A Phone Call
“I’m going to switch language now,” I say into my headphones. “I want to explain this properly.”
If I had a bluetooth headset I’d be using that, but I don’t, so I’m speaking into the bit of plastic where my headphones come together into one white cable and hoping that no one walking past realises that the person I am supposedly talking to as I hurry to meet them is actually the Falsettos revival cast recording.
The looks I get from the people who take a moment to realise that I’m on the phone are better than the looks I get for being young and female and walking home alone after dark.
I tell my headphones all about my weekend. At one point, a man on the other side of the empty street crosses the road on an intercept course.
“I can see you,” I say, loudly, in his language. “Look, I’m over here!” I stop and wave at a distant figure outside a well-lit bar. “I’m two minutes away, I can see you.”
The man changes course almost imperceptibly and joins the pavement in front of me. I keep an eye on him as I start walking again, still talking.
“What do you want me to do, wait here while you turn the car round? No, I don’t mind. I can cross over, if that’s easier. Who else is with you?”
I keep it up until I am well past the bar. The man – probably innocent – Turned down a side street before we reached it. A few minutes later, a man cycles past and hisses.
They do that here. Hiss, or catcall, or occasionally whistle. It shouldn’t be normal but it is, and I don’t react quickly enough. I watch him go without seeming to. Making sure he doesn’t double back.
I am nearly home and I cross the road and keep walking. I walk this way every day but I do not trust it. Not at night.
Almost home, and a man – the same man, a different man – cycles past, close enough to touch, and hisses.
I react half a second later – fear and disgust and adrenaline – but he is long gone.
They do that here, and I never know what to say.
“I’m going to say this in my language,” I say into my headphones. I am nearly home now, and I don’t care if they hear me speaking like this.
I wish I knew how to respond to the hissing. I tried not to let it bother me at first, but it does, and I know it bothers the other girls too.
I want to tell them to fuck off. Like that, fast and immediate, but I never expect it so my reactions are slow. And I’m scared of them retaliating. Because then it would be my fault, for provoking them. I know all that. I know it intimately, because I have lived it. And I want to tell them to fuck off but the words aren’t there on the tip of my tongue, I have to fumble for them, and they come with an accent, with my accent, announcing my foreignness to the world.
“And I can’t tell them to fuck off in my language,” I say into my headphones. “Because that would give them power over me. That would be worse.”
I practice. Fuck off. Fuck off.
Foreign. Accented. Tinged with embarrassment.
I take off my headphones.
