I was walking my best friend’s son across a crowded station concourse to put him on a train back home after staying at our house. I went on a little ahead of him because anyone I have known since they were born is forever a toddler in my mind, regardless of whether they are now 14, six feet tall and shaving, and in need of protection. He was lucky I wasn’t holding his hand and trying to foist an Ella’s pouch on him for the journey.
“You walk,” he said with interest, as we arrived safely at the turnstiles and I successfully resisted the urge to wipe his nose and pull a hat down over his forehead, “like a mayfly on drugs.”
In compensation for such rudeness, I made him kiss me goodbye before he escaped to the safety of the train. When I told my husband and son what he’d said, however, they replied. “Oh yes, you do!” and “That’s it! Exactly!”
After a moment’s honest consideration, I had to admit they were (all) correct. And why? Why do I comport myself like an intoxicated insect in public? I realised that it is because the straightest path between point A and point B is never one available to me.
I am a small and extremely – even by the usual standards of these things – feeble woman. I have no presence. I do not command a room – any room, unless it is the lavatory and I have remembered to lock the door against the cat. A concourse is completely beyond me.
When I must make my way through an area thronged with humanity, I am constantly scanning ahead and adjusting my route according to potential threats, difficulties, and complications I wish to live without. For example, the man ahead muttering to himself: could be on the phone, could be drunk. If the former, he’s likely to bump into me and knock five foot two me to the ground. If the latter, he’s clumsy and possibly violent. If it’s dark outside and we’re both heading for the same exit onto a quiet street, a different set of potential dangers arises.
Moreover, virtually no one is going to get out of my way. I am invisible. This is not particularly an age thing for me, though better-looking friends have told me that once the glow of youth is firmly behind you there is a definite falling off in attention, courtesy, and simple recognition of another human being existing in the immediate environs.
So I have to make my dispositions accordingly. I thread my way through sudden gaps that have opened up. I give him, him and sometimes her, a wide berth just to be on – almost literally – the safe side. I slow to let people cross my path because the chances are they’re going to do it anyway. I speed up when I see an aggressive-looking individual homing in and yes, I can see that the overall effect might not make sense to my husband et al.
Because, of course, they don’t have to do it. Their route, across the concourse and through life generally, looks very different from mine. Their calculation of risk is minimal. Partly because they’re really quite obtuse but mainly because there just isn’t as much of it around as there is for me.
Watching my son move through adolescence has made all of this abundantly clearly too. For him, the advent of years and hormones has been nothing but an expansion in possibility. He and his friends simply get bigger, stronger, taller and freer. You can see it in every lineament of their confidently striding bodies. They have to be reminded to get out of people’s way, to make concessions for the smaller, weaker, more vulnerable. And they do – I mean, they’re good boys, you know? But they are very much on the other side of the experience from mine.
It’s wonderful to watch, of course. But it cannot help but provoke a compare and contrast with a female adolescence, where your body becomes public property, something to be looked at, assessed, groped if you’re unlucky, worse if you’re unluckier, and always something that in the last, base analysis, can be overpowered by 90 per cent of the people you pass. This mayfly is not on drugs – she has been hyperalert for nearly 40 years and it has kept her alive. Now, get out of my way.
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