You say you don’t think much of pop music these days? Never
have? And classical, well, you’re too
young?
Hip hop is too black.
House? You don’t do drugs.
You want to know if I like jazz?
Here’s an answer in the form of a short story, with, may I add,
a preamble:
Picture a girl.
Perhaps late thirties.
Pretty. Still young, fit.
She is called Leah.
Leah stands in the middle of the public square, jerks her
head, waves her arms and squawks like a seal.
She is not, however, balancing a ball on the end of her nose for fun or
spectacle. Passers by look only once.
And an old drunk watches woozily, slumped against a statue-cum-fountain, erected
bizarrely in honour of Mary Queen of Scots.
Presently, Leah stops her manoeuvres, picks up her shopping
bags as if nothing has gone on, and walks in the direction of the supermarket
car park and taxi rank. The old drunk
pulls his tattered baseball cap over his eyes and drifts back to Neverneverland
where he daydreams of a beautiful female scarecrow performing semaphore in a field
deep with red poppies.
Leah has one of the forty plus varieties of epilepsy, a
simple focal tick caused by scar tissue on her brain. Leah’s tick is triggered by sound. Day to day she works in the charity store and
looks after the hanging baskets of the George pub bordering the public square
in the town of my birth.
The George pub is next to a small, squat limestone building
that once housed the filthy public toilets, now masquerades as a café. The coffee does not taste funny, nor is each
cup a cesspool, but for Leah, it is the cappuccino machine that is provocative
– the whirring, frothing and grinding could have her performing like a demented
circus acrobat as fast as you can say Bo Diddley!
Music alas for Leah is a conundrum. She may stand next to the wheeze and trill
of a bag-pipe all day and nothing, yet if a sudden gust of wind carried with it
brass, she will start to jive on no accord.
Her seizures can last as long as the March
for the Prince of Denmark.
Do you know it?
Nevermind …
As with every small town there are characters – people who
for one reason and another stand out as a consequence of their looks, or
behaviour. As with the old drunk,
resident at the statue-cum-fountain to Mary Queen of Scots, Leah is one of these people – so
too the one Indian in the community who runs the post-office, so too the fifty-five
year old transvestite who rides his bicycle about the place in a long, flowing,
flower festooned dress. Leah is, in
essence, a local celebrity, and part of the municipal landscape as much as the church,
library, George pub, the supermarket.
In a past existence, Leah was a hot-shot advertising
executive in the city. However, dumb
luck served up an unpleasant surprise in the hulking form of a ten tonne
truck which knocked her off her bicycle and into the central reservation
travelling home one evening. Leah
survived, but when she came-to, after a week at London Metropolitan hospital in
an induced coma, she discovered she had a new quirk. The duty nurses’ mobile phone ringtone trumpeted
the introduction to Louis Armstrong’s Lazy
River.
… When I first met Leah I was sitting outside the George pub
nursing a light ale on a warm summer’s day, pondering a famous saying which
goes: ‘if this isn’t nice then what is’.
You may know it, if you read American literature.
I was on the way to visit my parents, both of whom are retired in the neighbourhood after a lifetime of toil. Leah was up a step-ladder, watering can in
hand, quenching the thirst of the marigolds and violets in the various baskets
over-hanging the pub fronting. And then
some unwitting soul in the café next door, seeking a little stimulation and
refreshment, ordered a cappuccino. I, of
course, in my earthbound way, was entirely unaware of the significance of all
this until Leah threw her watering can at my head, and began clicking her
tongue, whirling her arms and whooping.
Following this unusual introduction I found to my surprise I
could not get the thought of Leah out of my head. I would be idle at work and her face would
appear in my mind, calm and placid, she is a beautiful woman; or I would be
reading in bed at night and find myself touching my left temple where there
was, for a week or two, a small scar caused by the aforementioned horticultural
projectile.
Horticultural projectile? I refer to the watering can.
So, on my next visit to see my parents, I made a point once
again of stopping by the George pub to see Leah, or at least I hoped. Sitting outside the pub, with another
light ale, I began to take in the other clientele. Strange to say it but they were mostly
middle-aged men such as I, in varying states of health and dress – and then I
noticed: perhaps three of four bore a scar or plaster on their left temple.
Coincidence!
When I was halfway through my second pint of light ale, Leah
appeared in our midst, as ever with watering can in hand. To me she looked more beautiful and radiant
than I had even imagined, her skin shone in late summer sunshine and her eyes
were as big as pretty blue marbles.
Almost at once, a man stood and offered to help her onto the step-ladder
up which she would climb to begin watering the marigolds and violets, another
two were poised but beaten to the moment.
Pleasantly, Leah obliged, and with a gay laugh took the man’s hand and
stepped onto the first rung.
On this occasion the cappuccino machine next door stayed
silent and the hanging baskets at the George were watered one by one in an
atmosphere of relative peace, and with an enraptured audience.
Then, a few days later, by chance I was doing some research
into the life of Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev. Bekhterev was a Russian neurologist
and the father of objective psychology. Today he is best known for noting the
role of the hippocampus in memory, his study of
reflexes, and Bekhterev's disease.
Hammering out the draft of my article for the British
Medical Journal I found myself yet again thinking of Leah, and as I had frequently
done in the intervening period, began reflecting on my most recent visit to the
George pub. Presently, I could think of
no-one and nothing else. What, I
wondered, had happened to my hippocampi? Had I, and several other middle-aged
drinkers at the George, in a strange twist of memory and context been hypnotised
by Leah’s theatrics?
Hippocampi – you may need to look that one up …
Anyhow, over the course of the next month I made several excuses to visit
my parents and town of birth, always stopping by the George for a light ale, and sure enough by
perhaps my fifth or sixth visit, the number of middle-aged men drinking out the
front of the pub had more than doubled – all for the main attraction and daily
ritual of Leah watering the marigolds and violets in the pub’s hanging basket
displays.
By the sixth (or seventh) visit, I had come up with a
plan. After Leah had finished watering,
I followed her into the cool, low beamed, flag-stoned interior of the pub – I
would pose as an internationally renowned hypnotherapist, possibly with a cure
for her epilepsy, though I hadn’t the foggiest what this might be, if indeed
there was one.
So, I followed her past the bar, empty for all the men
outside, and through an opened door marked ‘staff only’, down a dim
corridor. And then I chose to introduce
myself.
It was foolish of me not to have alerted Leah to my presence
earlier, and she positively jumped when I said: ‘excuse me’, turned around wild-eyed, and poised, it seemed, to flee.
What happened instead was that all of a sudden her arms
thrust wide …
…I’m nearly done …
Her back arched, neck jerked to one side.
I froze, I knew this was a seizure, had seen it before, but
was paralysed with helplessness as to how to react.
And then she threw herself off the ground and into my arms,
and although Leah is petite, I staggered heavily on receiving the full force of
her weight and cracked my head on the door frame.
Next thing I knew I was coming-to in hospital.
The punch line: You asked me if I liked jazz?
I hope this passes as an answer.
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