Yesterday afternoon I was in a large charity shop, called Bluebell Wood. It was quietly busy, but above the usual hubub a single voice could be heard clearly; it was a tubby, scrub-bearded youth of about eighteen, he looked rather like a younger version of Comic Book Guy, who was talking to the ear of a disinterested older man busy making marks on a clipboard. It was action films he was talking about.
“A love it, me. A've seen em all. A count em, me, tick em off in this book. Name any film, an a'll tell yer ow many...”
He began naming various current action blockbusters, commending each for the number and glory of its explosions, woundings and fatalities. No one in the shop could escape the voice, but when I took a mildly interesting book from a shelf and started reading the volume seemed to decrease to a murmur. A few seconds later the voice intruded again. He'd turned up the volume and was now declaiming to the assembled listeners:
“Of course, the numbers were grossly exaggerated. Grossly exaggerated.”
Now he was talking about the Shoah. He clearly enjoyed the phrase 'grossly exaggerated' because he said it again. He then went on to explain that had so many really died at Auschwitz it would have taken 68 years to kill them all. This number had not just been plucked out of the air, but was the result of extensive scientific research conducted into the capabilities of cyanide gas and furnaces in the annihilation of human persons.
I found myself standing before this young man, the owner of the voice. He blinked, I tried to smile.
“Who told you the numbers are grossly exaggerated?”
“A red it. A study it.”
The other customers had turned and were listening now.
“You like to watch people being killed. Is that why you study it, so you can imagine yourself counting off the naked bodies as they go into the gas chambers?”
“It's history.”
I invite readers to send in their own suggestions as to how this conversation might have ended. I simply walked out of Bluebell Wood into the bright afternoon sun and headed for the fish market.
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