The Nature of Cruelty (38 page)

“Lana, shut up,” he says, cupping my cheek in his hand. I step away out of his reach.

Sasha and Poppy are oblivious to us, going wild for Annie Lennox, who’s zooming around the stage on a massive moving contraption, the setting all black and red and striking.

“I probably shouldn’t have come here tonight,” I say, looking at him in agony.

“You’re over-thinking things,” he counters, trying to get close to me again, but I keep moving. All of a sudden, I feel caged. There are too many people around me. Robert’s very presence surrounds me entirely, and I have the violent urge to get away.

Without breathing another word, I turn on my heel and begin weaving through the crowd. Robert follows after me, calling my name, but soon I vanish among the throngs of people and I can’t hear him any longer.

Nineteen

I
t takes forever to get out of the stadium; there are way too many security guards and people getting in the way. When I finally reach the outdoors, I gasp in air and continue walking speedily away from the venue, feeling frantic, not in my right mind. Before I know it, I’m standing on a city street I don’t recognise, trying to get my breathing to calm down as cars zoom speedily by.

I stare at the headlights, my eyes becoming blurry and my head dizzy. I should hail a taxi and go home, get some food and some rest.

“Lana!” I hear Robert call my name and I turn around, seeing him running toward me from halfway down the street. Unable to face him, I start walking again.

“What the hell are you playing at?” he yells, closer now. Seconds later he’s gripping my arm, stopping me in my stride.

Trying to slow my breathing, I tell him calmly, “Let go of me, Robert. I can’t be around you.”

“Why? Why are you so determined to make something that could be so simple so complicated?”

“Because it
is
complicated. You and I are the very definition of complication. I just – being around you isn’t good for me. It only hurts, only makes me sicker. Go back to the stadium. I’m going to catch a cab home.”

Before he can reply, I see a gap in the traffic. There’s a taxi rank over the road, so I begin walking towards it.

“Please don’t walk away from me,” says Robert desperately. I’m halfway across the road when he catches me around the waist, trying to pull me back. I struggle to break free, not noticing that the traffic has started moving again. The horn of a gigantic truck sounds loudly in my ears as I glance up to see it approaching us from only feet away. Just in time before we get knocked down, I push Robert off the road hard and we both fall to the concrete path, me on top of him.

“Shit,” he breathes, just now realising that he almost killed the both of us.

The aftershock makes me lash out. “You see! You can’t fucking help yourself. You’re so reckless. We both nearly got knocked down!”

“I’m sorry, Lana. I wasn’t thinking straight. Please, let’s just go home and talk.”

Scrambling to my feet, I hold my hand out in warning for him to keep his distance. “Don’t, Robert. Just stop, okay?”

His sad eyes momentarily make me wish the truck
had
hit us. At least then we’d both be put out of our misery. He remains sitting there on the path as I walk away, finally getting safely over the road and heading home.

In the morning I wake up early and have this urgency in my gut to get out of the house. I heard Sasha and Robert return at around one, but neither of them came into my room. I guess Robert must have already explained to Sasha why I left. I can’t imagine how awful he’s feeling. Actually I can, because I’m feeling it, too.

It will fade.

It has to fade.

I get dressed and pack a bag for the day, planning on staying out for as long as possible.

I spend a long time in the British Museum, staring at a picture of Medea and thinking about how her husband Jason left her for the princess Glauce. As revenge, Medea killed Glauce by sending her the gift of a dress covered in poison. Then she murdered her and Jason’s two children. I always used to wonder how Medea could be so callous, having never felt the need to be callous myself. But now I can understand it. I might not condone what she did, but I get
why
she did it. I feel callous by the simple act of withholding my love from Robert.

Callous and selfish, but oh, so very desperate to survive.

There’s always a reason for cruelty, no matter how big or how small.

After lunch I walk to Speaker’s Corner, happy to see Fareed standing in his usual spot, smoking a cigarette this time instead of a cigar. He nods to me in greeting, but we don’t converse. Perhaps he sees the look of contemplation on my face, a look that shows I’m thinking deep, dark thoughts.

