‘Against Destination’

An Introductory sketch

The pelting of snow and sleet on the car’s exterior exactly corresponded to the rush of words being catapulted out of Angelina’s mouth inside it. Her family indulged her in this. Most of the time they wished they didn’t have to. But this was seemingly the sum and mean of their holidays: an infinite drive through anonymous scenery, the alloyed drone of the weather and the rental nulling them all to sleep, and Angelina’s rickety alto rising above it to restrict them to reality. ‘At least we save on audiobooks’, her father thought, gazing longingly at the dashboard.

To be sure, she didn’t have bad taste in tales. For a post-pubescent adolescent her serious choices were admirably strange. Not just Camus and Fitzgerald but pretty often the lengthier Tolstoy and Eliot too, and she could have enraptured her family in much the way that she herself was vacuumed into the 19th Century by those latter books, but she read aloud flatly. She exterminated punctuation. Her parents and Julie were readers too, but perhaps no literate thing could focus on this: “ItwasonamorningofMaythatPeterFeatherstonewasburiedIntheprosaicneighb ourhoodofMiddlemarchMaywasnotalwayswarmandsunnyandonthisparticular morningachillwindwasblowingtheblossomsfromthesurroundinggardensontot hegreenmoundsofLowickChurchyard…”

They were still hours away from wherever they were going this time. Where landmarks had previously stayed true on the horizon’s rim there were now mere nebulae of grey haze and white light. Finally, Julie wrapped her thick- padded arms around her sister, blocking her book.

“Have you tried just reading in your head, Angie?”
“Have you tried listening to me without interrupting?” she responded.
Julie shrugged. “If I didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to stop.”
Angelina was frustrated to find she was not witty enough to retort further. Their mother swiveled her head away from the road for a moment:
“Carry on, Angie. We were all enjoying that.”                                                                      “Were we though?” said Julie.                                                                                           “Yes, we were. If you have an alternative means of entertainment, bring it out, but in the meantime give your sister a break.”

Angelina, meanwhile, stayed vexed. She could never point out this mistake in time: that her mother’s attempts to support her and Julie’s campaign to be a cliché big sister clashed in a manner that only made her feel more like a girlish chump, a childish liability. She read aloud as she did because she hated the cranial echo of her inner voice. She didn’t know anyone else who bore this paradox. She didn’t think it was possible that anyone else could live this way, and in a sense prided herself on that. But she was used to it. Even reasoning to herself like this was perpetually annoying, though at least it had a point. When she tried to read in silence instead, every word seemed to try to trip up its successor like a discordant note at the start of a pop song. She appreciated her family letting her carry on reading aloud in ‘public’ but she wasn’t going to pretend she was any kind of performer, even if she couldn’t help externalizing her experiences. In conclusion, once again, if she could learn to live with them, they’d better learn to put up with her.

“Did no-one remember to pack an aux cable?” asked Julie.