Why does it take so long? Why do we stay so stubbornly blind to our own condition, when our eyes are not only open, but frequently wet with grief and bewilderment?
I’ll tell you, old woman that I am, without an old man to hold my hand or call the ambulance. Don’t disregard me on that account. Women outlive men: it is how most of us will end: and most of us, I sometimes think, mis-spend our youths in blind panic on that account. This man or that. Really! Willy, Ivor, Phillip: does it matter, in retrospect? No.
We are betrayed on all sides. Our bodies betray us, leading us to love where our interests do not lie. Our instincts betray us, inducing us to nest-build and procreate – but to follow instinct is not to achieve fulfilment, for we are more than animals. Our idleness betrays us, and our apathy – murmuring, oh, let him decide! Let him pay! Let him go out to work and battle in the terrible world! Our brains betray us, keeping one step, for the sake of convenience, to avoid hurt, behind the male. Our passivity betrays us, whispering in our ears, oh, it isn’t worth a fight! He will only lie on the far side of the bed! Or be angry and violent! Or find someone else more agreeable! We cringe and placate, waiting for the master’s smile. It is despicable. We are not even slaves.
We betray each other. We manipulate, through sex: we fight each other for possession of the male – snap, catch, swallow, gone! Where’s the next? We prefer the company of men to women. We will quite deliberately make our sisters jealous and wretched. We will have other women’s children. And all in the pursuit of our self-esteem, and so as not to end up cold and alone.
I tell you, it is not so bad to be old and alone.
Well, no doubt men and women should walk through life hand in hand. There is enough to be done in the world, as Phillip once said, without all this trouble. And it does not take a man to make a woman cry. I think of Colleen, crying through the night: and I think of my all-women prison. It was not a pleasant place to be; yet I imagine the sum of emotion, good or bad, happy and unhappy, pretty much the same inside as outside. A girl can cry all night because a woman has been unkind: it doesn’t take a man to do it.
Outside my window old men and women shuffle by: their chins are whiskery: their slack mouths mutter: they are full of discontent and will die in the same state – I don’t believe that life has dealt fairly with them.
It can’t, as I used to say (usually wrongly) go on!