Hatred

A monologue.

Content Warning:

Disturbing content, xenophobia

Transcript

Hatred

The day before Wimbledon, I was cooling my heels at The Shakespeare in Victoria. It was early evening. I was quite content, drinking my seven-pound pint. I had just finished watching all fifty-seven minutes of a fifty-seven-minute compilation-video on you tube of Sharapova grunting. The first part of the day I had been manic and obsessed, gripped by a crippling intensity. I go through such phases regularly, I should be used to them by now, but the fact is I’m not. Tennis statistics are one of my prime obsessions. On occasion, I have made the entirety of five, six, seven, seven and a half hours disappear just by googling tennis statistics. That morning, I had spent just over two hours locked into this activity. Two hours and a further eight or nine minutes came and went before I managed to get a hold of myself and check the behaviours. I get into states where I simply have to know the overall slam performance of just about every player on the tour, both ATP and WTA, sometimes even of former or inactive tennis players. Ons Jabeur, Vondrouzova, Swiatek, Ostapenko, Andrescu, Sabalenka, Rybakina, Fognini, Federer, Tiafoe, Agassi, Lopez, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, Kyrgios, Tsitsipas, Medvedev, Sinner, Rune, Alcaraz, Garin, Musetti, Zverev, Taylor Fritz, the Williams sisters. Their wins or best result at the Australian Open, the US Open, Roland Garros, and Wimbledon. Then I search up Becker, McEnroe, Connors, Stefi Graf, Evert, Navratilova. When I start needing to know the scores of Slam finals, games, tie-breaks, sets, I know I’m in trouble. All of this I have looked up many times before. None of it sinks in, none of it remains. It is no more than a spasm; the impulse to type, click, click again, scroll abruptly down, and see the information displayed before me. But then the obsessions deepen, the information leads me down rabbit holes in the search for more information. For example, Ons Jabeur: F- Final, 2022 and 2023 at Wimbledon. She didn’t make it to the final in 2024. So, my mind enquires in frenzy and panic, how far did she get? Was it as far as the quarter-final? Fourth Round. It must be. I look it up. Third Round is the answer. If Djokovic won Wimbledon for the first time in 2011, how far did he get in 2010? 2009? How far did he get the first time he played at Wimbledon? In which year did he first play at Wimbledon? How many Wimbledon finals did he play in before winning in 2011, and against whom did he win in 2011? I have to know all of this, you see. To feel the impulse, to feel the desire to know and to do nothing comes with a strange guilt. It is so easy to know such things as these, these days. The hunger of the entity amazes me. I do its bidding; but the hunger is not mine.                           

Anyway, by this point in the proceedings I am describing, the grip of the “thing” seemed to have relented. I was nursing the pint at my table in The Shakespeare. The prior two had disappeared quickly. I looked around. Observing my surroundings, expecting to find them gratifying, I had one of those moments of sudden realisation, where you suddenly recognise the environment of which you are a part. Tourists. In every seat, at every table, there were bespectacled Americans in their sixties, overweight husbands and wives, the kind who wear rucksacks on their fronts. Or Asians with tucked in polo shirts, bumbags and selfie-sticks, plastic-wrapped maps hanging from lanyards around their necks. 

I watched them squint at the menus, remark on various features of the environment around them, go off to the bar and come back with virtuous half-pints of beer, large glasses of water to dilute it and keep hydrated. Most of them ordered fish and chips, I would discover. 

While they awaited this staple, I felt the commencing tremor of obsession once again. My fingers edged towards my phone, comforting and weighty in my pocket. I felt for the long, diagonal ridge of the largest crack in the screen. I took a few further gulps of my pint, gulps of diminishing reluctance. I tried to satisfy myself by merely remembering tennis statistics rather than looking them up, rehearsing them mentally. Those that had gone in, anyway, remained stored in the reservoir. It turned out that almost none of them had gone in. Sharapova. Total Slam wins. No idea. Sabalenka. Any grand slam wins? No idea. Did she reach the Wimbledon final, 2023? Or just the semi-final. Alcaraz. Total Slam wins. Five. Djokovic. Wimbledon wins: 2011, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022. Nadal Wimbledon wins. Two. 2008, 2010. It was quite quite depressing. How many hours I had wasted looking up these facts, and yet how little the knowledge I had accumulated. I told myself I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. After all, the hours spent searching up tennis statistics were a symptom of illness, not strength or discipline or aspiration. Who values the experience we collect in our ailed hours? Illness limits our ability to experience, our ability to experience experience itself. It’s a hiatus from experience while the body, (in my case the body’s highest section, the mind), heals itself.

