by David Birchall

Created on: June 19, 2008

In a small bar on Woolmer Street a young woman contemplates the ethical dilemma suddenly extended to her. She would rather not be here. She would rather be anywhere but here. This bar, like that restaurant opposite with its understated, modern sign and that coffee shop next door with its globally recognised emblem, are all places in which Joanna feels traitorous. Yet she does come here, unable to really impinge her views on anyone else. Already, at the tender of nineteen, Joanna has begun to feel defeated. Not defeated in any deep sense, though already she knows her place in this world. She wanders at the benign whim of normal folk. If she is not to desert humanity she must become one of them despite all her instincts that seem to disagree with the normal folk. She is lost. She has no quantifiable objections to the complete rejection of everything but something holds her back. She does not like her friends, and most likely, she believes, they do not like her. She is attractive to the wrong type of men and women, the types who will forever lie in straw beds with feather pillows, live in hovels with golden doors.

She cannot bring herself to either tip or not tip the barman. To tip is to support this man's bid for mediocrity, to not tip is to be selfish. Maybe, she thinks, I will donate the tip to charity, but to support charity is to prop up in an even more insidious way all that charity rails against. Joanna has not donated a penny to charity for a year. Her charity is the WPI, the Workers Party International, an obscure, possibly, she sometimes thinks, purely imaginary party that strive in glorious futility around the world to overthrow all that created it.

Her friend arrives. She sits down. Joanna looks at her and smiles. They order and Joanna gives the man a tip of half the price of her drink. What, she thinks, made her do it? To her friends she is he altruist, the kind, mad, saviour, or destroyer, of civilisation. It is of course this pretence that made her do it. Had she been alone she would have kept her money, telling herself it would be wrong to help this man kill his hope. Is it more selfish to trap this man, and look generous, or to keep her money, making this one day that little bit worse? Perhaps this bar was a mistake, perhaps the character of it stifles positivity. All Joanna can do is reflect on her selfishness as the man walks away, to continue the life of mediocrity she has forced upon him.

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