Second opinion
YOU shouldn't judge a book by its cover, perhaps, but you'd be a fool not to take any notice of the rings a girl wears.
I am not talking about diamonds as big as the Ritz, you understand; I am refer- ring instead to a new fashion among some girls of the lower orders for placing a ring around one of their thumbs. This ring signifies, almost without exception, that the girl is attracted to drug-addicts, criminals, psychopaths and sadists. She is usually in trouble with the police herself, or ought to be. Such girls usually apply make-up as if it were icing on a cake, and pout whenever asked a question, but that is by the by.
The rings on their thumbs often have a little pendant attached to them that jig- gles as they speak, breathe or move. Needless to say, girls with rings of this kind are particularly bad girls, past all redemption. They love doormen and body-builders, and either have no con- ception of the dangers involved in associ- ating with such types, or never learn from experience. And the pendant that jiggles on their rings puts them in yet graver danger.
The first murderer I ever met — in the days when I considered it an honour and a privilege to meet murderers — killed his wife because of the jiggling. Admittedly it was the jiggling of her earrings rather than of the pendant to her thumb-ring, but it was a long time ago, in the unenlightened prehistoric era when no one had even heard of thumb-rings. 'When I came home of an evening, doctor,' said the murderer, 'all I wanted to do was sit and read the paper, while all my wife wanted to do was talk, talk, talk. And when she talked, her earrings went jiggle, jiggle, jig- gle, and in the end I couldn't stand it no more, so I strangled her.'
Even then, before I had ever been con- fronted by jiggling pendants on thumb- rings, I thought I understood. It is the small things in life, after all, that arouse the deepest passions, and prove what a thoroughly trivial-minded creature Man is. Even without the jiggling, thumb-rings infuriate me. A thumb-ringed girl was admitted to our ward last week having made a vain attempt at suicide. She left a suicide note. It read, `Fuk u, Baz. U never beleived me.' (The rule of English spelling taught in modern schools is strictly e before i except after c.) Baz, it seemed, had betrayed her for another, and would not believe that she was pre- pared to die for him.
`I suppose Baz works the doors?' I asked, adopting for once the argot of the slums.
`Yeah, how did you know?'
On my way to the prison later that day, I walked for a while behind two young women, each with a baby in a pushchair. The babies were obviously on their way to visit their current fathers in the prison, it being never too early to grow acclima- tised to one's future environment. I over- took the mothers and their offspring, palely loitering, and I noticed thumb- rings on the right thumbs of both the mothers. I also overheard a snatch of their conversation.
`F—k off, I goes to him. I goes, f—k off.'
Theodore Dalrymple
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