32 :

After Helen moved in, life was very different. The sanctity, the safety of our lives was broken. Her home, what once had been safe, secure - the place where the outside world goes away - had been violated.

He knew where she lived. He knew where she slept. He knew where she was hiding. Nowhere was safe. Not a street, not a home, not a bed. Nowhere but the few square inches inside her brain. She could never go home again.

But not any more. Not when she was here.

Helen never went back there. She rang her friends from callboxes, explained to them the situation and got the rest of her stuff shipped over in bits and pieces. Friends of friends picked up boxes. She made apologies. She changed her phone number. Her hair colour. But she couldn’t change her past. God, not through a lack of wanting.

She did try her best to make it easier for the other two. She asked at her work, tried to get some people in the office to see if they wanted to move. Placed adverts in the business messageboard, the usual.

They weren’t very happy about her sudden escape. They were equally fucked off that some paroled criminal with convictions for aggravated bodily harm, burglary, trafficking, and domestic violence not only knew where they lived - but wanted through that door.

They rang the police. They never heard any more from him - it was as if he knew that Helen was no longer there, but if he knew where she was, we didn’t know. There was no indication yet that he knew where she was hiding. Yet.

I didn’t like her going to work. I didn’t know if I was going to see her again. Every time we made love, every time we kissed, every time we went to work and I kissed her goodbye at the station, could be the last. Every night we tried to sleep as the car headlights lit up the ceiling, and every night we feared we would be woken by a man standing over us with a weapon pointed at our sleeping bodies.

No future. No future. No future for you.

What had seemed like an ordinary love was suddenly telescoped to a level of intimacy beyond all reasonable human imagination. A years worth of sweet nothings and casual intimacies were condensed, squashed into a handful of weeks. Love fast, die young.

I installed burglar alarms. I thought about CCTV and motion detectors. I considered restarting my insomnia addiction. I couldn’t relax.

It was as if life had suddenly ceased to make sense. There was no correlation between our actions, and the effects. All these things were now out of our control. No indication that anything we did could affect this. We could only try to get through it sometime, somehow.

Our hearts leapt in our mouths at the slightest noise. An unexplained creak downstairs. The creak of a shelf. It could be the footstep of a killer.

Every time I opened the door I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know if I was going to find a single, black rose and a card. A petrol bomb. Or a man in a Halloween mask singing as he delivered a raining set of blows pummeling me into unconsciousness.

Its no way to live a life. No way to exist. It’s not really being alive - for every second you spend in fear of not being alive anymore. Life passes you by. Everything is seen with paranoid eyes. The eyes of fear see a world it fears.

I don’t know if he’d followed us. We were looking behind each other during the drive back to mine. We didn’t see anything that we noticed could’ve been following us. But what if was a series of cars? What if someone else - someone she didn’t recognise - was following her?

It fell out in small gasps. Their relationship could politely be termed abusive. Domestic violence was the case in norm. The two wanted different things. They met in a suburban nightclub. Loud music, shouting, men fuelled by alcohol and awful shirts, looking for someone, anyone, they could take home. A momentary attraction became a permanent regret.

Time would run short. It would get late. Late evening or early morning. People would pair off through desperation and their two o clock princess would become their eight o clock monster

But she caught his eye one night. Slowly, they became lovers. A man with everything - wit, charm, and money. And a dark past. Connected to the kind of people anyone would be scared of.

Why did she stay with him?

Why would you stay with someone you think you love when things go sour? Because you think things are going to be better. Because you think its just a blip. Just a phase. Everything changes in time. Everything passes. Even the bad times.

Because somewhere inside a man who is a beast is also the man you fell in love with. The person you still want to be in love with. Even if he seems to be so far inside there that he may never come out. May never be seen again.

As the bruises fade, new ones arrive. From a stinging punch on the basis of an imaginary slight, to the noise-breaking blow for a multitude of other supposed insults. Your skin stings in shock, in hurt pride, in fear. The half-life of domestic violence is a lifetime. But you never know. After that you may never be able to trust again. Everyone you may ever kiss may be the one who finally kills you.

You just don’t know.

For dinner being wrong. For being out too late. For not buying the right food, or wearing the wrong thing. For not being as drunk as the other. For daring to have an opinion of your own.

At the start, the bruises used to be in places you couldn’t see. As if somehow, this was something to be ashamed of. And it was. For when you cannot express yourself, you resort to the rule of the gun. Because its the only way to win.

That’s why she stayed with him. Because most people don’t want to walk out on everything you know. You don’t want to leave all you’ve done of the past few years and burn it.

The main problem was he was still the person she fell in with. Sometimes.. His temper just occasionally got the better of him. And that occasionally was becoming frequently. But people who, to him, had betrayed him, ceased to be entities. They were scores to settle. They were enemies to be removed. As if they had never existed.

