When Karen passes through a party in her electric wheelchair she creates a wake, about four feet wide, devoid of people and furniture. When she comes to rest, a high proportion of the people in the room will be circulating around her, stacking like airliners, awaiting their turn to talk to her, or, more likely, listen to her, because Karen can talk from midnight to sunrise. Hilarious stories and sad stories, recounted conversations and happenings, character assassinations, opinions on politics, religion, football, music, art, business, house prices and ex-boyfriends, the comparative merits of the beaches of Ireland and the pubs of Kilburn, drinking stories, dancing stories, tales of the drug-fuelled raves of yesteryear, all told with a forceful urgency, as if she must download everything she knows quickly, before time runs out.
You don’t just listen to Karen; you watch, too. All the lost movement which would have taken place below her chest, were it not for the motorcycle accident in Spain and the resulting broken spine, seems to have been replaced by hyperactivity in her upper body. Her left hand is usually fiddling with the joystick of her wheelchair or holding a cigarette. The right waves wildly in expansive gestures, or holds a drink. Her voice is as agile and strong as the rest of her body is still and weak. It’s a throaty voice, husky from a lifetime of hard drinking, Marlboro cigarettes and shouting above loud music. When she laughs her head rolls back, hair flying, big white teeth showing, letting loose a great animal-like, room-filling sound loud enough to wake the neighbours.
Karen was always in trouble of some sort. Boy trouble, girl trouble, drink trouble, money trouble, work trouble. Earlier in her life, long before the accident, her sister once put a post-it note on her bedroom door saying simply, “Karen, they know.” Karen had no idea who “they” were, or what they knew. The possibilities were endless. She put the note in the bin but kept the sentence in her head as the working title for her autobiography.
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Tim Barlow Writes 
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