DICARDED DRAFT DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER F

LA COMPARAISON

BY

JEHAN GEORGES VIBERT

ARTVEE PUBLIC DOMAIN

I am writing this chapter from the same perspective as Chapter A, twelve years after the Reverend S.B.’s funeral.

Like the Reverend S.B., these two paintings, the one immediately above and the one immediately below, highlight men’s hypocrisy when it comes to matters of virtue. Though this chapter is not about him and his manly attributes of self-regarding behaviour and misogyny, he gets a mention towards the end of the chapter.

Selfie-seekers, like men, are also propelled by self-interest and an overwhelming sense of the rightness of their actions.

The narrative will discuss selfie-seekers and the damage their self-regarding behaviours, like men’s behaviour, though not always cut from the cloth of misogyny, wreak on the lives of others.

The chapter will also discuss themes of male violence directed at girls and women through the enabling of this violence by a faith-based organisation and its teaching of insidious school lessons.

Instructions taught to female students to trim their wings, curb their outrage, and ‘cop it sweet’ when it comes to the shitty violence men will pour into their lives, both at the school the girls attended and in the wider world.

Now, as this diary is written my way, therefore, in my own time, I will return to the bonfire, the small-scale riot outside the Reverend’s house, my delight as blues and twos rushed to the scene while bricks were hurled through windows and why first responders trained hoses on a fire.

The setting for this chapter starts with me leaving Maccas for reasons I will discuss when I feel like it, and moving to a coffee shop.

Not a relatively egalitarian caff like Macca’s coffee shop (Maccas allows footy jumpers, trackie daks and even Jesus shoes)

but one of those places that, in all kinds of subtle ways, push, very cleverly without breaking the law, the boundaries of discrimination against mums who don’t have the right sort of pram to show off their kids.

Barriers designed to also exclude street people and coffin dodgers from entering a hallowed space where those of the right class will not be

troubled by the unseemly sight of people who will never be included on a class-approved Christmas card list.

Ignoring these barriers added to my chipper mood as I walked into the coffee shop’s precincts immediately after I walked out of Maccas, having intentionally dropped a cup of coffee I held onto the tarmac of the Maccas car park, leaving others to clean up the mess.

Though disappointed that I had to drop the coffee, it helped to ease the annoyance I felt towards Maccas staff and, feeling marvellous, I decided to see if I could piss off the staff and customers of the coffee shop across the cobbled square from Maccas, where I am now sitting even though I had no gas in my guts.

I am sitting within a section out the front of the shop cordoned off from the rest of the square by a red cord that loops through chrome-plated poles, marking out an area set aside for the right kind of people.

The right kind of people, some of whom have brought children with them,

babies snuggled within the right sort of trendy pram.

A pram with oversized wheels and a ground clearance of at least half a metre. A pram that is more about styles and wealth than transporting farting, shitting, giggling, burping, pissing, smiling, retching, bawling, howling, wriggling kids.

The ground clearance, because it lifts the top edge of the pram above the height of the tables at the coffee shop, makes the kid (or kids) in the pram more noticeable to passersby and just as significantly to selfie-seekers.

Like the men and women taking selfies when they have stopped parading and have parked themselves and a pram at tables way too close to where I am sitting.

Though I don’t tolerate that kind of closeness at Maccas, here, at the coffee shop, that feeling is mitigated by a deep sense of satisfaction at sitting in a place designed to exclude people not of the approved class from patronising the joint.

And, also deeply gratifying, sitting next to trendy selfie-seekers who I imagine will be as pissed off by sitting as close to me as I am to them.

Like so many others, a person who is to be blocked out from the sensory input of themselves, their children and their children’s schools.

A blocking out through the use of the trendy selfie-seekers’ wealth.

The wealth that ensures their means of going to work, the offices where they work, and the habitats where they live, play sports, socialise, and

party will only involve the sight of and encounters with people like themselves.

Unless there is a hors d’oeuvre and alcohol-based occasion to which invitations are eagerly sought because their click-based potential is as valuable as the accumulation of ‘likes’ on social media.

A charity event, that is, to raise funds for the needs of people, as

determined by the healthcare professionals running the organisation. People who exist outside the bubble world of pseuds and scammers.

A fundraiser that is resplendent with photos and other artworks decorating the walls of the place where the event occurs.

