invariably follow a natural course, from their revolt against another wicked belief to their transformation into the new wickedness that will later have to be destroyed. Pain and beauty, on the other hand, are irrefutable because they cannot be measured against any belief, nor do they require any belief to be at their service. No man is worth what he believes in, but instead what he has desired and what he has been given to suffer. Any son of a bitch or dimwit can believe whatever they like. The chosen ones are chosen for ecstasy or misfortune. The best, for both.
I contemplate the distant image of Olga with her sisters, all destined for torture (at least we can be sure of the moral torture) and execution. Who would have thought, when everything I’ve written was nothing more than nonsense to while away Sunday afternoons, that I would find myself one day experiencing the Bolshevik’s guilty faint-heartedness?
The fact is, the body knows what’s best for it, and sometimes so does the brain bubbling away up top, so that the next morning, I no longer remembered having harboured sinister thoughts regarding myself and that highly disconcerting young girl. I might go so far as to say I was in a peculiarly good mood. There was a time when my ability to switch from despair to light-heartedness with the same ease as swapping one tie for another bothered me, but since I discovered that being cyclothymic protects against other more tiring and unpleasant mental illnesses, I have happily welcomed my mood swings.
While I made coffee I decided I was sick and, putting on my most pitiful voice, I called the office to let them know. I would have time later to come up with something serious enough to justify my abandoning ship for the day. I took off my tie, but while I was taking off my going-to-the-bank shirt to exchange it for my lucky one (which has an indelible mark on the front, the result of a red-headed bombshell puking on me during a rather mysterious work dinner), it occurred to me it might be of some use dressing up a bit. I therefore reassembled my normal image as a respectable guy, in the usual sense of the term. By this I mean I looked more like the kind of bastards who, if they want to screw you over, pay someone else to do it, rather than the kind of bastards who screw you over because someone’s paid them to do it (decent people don’t have a definite appearance; you recognize them after a while because they haven’t screwed you over). I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s also possible that I splashed on a bit more Paco Rabanne or Armani, which is what jerks like me do once we get past thirty, to disguise the stench of decay.
When I left home I didn’t have a concrete strategy, but I already knew I was going to approach the girl and push my luck. I brushed aside everything that told me I should leave her alone and everything that had depressed me the previous afternoon. I was nothing but a filthy, unscrupulous pig, and that little darling was but a promise of sordid delights. That being the case, things were bound to happen.
I got to the school after registration, when the girls were already all in class.
For a while I indulged in some hare-brained ideas: passing myself off as an inspector from the Ministry of Education, there to give the owners of that select teaching establishment a headache; posing as an exec from an advertising agency looking for cute little girls to advertise mini tampons; going in wearing dark glasses and suggesting to a member of staff that human trafficking could provide a healthy supplement to their meagre wages. But when it came down to it I couldn’t be bothered, so I thought it better to wait until the break. The wall around the playground was low and by taking up position by the railings I might be able to see something.
Break began at eleven. The girls came out in year groups and arranged themselves around a skipping rope here, a hopscotch over there, a mysterious joint glowing in
I contemplate the distant image of Olga with her sisters, all destined for torture (at least we can be sure of the moral torture) and execution. Who would have thought, when everything I’ve written was nothing more than nonsense to while away Sunday afternoons, that I would find myself one day experiencing the Bolshevik’s guilty faint-heartedness?
The fact is, the body knows what’s best for it, and sometimes so does the brain bubbling away up top, so that the next morning, I no longer remembered having harboured sinister thoughts regarding myself and that highly disconcerting young girl. I might go so far as to say I was in a peculiarly good mood. There was a time when my ability to switch from despair to light-heartedness with the same ease as swapping one tie for another bothered me, but since I discovered that being cyclothymic protects against other more tiring and unpleasant mental illnesses, I have happily welcomed my mood swings.
While I made coffee I decided I was sick and, putting on my most pitiful voice, I called the office to let them know. I would have time later to come up with something serious enough to justify my abandoning ship for the day. I took off my tie, but while I was taking off my going-to-the-bank shirt to exchange it for my lucky one (which has an indelible mark on the front, the result of a red-headed bombshell puking on me during a rather mysterious work dinner), it occurred to me it might be of some use dressing up a bit. I therefore reassembled my normal image as a respectable guy, in the usual sense of the term. By this I mean I looked more like the kind of bastards who, if they want to screw you over, pay someone else to do it, rather than the kind of bastards who screw you over because someone’s paid them to do it (decent people don’t have a definite appearance; you recognize them after a while because they haven’t screwed you over). I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s also possible that I splashed on a bit more Paco Rabanne or Armani, which is what jerks like me do once we get past thirty, to disguise the stench of decay.
When I left home I didn’t have a concrete strategy, but I already knew I was going to approach the girl and push my luck. I brushed aside everything that told me I should leave her alone and everything that had depressed me the previous afternoon. I was nothing but a filthy, unscrupulous pig, and that little darling was but a promise of sordid delights. That being the case, things were bound to happen.
I got to the school after registration, when the girls were already all in class.
For a while I indulged in some hare-brained ideas: passing myself off as an inspector from the Ministry of Education, there to give the owners of that select teaching establishment a headache; posing as an exec from an advertising agency looking for cute little girls to advertise mini tampons; going in wearing dark glasses and suggesting to a member of staff that human trafficking could provide a healthy supplement to their meagre wages. But when it came down to it I couldn’t be bothered, so I thought it better to wait until the break. The wall around the playground was low and by taking up position by the railings I might be able to see something.
Break began at eleven. The girls came out in year groups and arranged themselves around a skipping rope here, a hopscotch over there, a mysterious joint glowing in
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