Tag Archives: Reading

The Bathwater

Maria was tired of life. Tired of the flat that they lived in. Tired of not having enough money. Tired of being a mother to a four year old. Tired of not being able to take a bath on her own. That was it. She was tired of Joe most of all. They sat opposite each other in silence. She kept still, but he fidgeted, unable to get comfortable and put his feet against the wall behind her and trapped her head between his legs. She noticed the scar on his left knee that had turned pink in the hot water. She also saw how white the bubbles on his legs seemed against the dirty bathroom tiles. Joe lit a cigarette and offered it to her, but she declined, and he simply shrugged. All the time he flicked ash into the bathwater, but she no longer cared. At least he wasn’t wearing sunglasses like he normally did in the bath. ‘I used to love him,’ she thought, ‘but now I hate him more than anything.

I get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because I like to read

1 Reply

Two stories. Two boys. “The realisation came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn’t imagine when it would end.” In 1945, Alberto Moravia was writing about puberty, moral dilemmas and sexual awakening. Agostino, the story of a 13-year-old boy’s adolescence and an obsession with bad boys on sunny beaches. I think back to that age, and, almost certainly, I might have been Agostino himself. And then there is Luka, a troubled boy, who appears in 1948’s Disobedience, who resists societal norms and expectations, and acts strangely. Only later did I read that this was supposed to be allegorical, and meant to highlight his refusal to serve in the Italian army during World WarTwo. I didn’t like Luca much, but there again, I had completely missed the point. I’m a dumbass!

Andrew McCarthy/Maybe you didn’t want it

Leave a reply

Brat: an 80’s story/Andrew McCarthy/2021

If I’d been a member of the Brat Pack, I would have wanted to have been Rob Lowe. But I was more like Andrew McCarthy.

He wasn’t handsome, nor was he a good actor. I wasn’t handsome either, or ever been an actor.

Underneath that cute shyness he was an outsider, not liked by his contemporaries, and he was resentful, and probably not a nice person.

“Early on in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the character Tom Buchanan as a ‘national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.’”

Now we know the truth.

McCarthy thought he could deal with fame, but wasn’t able to, and lived by the bottle. And this meant that once he’d peaked at a young age it was downhill. And then, by his own choice, it ended.

“Maybe you didn’t want it,” Alec Baldwin said to him on the Here’s the Thing podcast without realising he’d come closer to the core than McCarthy ever had.

I’m not sure I liked him after reading this, but he writes clearly and honestly, and afterwards I realised that we were alike after all.

He might not have been a nice person, but I suspect he might be now.