Re: [Jester's Court: Cat & Jack]
He wouldn't get it. Not the male privilege shite, yes, all right, Jack could wrap his brain around it. He was unapologetically an occupant of the privileged few: white, middle-class and with enough money to comfortably pad out the room between him and the one percent bollocks. But Jack's sense of self was rooted in his own skin. His own bones. It was the look in the mirror that put his father in his past and his mother in vague proximity and no, Jack wouldn't have gut-instinct understanding but when had he ever, when it came to Cat? He'd watched her flit through a market just because she could, he could however, believe Cat would dust-stamp.
So Bruce had listened. That was more than Jack, even when he was sober, gave Bruce credit for. He heard instead the note of candor, limning around the wistfulness. God, if Bruce had fucked off and left a host behind who all needed hearing but without the ability to listen, it must be like Babel.
"A perpetual spiral. Hence looking outside the Jersey club if you want five minutes without someone interrupting the whinge. You can miss it, you know," he said, obligingly of the wistfulness that bloomed like heavy patchouli, "Being heard. If you've had it before, I think you miss it more when it goes. Particularly if you come to it late. It's like the thing with kids," and Jack thought the funhouse looked like a wreck but wasn't that part of it? "You ought to be heard early enough, poor sods. Seen, listened to, something in between." He wanted a smoke, another one and the thought was brief and flitting.
But so the Jersey crowd longed. It was like - oh god, what was it? Jack thought briefly, of the stories of poisoning, slowly and by degrees in the old spy days in the Soviet era, where you ingested little quantities until you were reliant, wholly dependent even as it consumed you. That probably wasn't what he ought to say, and, "The real world doesn't make a lot of room for you even when you do. So you're all miserable and stuck and trapped and alone, even when you're all there together. That right? It sounds fucking miserable and like the minute any one of you thinks about swimming instead of drowning, you're dragged underneath."
But all right, they were through and it was a bloody silly puzzle. Jack glanced at Cat, with the orders and cocked an eyebrow. Who-me, taking orders? He looked for the book that had been groped good, smeary fingerprints and a trace of sticky cotton-candy and leaned it out of the line, with a deliberate yawn.