What happened to me was nothing – the nothing women know all too well
Idon’t know why I’m writing about this really, because nothing happened. Compared to what happens, nothing really happened. And in the five minutes it took to not happen – between 4.55pm and 5pm yesterday – he was never closer to me than three feet. What a respectful distance from which to be called a “dirty cunt”, my ha-di-ha-ha brain is saying. I was merely verbally aggressed by a stranger in a socially distanced way.
Plus it all feels a bit convenient for a columnist, right? And I agree – being followed and simultaneously screamed at by some guy I’d never clapped eyes on before yesterday afternoon was nothing if not convenient. Look, I’m writing a column about it today. But before this outbreak of convenience, this column honestly was going to be a fictional imagining of the royal family attending implicit bias training. I don’t want you to conclude I didn’t have other wares for this space if it hadn’t been for the convenient nothing that happened.
I’m absolutely and completely fine, I said to my editor, when I told him what I’d write about instead. Really, it’s just – [don’t say “part of life”, don’t say “part of life”] – it’s just part of life! I told him the truth, that I genuinely forget about these things soon after they happen. Except I’m writing this stupid record of this one now. Should have just tied a weight round it and sent it to sleep with the fishes, with all the other ones. The healthy option. But please, I said to him, please tell me if it comes out wrong. I never say that with any other column, but of course we ladies worry about telling our own stories wrongly or unsuccessfully.
Anyway, I’m walking to collect one of my children after school yesterday, down the street I always take. It’s never lovelier than now, when all the magnolias are coming out. He stares hard, passes. Stops.
Behind me: “What are you looking at?”
Honestly? The end of the street. How is it that the end of this empty London street, where there’s a busier road and then a square, has suddenly stretched to a point somewhere just beyond Moscow? What happens to time and space when these nothings happen? This whole nothing is going to take five minutes, yet feel so long it’s like I could have learned Mandarin, or written a novel. You absorb every incidental detail. Just in case! And in every split second, you’re somehow able to consider multiple possible theories as to what is, or isn’t, happening.
“I’m talking to you. Fucking turn round.”
Really? Today? When it starts not happening, I’m just thinking: oh, but this is such a COINCIDENCE! I mean, I’ve spent all day reading women’s stories of nowhere near all the things that have happened to them just walking down streets. Maybe this is happening because I didn’t offer up my own stories. Maybe I’ve angered the social media gods.
“Dirty cunt.”
Man, this guy is really ruining the magnolias for me. I’m walking so fast now I’m not even looking at the magnolias. Still, this is SUCH a coincidence. Actually, let’s be statistically rational. It’s just an incidence. Whenever these nothings happen, you understand very powerfully that they are singling you out to tell you you’re not special. You, a 46-year-old woman in a double bobble hat that makes you look like Mickey Mouse, which is why you chose it, are not special. Right now, at 4.56pm on a spring afternoon, countless women are being harassed in the street. I wonder what a UK heat map of incidence would look like. Hot, I guess.
He’s walking alongside me now. “Hello? HELLO?”
Quick, do the triage. How seriously do I take him? He hasn’t grabbed me, so my sense is that he’s one of the good street harassers. That would be great news for this fucking whore currently being asked who the fuck she thinks she is. Hang on, he’s got a shopping bag. New data points, need to establish what’s in it. Oh. A really big box of chocolates. I wonder if he’s saying sorry to someone. Or maybe I love you. “I love