Granny Dooms

 Posted by at 10:49 am  Echo Effects, Fundamental Perversions, OUT in the WILDERNESS  Comments Off
May 152014
 
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Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Agnes joined me in the Made in Brazil north London café restaurant last Tuesday. I had gone there to write. “OK, I’ll have the feijoada”, she says, “but I am not drinking, so I’ll only have a beer.”

“You can’t smoke,” I say as she brought out a packet of ten and extracted a thin white cigarette. “Don’t tell me what I fucking can or can’t do,” she says fixing me with a dark stare. But she got up and went out of the entrance of the restaurant and stood on to the steps to the street.

A few moments later I heard her shouting at one of the stallholders on the street. “Join me in the Underworld. What’s that on your fucking T-shirt supposed to mean?” she says. There were several male voices but I couldn’t pick up anything of what they were saying.

Then I heard her kicking off some more, “I am here to eat pork you know,” she shouts. “So you know what you do with your Allah, don’t you?”. I got to her and put my hand around her waist and guided her back inside. She still had the cigarette in her right hand which she waved in front of her like a smoking gun, and I noticed the brown staining on her first two fingers. Her finger nails were stained and curved too. There was a roll of thunder.

“They could do with a fucking good lightning strike”, She says. Then she laughed, a mix of shriek and chesty heave. It turned to coughing. It reminded me of my grandmother.

“Lucky Strike”, I say. Granny Dooms I was thinking.

By coincidence I had also been thinking about lightning strikes a few days before. I’d got to the poem with the title ‘Dooms’ by Martha Sprackland (LRB 08 May 2014, P 7 ) about Roy Sullivan (1912-1973) who got hit by lightning 7 times. But to be frank I preferred the text I had found in The Lakeland Ledger Oct 23rd 1977 (P 7). Here is some of it under the headline Bolts from Sky High Have Struck Gentle, Upright Roy 7 Times

‘DOOMS, Va. – Roy Sullivan, bless his beleaguered heart, is as gentle and upright person as can be. He pays his bills, loves his family, goes to church, has never harmed a soul.

Why is it, then, that Roy Sullivan has been struck by lightning seven times?

Seven times. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap.

“Lordy, I wish I knew,” he said. “It’s awful. I don’t believe God is after me. If he was, the first bolt would have been enough…”

…After constructing 4 lightning rods… By Zeus, that ought to do it.

“Well, you don’t know. Lightning has a way of finding me.”

…Jolt number one came in 1942 in a lookout tower; number two in 1969 while driving his truck; number three in his front yard; number four in 1972 when the bolt searched him out through the fuse box; number five in 1973 when he thought he had outrun a storm and got out of his car to watch it; number six last year while checking a campground; number seven last July, fishing.

“Ever been shocked real bad? It’s worse. Ever been scalded? It’s much worse. It’s like being cooked inside your skin.

“Just before it strikes I smell a certain smell, like sulphur and my hair bristles all over. That’s the signal. In about two seconds, no longer than three, it hits. Too late to hide.”

…It does beat all. But good luck to you, Roy Sullivan, and pleasant dreams.’

Then I’d also read that Roy Sullivan died in 1983, but that bit wasn’t in Martha Sprackland’s poem either. He committed suicide – he had been unhappy in love – a single gunshot to the stomach: lightning strike and suicide.

“By Zeus that ought to do it,” Agnes says.