44
You can’t act without a script
Tuesday, January 17
Night in the Hartley Castle court room. The only light in the long, gloomy room came from a desk lamp where Gabriel leant into a laptop computer screen and a fridge light where I bent into a shelf of cold Carlsberg. Then it was just one light as the fridge door closed. I returned to the centre table and handed Gabriel vodka, lime and lemonade in a tall glass. Half her face was in shadow – the bit with eyes – the other half, containing a set mouth chewing gum was bathed in light.
‘I’m opening the video now, monkey face,’ she said. ‘Should be almost done. In fact…’
A small frame appeared which she enlarged to full screen, then the title ‘Killing for Kicks’, then sorrowful violin music, then an Australian narrator…
‘I can’t watch this,’ I said retreating to the bar.
‘Come on, monkey. This is your show!’
‘I don’t care. You watch it and tell me how bad it is.’
‘This isn’t about me! You have to watch it and judge for yourself!’
‘I’m not watching it.’
‘You don’t even know what it is!’
I sat on a bar stool and peered suspiciously at the back of the laptop. ‘For Mister Furry Friend to rate it in his must see videos, it’s got to be grisly. He’s got a history of grisly videos.’
‘Move on, monkey.’
But I couldn’t move on. Not from the happy couples’ video. Not yet. And not from my absolute terror of animal abuse videos. Some people were scared of roller coasters. Others of spiders. My primary fear was being exposed to sixty seconds of grainy but graphic footage that scarred me for life. I’d always been like that. I simply loved animals too much. I was scared of what I might see, not just for what it may confirm about the abuse of those animals, but for how it would affect me.
Herein lay the best possible proof I had never been and never could be an animal activist: As Marcus Friend had said: In order to act, you first needed to arm yourself with the gruesome facts. This meant consuming every morbid article, every piece of shocking footage. And I’d avoided the gruesome facts for fear I couldn’t sleep at night. Granted, I had acted in the sense of a detailed account of battery hen farming, a concise, hard hitting article that had found its way onto a dozen animal rights websites and, perhaps, made a semblance of difference. Yet even I, who didn’t differentiate between any living, breathing creature, still couldn’t deny a fundamental emotion: chickens just weren’t as cuddly as puppies.
Sad fact. I was too sensitive to be an activist. Too soft to make a difference.
So too Gabriel I suspected as, bent into the computer screen watching the video Killing for Kicks playing to her and her alone, her eyes widened, her hands clasped her face and she moaned, ‘Oh God…Oh, my God.’
