49 :

At the end of yellowed fingers, held between nails bitten to the quick, a cigarette burnt down the tip. Hands shook with the trembling of nerves, nerves that came from years of watching your back, always fearing that one moment where your guard drops, where the tide turns, where that stab in the back comes from your closest friend. Keep your friends close, that old clichés went.

Your enemies are closer.

In a world like this, where the law is something that is a mere irrelevance, your enemies are always closer. They think like you, feel like you. See the world like you. A life where all people are marks, all kindness is merely weakness, all character a flaw waiting to be exploited.

All people are just waiting for the big scam, either the one they pull or the one pulled on them, be it the ultimate con or the endless series of smaller jobs.

Always with an eye on a chance : always waiting to see people, the endlessly hopeful, generally good, virtuous masses, the quiet millions, the meek, who’ll inherit shit, the shit we’ll make. Everyone else is just a mark, waiting their time.

It’s no life, this one. It’s a life yes, but not one worth living. Some kind of shady half-life, some state of perpetually tense awareness. But it’s the only life one knows. A life where you start down a certain path, and there are no exits but the final exit.

He sat and waited. He flicked through the papers : the photocopied credit card receipts, the phone records to dead numbers, bank statements, the emails, the intercepted post, opened, copied, resealed, everywhere she’s been, everyone she’s seen, everything she’s said or texted.

A number unfamiliar, and the seven letters (eight including a space) that spell a death sentence. Sent to my number.

He had no idea what kind of inner glow that message gave me. Like a Readybrek kid, I radiated. Then again, I had no way of knowing that the light it gave me also gave darkness elsewhere. That there is only a finite amount of love, and when love is made somewhere, somewhere else it is broken. In my corner, I glowed. In his corner, the sky darkened.

There are no secrets. Everywhere you go, unseen eyes watch on CCTV. Mobiles phones constantly broadcast a location – even when switched off – a quarter hour radar signal to the nearest beacon. Global Positioning Satellites can trace you down to within three metres four times an hour with nothing but a SIM card, should someone want to find you. And someone always wants to find you.

Someone always wants to sell you something. A septic tank. A bigger penis. A Russian mail order bride. They always want something from you. Money. Love. You can always find someone if you want to bad enough. He didn’t want me, he just wanted to remove me. Without me, there would be her in his life. As if I was all that stood in his way.

And in his fucked up way, all of this made sense to him. Life is all about perspective. All about angles. And his angles, his perspectives, saw the world in a way nobody else could. From his place, all things looked different. Not wrong, or inaccurate, just perverted. In his world, all these things made sense. To an insect, a human stands taller than heaven. To a psychopath, all humans are just objects, devoid of feeling, devoid of import, merely things to be manoeuvred around.

Sometimes, so far removed from other people, seeing all other people, all other things, as resources to be used, weaknesses to be exploited, objects to be discarded, one loses all empathy or relation to others.

This is his world. All other things were of secondary import. With logic as clear and pure and brilliant as a scientist, but with a grasp on reality as perverse as the Marquis De Sade.

The paranoid needs no evidence : he just knows. With a conviction stronger than a religion.

He’d found her again.

Time was running short. Always one second further from the past, always one second nearer to the future. The great beyond. The unknown.