Artworks and photo-shopped pictures that are curated so as not to reflect the present-day reality of the lives of the people that the charity is funded to assist.

Instead, it is part of the orchestrated nature of the event not to distract these selfie-seekers with any prop that could unsettle these pseuds and scammers

and therefore limit that all-important posing.

After all, what trendy selfie-seeker wants to pose at an event that unnerves them with realistic images of circumstances or people the lifestyle of the scammers and pseuds is designed to avoid?

Therefore, the number of selfies taken at that charity event is a surefire indication of the number of donations made.

With the donation, the pseuds and scammers get to wear a coloured ribbon to show they care. A ribbon that is flaunted on selfies used to mine the click-based potential of the event.

Now I sit at the coffee shop surrounded by these types as they have made their spontaneous but social media-dictated visit to the coffee shop. Vital visibility, as life-sustaining as the air they breathe, for their click-focused lives.

I am sitting so close to them that it is annoyingly easy to hear the social media babble they prattle into their phones or to other selfie-seekers.

That is, other click-focused movers and shakers within the social media world sitting at the same tables as the pram pushers who speak in social media babble into their phones while the pram-pushers are also talking in social media gibberish to the movers and shakers.

These trendy selfie-seekers, social media movers and shakers all exuded confidence that their class and wealth would provide the warmth to shield them from the chill winds that woke them with a start in the early morning hours.

The winds they dismiss because they do not want to acknowledge their origin. An origin that lies within the dreams that come with sleep. Dreams with the chilling breath of fate whispering enigmatically, ‘Luke Chapter 12: verses 16 -21.’

Dreams that never make it into their bubble world of supposedly unique ordinary and habitual selfie poses, unlike the generational photos of selfie seekers’ relatives.

Unaffected poses,

black and white photos from the last century and the years before that, now gracing the pages of a family photo album.

Unlike the men and women I saw taking posed selfies while they stood on the edge of rock platforms.

Uncaring, cruel selfie seekers, in their usual self-deluded state of thinking that they would light up the social media world because of the creativity displayed by their poses

copied from a social media app watched minutes before they climbed over a fence alongside a warning sign advising them not to do that.

Callous bastards, I watched taking selfies as I went for walks along the ocean cliffs of Sydney

during my second visit, several months after the Reverend S.B.’s funeral, to Australia.

Heartless, selfish pricks who did not give a shit if the edge of the rock ledge they stood on at death’s-height from the waves breaking on the rocks below them gave way.

When it does, taking the selfie-seeker with it as chunks of rock plummet towards the waves crashing onto the base of the cliff, social media will light up with unique, plagiarised tweets (how appropriate is that word, eh? A word that aptly skewers the intellectual heft of some of the discourse on that app as having the intelligence of a bird’s chirp), memes and Facebook comments hoping to post that ego-burnishing utterance that harvests the most ‘likes.’

And, of course, the one unique comment repeated throughout all the others, the one that will bring a contrived tear to the eyes of influencers as they sit in front of their webcams,

‘They died with a phone in their hand.’

Unless the selfie seeker lost their grip on the phone as they fell through a void and the rolling breakers of the blue Pacific Ocean took it.

After all that posing and preening, no one will see the shot.

Fuck me dead.

How bloody disappointing.

No one would see that last ordinary, habitual, supposedly unique selfie, would they?

How fucking awful would that be, eh?

Just as awful as the uncaring, unkind attitude you gutless wonders have towards the first responders who retrieve battered bodies

(how do you preen yourself for an untimely death?) from the bottom of the cliff.

It is a casual cruelty to pummel those first responders with the emotional turmoil that will hammer their lives as they undertake that task because you, a self-regarding selfie seeker,

hungered to take a click-harvesting shot, despite the warning signs.

As for the danger to the first responders as they are lowered down the cliffs to retrieve the selfie seeker’s body, why should you fucking care?

The unselfish behaviour of first responders that me-look-at-me selfie-seekers don’t give a shit about because those people are outside the selfie-harvesting bubble world of social media and the next supposedly distinctive but, in truth, ordinary selfie.

A world not linked by the clicks a selfie is designed to garner.

Links, like those between the community, spurned by selfie seekers of people who designed a phone, produced it and delivered it to a now dead hand.

