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Authors: Matthew Crow
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part of some sort of rehabilitation scheme. He was interested in football and dance music and kept trying to talk to me about girls. I suspect he was what they call a reformed character. I guessed that all sorts of unpleasantness lurked in his backstory.
Amy was not, actually, called Amy. Her real name was Thai and too difficult to pronounce for most people there. I told her that whenever I went to a foreign country I made an effort to learn the language, but âAmyâ seemed shy andthen a bit cross when I kept asking her for her real name, so I eventually dropped the subject. I made it my mission to find out, though. It did not seem fair that her heritage should have to be erased to suit the idiot patrons of the National Health Service.
At first there were only three of us on the unit. I lay on one side of the room, in my bed, with a curtain that could be pulled at my discretion but which they suggested I kept open. I often ignored this advice. I craved solitude so that I could contemplate and stuff. Next to me was an empty cot waiting ominously to be filled. Across the room there were two other beds. Kelly occupied the one closest to the window that didnât open. Next to her lay Paul.
He spoke sometimes but not all that often. I knew his sort. I was quite good at reading people, being one of lifeâs natural observers. Chris came in handy for filling in the bigger gaps in my knowledgeâfor example, the fact that Lindsey Buckingham was the boy in Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks the girlâbut at a grassroots level I am perfectly capable of analyzing both individual characters and, in turn, whole subsections of society.
E.g. if we were all in The Breakfast Club , Paul would have been the Emilio Estevez character. He was sporty and good-looking in an obvious way. He had loads of friends and, despite a noticeable lack of visitors, was keen to remind us of this fact.
He behaved the way all boys like him behave around the sort of people they wouldnât usually associate with. He was pleasant and talked sometimes, but stayed forever at armâs length lest I get the wrong idea and wander up to him in a sporting goods store one day while he was in town with his crew, destroying his whole life in the process.
But I knew all about boys like Paul. He had to be nice to me at the moment because he had to be surrounded by people. This was because boys like him were, essentially, pasta. Everyone thought they loved him because they had never been forced to experience the true blandness of him on his own. Paul was surface all the way to the bone.
Kelly was equally cookie cutter, even if she didnât sit as comfortably into my Breakfast Club analogy. Socially she was from the same tribe as Paul. They didnât go to the same school, but they might as well have. She wore makeup even though she spent all of her time in bed, did not intend to further her education, and spent most of her time before she was in the unit in supermarket parking lots with boys who drove loud cars.
It was a triumph of geography that she and Paul never shared a pregnancy scare.
For a while it was just us three. Weâd chat, at times. But the Venn diagram of our interests seldom overlapped, so by and large I was without allies. One morning, not long after Iâd arrived, I tried putting my Breakfast Club analogy to them. I explained the theory of mise-en-scène, which Iâd read about a Media Studies textbook. The theory is that everything in the frame is significant. So you can pause a film and see the red in the background as a sign of bad things to come, or the cigarette hanging from the womanâs lips as a suggestion of a wild, careless streak in her character.
I began to explain that the mise-en-scène of this unit was quite apt to the dynamics of our relationship. Only as I was moving fluidly on to my second point, Paul pretended to fall asleep. I carried on anyway, and assumed he was taking it all in with his
Amy was not, actually, called Amy. Her real name was Thai and too difficult to pronounce for most people there. I told her that whenever I went to a foreign country I made an effort to learn the language, but âAmyâ seemed shy andthen a bit cross when I kept asking her for her real name, so I eventually dropped the subject. I made it my mission to find out, though. It did not seem fair that her heritage should have to be erased to suit the idiot patrons of the National Health Service.
At first there were only three of us on the unit. I lay on one side of the room, in my bed, with a curtain that could be pulled at my discretion but which they suggested I kept open. I often ignored this advice. I craved solitude so that I could contemplate and stuff. Next to me was an empty cot waiting ominously to be filled. Across the room there were two other beds. Kelly occupied the one closest to the window that didnât open. Next to her lay Paul.
He spoke sometimes but not all that often. I knew his sort. I was quite good at reading people, being one of lifeâs natural observers. Chris came in handy for filling in the bigger gaps in my knowledgeâfor example, the fact that Lindsey Buckingham was the boy in Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks the girlâbut at a grassroots level I am perfectly capable of analyzing both individual characters and, in turn, whole subsections of society.
E.g. if we were all in The Breakfast Club , Paul would have been the Emilio Estevez character. He was sporty and good-looking in an obvious way. He had loads of friends and, despite a noticeable lack of visitors, was keen to remind us of this fact.
He behaved the way all boys like him behave around the sort of people they wouldnât usually associate with. He was pleasant and talked sometimes, but stayed forever at armâs length lest I get the wrong idea and wander up to him in a sporting goods store one day while he was in town with his crew, destroying his whole life in the process.
But I knew all about boys like Paul. He had to be nice to me at the moment because he had to be surrounded by people. This was because boys like him were, essentially, pasta. Everyone thought they loved him because they had never been forced to experience the true blandness of him on his own. Paul was surface all the way to the bone.
Kelly was equally cookie cutter, even if she didnât sit as comfortably into my Breakfast Club analogy. Socially she was from the same tribe as Paul. They didnât go to the same school, but they might as well have. She wore makeup even though she spent all of her time in bed, did not intend to further her education, and spent most of her time before she was in the unit in supermarket parking lots with boys who drove loud cars.
It was a triumph of geography that she and Paul never shared a pregnancy scare.
For a while it was just us three. Weâd chat, at times. But the Venn diagram of our interests seldom overlapped, so by and large I was without allies. One morning, not long after Iâd arrived, I tried putting my Breakfast Club analogy to them. I explained the theory of mise-en-scène, which Iâd read about a Media Studies textbook. The theory is that everything in the frame is significant. So you can pause a film and see the red in the background as a sign of bad things to come, or the cigarette hanging from the womanâs lips as a suggestion of a wild, careless streak in her character.
I began to explain that the mise-en-scène of this unit was quite apt to the dynamics of our relationship. Only as I was moving fluidly on to my second point, Paul pretended to fall asleep. I carried on anyway, and assumed he was taking it all in with his
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