Repetition

To illustrate her theory of repetition and disaster, she described the way her walk that morning had contained several features that were a precise repetition of the day before: how she had approached all three sets of lights at the exact same moment in their cycles that she had approached those lights on the previous day - how she had passed a woman near some trees whom she had passed near those same thin trees on the previous day - and how when meeting a person she hadn't seen for a while, this person had smiled and spoken with the same bright, cheerful intonations of sarcasm that this person had used many times on many previous occasions and so, during all of the other more immediate repetitions (which actually followed on from this meeting in the course of the walk), she was unable to enjoy the repetitions for what they were and could only brace herself, as she said, for worse to come.

Suicide isn't news

As she passed me in the park, talking into her mobile, I heard only this: but suicide isn't news.

Prose couplets

She showed me photos of her tiny, purpling, premature twins in their plastic beds.
Later, I saw a woman in high stiletto heels at the doors of a flat. She was holding a baby.

As I watched him run across the road, dodging the traffic, I couldn't help noticing that his artificial leg had affected neither his stride nor his confidence.
Less than two minutes later I was jay-walking myself.

As a friend on Facebook

At the reception a woman approached and said to my friend that she recognised her, that she had just added my friend as a friend on Facebook; my friend said she thought she recognised the other woman too, and so they began to chat.

You're beautiful

She told me that she'd grown used to the noise of her neighbours through the wall. One played Michael Jackson all the time. The other cabaret, and when he played James Brown's You're Beautiful over and over - end to end, as she said, all day and all night - she assumed he was feeling low.

Only three removes

Today I am only three removes from Kafka, having talked to someone who has talked to a concert pianist - a Holocaust survivor - who used to know him (and didn't think him nice).

Listen

Abcde

She told us that, in her work as a doctor, she’d seen many young patients whose first names were Abcde. One patient might have been accidental, perhaps, or the first random find on an internet search; perhaps it was a joke, we thought, like the names Zoe Bowie and Telephone Booth, or a situation where migrants who didn’t speak English wrote the only five letters they had ever been taught. But the fact remains that there is more than one child called Abcde – and all of them white, she said, with Australian born parents. It had to be the fashion, we decided: la mode. Le chic.

The pronunciation, of course, is not straightforward.