If symptoms

persist.. .

LAST WEEK, a young man came to me and complained about his temper.

'A temper's a terrible thing,' he said. `You never know what it'll do next.' He spoke of it as though it were a pet ferret of more than usual ferocity. 'And my family's not giving me the help what I need,' he continued.

'In what sense?' I asked.

`Well, my sister only talks to me when she needs someone beating up. She made me beat up her boyfriend.'

`Made you?'

`Yes. She knows just what to say to make me do it. My cousin's the same.' `What happened?'

`She stabbed her boyfriend in the stom- ach, then he broke her nose. So she asked me to send round my people to beat him up. My people are very violent people.'

I made tentative enquiries, not as to his employment exactly, but rather into the provenance of his income.

'My job is crime, all aspects of crime,' he said.

'It wasn't, then, that he had an abstract objection to violence, it was merely that his girlfriend had decamped because of his pet temper. She had always had the habit, he said, of running away from her problems.

'Perhaps you can't really blame her,' I suggested.

'Oh, I understand women's got their moods,' he said magnanimously. 'And women have a problem — they are stronger brain-wise than men, don't you think?'

I enquired into the events immediately preceding her departure.

`Well, we're not married, we live together like, we've got this kid. Me and her, we've got these two flats, hers and mine. Most of the time she stays down mine but that day she went back to her flat, but she found that the next-door neighbours'd broken in and stolen every- thing.'

`How do you know it was the next- door neighbours?'

`Because they put her curtains up in their windows. So my girlfriend asks me to go round theirs and teach them a les- son. So I went, but they wasn't in, so I came back home.'

'And then?'

'My girlfriend wasn't very pleased with me 'cause I hadn't done nothing to them. And earlier in the day I'd borrowed our iron to the girl downstairs. She's a prosti- tute, like. Well, we all know what she does is wrong, so we don't judge her. It's her nature.'

I felt I was beginning to lose track of the story.

`What happened next?' I enquired.

'My girl asked me, where's the iron? and I told her I'd borrowed it to the girl downstairs, and she said, she's a prosti- tute, she can afford her own iron with the money what she earns every night, and I told her to shut up. We started to fight, like.'

`And then?'

`Well, I pulled her hair and got her round the neck. She had these marks — I didn't really do nothing, she bruises easy because she's got light skin.'

'I see.'

'I don't want to upset her because it upsets me too much.' 'If she were in this room and you had a disagreement with her in front of me, would you pull her hair?' 'No. But if she leaves me and I get another girl, I know it'll be the same.' 'What do you conclude from that?' 'We got to get our heads sorted out.'

Theodore Dalrymple