THEODORE DALRYMPLE
There is no accounting for taste, of course — or should I say thank God? A theory of human taste would be almost as horrible as the taste it sets out to explain, and quite as unflattering to the human race. It is as well, therefore, just to recount the facts.
Last week I saw a woman with what is sometimes called a lived-in face. There are no prizes for guessing what kind of life the owners of lived-in faces live; and so it was with my patient. As the good William Blake once so accurately remarked:
Every night and every morn Some to misery are born...
Of that fellowship was she. However, she told me that she had an infallible method of improving her mood.
'What is it?' I asked.
'When I gets a little low, I tells him to hit me. That makes me feel better.'
The him in question was her boyfriend. Her face looked as if he had done her some damage, just to oblige her, but of course her request rather took the pleasure out of beating a woman. It is a bit like shooting at a sitting duck: not quite cricket, to mix metaphors just for once. Bad taste is not without its adverse consequences, of course. That same day I saw a young Sikh woman, living away from home, who had chosen a Muslim boyfriend; not just any old Muslim, but a weight-training martialarts Muslim. There may be no art to find the mind's construction in the face, but art was hardly necessary: his evil was manifest, he exuded it as a skunk exudes scent.
With devilish cunning, he had fixed upon a Sikh girlfriend precisely because he knew that she would not be able to complain about him to her parents. They would tell her that she deserved what she got, and then disown her.
Thus he had carte blanche to torture her as he wished. He locked her up and would not allow her to go to work. He stole her car, her passport and her telephone. He extracted from her by means of violence the numbers that would allow him to draw money from her account at cash machines, with her various cards; so far, he had taken £6,000. He beat her and held her against the wall with his hand round her throat.
She took an overdose and called an ambulance, It was her only means of escape. He followed her to hospital with obsessive malignity. She would not inform the police, of course. His friends were as evil as he, and evil men stick together: they are unionised. They would terrify her into dropping the charges. And even if he were found guilty, he would receive no punishment commensurate with his crimes; only a life sentence, as he deserved and as scores of thousands of young men in this country deserve, with absolutely no possibility of parole, would do. She knew that it was hopeless — that our Lord Chief Justice is wholly on the side of malefactors — and that her only hope was to disappear without trace. This we helped her to do.
Never was a more bitter tear shed in my room.
Then I had a happy thought. It was obvious that the evil young man was suffering from low self-esteem. I had the solution: when the royal family is driven out, as shortly it must be, to moulder in Estoril, and we need a president for the new British Republic, why not make him president? His self-esteem would be wonderfully enhanced. And does he not truly represent our new thrusting, dynamic, youthful, tolerant, multicultural, equalopportunity Britain, of which indeed he is the finest flower?
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