There’s a lull in the people debating, a quietness permeated only by soft mutterings and chat. Within this quietness I see an opening, an outlet for the thoughts that fill my head. If I don’t get them out, I feel like I’ll burst. Like an out-of-body experience, I step in front of the gathering and begin to speak, my voice low and unsure.

“I – I want to talk about cruelty.” Glancing around warily, I wonder if anyone will even listen to what I have to say. Coughing to clear my throat, I go on, “The casual kind you commit every day in small doses but don’t really think about, and the more serious kind, the kind you obsess over, plan in your head to the point of madness. Sometimes cruelty can be careless. Like a suicide bomber or a shooter, you plan it out, convince yourself that your reasons are noble and worthy. But then, quite ironically, after all the agonising and planning, the way you dish it out is random.

“You walk into a crowd of people you don’t even know and hit the ‘detonate’ button, or you spray and pray, not caring who you hit – just so long as you hit
someone
. All the political and religious causes in the world are nothing compared to the need to get your own feelings out from underneath your skin, where it feels like they’ll eat you alive if you don’t do something to appease them.” I pause, glancing around wide-eyed to find that I have the attention of at least thirty or forty people. Fareed looks at me, intrigued, and continues puffing on his cigarette. Taking a deep breath, I continue.

“Cruelty is seldom forgotten. You feel it as a child. Somebody takes away your toy or thoughtlessly kicks over your sand castle. A beautiful boy walks into your life, sees something he doesn’t like or doesn’t understand, and painstakingly endeavours to make you feel how much he hates you, to be constantly aware of the flaws that provoke that hatred. And then you grow older and wiser, but you don’t forget the cruelty. You can’t forget it, because there is nothing stronger, nothing more palpable in the human brain than the memory of mistreatment. The feeling of denigration set upon you by another. You fixate on that person, question the reason why they act the way they do. Is the reason big, or is the reason small? Like, maybe they just don’t like your hair or the set of your mouth. Or maybe you are so very imperfect that they simply can’t ignore you — they
have
to set out to make you see all those little imperfections in bright and vivid detail.

“This is why cruelty is hard to forgive. Those memories that you hold onto like a brick tied to your wrist, constantly dragging you down, tell you that you can’t let it go. You cannot and should not forgive the person who wronged you, because if they can do it once, they’ll do it again, right? They can’t change the fundamental aspects of their personality. But then doubt sets in. You compare the child who was cruel to the grown-up who seemingly isn’t, and you ask, have they changed? Was it all just juvenile stupidity? Have they evolved into a person who deserves to be forgiven?

“And then you realise that cruelty is the symptom of a deeper cause. It makes you want to show forgiveness, because there was a reason why that boy mistreated you. He was lost and confused, the child of a broken home, mistreated himself by a father who taught him a bad value system. He didn’t know how to deal with the feelings inside him, so he lashed out.

“Or maybe you’re a girl who sees that your father will never accept the truth behind the façade you put up, and so you hide, living a lie under the cruelty of a parent who simply can’t open their mind and give you the acceptance you deserve. You could be a pop star who’s shot to fame, living the life you dreamed about, but then you realise that the reality doesn’t match the dream. You see that there are sharks in the waters you tread, and they are waiting for you to bleed just one drop of blood, show just one tiny flaw, so they can dive in for the kill. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re a woman who’s had something stolen from you, something that could ruin you if it’s revealed to the world. So you become crazed in your quest to get it back, breaking the law and hurting others in the process.

“No matter what form the cruelty takes, it often births an offspring called regret. That emotion of remorse, where you wish you’d never acted the way you did. You wish you’d never made the girl you love think you hated her. You wish you hadn’t told your daughter you wouldn’t accept her unless she conformed. You regret writing the story that pushed that pop star over the edge and caused her to try and take her own life. You tell yourself that even though someone was cruel to you by stealing from you, you should never have sunk to their level and tried to steal something back.

