SYLVIA was one of those people with whom it is very difficult to argue. She and I met at a lecture. She arrived late, and sat beside me in a flurry of shocking pink and Chanel. Of a certain age, her hair was an orange candyfloss, but with dark grey roots. Her voluminous bag had “I’m a happy hippy” daubed all over it.

She wore a loose fitting tangerine suit with a pink blouse under her plastic raincoat and white patent leather buccaneer boots with daisies embroidered on them. Before long we were giggling like subversive schoolkids, for she was mistress of the devastating aside.

Afterwards we went for a walk through a park, discussing life, the universe and everything. She talked rapidly and loudly, hardly pausing for breath, bitching about someone in the audience who was French, asserting how underneath it all he was a peasant. Didn’t have the education that we had. I said that, well, I was Irish, not English. To which she replied “Oh, Irish, English, what’s the difference?”

She had already assumed that I was gay, and was telling me about her gay friends. She was confident that I would think her fabulous as most gay men do, as she was telling me of her depression cure – she goes for weekends to Paris to shop and has a wonderful time. Her close friend is a jeweller, who makes her the most beautiful things. “You’re all so creative,” she tells me. “What problems do you have? You don’t have to worry about the real world of families and responsibilities.” She brushes aside any objections. I said that it’s not as easy as that.

I told her that I had been queerbashed, with an uneasy feeling that I was being forced to use a nauseating form of victim manipulation. “Oh, well, that’s what you get for being in the wrong pubs,” she retorted, and then carried on. “I mean what is rape anyway? The act itself does not cause any damage. It’s the way you perceive it. I’m not worried about it. I think I could even have an orgasm if I were raped.”

I said, interrupting her flow (a tricky thing to do) “NO! You can’t just brush aside a painful episode in my life as if it was all my fault. What about the bastards who took great pleasure in breaking my nose and kicking my head in?”

She replied “Oh, I’ve heard this all before. You’re so good at being victims. What do you want me to say, ‘there, there, that must be awful for you?’”

“No, just don’t diminish my experience with one sweep of the hand the way you just did.”

“Oh, alright,” she bristled, surprised.

HEINOUS DAUGHTER

I then tried to explain how I was trying to reach a sense of myself that was less centred on my sexuality, and more on me, but that I didn’t appreciate other people doing the categorising for me.

“It’s just an orifice, isn’t it?” said Sylvia. “When it comes down to it. There’s no difference really.” She said this while we were sitting on a bench, with an amused bespectacled man sitting at the other end of it, trying to concentrate on his book. She was rooting inside her bag, and produced a soft pack of long and crumpled cigarettes. Then she proceeded to rummage around for her cigarette holder. All the while I was transfixed. I was pondering the breathtaking negation of everything that her statement implied.

She went on to talk about her problems, (which I began to realise in her view were real as opposed to mine which were irrelevant due to my freedom and creativity). She waxed lyrically about her son, who could do nothing wrong in her eyes. But her daughter was a terror.

“Do you know that she’s robbed me? We were having a party upstairs, and she wasn’t invited because she had taken up with this awful man, and she burgled the place!” She was expecting a sympathetic moue of sympathy, realised she wasn’t going to get it, and carried on regardless.

“I don’t know what to do with her. She’s out to destroy me. She’s now going out with a bisexual, who shoots up heroin! I’m expected to look after their baby! Do you know, when he gets angry with her, he goes off and has sex with black men? What is it about having sex with strangers when you’re angry? You wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that, I suppose?”

I murmured a noncommittal reply. Yes or no were both wide of the mark as answers. Besides, she wasn’t interested in what I had to say.

She carried on talking about the heinous daughter.

“I thought we talked everything out when she was growing up. We used to have problem-solving sessions every day. I thought she could tell me anything. But no. She’s determined to self-destruct.”

“Do you like her?” I asked.

She looked at me for a while. “No, I don’t really.”

Walking in the park with her evoked the strangest of emotions in me: a sinking feeling that she was smoothing me out like a bump in wallpaper. I managed in her walk to get her to hear that I was Irish, and that it mattered. That I was gay, and that it mattered. That I was me, and that I mattered. I managed to put words to my experience of my life with which I was comfortable. Part of me knows that she is right, that we are all one underneath, that clinging to individuality is eventually redundant. But it is surely for us to find out for ourselves.

As she was leaving, she thanked me for our little walk, and said good-bye. She kissed the air twice, quickly, with a camp flap of the hand, and got into her car.

I felt for her daughter, and was left in little doubt as to what those “problem-solving” sessions were like with her mother. For of course, that was exactly what Sylvia and I had just enjoyed, in our walk in the park.