Invisible Threads

The Grapevine Moment

There is a particular memory that crystallises what this book is about. I am sitting with my mother, a vibrant woman in her late seventies who has adored Marvin Gaye since before I was born. The song is 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine.' She is humming. Her face is alight with the uncomplicated pleasure of a melody she has loved for five decades.

'You know what the song's actually about?' I venture. And I watch something shift in her expression, not displeasure, but genuine surprise. Because she had heard that song hundreds of times and never once, consciously, sat with what it was saying. The melody had carried it. The melody had made it familiar, pleasurable, safe. The melody had occupied the listening space so thoroughly that the lyric had slipped through as a passenger, unopened.

We listened again. This time, to the words. The song is about betrayal. About finding out, through gossip and rumour, that someone you loved has been unfaithful. It is a song of heartbreak and suspicion, dressed in one of the most irresistible grooves in the history of recorded music. My mother laughed. Then she went quiet. Then she said, 'I never actually listened, did I.'

No. And neither had millions of others. And this is not because my mother is not intelligent, or observant, or perceptive. She is all of these things. It is because the melody had done its job. The architecture of the song had placed the lyric precisely where it would be least examined.

People leak

What was said: ‘This is the quiet one.’

What it leaked: I am the loud one, the visible one, the one who takes up space. Quiet is positioned as lesser, the absence of something rather than the presence of something different. It also reveals that quietness has been observed but not examined.

What was said: ‘This is the good one.’

What it leaked: The others are, by implication, less good. Which tells you not only what the speaker thinks of me but precisely what they think of whoever is standing next to me. The speaker has ranked all of us in a sentence they intended as a compliment.

None of these labels were offered with malicious intent. That is precisely what makes them instructive. The intentional insult is legible, you can see it, name it, defend against it. The unintentional label, offered with warmth and a smile, is more interesting. Because it gives you access to how the speaker actually thinks, unedited, before their consideration of the impression they are making has had time to intervene.

This is what I mean when I say people leak. The deliberate statement is managed. The unreflective statement, the introduction, the casual aside, the comment made before the speaker has considered whether to make it, is where the real information lives. I learned to listen to the drip. And the drips, accumulated, gave me a very accurate picture of how I was actually being perceived by the people around me, including the people who would have been surprised, or embarrassed, to know that I had the picture.