“So, you see, in essence, cruelty is a cycle. A person inflicts it and it spreads. It simply breeds more and more of itself in a loop. The father inflicts it on the son, the son inflicts it on a girl, the girl inflicts it back on the son and I’m sure the son will return it to the father eventually. But maybe that’s not true, because even though that boy was hateful to you, you were never hateful back. You might have defended yourself, but that’s all it was, right? But oh, then you look deeper, you examine your own actions and make the startling discovery that something in the fabric of life’s order has twisted. Suddenly, the power has shifted, and you’re the one inflicting pain on another. You, when you’d always considered yourself the recipient of cruelty and nothing more, are now the perpetrator.

“You look at your life and see that your fear has caused you to destroy a man’s heart. You look back over the years and realise that you’ve been causing others pain the whole time without even realising it. Your sickness caused your family to worry and agonise for your welfare. And sometimes you were passively cruel just for the fact that you were present. Because a girl wanted you but knew she couldn’t have you. A boy did, too, but he couldn’t have you, either, because you would never forgive his many small acts of hate. Perhaps if you weren’t so shy and guarded and sick, other people wouldn’t find it difficult to break past your barriers. Perhaps your way of keeping yourself to yourself was cruel to the people who wanted you to show them your insides.”

Rubbing my hands over my eyes, I shake my head. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, cruelty is a fundamental part of our psyche. You can look back over history, pore through text upon text, and even if it’s not showing on the surface it’s there somewhere, insidiously poisoning everyone it touches. Like a virus, it spreads and grows, sometimes even mutates into other things like fear and revenge and exploitation. But at the end of it all, it is a flaw in our design, and it seems like the only way to purge it from our lives is to remove ourselves from every kind of human interaction there is. And there lies the rub, because a life without human interaction is no life at all.”

My voice goes quiet as I utter that last sentence. Then I stop speaking entirely, feeling like I’m rambling and not making any sense. Slowly, I become aware of the fact that there are tears streaming down my face. I look at the dozens of eyes staring back at me and get a fright. For a moment it felt like I was alone, simply theorising to myself like a crazy person. Fareed begins to clap and then others follow, and soon there are people approaching me, putting questions to me about the speech I just gave, asking me to elaborate on my points.

I can’t give them what they want. Now I know what Fareed meant when he’d given his talk about David Cameron; he’d just wanted to say his piece and leave it at that. Sometimes over-analysing stuff kills it. And so I tell those around me that I’m sorry, but I have to go.

In a trance I walk to an underground station, headed for home. The words that spilled from my mouth like lava, thoughts I never knew I had until I’d articulated them, spin in my head. That’s when I have my epiphany. I know what all those thoughts were meant for. I wasn’t simply figuring out my feelings about me and Robert, I was coming up with a theory. A thesis.

Maybe all the craziness and heartbreak of this summer wasn’t for nothing. Maybe I was meant to go through it all so I could see the bigger picture, realise what I’m really meant to write my dissertation on: “The Nature of Cruelty.”

Experiencing its cycle in real life has allowed me to understand it in the mythologies I study. All of a sudden I can understand why Medea killed her children. Why Athena turned Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her beautiful face so ugly it turned those who beheld it to stone. Why King Laius wanted to end the life of baby Oedipus so that he wouldn’t grow up to fulfil the prophecy of murdering him. Of all the reasons — revenge, jealousy, disgust, fear — none of them are pretty. They’re real and complicated and brutal, just like people. I get that now.

When I arrive at the house, Sasha’s out in the back garden, sunbathing. I sit down beside her on the grass, not speaking at first.

“I think I have to go home,” I whisper, breaking the quiet.

Shading her eyes with her arm, she looks up at me sadly and asks, “Is it because of Robert?”

I nod, unable to speak when tears catch in my throat.

“I had a feeling this was going to happen when you two broke up. It was all so intense, and then poof, it was finished.”

“Yeah,” I say, my voice scratchy. I pull a daisy out of the earth by its root and roll it between my thumb and forefinger, watching its pretty white petals swirl around and around.