A medium sized chapter

By Christmas Virginia had had several more migraines and great sleeps. Her trolling activity had been rather reduced, due to the photophobia which seemed to hang around in the hinterland of her migraines, as the screen of her iPad was too bright, when bright enough to read and strained her eyes if dark enough not to make her turn away from it. She thought about the articles she’d read about the real, medical cause of the disease which had afflicted Transylvanians and caused their photophobia and desire for blood, which in turn had given rise to the Vampire myths. It had been some kind of vitamin B deficiency. Virginia was simply too big-headed to believe she was deficient in anything.

Virginia did write one or two bad tempered letters to her MP, at this time as there seemed to be no end in sight and Brexit was becoming more diluted by the day. Everything was about placating the enemy. And there had been more of the same Florence type guff about defending Europeans with British lives, without spelling it out so plainly. Some of those with whom Virginia had argued in the comments section were at last beginning to see Virginia had been right in the summer, though of course nobody said so directly, or thanked her for her sharp, analytical mind. Russia was being whipped up as the common enemy, it was the Cold War revisited, reds under the beds, in order to create a particular narrative. And Boris Johnson was the Foreign Secretary. And Virginia knew Boris was impressed by big military invasions, from his own writing. She had wanted him for leader, she didn’t think he was as bad as his enemies portrayed him, she believed they were merely jealous of his popularity. But she did worry about his taste for dropping huge bombs in the Middle East, even if, so far, he had only expressed that taste in the form of admiration for the violent interventions of Blair and Cameron.

Virginia knew Boris’s mother was an artist and portrait painter. They had something in common, therefore. Boris was meant to be quite skilled at producing likenesses himself, in quick sketches. Virginia wondered if Boris ever took that skill and made use of it, in the old way, with a pin? And in so doing reflected on the first time she had tried it herself. She had been up in the garret which had been her father’s studio. It was an unusual studio, in that all the mullioned windows faced south, there was no steady northern light up there. The only north facing window had been blocked up against window tax and never unblocked. That was the room Virginia’s father used as a dark room for developing his photographs. The garret got very warm in the summer, and one afternoon, Virginia had fallen asleep on the paint splattered studio couch. She had woken suddenly as a deep, man’s voice in her head had seemingly spoken out loud. Virginia could not remember now what the words were or what was the word which that voice had uttered. But she had got up, seen that her family were drinking tea and eating scones on the lawn below, and taken a little splinter from a rough and anciently wormed floorboard. Then she strolled over to the clay sculptures her father had been working on, the heads and shoulders of several people. She stuck the splinter into the left-hand part of the chest of one model, of a man. The sensation she had felt on so doing had been dreadful. She had gone cold, even up there, where it must have been about eighty degrees, and had started to sweat and feel sick. She had pulled the splinter out and smoothed over the little hole in the clay. Running out into the garden to join her family on the lawn, she had tripped over the high stone threshold in the porch and smacked her hands down hard onto the stone flags and grazed her knees.

Was that the sort of experience Boris might have had. Virginia could not imagine it, though his awful sister might. If Boris had discovered the terrible power of that small act of devilry, then, she wondered what had prevented him from using it properly when Gove had caused him to withdraw from the leadership race?

Hang on, thought Virginia. How had she known what power there was in that moment of sticking the splinter into the heart of the similitude? It had been nothing more than a sickening sensation and a strange sense of premonition in the overactive imagination of a hot and tired little girl. No, a terrible realisation dawned: her father had been sculpting a bust of the composer Guy Roberts. Was that day the one after his visit and the meagre dinner party? Had Virginia invented the story of her mother cursing her guests when she had not known who they were to be and the curse somehow landing on Guy, because she had felt so guilty about sticking the splinter into his clay heart and his heart having given out a day or two later. Oh, poor Mummy, poor Guy! But then men’s hearts were feeble things in those days. And God sometimes needed good composers in Heaven, Virginia told herself feebly, before sitting down to pray and ask forgiveness.

In the second of her letters, to her MP, she had asked him why Mrs May was such a bloody stupid woman. She had forgotten he was a loyal fan of May’s and when he replied it was merely to tell Virginia he would not be corresponding any further. ‘Sod you then!’ Thought Virginia. She took down her sketchbook and took up his newsletter, which always had a mugshot at the top and usually contained several other photographs of him posing next to supposedly improved flood defences or village defibrillators. Virginia divided a clean page of her sketchpad in two. Then subdivided the top half into four and the bottom half into three and began making her pictures, starting in the bottom left hand corner. One had to make the pictures oneself. Photographs were no good, you had to put the venom into every mark of the pencil on the paper.

Virginia knew that her MP was popular. She had decided that her cause of the moment was democracy and her MP was one of very few to have increased his majority in the recent disastrous election, so she did not think it right to inflict anything too awful on him. But on the other hand, he was deaf and blind and couldn’t see the woods for the trees, politically. So, Virginia found a pin in the drawer of her treadle sewing machine and pricked his image about the ears, the eyes and on the three larger portraits about the frontal cortex. She had decided he could share her severest brainstem migraines. He could be really deaf to all things in his deep unconscious sleeps, he could suffer days of diplopia as his brain stem swelled, he could lose the ability to read and comprehend, for hours, during the second aura, even when the double vision had worn off. He must pay for his arrogance. And it was good for men to suffer a little, they got off too lightly, physically, on the whole, except for the way they dropped dead, out of the blue.

Virginia had decided that as identity politics were all the rage these days, there was no reason to dispense with the identity she had had all her life. Being rational and factual was soooooo last week. A man could ‘identify’ as a woman and everyone must regard him as such or pretend to. So Virginia could damn well identify as a witch, when it felt necessary to her wellbeing.

It was odd how quickly this ‘identifying’ as a member of the opposite sex had taken off, one could not even find the video of Blossom Dearie, singing ‘Bruce’ on Youtube anymore.