Monday 28th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

(Some ‘pick ups’ – like they do in the movies when they go back and shoot some new stuff that they didn’t think of before…)
[Slave market] The slave market precincts have undergone a recent renovation, and all the original flag stones, bricks and mortar have all been sand blasted and, where necessary, re-pointed or re-laid. Fixed tables and metal mountings for sun shades have sprouted amongst the stones, and elegant glass and brushed steel wind breaks have been artfully arranged to screen off discrete restaurant spaces and shaded seating areas.

The stones now have a scoured look, and sawdust and cement dust linger in the joints and interstices, lending the area a fresh, scrubbed air of coarse rejuvenation, like an ageing person whose had a layer of skin stripped off and thinks that their raw pinkness gives them a healthy glow.

From the seventeenth century onwards, slaves from the east and south-east of Europe flowed up the wide rivers and canals to the ports of the empire and thence to the great slave markets spread across Europe – Antwerp, Amsterdam, Delft, Hamburg – from where they were diffused throughout the continental empire, and onwards overseas. How many moustachioed faces, dark-haired women, and snotty-faced children had passed through this now-bright square of stone? [She catches herself thinking in stereotypes – (the beamer = the drug dealer, the gentle south asian, the heartless, unreadable far eastern – the stereotypes of my childhood and youth), knowing that these were the kind of shorthand attitudes/thinking that allowed the slave trade to flourish for so long: seeing these people not as individuals but as representatives of a type.]

While the kids sit down and make their painstakingly delineated sketches of the brick- and stonework, Mathilde and the other teachers treat themselves to coffee from the stall, warming themselves in the fug of fumes: coffee, hot sugary doughnuts, cinnamon, fried onions. The stall, seemingly like all the others across the square – across the city – is staffed by a pair of Slavic-looking Easterners: she with olive skin, black hair, and startlingly delicate eyes and lashes, he heavier-set, his shirt untucked, and sporting the stereotypical thick black moustache. Mathilde notices that his fingers have the burnt umber cast of the heavy smoker.

Three hundred years ago, these people’s ancestors would have been dragging their way across the stones to the slave pens, and [this ethnic group] still occupy the lowest berths of the economy, grinding out their thankless work in the low paid, low status roles that the white working class started turning their noses up at in the post-war years, when new technologies and the [burgeoning] consumer culture created new, better-paid [sectors in the economy].
Mathilde remembers the open contempt that her family and friends used to express about the Easterners, [dismissing them as two-dimensional economic ciphers, devoid of individuality, emotional weight, or inner life. How easy it was to dismiss whole swathes of people in those days, when you could look at someone and not see them as a human being at all, based just on the colour of their skin, or the way they wore their facial hair, or the style of their clothing. It makes her realise how far this society has come in thirty-odd years: the common linguistic currency of abuse and ridicule has become unacceptable in mainstream society, although you’ll still find it spent freely in some contexts; some of her kids, for example, come out with shockingly extreme and profane statements – things that they’ve obviously heard at home or in the company of their relatives [reify, reify!]]. She consciously tries to make eye contact with the [barristas], smiles warmly, and leaves them an overly generous tip. [At some level, this is her personal compensation effort – emotionally, it tries to make amends for years of physical, verbal and economic abuse/mistreatment/exploitation. Something also about the structural/cultural embedding of inequality…but in novel-form, not this fecking pseudo-undergraduate essay style…]

[Going Home]
When she gets off the bus near home, she’s still full of a sense of well-being derived from coffee, cake, and the unnecessary purchase of three lovely books from the warm, brightly-lit bookshop near the coffee bar. She loves the weighty swing of the books in their plastic bag, and she swings that weight as she walks along the familiar streets near her home. The traffic’s tyres slur on the tarmac, another comforting sound from her urban upbringing: it reminds of summer nights spent playing out in the streets until night fell, when she would suddenly feel the profound tiredness of [a full day’s play] tugging at her, and a painful hoarseness [lead poisoning? Exhaust fume toxicity?] scratching at the back of her throat; it was then that she would crave the smells of their own kitchen, and the feel of her dad’s overalls against her face and chest when she hugged him, her nose up to his chest. His overalls would smell of oil and detergent, and he’d have a subtler aura made of aftershave and the fat from his fried supper. [need to work this up some more for emotional/sensory conviction – how warm, secure, safe – and loved – he made her feel, despite her tiredness and fractiousness].

The memory of that summer evening smell and that intimacy is intoxicatingly nostalgic for her: when she’s already feeling sad or anxious, this kind of memory will have an achingly tragic quality, and will be accompanied by a sense of a great wind blowing through vast empty spaces; a sense of how terminally lost the past is, and how directionless and empty her life has become, and how she will never know the certainty, security and possibility of those pre-adolescent times.

On other occasions, though, when she’s feeling satisfied and confident – like tonight – that nostalgia is an empowering thing, and it reminds her that she has lived through good times, and known pleasure and love and intimacy. In these contexts, it will bring an unselfconscious smile of pleasure to her face: she’s a good person, with well-rounded emotional responses and experiences – someone who is self-aware, ironic, loveable, and who recognises what’s important and beautiful in the world [that simple joy of being in the world and warming to it…].

She turns the last corner, into her home street. The street lights mark the usual flight path home – amber ingots against the sky’s [deep blue-purple] backcloth – and the combined noise of cars, TVs, hoovers, voices and stereos hums in the background, while her boot soles clunk and echo on the pavement. As she lays her hand on the rough wooden top rail of the front gate, she can smell fat frying, and sausages and bacon: the evening smells of home.

(c. 1100 words)