Confrontation

 

There were too many dead birds on the roads these past days, one or two of them steamrolled horribly flat. (Last week a foreign worker was killed by a steamroller in Carpmael Road, 100m along from the house.) On one of the paths one bird looked an unnatural or desecrated death of the kind reported from battlefields, rats or possibly cats the only explanation. And that was before the news-reports from NSW of large numbers of corellas dead and dying in Newcastle, poisoning suspected by farmers, presumably. The Kursk casualties late afternoon left only poor imagining; “horror movie” one of the witnesses resorted to in his description to the BBC. Then on top of everything the little Arab kid with her older sister on the bus returning from town, choking her sobs and hiding her face by turns. There was silent freak gaping at the sister when the latter came over beside her. Adjacent the mother remained fixed on her phone, not neglectful, only the Arab Tiger form. The child couldn’t be helped—that was the truth of hardship and despair, even from the get-go. You hide it if nothing else, bite down on it, get used to it.