, strong and sharp and yet still rounded, I see a wild mouth, a horse's mouth. I'm standing there leaning over the sink with the pear, the overripe fruit, in my hand and thinking about a horse's mouth, about the brown-flecked teeth, the dirty-yellow, oblong, pale-brown teeth, about the pink gums, those firm gums, about the ruffles on the soft palate, about the uvula.