Extracts from my personal diary (part1)

Red nose, buck teeth, aged 19.

In the shop today, a Russian woman, aged about thirty, happened to pass a comment to me that my nose was red.

I was very much taken aback by this, wounded to the core. I didn’t know what to say. I had been in a good mood till then. I really felt the women – who I’d never before met – had such cheek to say that to me. But I was impotent to retaliate. I just withdrew into myself, looked daggers at her. I felt really deflated inside, as if my day had been flushed down the toilet.

She has lived in this country for a few years, is married to an Englishman, and comes to work here on a Saturday for the good of her soul, I understand. Otherwise she is a housewife. She is moderately attractive, but her face is pasty and sluggish, her eyes dull and dead. She is clearly intelligent, clearly unhappy; she is not an out and out waster – like I say she comes here to work for the good of her soul. But, like so many Russians I have met, she is slovenly and insipid, doesn’t work, exercise or study, and this shows itself, in the spiritual torpor and dissatisfaction writ into her eyes and her sluggish, immobile face. Her skin is so pale and pasty; it is blotchy and set with slight fat deposits, so that her face is inclined to hang down; her features are so slothful, so rigid; there is no blush in her pallid face, no readiness to smile. When I see her dissatisfied eyes, looking out at me, she is like an intelligent person trapped, through bad karma, in the body of a rigid, ponderous slug.

She could not hold her tongue on my red nose. And I think my evidently sensitive face and deportment had encouraged her to make the remark. Although I think she hated herself for saying it, she made a pretence that I was to blame for taking her words too seriously, for being huffy. And to rub salt in my wounds, and deject me further, she played a game of favouring Michael, my friend and colleague. Talking to him with greater respect and touching him with womanly charm, she ignored me and made him out to be a real man. He is I guess, and more handsome, more masculine than I. He is incredibly genial too, also more pleasant and sociable than myself. He is my friend. He felt sorry for me, for Sonya’s insult. But he also felt flattered by her favour, and played her game, happy to be her lapdog. I don’t blame him. He was at pains to ensure me he meant no ill will. He called me mate and so on.

I know I have a red nose, but to be reminded of the fact so bluntly like that, in public hearing, hit me in the heart. It is funny how we can live our lives in a bubble, deluding ourselves about who and what we are. Our true selves know everything about us, our weaknesses, faults, limitations. But in order to get through the everyday slog of life, we blot this knowledge out, and see ourselves as unblemished, invincible. Then one cold winter’s morning we are given a rude wake up call, a snow ball in the face. We stare in the mirror of truth, and see ourselves once more as we truly are. See our unchangeable weaknesses.

But although Sonya’s insult scored me to the marrow, it is also in a sad, dreary way salutary, as if I see the truth, the cold light of day. I feel so depressed tonight, so dejected. There is no God, there is no future save death. I am stuck with my big red nose for life. But I also feel tired, ready for my grave. Death will be a relief, an escape. I am gratified that one day I will no longer be.

I spent the afternoon with a complex, as though a big, shiny red nose abutted from and dominated, the landscape off my face. I was curt with the customers, I didn’t look them in the eye. I was ashamed, I kept wanting to hide my face. I was really downcast and low. I just wanted to go home. And it was in this state that I endured an even worse blow to my moral.

In the afternoon another girl, Pauline, came on to work at the till with me. She is middle-aged and divorced. She has spent her life working in a department store, but was recently laid off, and is now on the dole. Though uneducated, she is wise, intelligent, extremely sensitive. In appearance she is blond and fairly comely; she is tall and if a little too well-built and corpulent she is also buxom, plump, motherly. She has in fact got children. When she arrived she started talking to me. She was keen, sensitive, she started to tell me a joke. I was down, dispirited, low. I tried to rouse myself, but my eyes, as I looked at her and listened, were sad and humourless, cold. I wanted to be at home. Anyway as she came to the punch line, she smiled sensitively, and at that point, ‘ping’ her front teeth, like a pair of fangs, popped out, so sharply, so grotesquely.

I couldn’t hide the look of disgust that swept across my sad, miserable face; could not hide the contempt written in my stony, cold, mirthless eyes, as she laughed sensitively, exposing her awful teeth. She saw my look and immediately coiled into herself, a mixture of shame and anger clouding her person. She was fuelled by an impotent anger, a bitterness. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. She couldn’t argue with me or take me to task, my insult had been indirect. I had given her a cold, mean, contemptuous look.

I had, after this subconscious reaction of mine, brightened up, smiled, tried to be kind, and for a while, as I sat and brooded in my dejected mood, hit for six now by the awful but undeniable reality of Pauline’s buck teeth and my disgust with them, I tried to kid myself that I was not as bad as Sonya, not having so openly insulted Pauline as Sonya had me. But in the end I saw that there was no real difference, that my cold, contemptuous look and the feelings of disgust engendered in my heart were just as cruel as Sonya’s thoughts and words. And so I spent the rest of the day utterly gloomy, wondering if there was any point in being alive.

I tried for a while to accept Pauline for what she is, but the teeth are just too bad; otherwise I think she would be very pleasing, in her blond, buxom, motherly way. But the teeth are dreadful and I can’t get beyond them.

There seem to be so many unsightly appendages in this world. In the shop today I served an old lady with huge grey whiskers sprouting from her face; a young girl with a thin but prominent black moustache; a man with a deformed hand and lots of people with bad breath. In all cases I was unable, in my mirthless state, to think beyond the grey whiskers or the moustache, to mentally escape the deformed hand or the bad breath, I was overcome with an obsessive disgust of them; unable to look and think beyond them. Imprisoned in a gloomy cell and left to chew over all the ugliness of man. Others have it worse. The other day I saw a young girl with an elephant man like condition; her face was flabby, tumourous, as well as porridgey and pale; I could invoke no sympathy for her, no love; I was simply overcome by disgust.

Demoralised I stood in front of the mirror tonight, spending hours looking at my disgusting, big red nose, and sticking my teeth out savagely, making such an ugly, hideous sight.