Dialogue: Whimpering in a pusillanimous sorrow for the weak

By JOE BENNETT

Sing boo and hiss for the feebleness gene. It's got me nowhere. And how people do misread it.

Once years ago I was gently mocking a Canadian colleague - a former priest, I think, defrocked or otherwise I don't know and didn't dare to ask - but anyway, he asked me if I would accompany him to another room.

Those were his very words - and I did, and he sat down and I sat down and he reached out and held my wrists.

"Joe," he said, "I didn't appreciate that last remark."

"Oh, sorry," I said, my face all flushed and guilt upsurging, "yes, very sorry, but why are you holding my wrists?"

"I thought you might hit me," he said.

Oh dear me, the man was mad or blind or both. I do not hit. I am in thrall to the feebleness gene. It's my master gene, the one that gets in the way of progress. It makes no evolutionary sense.

How did it get there? I'd like to blame my mother but I don't think I can. She is good but not damp.

Nor was my father. The gene is mine alone. I cooked it up and it has ruined my life.

I see it every day. I have six chooks and one of them's wet. It's been wet since birth. The others have only to look at it and it takes refuge on the rotary clothes-line.

When I go out to toss the grain and greens, five birds come rushing but the wet one cowers. I have to toss it special handfuls on the sly but when they land like shrapnel the bird takes fright once more.

It's hard to get the thing fed. And it's an ugly brute, all dirty white with one black wing feather and a comb the colour of the rubber on the end of a pencil. The bird's a runt. I should eat it.

My two most recent chooks are made of better stuff. One's a golden wyandotte, all windowed elegance. The other one has mongrel genes and strides on legs like piston rods and cackles at the dogs.

They're fine upstanding birds who scrap for scraps. And I like them. But I prefer the runt. The runt's my special darling. It makes no sense.

Yes, yes, I know it's supposed to be a virtue to succour the weak, but a virtue is only a virtue if you choose to do it.

Breathing is no virtue, nor is my feebleness.

Feebleness comes with none of the qualities which would make it rare, the courage to stand up for what is right or any of that stuff. It's just one big damp.

I can't watch Lassie movies. I can't watch those Hammer horror things. Despite their creaking doors and coffin lids and improbably thick cobwebs, they make me quake. I believe them.

This feebleness must be fairly common, I suppose. The fundamental plot of any weepie film or book is to make the good guy suffer. Put him in a fix he doesn't deserve, oblige him to struggle for what is right, dump injustice on his head until he almost croaks and then enable him by his own strength of will to fight his way to triumph and the girl.

The plot's as old as storytelling and it works. So perhaps I'm not alone in sympathising with the downtrodden.

But where's my fighting gene? Where's the treading-on-fingers gene? All must go well for me or else I weep and buckle.

This passionate need to be liked has hampered any hope of independence. And I dare to be selfish only by stealth.

I'd like to throw the honest punch of either good or evil - the take-that-because-I'm-me-and-you're-in-my-way-and-I-don't-care punch, or else the take-that-you-cad, this-fist-is-telling-you-that-you-did-wrong punch.

But I am capable of neither. I throw only the jelly-spine punch of virulent words, or criticism veiled in laughter such as drove good Father Frockless to seize my wrists.

When as a young thing I played cards against my mother I tried to lose. What was the point of that? To tell her that I loved her? I've never had the courage to say bold things like that.

I have always loved courage. I suspect we all love what we lack. I have chosen courageous friends and tricked them into thinking I was of their number.

And honesty draws me, too. Honesty and courage are kissing cousins. But I've got none of either. Only the 70-year apology, the whimpering soft-hearted reluctance to disturb the universe and the pusillanimous sorrow for the weak.

Feebleness, that never got anything done. But if you, too, are feeble, don't take this wrong. I mean no offence, you understand.