Pigs in the dark (II)

‘Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!’ he said, unsure if she had seen the small shape running towards the edge of the road in the gloom and out into the path of the car.

She braked hard.

Anthony saw the rabbit skittering away across the lawns on the other side of the road.

It would have been an inauspicious end to the night. She had hardly sworn at all navigating in to town, nor during the usually traumatic period of finding a parking place.

Anthony had cried watching An Inconvenient Sequel – at the good things, at the bad things, at the incontrovertible doom of it all. When they left the theatre – with the other white people – the sky was a hallucinogenic trout skin of orange and blue.

Anthony knew about US police – Laquan McDonald: sixteen times; Ezell Ford: three times in the back; Tamir Rice: aged 12; Alton Sterling: while held down on the ground by two officers; Walter Scott: for a broken tail light; Philando Castile: for reaching for his driver’s licence … – they gun you down and then try to find a crime to pin on you as you bleed out at their jackbooted feet, so when, after the movie, they were walking from the Little Theatre along Park Avenue looking for dinner and fell in step with three heavily armed officers, Anthony was keen to say a polite ‘good evening’ and cross the road. However, with the relentless sociability of the Norman Rockwell version of the US in which his companion lived – she was having none of that. Conversation was required.

Anthony edged closer towards the curb as the discussion reached ‘Is there a reason you are Republicans?’ One of the blue-clad giants had had to guard president Barack Obama when he visited Magnolia’s Deli & Café to eat a sandwich on this very road and, no, he was not going to concede to his determined interlocutor that that person had been at least a decent person.

From an exposition of the importance of the ideology of personal responsibility and the pointlessness of compassion, the conversation made its way to the less provocative subject of the effect of lacing heroin with Fentanyl, and then – thank God – to good restaurants in the area.

One officer recommended a place further along the road – ‘Contemporary American cuisine – with a snappy feel’. This was how they talked to you just before they shot you in the back?

Anthony was glad at last to scuttle safely, rabbit-like, across the road to Sinbad’s Mediterranean Cuisine for malfouf and Lady Fingers.

Barnaby McBryde