The phone that now lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

The phone that’s not available to take a selfie with the compassionate first responders as they strap a selfie seeker’s body to a stretcher and give a signal that the body is ready to be hauled to the top of the cliff where that selfie-seeker perched after climbing over a fence despite many signs warning of the dangers of doing just that.

First responders, too, are linked to a community beyond the purview of me-look-at-me selfie seekers.

A community whose links are shat on by cliff-edge selfie seekers through their callous indifference to the impact of their behaviour

on the women and men who have taken the emergency calls and activated the call-out of those first responders.

Law enforcement officers are also part of the community forged by links of caring that me-look-at-me selfie seekers have never let intrude into their fucked-up bubble world of social media, selfies and clicks.

Those law enforcement officers now have the awful, gut-wrenching task of

driving to the homes of people close to the person, once a selfie seeker but now a body, the next photos of whom will not be selfies.

They will be photos taken in the chill air of a morgue and from there to be displayed in a coroner’s report.

Photographs that will accompany the pictures of a body strapped to a stretcher as the stretcher lies at the top of the cliff.

A sight law enforcement officers want to avoid conveying to the people who are close to that selfie-seeker.

A sight, however, that will be conjured up when law enforcement officers, keeping their emotions in check until there is an appropriate time to release them, knock on a door and deliver news that will rip those people’s lives to shreds.

Ah! But the selfie was taken.

But the phone now lies at the bottom of the ocean, and no one will see the last selfie in which self-initiated posing was still possible.

The opportunity to accumulate those vital, life-defining clicks will be just as impossible.

Ain’t that bloody awful?

It’s enough to make a me-look-at-me selfie-seeker weep bitter tears at the futility of their existence.

Those walks along the ocean cliffs of Sydney happened several years back from the time and place where I am now, sitting in an exclusive coffee shop, surrounded by swarms of trendy self-seekers and their prams.

I stayed in Australia for about six years on that occasion and then returned to the United Kingdom for reasons that don’t concern this chapter.

In Australia, I forgot about the class barriers that define life in the UK.

Those barriers hit me like a slap in the face when I returned.

Like the barriers determining who is a suitable patron for this coffee shop across the cobbled square from Maccas.

Barriers that exclude mums who balk at the price of trendy prams; women and men, girls and boys who spend their days on the streets, either through choice or necessity;

and any coffin dodger whose clothes and manner of dress show they do not belong to the right class.

These people are considered a polluting presence if they enter the refined atmosphere of the coffee shop and therefore are dissuaded from crossing the threshold by all the objectifying, belittling ways the English class system is so adept at applying.

However, on both visits to Australia, the first several years before the second, and while travelling back to the United Kingdom after my first visit, my only visit to New Zealand, I noticed an incredible difference from living in the United Kingdom.

Though in Australia and New Zealand, as in the UK, race-based issues stood out like a sore thumb, what struck me was how different life can be when the shackles of social class do not exist.

I felt an exhilarating sense of liberation without those shackles slowing down and cramping my life’s journey.

A life-enhancing freedom enabled me to see how toxic a society becomes when an entire nation, like the UK, submits to the mouldy hollowness of social class to structure society and permit that mean, cruel male-centric value to determine the country’s governance.

Therefore, I could never take that coffee shop’s fucked up class-focused barriers seriously.

And why, to annoy the frigging hell out of the staff and customers, I would make repeated visits if a cup of coffee wasn’t so bloody expensive.

Not that I paid for it.

When I left, I saw the prices chalked in fashionable style on an Eco-friendly wooden board hanging on an outside wall of the shop beside the doorway.

I will write this coffee shop on my bucket list because I am eager to return and release farts at the wait staff.

Staff who were very deferential to the selfie-seekers with their trendy prams, but when the wait staff talked to me, they spoke in accents that showed the diversity of dialects to be found across the United Kingdom as the staff flitted between the selfie seekers tables, saying a mantra,

‘I’ll be back to take your order.’

Words said with a sneer in my direction when the resentful gaze of wait staff flickered towards my table.

I received undivided attention, though, when I gave a hacking tubercular-like cough, the sort of sound I heard when I worked in a medical ward at Sydney Hospital, as if I was about to spit on the table.

Therefore, with bad grace, the wait staff took my order.

The waiter who brought the cup of coffee to me leant in close to my ear and whispered,

‘The coffee is on the house. Drink it, then fuck off and stay away. Your type doesn’t belong here and never will.’

