Bastard Freedom: Chapter 4

"For fuck's sake, pump the clutch and not the brakes when you feel the engine lurching, you idiot!", Marie's father shouted, as the car stalled twice now. They were on a field, and she was learning - by being shouted at, of course, pedagogy by volume, as it were - how to drive. Her sister underwent this rite of passage six months before, and Marie could see her sister's smug and yet.. sympathetic? face in the rear view mirror. 

After stalling exactly three times, she finally learned to balance the clutch and gas, to her father's ever-momentary satisfaction. He was a soldier, after all. He fought against rebels in the south, and his feet got shot to shit by an M-13, leaving him with a limp, an honorary dismissal, and 20 offspring across the country.

She was remembering that memory when Joseph rang her doorbell, and she gladly let go of it, or at least glad to replace the grip of memory for the grip of the door handle. 

They briefly hugged at the door, which was a strange sight: the writer and the scholar, of a budding romantic relationship and an ancient sexual one, still managing to do something as quotidian as hug. The social conditioning was strong, after all. 

"I'll put the kettle on," Marie says, stepping aside and back in welcome to Joseph, although she can't help but give a slight upward wave to her flat, "Welcome to where Foucault meets Derrida and gives birth to Žižek," she said with a sardonic and cheeky smile. 

I want to fuck you against the door jamb. Is fucking in doorways a good metaphor for how Britain has conquered Europe and beyond?, he thought, equally turned on and disgusted by his baser and intellectual instincts. Realizing that Marie was still waiting, he hastily stepped inside. 

"What was that, baby?", Marie asked, noticing the pause. 

"Oh, I was just recalling my father," he replied, which was sort of true. His father, after all, was his doorway to this earth: his Czech sperm unlocking the possibility of a Joseph unto the world. However, like all doorways, his father didn't belong in England, where he met Joseph's mother. 

"He might be the bastard son of Fyodor Karamazov and your country's Rizal's character, Narcisa." He threw the reference in with a carefully studied nonchalance, waiting to see what she would do with the fact that he read something about the literature of her fatherland. 

She took it in stride. "Oh, that's hardly likely, baby. Although.." she paused, wanting to ask delicately, "I have yet to hear how you describe your father." 

"I'll do it on the tram," he said. Her father teaching her to drive the way he did and his father not teaching him to drive at all meant that they were taking the tram. 

They were going to karaoke.