The Other Georgia

There is a man look­ing in my study win­dow from the back yard. I sud­denly can’t remem­ber where I keep the cricket bat. He’s swarthy, and he’s tap­ping on the glass and say­ing some­thing which I can’t hear because I’m listen­ing to some tra­di­tional Geor­gian choral music on my head­phones and I’ve just turned up the volume as high as I can stand to get the full majestic effect.

He’s five feet away, banging on my win­dow and I’m star­ing back at him, as life­less as one of those ducks hanging in res­taur­ant win­dows in Chin­atown. The Geor­gi­ans are giv­ing it hand­ful in my ears. Prickles are run­ning through my blood. He’s yelling now, the man, and I want to run.

He’s point­ing to his ears, and at me. He’s lift­ing some­thing up for me to see. It’s the nozzle of a large vacuum cleaner.

I yank the head­phones from my ears with a hand like a box­ing glove, and the Geor­gian wail drops away to silence. At least, it should drop away to silence. Instead I find that out­side the head­phones the huge, moun­tain­ous har­mon­ies are boom­ing around the walls and, crit­ic­ally, out the win­dows. The head­phones are still plugged in.

I jab at my laptop until it stops.

“Sorry,” the man is say­ing. “Only I’m steam clean­ing the car­pets of the place next door and I couldn’t tell if my machine was on or not.”

“Sorry,” I say numbly.

He goes to leave, then stops. “What is it, any­way? Muslim music or something?”

“It’s Geor­gian,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “I thought that was all fiddles and ban­jos and Lucinda Williams.”

“There’s another Geor­gia,” I say. “It’s near Russia.”

“Oh.” He doesn’t sound con­vinced. “Good luck with it then.” He leaves, pre­sum­ably to call the Ter­ror Hotline.

I invest­ig­ate the head­phones lead. I had plugged it into the micro­phone jack instead of the head­phones jack, which appar­ently makes the music play at the reques­ted volume through my head­phones and deaf­en­ingly through the speak­ers. I plug it into the cor­rect hole, close and lock the win­dow, draw the blinds and make myself a set­tling cup of tea.

How lucky, I think as the kettle waits for me to look away, that this happened at home. I some­times have to take the train dur­ing the day, and I’m always being told I should take my laptop to get some use­ful work done in transit. I never, ever do this, because I fear that one of the gen­er­a­tion Naomi Rob­son refers to as Our Young People will take it off me and hurt me and run away.

Now it becomes clear what infin­itely greater humi­li­ations could have befallen me. I con­grat­u­late myself on my instinct­ive trust of fear as an evol­u­tion­ary adaptation.

Back in the study I return to my laptop, put my head­phones in, click Play and my eardrums touch in the middle.