In a smooth, graceful manoeuvre, the waiter straightened up and moved to a table where a selfie-seeker had lifted their hand and snapped their fingers.

Though I wanted to do something like standing up suddenly, knocking the table over and sending coffee flying over the selfie-seekers and their prams, I thought of those class barriers.

I could fart in a relatively egalitarian place like Maccas and not be chucked out.

But a display of anti-social behaviour from a person deemed by customers and staff not to be off the 'right sort', like a coffin dodger not dressed in the 'right' clothes for this coffee shop, would mean the police would be called.

The police, respecting the class status of the establishment, would be on their way within minutes.

As the police approached the shop, they would know instantly that I was the one causing concern for the staff and customers. An assessment based on my appearance and how I dressed.

The wait staff would not have to nod in my direction when the police walked between the outside tables. The police would grab my arms and escort me from the premises.

I would then be dragged into the law enforcement and judicial institutions by which the UK’s social class system exerts its power over those deemed by the upper classes of society to be poor and underprivileged.

As I did not want to bring joy to the hearts of those institutions as they exercised those thuggish, prejudicial powers, I accepted the situation.

The waiter pissed me off by his words and attitude. However, because of the enforcement of those class barriers, I had few options for dealing with my anger.

The best I could do was to leave a globule of spit in the bottom of the cup as I finished the coffee. I then stood up and left the joint.

Swearing under my breath at the waiter, I strode towards a Christian charity shop at the other end of the square from Maccas.

As I approached this shop, my mood lifted as I realised I had succeeded. I set out to piss people off at the coffee shop and I had achieved that purpose.

However, unlike previous visits, the charity shop staff eye me warily as I strode in. I guess the scowl on my face had not lifted.

Just inside the front of the charity shop was a space across the aisle from the counter.

The aisle led further into the shop, where closely aligned rows of shelves were crammed with many bargains, treasures and delights.

However, the space at the front of the shop had been cleared of shelves, creating a large area where several coffee tables and scruffy-looking lounge chairs and sofas were spread out across a floor decorated with tatty-looking strips of carpet.

At the entrance to this space from the aisle, on a large table, were white polystyrene cups, a steaming hot water urn, instant coffee in a jar, and, alongside a couple of teaspoons, tea bags scattered across a cracked ceramic platter. Beside the platter were a couple of open tins of biscuits.

A manufacturer had provided the biscuits, I assume, because the bickies had passed their use-by date.

There were also, in another open tin, tiny fiddly paper bags of white sugar and plastic stirrers.

On the floor, to one side of the table, stood a large open black plastic garbage bin lined with a yellow plastic bag.

Few people were sitting on the chairs or sofas as I stood before the table and rejected the idea of making coffee.

Compared to a flat white, instant coffee is crap. My only option then was the tea bags.

I needed a hot drink to sip and cradle in my hands while I thought about violence and how men would readily use it to dominate others. The vicious arrogance of the waiter inflamed this line of thinking.

Though Christian faith-based organisations are prime examples of how men use violence in that way to direct the lives and thinking of others, those violent male voices do not always have the final say in the conduct of those organisations.

Other voices, more likely from women, but men may have contributed, spoke narratives of mutuality, inclusiveness and shared humanity.

These voices showed the moral rightness of these attributes for the customer experience of the charity shop through the provision of complimentary hot drinks and biscuits. Freebies I started using as I picked up a polystyrene cup.

I poured hot water into the cup from the urn and grabbed a bunch of tea bags.

After I had dumped the tea bags into the hot water, I muttered, ‘Slack bastards,’ at the unknowns who had left out a carton of milk, now getting warm in the sunlight streaming through the doorway, on the table as I picked up the carton.

I poured milk into the cup and returned the carton to the small glass-fronted fridge, standing at the opposite end of the table to the hot water urn.

With the number of tea bags in the cup, I did not have to let the tea brew or jiggle the tea bags before the tea reached the desired strength.

Therefore, I pulled out the mass of tangled tea bags immediately after I had put the carton in the fridge.

Having dropped the tea bags into the bin, I picked up the cup and a tin of biscuits and, while holding both, walked towards a coffee table close to a lounge chair near the shop’s front window.

I placed the cup and the tin of biscuits on the coffee table and moved the chair so that it was facing towards the window with the coffee table beside the chair.

Before I sat down, I looked at two older women chatting while sitting on a sofa near the coffee table.

