The Big Read: Looking back in anger

We felt her before we saw her; that flicker of anxiety that passes through the herd when Something is happening.

Even though I was standing deep in the dimness of a bookshop and the two young men behind the counter had their backs to the window, we all suddenly looked up, like wildebeest smelling a rumour of lion, and looked out into the street.

A moment later she strode into view; rangy, loping, livid. A crowd of builders, hurrying towards the station in their big work boots, parted in front of her and stared. But a drunk, accusing a bollard of some injustice, was too slow: she barged into him, hitting him square in the back. He spun away, groping at the air. One of the builders said: "Yoh!"

A man stepped out in front of her, disdainfully amused. He walked from the hips, like a lawman weighed down by a gun belt. The sheriff of El Mucho Macho was taking charge and putting the crazy little lady back in her place. "No girly," he said, shaking his head; but if he had meant to say more he didn't get the chance. The woman raised an arm, locked at the elbow. "F***ing move!" she yelled. He didn't. Her hand rammed into his chest and he swore as he staggered aside.

The men in the bookshop, bored and silent until now, came alive. "No look here!" cried one, clutching at his own chest. "Did you check? She groped his borste!"

"What's wrong with her?" asked his colleague, leaning on a copy of Psychology for Dummies to get a better view of her as she reached the pedestrian crossing and suddenly paused. Everyone on the street was wondering the same thing, all trying to figure out what they were seeing, weighing a variety of easy prejudices to find the most satisfying explanation. Drugs, lunacy, that time of the month: you could see the options flickering across their eyes like symbols on a whirling fruit machine in a casino.

The rush to diagnose was predictable. In our society women are not permitted to be publicly, incandescently angry. If they apply for the relevant permissions, and gather as a group, say outside parliament or a police station, they are allowed to be somewhat cross. But a lone woman, consumed with rage and wanting people to stay out of her way, can stop traffic. If a man stiff-arms another man, it is a punch, a charge, a tackle. When a woman does it, borste (breasts) have been groped. Even the language denies her rage.

But the need to understand why runs deep. I would never meet her again, we meant nothing to each other, and yet, as I walked home, I found myself speculating about her anger and my need to understand it. Was this urge to impose a back-story on those few seconds a creative one or was I simply gossiping with myself? Was I thinking like a writer, trying to see a narrative unwinding behind her like a roll of film snagged on her heel, or was this simply a kind of pop-psychology rubbernecking? And were they the same thing?

Perhaps those men who imposed their stereotypes on her had simply been responding to our universal need to believe that there are causes and effects, that life is a story with a plot rather than an arbitrary series of events. Stereotypes are easy explanations, and usually inaccurate, but they are a form of explanation nonetheless.

The Vikings believed in the three Norns, ancient goddesses who sat at cosmic spinning wheels, spinning out the fates of every person on the Middle Earth. I thought of the Norns as I walked home; how the city and the country and the world often seem like a tangled fleece, each hair an individual life, each knot a love affair, a falling-out, a life shared with one or two or three other lives. And I wondered if the writer's urge might be universal, whether we all have an instinct to brush out the chaotic wool of existence, to separate the strands, to pick out and discard the inconvenient burrs and twigs that have no place in our stories, and then to spin and weave those strands into a tapestry of a world that makes sense.

The tapestry is immense. Some parts are beautiful, others grim. Sections of it are fraught with busyness and intrigue; large expanses are dull. For the most part, however, its surface is even, its weave reassuringly uniform. But when an angry woman storms down a street in Cape Town, stitches begin to lift, threads pull apart, and for a moment we are given a glimpse through the picture to a bright, cold world beyond; a view of something that might just be true.