I eyed them, with secret hatred. I watched them with private animus, keeping my eyes hooded and downcast. I admitted to myself, without ambiguity or hesitation, how much I hated them. Those excruciating conjugal, foreign couples. In each case, their bond seemed puny, their manner awkward, like two virginal sixteen-year olds on a lukewarm first date, utterances laconic and sterile, silences protracted and unwelcome, toilet breaks over-lengthy, movements of the head and the eyes lost and pleading. Surrounded by Saxon trinkets, we all sat, at different tables, different.

In front of me was the Asian couple. They spoke hardly a word of English. They were so mild, so self-effacing, so self-deprecating, so servile. I hated them. Why? Is the tribal impulse seductive, weak and nebulous as the tribe itself is, let alone my identification with and my sense of belonging to it? Yes. Is it moral? I’m not sure. At one time or another, it probably served some moral cause, met some ethical criteria. One is preconditioned to hate tourists, by some predisposition quite out of one’s control, some atavistic territoriality. Or is it more to do with that old pop-psychological cliché: that we hate in others what we hate about ourselves. When we see two badly-dressed, speccy, slightly overweight Asian or American tourists in a city foreign and bewildering to them, we see our own affliction spelt clearly out, writ, as they say, large. 

To be perfectly honest, I was glad not to be thinking about tennis. I was glad not be obsessing over the number of Slams won by Simona Halep, which year it was John McEnroe ended Bjorn Borg’s spree of Wimbledon victories (when did that begin, how long did it last?), or how many French Open finals Federer played and lost, and which year was his one Roland-Garros victory anyway? I knew there was only one…

Plates of fish and chips arrived to the tables that ordered them. They ate, and I continued to drink.   

Meals were finished. Then at about a quarter to nine, there was a change. The wife of the Asian couple just ahead of me went to the toilet. Alone at the table, the husband was quite still. He didn’t move a muscle. He was present, within the situation, he wasn’t looking at his phone or fiddling about with anything in the bags beside him. He was unmoving, as still as a stuffed animal. Then he reached for the tiny half-pint that was on the wife’s side of the table. I couldn’t be sure when the half-pint had been produced, I assumed it had only been very recently poured. The husband moved quickly, concealing most of what he did. He never turned around, he never turned around to check whether I was looking at him. Perhaps he thought this might arouse suspicion. He opted for swiftness rather than concealment. Maybe he saw the empty glasses on my table, thought I looked drunk, oblivious, in a world of my own. In any case, I saw everything. Mine was the lucky angle at which the crime could be spied. I spied it. The man took a sachet, or maybe a miniature paper envelope, from a compartment in his bag. He opened it and poured the contents, about a teaspoon’s-worth of white powder, into the half-pint. He pushed the glass, still fringed in foam, back towards his wife’s side of the table. He sat, quite calmly. He never turned around. 

I was more engrossed than shocked. I tried to imagine the most innocent explanation. A wife who had given her husband prior permission to drug her while her back was turned so that he might copulate with her while she lay in a state of narcotically-induced unconsciousness. Perhaps the husband felt it was the only way to reach his wife, the only way to end sexual frustration, to assert his will over a partner whose will was majesty. No. That was all nonsense. This was a crime, a deception, a spiking among unlikely parties. 

At any rate, my hatred all but disappeared. Seeing one of them do something hateful, I felt no hatred for them whatsoever. It was all I could do from giving him a big slap of congratulation on the back, shaking him by the hand, welcoming him to London, apologising for underestimating him.

I felt such calm. Such inner calm. The busy frenzy of tennis statistics couldn’t be further from my mind. I felt gratitude now. Personal gratitude. 

Beneath my feet, I felt the clattering rumble of the underground. There could be no doubt, the district or perhaps the circle line service, thundering under the floor of The Shakespeare, Victoria. I heard it only faintly but I felt it fiercely, doubtless, enormous, and wailing, like the wrath of Gods.

Then, a vista opened. An island of clarity, a bright vision, announced itself in my mind. From my dark, locked world of alcohol excess and endless tennis statistics and hatred, I gazed, amazed, at this kind, lit oasis. I could lend a helping hand. I could be a citizen, I could be responsible. I could do the right thing. I could be respectable, I could tell the woman- she’d look at me bemused and startled and uncomprehending but credent that I had something important to communicate-, or I could tell a member of staff, or call the police. I could be a different sort of person for once. If not for the woman, then for myself, just to prove that I could be different if that’s what I wished. I saw the pictures of a possible future; me, heroic, benevolent.     

It quickly subsided, this brief sense I had of what might be possible. It had only been a contemplation, not a spur. It was only ever very airy and ethereal, there was never any resolve. It seemed swiftly ludicrous to have considered this course of action. I soon tired of the situation, and trudged out The Shakespeare doors, nicely sloshed, into the lovely evening light. Soon I would discover hatred again. But for now I had conquered it and enjoyed a sense of inner quiet and peace.                                           .