I jerked my head toward the open tin of biscuits and said,

‘Help yourselves.’

They smiled, and one of them said,

‘Thank you, they are more convenient for us over here than beside the hot water urn.’

I then picked up the cup of tea and sat on the chair with my back to the shop’s interior.

Sitting this way, I could look through the window and glare at men walking past the window as I contemplated the violence men brought into the lives of women and girls.

These ideas assumed a particular focus as I sipped the tea and watched a group of girls dressed in school uniforms walk past the shop window.

I thought about men in faith-based organisations and the means they use to inveigle girls into the doctrines and beliefs of these organisations.

If those girls walking past the window attended schools bankrolled by a certain faith-based organisation that worships the God of the Christians, and the person claimed to be his (a Christian ascribed gendered pronoun) son, the Christian Jesus, the girls will be taught a male-centric ideology of what their student’s lives as adults are to be.

Many years ago, as kids, both forms of this ideology, either a male version or a female one depending on the gender of the students in the class, were taught to me and my siblings when we attended one of these schools, the one nearest to where we lived.

For boys, the form this male-centric ideology took was the importance of male power in world affairs. Therefore, it was their God (the God of the Christians) given right to exercise that power over women and girls. And, provided they lived within a heterosexual framework, that God had given them the right to own and enjoy their sexuality.

For girl students, however, the ideology inculcated into them was the submissive role they must adopt in their relationships with men.

Like masturbation, relationships outside a heterosexual framework are sins worse than bestiality.

This submission to the wishes of men shows its ugliness in the social, financial and emotional violence inflicted on girls and women to ensure their unique capacity to conceive and bear children remained under the control of men.

There would be no limits placed on the male initiated, enabled and perpetrated violence to stop women owning and enjoying their sexuality and reproductive capacity.

The church, like other faith-based organisations, saddled these attributes with the hang-ups of men throughout the world who know, in their heart of hearts, they are like drones in a beehive. Like drones, they have one function to perform.

Unlike women and girls, though, men and boys do not have to be present to perform that function. Apart from that one function, they contribute little else to the functioning of society that others can achieve, and the world can get by without them.

My siblings and I attended this school at the insistence of my mother.

The Reverend S.B wanted us to attend a local school where I and my siblings knew, from friends who attended that school, a couple of the Reverend S.B's. bathroom mates worked as teachers.

Whether my mother knew about the Reverend's mates working as teachers I don’t know as she never said anything about it. However, she did speak openly about the English social-class system both to us and to friends in her social circles.

In particular, she claimed that employment doors would open for girls and boys who had a public school education that would never be opened for kids educated at a state-funded school

Her plan for our public school education, however, almost fell apart two years into our attendance at that public school close to where we lived.

Like faith-based schools across the globe, the sexual abuse of pupils

by a member of the clergy came to light.

One summer afternoon, wearing only their panties, with the remainder of their clothes folded neatly on the floor beside them, my six-year-old sister and other girls aged six or seven sat in a semi-circle on the floor of the vestry.

Facing the class, at the front of the vestry, a priest quizzed the girls on their knowledge of Catholic feast days.

A girl who answered incorrectly had to kiss the bulge in the zipper line at the front of the priest’s black trousers.

A father discovered this sordid priest-led debasing of the beauty and childhood of the girls when the father arrived early at the Cathedral to collect his daughter

from this religious instruction class.

I don’t know whether the father hesitated when he witnessed a semi-naked girl kissing the priest’s pants, thinking about the sexual indulgences presented by an opportunity to assist the priest in instructing these young girls. However, whatever the ambiguity in his thinking was, the father took his daughter out of the class and reported the matter.

The church responded with bribery for the parents of the children involved and the priest’s removal to another parish.

Nothing was offered directly to the girls involved or to the other pupils of the school. Neither did the church offer an apology.

The bribery took the form of the church, paying the school fees not only for the girls who attended those classes but for any of their siblings who also attended the school.

The church paid the payments for as long as it took all these children to complete their education at the school.

Mum flew into a rage when she heard what the priest had been up to and what the churches response was.

She wanted to tap into her suffragette networks and publicize the issues with a view to demonstrating outside the school. As part of the demonstration she intended taking us out of the school and enrolling us in another public school as she maintained her belief in the value of a public school education to give us a leg up in life.

