by I. Bismuth

Semi-jogging home along Market Street this afternoon, I passed a lone beauty at a bus stop. And after passing her, I mused to a halt, for I had heard her, or thought I had heard her, speak certain words into her mobile, words that are totally unacceptable in a decent society. Taking a breather (of which, inhabiting the body of a man half my age, I had no need) I made a show of staggering back towards the suspect, and leaned against the stop.

My intention was to monitor the remainder of her call and catch a possible repetition of the offending vocables, but by the time I could sag within eavesdropping range, she was saying good bye, love you, and now here was her bus.

This was frustrating. I did not have much on her, but letting her go would send the wrong message, if only to her loved interlocutor. Besides, she was guilty all right. She was guilty of having made herself a suspect. It was unthinkable that there would be no consequences.

Feeling I could gather more evidence from an entrapping interview with her before turning her in, I followed her on board and to the upper deck. She sat at the front. Waiting for my chance, I occupied the seat directly behind her and breathed on her hair.

But once the bus had moved off and I looked behind us, I saw that, after all, waiting was unnecessary. I had assumed I would have to let the other passengers disembark before I could tackle her in peace, but there were only five of them, and they were already gone. They were well gone. The first was shouting in Swahili up his sleeve, the second was being spasmodic to rhythms throbbing from his headphones like off-shored industry, the third was snoring, the fourth was cutting his toenails, and the fifth appeared to have been dead for several days.

So, satisfied I could go to work on her unmolested, I leaned slowly forward, tilted my head reassuringly, and whispered in her ear, “Don’t be frightened.”

Those were my exact words. I knew she understood English. I had heard her speaking it on her mobile. That was the reason I was there. But human beings belong to a contrary species. Equipped with a language that enables the efficient and unambiguous transmission of, among other things, a simple instruction, they can still mistake the meaning for its opposite, even when only four words, contracted to three for colloquial ease, are disposed into a properly structured sentence and delivered with impeccable diction. She received the instruction “Don’t be frightened” in the same ear, so a functioning ear, to which she had held her mobile, and yet her method of following it was to heave herself away and bang her head against the window.

“You must not think I am a creep,” I went on, hiding as best I could my dismay at her paradoxical reaction. “I did not accost you simply because I like the look of you. I am not saying I do. I am not saying I don’t. But if I did, I would be an exemplar of self-restraint. I am a happily partnered man.”

“Excuse me,” she said, jumping out of her seat. “This is my stop.”

Reader, I did not believe her.

Like my simple instruction to her not to be frightened, my simple explanation that she was being addressed with professional detachment had apparently not been simple enough. I ran down the stairs after her.

“Wait, I must speak to you.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to mentor you.”

She stared at me as if I were a surgical procedure that had gone wrong.

The doors opened.

“I have to go,” she said, and took to her heels.

“Only micro-mentor you,” I said, keeping abreast of her. “And I shan’t bill you for it.”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

She might have been, but the heels she had taken to were high, so she was not going to outrun me.

“One quick guideline,” I said, “that’s all.”

“I have an appointment at the hairdresser’s.”

“Five minutes. No more. You can still keep your appointment. By the way, did you notice? I refrained from taking the opportunity of saying I like your hair the way it is. Would you expect that kind of self-restraint from a creep?”

“Look, I’m not interested. Do you understand? I’m not interested.”

“Not interested in helping to protect society from racism?”

She stopped abruptly, and all the resistance drained from her face.

“Racism?” she murmured.

“You wouldn’t want the forces of evil to be unleashed, would you?”

“All right,” she said, standing with her head bowed, ready to be made moral. “Tell me quickly, then. I’m listening.”

“It’s quite simple. You used some unacceptable words. I want to help you not to use any more.”

“I think you must be mistaken.”

“I heard you say L’etat c’est them.”

“You can’t have done. I don’t speak French.”

“It isn’t French. It’s Franglais.”

“Whatever it is, I didn’t say it.”

“This isn’t doing you any good, you know. I can only help you if you’ll help yourself.”

“I didn’t say it.”

“I heard the last few words of your phone call.”

“You can’t have heard them properly.”

“What were you talking about?”

“I was making arrangements to see someone tonight.”

“What exactly did you say? Think carefully. What were your exact words?”

The suspect began to laugh.

“Oh, I know what you must have heard. I was telling him I couldn’t meet him at eight o’clock. What I said was Later, say ten.”

“Later, say ten? Then I was right. What you said was indeed unacceptable.”

“How could it be?”

“Though you did not say L’etat c’est them, you said something that could easily have been mistaken for it, which is just as bad.”

“But I didn’t really say it. I didn’t really say anything unacceptable.”