Isn’t the first and major sign of a disturbed mind, the perception that there is no such things as guilt. They wronged me. They must pay. It is the natural order to see the deliverance of pain and discomfort on those who have inflicted pain or discomfort upon me. And even if that pain may never have actually occurred. Even if those slights and assaults are imaginary, and exist only within a perverted world view, the perception is still that they occured, and should be corrected.

In a world like this, whatever they perpetrate upon their victims, is just and fair. There is no guilt, even if the punishment is far bigger than any crime.

It’s not that the world is out to get you. Its that the world will continue on, irrespective of if you are there or not. It’s indifferent to your suffering. As God is indifferent to the evils of the world we made in his image. In a world of indifference, of emotional detachment, where there is no empathy, then the concept of guilt, of responsibility is redundant.

Especially if your logical faculties are such that, realistically, your actions can avoid detection. If you close every loophole. Wipe your traces clean. And lackeys always, always take the fall.

Nobody likes a squealer.

My understanding of this was that this man was a successful psychopath. The type of person who exhibits all the traits of a psychopath, yet evades detection. Films, books, the news, all tell us that people like this always get exposed. We like reassurances. Happy endings. Closure. Whatever that means. By some flaw, some chink in his logic, the bad guy always get caught.

But they don’t. Like a secret agent working so deep undercover, the true identity remains so masked that the psychopath doesn’t even see it himself. In a world full of psychopaths, it is the kind, the giving, the loving that are the abnormal. And if we live in a world of majority rule, then the cruel wield the power.

Abandon love.

She had to. After he broke her nose one drunken night in the kitchen and she spent hours in casualty at 3am on a Sunday morning, surrounded by drunks and their belligerent friends trying to start fights or pull women something snapped. She did. And he slept.

Of course, she came back, but just long enough to fool him. Just long enough to get her things together and evacuate.

He tried to find her. Tried to track her down. She didn’t go to her mother. She didn’t go to her friends. She just vanished. Gone. As if she were never alive.

We had so much in common when we got to know each other.

They’d drifted so that they’re only contact was violence. Sex was violence. But this wasn’t sex. It was punishment, that love. He thought she’d never leave. She thought so too. For a while. But it became survival. If she didn’t leave I wouldn’t be talking to her now. I wouldn’t be feeling furious for what someone did to her.

He hired a private detective. Got her phone numbers. Her credit card receipts. Her everything. It took a while, sure. Even if she didn’t ring her friends. Or her parents. Or anyone she knew. She knew he was connected. Knew the people who could make life hell for anyone. So she didn’t risk anyone.

Tore the page out of the book and started again. But he turned up again.

Some people just don’t get the hint. Some people just don’t realise that true love can die. That a flower blossoms for only a short while, and you cannot force open the petals. That everything has its natural life span. However long that is.

Male pride, wounded male pride is a terrible thing. A woman could never turn him down. How dare she! He was a prize. An asset. Something to be proud of.

He was as stubborn, as cold, as resilient as nature itself. But after she left his life fell apart. She had no further voluntary contact with him. Letters still arrived. Roses, painted black. Love notes. Unusual presents. She never opened them.

Even as she was working minimum wage behind the counter of a book shop, he would send gifts of the things he presumed she might need in some way to win her back. Tempting as it was, she told me she never opened them. Never used them.

An acceptance of a gift is collusion with an enemy.

Among us walk creatures that look like men. They talk like men. Act like men. Have sound reason and intellect, but at their heart, have a moral centre that is corrupt and perverted. Without guilt or conscience. Without empathy or feeling. That see other people as ciphers, characters without feeling, whose emotions are without consequence, and who exist only to further the self’s position.

If someone gets burgled, someone gets robbed, attacked, hurt, or killed then that is their problem, not ours. We don’t get involved. We look the other way. Maybe society itself, without empathy, is intrinsically in a state of mass psychosis.

Maybe then, those of us who are lovers are the abnormal, the deranged, the minority.

Known as he was for his behaviour, his tendancies, he always seemed to evade capture. He always seemed to have someone else take the fall.

Until his luck ran out. Until he, unlike his normal style, made one fatal mistake. He hired the wrong guy to do the wrong job. The wrong guy confessed.

Helen told me that whoever this person is braver than she is. Braver than anyone, probably spends his time in the same type of fear we are now growing used to.

Convicted for fifteen years, he disappeared. Despite being inside, he never lost his connections. Except to Helen. Whilst he was incarcerated somewhere in the country, maybe only five miles away from here, unable to control his empire as tightly as he used to, she slipped through his fingers for the final time.

Or so we thought. Once again, she changed her name. Disappeared off the face of the earth. Like a Witness Protection programme. Began again. Like a virgin.

And a couple of years later she met me.