However, the Reverend S.B.’s employment at the car park cathedral was looking increasingly shaky, (for reasons to do with the company’s image concomitant with the Reverend S.B.’s indiscreet sexual proclivities) therefore money was tight.

After a blazing row between Mum and the Reverend S.B. (‘you’re nothing but a pathetic sex-addled creep,’ was probably the milder of the epithets we heard screamed through our bedroom walls as Mum gave the Reverend S.B a verbal thrashing one evening after we had said our prayers and gone to bed), Mum reluctantly accepted the churches offer after she told us kids at dinner time one evening the reason why and in the process, leaving no fig-leaf for the Reverend S.B. to hide under.

With the issue of the fees settled, the threat that my siblings and I could no longer attend the school because we weren’t Catholics also faded into history.

I learned about the preference given to enrolling Catholic kids as opposed to non-Catholic kids by the abuse shouted at my siblings and me by other kids at the school within weeks of our first classes.

Abuse like, ‘They only allow Catholics into this school. So, how did you lot get in?’

I assumed they knew we were not Catholics because they did not see us at Sunday Mass.

But I couldn’t answer the question because I don’t know what occurred to ensure our initial enrolment.

I guess as it was a male-centric organisation that ran this school and the Reverend S.B.’s car park cathedral had access to young women, that sex was involved. (I also assume that if there was an interest in young boys, the Reverend S.B. could have also catered for that malignant abuse of compassion, trust and power).

Or it could have simply been a matter of a bribe disguised as a donation to the school.

After all, considering the amount of money the Reverend S.B. was making at the time of our initial enrolment, money, could have been used to guarantee our place in the school if the men of the church were feeling squeamish about accessing the bodies of young children.

Though the churches 'bribe' to parents meant I and my siblings need not worry about the state of the Reverend S.B.'s finances for one part of our continued enrolment, I remained curious about the reason for the other part: our enrolment as non-Catholics.

This curiosity was addressed when I and my siblings, as well as mum and the Reverend S.B.,

sat in the school headman’s office a couple of afternoons after the dinner in which mum had put the Reverend S.B.firmly in the frame for the reason why she accepted the offer from the church.

The Reverend S.B. wore one of several suits he dressed in when he conducted a hell-fire or Jesus service at the cathedral.

The head man was dressed in black and wore a peculiarly shaped purple hat.

This man sat behind a large wooden desk while we non-Catholics sat on hard wooden seats on the other side of the desk opposite him with our knees touching the desk.

Lying on top of the desk, facing mum and the Reverend S.B., were several forms.

Mum picked up a pen lying beside the forms, glanced at them, and signed them without comment before passing the pen to the Reverend S.B.

When it came to the Reverend S.B.’s turn, as he took a pen from mum, he looked at the man behind the desk, and said in a silky voice,

‘Just to be certain, these forms make it crystal clear about the non-payment of fees and that there will be no further financial discussions about the children’s continued enrolment because of their non-Catholic status?’

I looked at the man behind the desk with the funny-shaped purple hat as he shot a swift glance of hatred, loathing and anger towards the Reverend S.B. before replying,

‘Yes, the documents make that crystal clear.’

I turned towards the Reverend S.B. and saw him smirk as he leaned forward from his chair and signed the forms.

With the forms signed, and little in the way of further conversation between the adults, we filed out of the headman’s office.

Three days later, as we filed into the family home via the backdoor, with school finished for the day, and through to the kitchen expecting to see mum with afternoon tea ready for us, we were met by a scowling older woman, who snarled,

'You're wicked mother has walked out on your poor, saintly father. I am the housekeeper and you children will behave.' The housekeeper glared at each of us in turn. 'There will be no afternoon tea,' she continued, 'until you have washed your face and hands, changed and put your filthy uniforms in the laundry. You will each take turns to read a passage from the bible before evening meals are served. Now scoot!' She snapped. We fled, terrified.

She also terrified us by telling us that, if we were angry, earwigs would crawl into one ear and nibble on our brains as they made their way through to the other ear. She claimed to have been a housekeeper for a family where she saw earwigs crawled out of a child’s ear. Earwigs chewing on children’s brains was the reason why children became ‘retarded’ and had to be put in special homes, she claimed.

Though the logic of these claims now defeats me, at the time I and my siblings were scared witless. The only saving grace during the months of mum’s absence was the non-appearance of the Reverend S.B.’s mates at bath time. However, that is a story for another chapter.

