Cross Conversations

Cross Conversations ©

By Michael Casey

We all talk, we all have conversations, we even have cross conversations and  we also can have cross conversations. No I’m not stuttering, by cross conversations I mean cross conversations and not just cross conversations, we can even have cross cross conversations. Shall I explain?  A conversation is just that a conversation, a cross conversation can mean you are angry, so really it’s an argument and not a conversation at all. But a cross conversation is a cross purposes conversation, or two actual conversations weaving in and out.

I hope I’ve explained it simply for you, me and my sister used to regularly have cross conversations. We’d be at the family house and talking to dad in my case and to mum in her case, then we’d switch for 5 minutes before we’d jump in my sister’s car and we go home to our own homes. This was the case for years, it kind of stopped 20 years ago when mum died suddenly and dad nearly joined her 8 bare weeks later. Some of it is explained in Padre Pio and Me.

Now my sister would speak of this and that, and did I know old Mrs Smith had died, not the fat Mrs Smith from Winson Green down by the Prison, no the slim Mrs Smith from the city centre, the one who’d won the lottery and bought that flat by the canals. I would talk over her and tell her I had diarrhoea from a dodgy kebab I’d had on my way home from work, but it had tasted so good I’d promised myself another. Now I was disappointed where would I find the perfect kebab, we weren’t on the Internet back then maybe 25 to 30 years ago so finding a good kebab was all about trial and error, not to mention lots of toilet paper.

I did in fact nearly die in Paris, I was on a trip in 1998 and JC had said stay by the Gare Du Nord,  little did I know it as a red light area. So I went out and had a Chinese, I looked like a German Policeman in my leather jacket, I could hear people on the bus comment, Flic Almand, I knew enough French to understand. I had too much wine with my meal, and was tipsy on the Metto, I ended up at the Eiffel tower with a broken camera, so I was asking the girl in the box at the bottom of the Eiffel tower how I could I could fix the camera.

Anyways on the way home I had a kebab, they were like whole sheep on a spit, it was fabulous. Then I stumbled into to my kiosk of a hotel, next to a huge church on the corner with Film Blache shops outside, this means sex films, as skin is white after all. In the middle of the night I erupted like a fountain of filth, from both ends. My bathroom  was a wardrobe, without a lion nor a witch, but with a sink, toilet and shower all squeezed in. I spent forever in there, I thought I’d die, I swore I’d never eat a kebab again, then I saw reason and compromised, I’d never come to Paris again.

And I never have, Kebabs are more sacred so I have had those. In the morning I found a pharmacy and asked in my best French “avec vous des asprins” and I received a box which on opening had a tube inside which said “tamponee”. So obviously I was confused and wondered how as a male I’d use this asprins. Luckily inside the tube were extra stong mint size asprin. I put one in my mouth, only for it to turn me into a rabid dog. They were meant to dissolve in water, I just foamed at the mouth, on the street outside the pharmacy, next to the condom machine, which at first I had thought was a bubble gum machine. It is France after all, in UK such machines are hidden in the filth of gents toilets in pubs.

Now I just went off at a tangent then, the Corrs are singing “everybody is searching for intimacy” on my hifi as I talk to you, have they ever been to France I wonder.  So we used to have conversations at rapid fire, because we only had a few minutes together in the car before we got to our own home. It was a way of sharing our hopes and dreams and worries and supporting each other. To an outsider, to a fly on the wall it could be incomprehensible, and just as I typed that word the Corrs sing it, they actually sung comprehend, this is my life a rich pageant of nonsense.

I’m trying to have a straightforward life but God intervenes at cross purposes and just as I do X He decides Y is far better, but I am still alive after my triple heart bypass, which was it God turned into a quadruple, because it would be better for me. I only found only 6 months later that it was a quadruple, 4 grafts.

So as I talk to you I hear the tv in the other room and wonder what am I missing, so I have the Corrs, conversation in Mandarin and children’s laughter floating all around the house. Then Totoro our cat smiles at me from behind the chair in the window, it’s very off putting and could make me cross, but then I suppose it highlights what I was trying to talk about in the first place, which was cross talking, don’t be cross I’m finishing now.