For Julia James & countless others.
96% of all murders are perpetrated by men. 76% of violent crimes are perpetrated by men. 98% of sexual crimes are perpetrated by men.
Men are dangerous. They are scary. They do bad things.
I am a man.
It would be easy for me to say:“That’s not me. I’m one of the good guys”, but it’s not as easy as that.
I carry with me tens of thousands of years of genetic programming of which violence is a very big part and I have often felt that part of me rise at inappropriate moments.
What is to be done about this?
I have no idea.
In her autobiographical poem “Quarter Past Eight” Minifreda Grovetski describes her confused powerless terror when confronted by “The nut that is loose”.
We’ve all been on that train and seen a man (and it’s invariably a man) on the edge of sanity, who’s 10,000 years of genetic programming has led him to the conclusion that random mindless violence is his best option when dealing with the world.
What do we do when confronted by this external force?
What do I do when confronted by this internal force?
MINIFREDA GROVETSKI
I wasn’t there at the time. I’d paid good money to be dancing in a field in Somerset. I hadn’t always had enough cash for a ticket, but back in the day you could climb over the fence if you had to. You can’t do that anymore. They build the fence so big that it’s all out of reach. Now you can only dance if you can afford it.
One of my neighbours told me about it when I got back. “He came out screaming,” she said.
That didn’t sound like our street. When we first moved here, my kids used to get woken up by sex workers fighting on the corner, but the sex workers have long since moved on. The place has been stripped of graffiti and discarded mattresses and rusty, dead cars. We, a happy mix of ages and ethnicities, lobby the Council to install communal bicycle lock-ups and plant trees along the pavement. We get along. We each water the tree planted outside our own house.
He’s lived here years, but I don’t know him. I thought someone once said he’d hurled abuse at her children. That he was crude. Uneducated. There was a washing machine lying in his garden for ages.
Of course, he’d been outvoted in our borough on that day. But he hadn’t been outvoted in the place where I come from. The place where I was once ridiculed for the economically long, but cripplingly unfashionable, length of my second hand school skirt. Where I was found out for lying that we had a colour telly. Where my dad once fixed our car by welding a fridge door to the floor of it. I got out and I got lucky and left all that behind.
It happened after everyone had gone to bed, the neighbour said. He burst out of the shabby, front door past his stunted, unwatered tree, yelling at the top of his lungs that weren’t we all fucking sorry now. Marching along the white lines in the middle of the road in the dark, up and down, up and down and shrieking. “Out you cunts! We’re out! Out! Out! Out!” He’d cursed and marched for a good ten minutes yelling for some posh bastard to come outside and take him on. And mocked them when they didn’t. “It was horrible,” my neighbour said, “he knew we were devastated and he was triumphant. He wanted to punish us. To make us frightened. And he lives right there.”
It was the same outraged and outrageous aggression on the train at twenty past eight on that other day. A need to make the group afraid. To make them small in front of one another. To pick them out. Humiliate. Remove their power by wielding a threat of wholly unpredictable violence. It was our comeuppance. Pliant, dull and smug-lucky us. Parents taking children to schools good enough to warrant the journey. A couple of swimmers going home for brunch after an early morning dip on the heath. Suits off to the City to earn plenty of money to spend on clothes or restaurants or houses or holidays.
Or on a ticket to dance in a field in Somerset.
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Minifreda Grovetzski writes prose, poetry, and articles, but her passion is creative non-fiction. Her book “Basic Training For The Soul” recently shortlisted for the Wasafiri International New Writing Prize and won Mslexia’s Memoir Prize 2020. It explores the experience of agency care-workers on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic. Minifreda continues to work on this and other projects that document the extraordinary drama often found in ordinary lives.
QUARTER PAST EIGHT
by Minifreda Grovetski
Reading a book, enjoying the morning
Sun shining happily, quarter past eight.
Everything peaceful, absolutely no warning
Of a threat to our regular, commuting state.
We hear him even before the doors open,
Spewing and retching out random abuse.
thank Christ, the seat next to me’s already taken.
No space there available for the nut that is loose.
Crudely-hewn, the boulder stumbles,
Drunkenly assaulting his defenceless bike.
Metal workhorse clatters, tumbles
Under the force of his violent strike.
Eyes down, eyes down.
“Mad as hell, yeah?
And every cunt here is gonna know it.”
Eyes down.
“Wake up you fuckers”.
Terrified but too terrified to show you’re terrified.
“Terrified.
That I will pick on you and fuck you up and no-one,
No-one
Will come to your aid.
Get in the ring, let’s fight it out.
I guarantee you I will win.
Cos I am a winner.
You think you’re a winner?
You’ll never be a fucking winner.
But your mother will always love you.”
Boots pounding one end of the carriage to the other.
Imagine it.
“Smack you in the face”
Hostages cringing.
Praying.
Saints and sinners.
“Sometimes you have to sin and sometimes you have to take it out on saints.
At the end of the road, They’ll just put you in a box”.
Verbal shrapnel tightly packed into a human shell.
Unexploded ordnance.
Antipersonnel.
Don’t encourage.
The firing squad.
Eyes down.
Oh my God.
A man has challenged him.
The Fool will surely die .