I went back to Soho and, unlike four days earlier, no one spat on me.
‘In what context?’
That was one friend’s opening question when, in the immediate aftermath, I needed to vent and decided to drop him a message.
‘Why does that matter?’, I asked.
‘Well, was it, like, an accident, something sexy, or an emergency?’ he said.
‘An emergency?’
‘You could have been on fire’.
‘No. I wasn’t self-immolating and there was no sexy pretext. I was just walking down Old Compton Street and this raggedy, old woman leaned towards me and launched a gob-full of brown sludge.’
‘Oh WTF!? Did it get on you!?’
‘Yes!!!! I didn’t get what she’d done until I looked down and saw a turd-looking lozenge splattered on my arm and started to gag’.
‘It got on your skin!? When did this happen?’
‘Like an hour ago. I managed to find a bar that let me use their bathroom. The guy looked fed up when I asked but then I showed him my arm, he freaked out and told me to “go downstairs on the right”. He was nice. Gave me a free drink after I finished dunking my arm in acid.’
‘That’s something. I guess people aren’t all bad. That’s so nasty though. I’m so sorry that happened to you.’
‘Yeah, thanks. It took everything I had not to throw up.’
Sitting in the bar writing to my friend, apparently I looked sad, though I wasn’t wallowing in too much self-pity. More shock and a mojito. Nonetheless, a middle-aged Liverpudlian couple decided to come over, tell me how miserable I looked and how, in a unanimous landslide decision, they would come over and cheer me up.
They were in town to see ABBA Voyage for Chris’s big 50th birthday. His favourite song was ‘Mamma Mia’. That’s what Liz told me. She did most of the talking. Chris nodded, drunk his pint, and made appropriate noises during key conversational milestones.
‘Well, if she’d done that to me, I promise you, she’d be in hospital.’ That was Liz’s take. Chris hummed in agreement through his pale ale, his cheeks now starting to blush.
Humanity is a funny resolving door of kindness. Liz had no mercy for this homeless woman, but when it came to brightening up the mood of melancholy strangers, she was unrelenting.
‘Go on babe. Buy Jamie a round too’.
The idea of hospitalising the spitting woman didn’t really cross my mind, which is surprising. Not because I’m a strong advocate for violence, but because I assumed my defensive instincts would kick in if I was ever violated.
But it’s really true, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face — or spat on the arm.
After she finished evacuating her mouth, the offending women just bobbed along, unfazed and unbothered, not feeling my eyes glowering into the back of her head, studying her for some sort of explanation. I couldn’t find one.
Like a slot machine, my brain was reeling through the combinations of actions I should take:
Shout at her? Well, that wouldn’t have achieved anything. It’s not like she wasn’t aware that spitting on people was naughty.
Punch her? This also felt pointless. The only change that would bring about would be to my criminal record.
Tell the police? They probably wouldn’t care, and if they did arrest her, she’d probably be back on the streets within fifteen minutes. Plus I’d have to preserve the evidence, which meant keeping her crime on my skin until the court proceedings ended.
Every option seemed futile and unproductive relative to the urgent impulse to get the turdy-lozenge off me, so I let her walk away.
Talking with Liz, she did wonder if I provoked the woman. Was I unknowingly hogging the pavement? Maybe wearing an offensive amount of body spray or carrying a picket sign protesting one of the endless controversies of our time?
I couldn’t think of any provocative gesture coming from my existence. I was walking, perhaps guilty of day dreaming, but still giving people a wide birth and being uncontroversial. It was her who closed the gap between us, going out of her way to single me out.
Though, Liz and I both decided it wasn’t personal. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there was no point exhausting myself with trying to figure out why people do nasty things.
That’s why I came back to the scene of the crime four days later. I wanted to suck the poison from the wound and reclaim one of my favourite areas of London. Like layers of sentiment, I didn’t want the top layer to be a horrid memory, so I returned with a presence to rewrite the story I’d tell myself about that corner of the pavement.
I stood there, on the exact spot where it happened, and nothing bad came to pass. My choices leading to that moment were all fine, except perhaps for the decision to wear short sleeves.
If I’d gone for long sleeves, I could have ripped my top off and burned it. Being unable to change that fact, I’ve found comfort in learning that our skin replaces itself every month, a process I’ve been helping along with a wire brush.
ABBA Voyage was only hours away and my new Liverpudlian friends needed to get back to their hotel to change. It was then that Chris finished his pint, put it down, and piped up, ‘You’re lucky it didn’t go in your mouth. You’d be the one in the hospital waiting for a tetanus shot’.
Mamma Mia… maybe I will go throw up.
