Sleight of Hand Read Free Page B

says.
    â€œYes, everyone says so.”
    â€œThough it’s probably time for him to go now. But you didn’t used to be able to go out at night,” she says. “It’s not scary anymore.”
    â€œNo, well, I’m sure … I mean, if you were used to it before. It must feel very different.”
    â€œYou never came before?” she asks. “In the eighties and the nineties when they had the … what do you call it when you can’t go out at night?”
    â€œCurfew?”
    â€œYeah, the curfew.”
    â€œNo,” I say. “No, thank God. Even now, it’s about as scary as
I
can cope with.”
    She twitches her nose, and then peels the aluminium foil from her dish with her vast fluorescent fingernails. “It’s pathetic,” she says.
    â€œAirline food?” I ask.
    â€œThe way you people look down your noses at everyone.”
    â€œI’m sorry?”
    â€œYou would think that nothing bad ever happens in Europe,” she says.
    â€œOh,” I say, realising that I have broken the golden rule of untainted adulation. “I didn’t actually say
that.”
    â€œThere are murders and gangs and drugs in Europe, you know. Where do you think all the cocaine goes? Who do you think they grow it for?”
    â€œNo, you’re right,” I say, frowning. “You’re totally right.”
    She forks a lump of non-specific vegetable matter from her dish and makes a “Humph,” sound, and then pops her headphones into her ears. And that’s the end of our conversation.
    As I eat my meal, I think about the differing nature of violence in England, France and Colombia, because of course, as Lolita says, shit does happen back home. If the media are to be believed, then it happens more and more.
    But it is somehow
different
shit. It’s drunken shit, and racist shit, and sometimes homophobic shit. But it’s shit that I understand, and for the most part, shit that I know how to avoid. I can sense when a bar brawl is about to happen and leave. When faced with a group of a certain kind of men after a certain hour in a certain part of town I can cross the road. It’s the way Colombian violence springs from a glassy lake that unnerves me. It’s the way it vanishes back into it leaving barely a ripple. It’s the way it bursts from smiling happy people who, often without even dropping that smile, pull a knife or a gun. There’s no aggro, no negotiation, no tension. It’s often not even about obtaining anything. It’s just about stopping some dog, or some
one
, doing some
thing
that is found to be irritating. It cracks like thunder, and thenvanishes leaving the bystanders to roll a cigarette and sweep up the storm damage. In the end what makes it so unnerving is that lack of understanding … it’s that I don’t get the context.
    There is a specific Colombian attitude to life as well. It’s as if, living amidst so much mayhem, they have learned to enjoy every moment. And they have looked death in the eye and accepted its inevitability as well. So, no matter what you discuss, you will hear how Colombian thinking has been forged between a rock and a hard place. On money:
better spend it today. You might be dead tomorrow
. On suicide:
Well, if you don’t like the film, I can’t see why you should have to stay to the end
. On paedophilia:
What’s the point of all that? A trial and a judge, and years of prison. Such a waste of money. Far better to deal with it the Colombian way. Click. Done. Over
. On cigarettes:
I’d rather die of cancer at fifty than sit in my own piss till a hundred
.
    And when you hear these viewpoints often enough, your own relationship with death starts to shift too. Life starts to seem like it
is
an episode of Desperate Housewives, where the
obvious
answer to a whole clutch of problems is murder. It’s catching yourself thinking the Colombian way, that’s the