Overall, it was a very traumatic time to the point where, as I look back now, we kids lost our sense of agency and did not ‘push back’ against the housekeeper’s rigidity and terror tactics.

However, this was not the case at school.

Maybe it was just a simple thing like students disliking their teachers rather than an adult world of a deeper analysis, but for whatever reason my siblings and I, as well as other kids found ways of 'dealing' with the 'black ants,' our pet name for the priests.

Like sprinkling mouse poo over the host just before Mass, or, as we knew, priests liked to take a swig of wine from the flagon before Mass, mixing wine with piss we collected in a jar when we went to the toilet.

And, on one occasion, we opened up the Missal, carved a hole through the pages, filled the gap with a bloody tampon and closed the Missal.

But the best of all was weakening the legs of the altar in such a way that all it would take would be a gentle kick from an altar boy

to send the altar crashing to the ground.

Which it did, part way into Mass one autumn Sunday. An event that so startled the priest that, in a thunderous voice, he took the Lord’s name in vain.

We heard along the grapevines kids use in schools that the priest was subsequently disciplined by the Bishop for this outrageous blasphemy and transferred to another parish while we continued our education at that Catholic school.

It was exhilarating to have this much fun at the expense of adults and not face any severe consequences unlike at home with the nightmare of a housekeeper.

I smiled at these recollections of school life as I sat in the chair at the charity shop, looking through the window.

As the smile disappeared, replaced by darker thoughts, I reached over to the biscuit tin on the coffee table and picked up a biscuit.

I ate the biscuit as I thought about the violence the male leaders of this Christian faith-based school slammed into the lives of girl students.

I wiped crumbs from my mouth with my fingers as I finished the biscuit while I looked across the square, empty apart from long shadows, like grey grasping fingers stretching across the cobblestones.

The girls of the school, before their young, impressionable minds had gained perspectives on the world so that they could form their own opinions and judgements, were taught the male ideal of the perfect woman through the adulation heaped upon images of the so-called Virgin Mary.

An image of a young white, well-fed woman with smooth, freckle, and pimple-free skin.

A sexualised image of a girl moving into womanhood, the shape of whose breasts are determined by a heterosexual male ideal of what a young girl’s breasts should look like, depending on the time and society in which any image of Mary was created.

Images that are approved for display by the men who run the Christian faith-based organisation that administered the school I and my siblings attended.

An image of an allegedly submissive young woman who bore a child after being raped by a man.

And yet, despite that violent, horrific sexual assault, with the life-changing events that followed in its wake, that was not how the men who wrote the current dominant script of that part of her life fantasised Mary’s life to be. She is portrayed in countless images as the heterosexual male ideal of submissive womanhood, calmly accepting her fate.

A fucked-up image created by men flying in the face of the rage Mary expressed through her words in the Magnificat.

An image promoted by the male leaders of that church that conveyed a terrible message.

A shocking message promulgated to the female students of the Christian faith-based school my siblings and I attended. Girl students were to respond with tranquillity, ‘to cop it sweet,’ to the male violence that would plague their lives.

Therefore, when their boyfriends smash their fists into the face of a girl or the schoolgirl is raped by a gang of boys who go to the same school as her, or she is fucked by a priest, regardless of her age or her unwillingness to consent, girls are taught to seek comfort in a male bullshit image of Mary who calmly accepted her fate.

This Christian church, like others, taught and still teaches that lesson not only to the girls who attend their schools but to women and girls across centuries and cultures.

After all, according to the male-centric teaching of those churches, it is a girl or woman’s womb (and its male-directed use), and not her mental state after any of these or similarly horrific explosions of male violence into her life, that is the most significant attribute of any woman or girl.

As I sat in the chair in the charity shop pondering these matters while shadows purposely pushed the last of the sun’s rays out of the cobbled square, a tinkling bell and a male voice shouting out,

‘The shop will close in five minutes.’

Interrupted my thoughts.

I finished the tea and stood up.

Leaving the biscuit tin on the coffee table, I carried the cup to the black garbage bin and dropped the cup onto the other litter.

I must not have looked angry as I walked past the counter.

The staff brightly called out, ‘See you again.’

I felt settled enough to say to them,

‘You will. Goodbye.’

Before striding through the doorway and out into the chill evening air.

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