“It’s a question of sensitivity. If the sounds of the words we use could be misheard as something unacceptable, then we must not use those words, irrespective of old dictionary definitions. You already know this rule, even if you don’t know that you know it, and you already follow it, though not far enough. Some pseudo-homophones are so obviously unacceptable that I can’t believe you have ever heard yourself using them. You would, for instance, never think of describing any miser, however stingy or pettily mean, as—” (I looked over my shoulder) ”a niggard. And if you do not already avoid the traditional word for them, I’m sure that whenever you refer to those early morning cobweb-silvering droplets, you are careful to give full value to the tricky consonant. I recommend calling them atmospheric water vapour condensate, just to be on the safe side. With other words that are less obviously unacceptable in their sounds, the way to recognize them is to imagine how the ethnic and racial minorities, the refugees and asylum seekers, the socially excluded, the marginalized, and all decent members of society who feel on behalf of these groups, would feel if they misheard them.”

By now she was sobbing uncontrollably.

“I didn’t mean to say anything unacceptable. I really didn’t. I never say anything unacceptable. Ask my friends.”

“You must be more careful in future.”

“I will, I will. I’ll never say Later, say ten ever again.”

“Well, perhaps there’s no real harm done. Though certainly the implications of the phrase it could be mistaken for would hurt the feelings of the vulnerable, no minds are likely to be changed by hearing it only the once.”

“No minds are likely to be changed?” she said, puzzlement staunching her tears.

“The possibility of mind-changing is the main danger posed by that particular phrase. Your confusable words could in principle have been misheard by someone susceptible, someone whose mind could in fact be changed by hearing, or pseudo-hearing, a mind-changing message only once. And the changing of that one mind could be the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the camel’s nose. It could be one of those first-they-came-for moments. In a decent society, we can’t be too careful.”

“Could L’etat c’est them change someone’s mind?”

“As I indicated, after one hearing, probably not. When it comes to changing minds, it’s quantity, not quality, that counts. We Anti-Racists knew at the very beginning of our own project to change minds that no mind-changing message changes minds by being said only once. We knew it needs to be repeated. It needs to be repeated with variation. It needs to be said again in different ways. It needs to be re-stated in novel forms. It needs frequent new affirmation. It needs daily fresh expression. It needs innovative diurnal treatment. It needs to be intellectualized polysyllabically. It needs to get said in short words. It needs to be shouted. It needs to be whispered. It needs the changes rung on it. It needs to be reiterated. It needs to be re-echoed. It needs to be re-doubled. It needs to be the skeleton at the feast. It needs to turn up like a bad penny. It needs to be the leitmotif of culture. It needs to be dwelt on. It needs to be harped on. It needs to be kept on. It needs to be gone over and gone back to. It needs to be done and done again. It needs to be overdone. It needs to be done to death. It needs never to be heard the last of. It needs to be hammered in. It needs to be drilled in. It needs to be dinned in. It needs to be drummed in. It needs to be dragged in. It needs to be coming out of our ears. It needs to drive us to distraction and it needs to drive us all the way back again. And it needs, by then, to have put us in the right frame of mind to ask why we are not being given it more often.”

“I know L’etat c’est them is unacceptable, because you’ve told me it is, but even if it was repeated endlessly, how could it change anyone’s mind? It couldn’t change mine. I don’t know what it means.”

“L’etat c’est them implies that the state is run by and for a shifting alliance of social, commercial, ideological, religious, ethnic, and racial minorities, all of them hostile to the very existence of the majority population, as long as the majority population is White.”

“I see.”

“Be careful.”

“I said I see.”

The faintest pucker of disapproval played on her L’Oréal lips. Nothing more. Did she imagine I could be fooled by that?

“You see, do you?”

“Yes.”

“So where’s your horror?”

“My what?”

“Your horror, your horror.”

“I’m only saying L’etat c’est them makes sense now. I understand what it means.”

A group of spectators had gathered round, attracted by the raised voices (raised voice, to be accurate, and rightly raised).

“Yes, yes, so you do. You do understand what it means. I was right about you all along. This only confirms it. Now you reveal yourself for what you are. You understand it, do you? Yes, of course you do, of course you do.” I grabbed her wrist.

“Let go of me!”

“You understand it too well.”

“Let go!”

“To understand it too well is to hold a torchlight parade.”

“Get off me!”

“To understand it too well is to host the Olympics.”

“Please! Get him off me!”

“To understand it too well is to sketch a Beetle.”

“Someone get him off me!”

“To understand it too well is to be very nearly a vegetarian.”

“Get him off me! Don’t just film what he’s doing to me!”

“To understand it too well is to need nipping in the bud.”

There was a premonitory numbness in my hands and feet, and my head filled with an ineffable light. Doubt died. I was racked by rectitude. And then I was ten feet in the air, looking down on my own body as I wrestled with repugnance.

“Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum!”

Though she was small she put up quite a struggle. She had sharp fingernails and a vicious knee. However, she underestimated my level of training. I quickly had her subdued and kept her grounded with a hammerlock until the police arrived.

January 27: Today I learned that she was held overnight at Paddington Green, and the following morning she was cautioned before being released without charge. I repeat—released without charge. This sort of thing serves to remind us how much work remains to be done before we have a criminal justice system that serves the needs of a modern democracy.