54 :

And here we were.

I was in his house. In his dull two bedroom apartment. Behind that door.

I remember Samuel saying to me a few short words. Not sure what they were but they were enough to convince me that really, I had no choice.

“You know what you need to do.” He told me. “You don’t want to do it but you’ve got to. You haven’t got a choice. Either you do it, or you don’t. And if you don’t….” His voice trailed off, to the extent that I no longer had a choice.

So I knew what I had to do. I had to become a murderer to defeat murderers. To defeat a monster one must become a monster. One must become a beast to rid himself of the pain of being a man. Cruelty always wins in the end.

Man, he had awful taste in wallpaper. Nobody chooses their wallpaper. Everybody accepts whatever it was they had before. That’s the way it is. But this? The walls were cheap : thin like models. You could hear the neighbours breathing, sleeping, fucking. Their widescreen television wrapped inside a cheap shell. It was a cheap place, a cheap town.

Nobody would choose to live here. Places like this, the circumstances choose you. The kind of place people start from before they have other things to do, other places to go, the type of place someone lives when they’re waiting for something, anything to happen.

His absence of personality was a personality in itself.

Coming out of prison, one wants to take back from society what society took from you. Sometimes no more, always no less. But the weakness of that thinking is simple : for society to take from you, you take from it first. Those years you lost, you can never have them back : those lives you took, those mistakes you made, they are all gone. There is no point in trying to exact vengence or even justice. Only to move on, accept the mistakes you made, take the responsibility, start again. If only some of us could have that opportunity, to start again, escape the pit of debt and history.

But that’s the sign of psychosis. An inability to take responsibility, an inability to accept consequence. To just think that we can just walk away from everything we don’t like. This car crash life.

Maybe every one of us has psychosis, all of us. A sociopathic planet. Devoid of a conscience, an inner life. Maybe this collective psychosis, this numbing of feeling to accept the cruelty of the world, maybe we were all in a state of psychosis. And the sane were those that had been brutalised to it, accepted it, lived within it. Where morality was a secret life. Where there was no choice, no morality, no law to obey excepting that of power. There ain’t no right or wrong. Only power.

Sometimes to feel anything is to feel too much.

Each place has its inner life. That’s why when I’m somewhere I’ve never been before I want to see it. I want to look at the bookshelf, the CD collection, the rows of clothes. Find out how things are: are they tidy or untidy, clean or unclean, what are they like, what makes them think, what drives them, what makes them feel?

Who is this person? What makes them who they are? Is there anything inside them?

And here there was nothing. An absence of things. An absence of anything. As if the personality itself had been sucked out and replaced by a void. There were no books, a handful of DVD’s (comedy shows, bad movies), a TV, a DVD player. A cheap stereo tuned to the radio, the dull buzz of pop music humming from its tinny speakers. On the table a curled newspaper. A mobile phone in the corner. It’s facia glowing a dull green as it sucked up its battery. Clothes hung on an open rail. A handful of shirts (the expensive kind), pairs of slick trousers, the cut just so, a coat hung over the back of a chair. Two pairs of shoes. Box fresh.

I don’t know how long he’d been out, but it can’t have been long. Here there was no inner life that I could see. Just some vague sense of survival, some sense of purpose that went beyond all other things, some sense of a life in waiting. Waiting for her.

An ashtray full on the corner of the chest of drawers. Full of papers, receipts, papers, ID cards, false passports, parole slips, unfilled, unsorted. Just shoved in and forgotten.

This was his life. A life half dead, waiting to come back to life or be put down. Nights watching television, making contacts, talking to dealers, moving up the food chain. Where phones always rang and where deals were always being made. Where kids hung out, where reputations were made, where power was all. A life on the run. A life always looking over your shoulder. A life unlived.

The killer hung up his coat. Went to the fridge, crawled through the dark to the door, the strip of cheap light illuminating the tile floor. Picked out a can of chilled soft drink with vegetable extracts, the nameless noise as compressed gas squirted out of a freshly opened ringpull, the cold acrid taste of carbonated water, caramel E 150d, aspartame, acesulfame K, E211 and a supporting cast of nameless chemicals slipped down his throat, mixing with the carcinogens from the lighted cigarette in his right hand.

Thank God I’d lost my sense of smell. Thank God I could not notice the yellow stench of smoke that stuck to everything. Dirt smaller than the molecules, grime that doesn’t wash out. That will never wash out from yellowed fingertips.

The cigarette gripped between stale, cracked lips. The sound of a zip decsent. And then from out of nowhere, the flaccid, vile flesh of his penis gushed forth a stream of piss.

I can’t believe this penis has ever been inside my girl. This lump of flesh had risen in arousal, semen had bulleted down the urethra, landed upon, inside, within her. I don’t know what she had seen in him – his charm, maybe? I hadn’t seen any so far. What the fuck was it he had that I didn’t, apart from her?

“You fucking –“ I snarled. He stood there and ignored me, his cock limp between his legs, his hands free and -

And He couldn’t even hear me. And yet I could –

See myself in the mirror. I hadn’t seen myself since I died. I’d seen my hands, my legs, but not my face.

Shocking. Sure, I could joke, say I was looking good, whatever, but you know. So fucking what? If I was in the mirror, I was real. I wasn’t a figment of my own imagination, I lived, breathed, walked, talked, I was alive. I was.

I think too much.

He zipped himself up, and the dirty bastard didn’t even wash his hands, the dirty fuck. Seriously, not even washing your hands. I was getting to like this guy less and less.

He walked through me. Oh Shit. As if I wasn’t even there, as if I had nothing, as I was nothing, as if I was not even there. And I felt him. I never got over it. It never changed. It always made me want to puke, as if I was being dragged through him.

But this was worse. This was fucking awful.

And I hated what I felt : something cold, something dark, and yet something so utterly, vibrant alive, having so much more than I ever did, life, flesh, blood, and yet, utterly remorseless, as if my wishes, whatever I wanted, were worthless, meaningless. Something cold was inside.

And I tasted his soul. I knew what it was that she loved about him – his wild, carefree abandon, his unbridled sense of limitless possibilities, the unrepressed side of him. So unrepressed, so wild and free that life seemed full of endless opportunity. The charming sense of psychosis that only those without conscience have. Consequence and consideration was for others, this, he was only concerned about what could be done, not what should. Mercifully free of morals and conscience. A predator. Someone who did things because they could, not because they should.

And I felt as if somehow my soul had been sucked out of me, as if the colour had been drained, as if he were a vampire, and I was his transfusion, as if – and I collapsed, sapped dry. Dry heaving, suddenly, vivdly alive, my breathing, for suddenly I could breathe, frantic, panting, clinging onto the radiator, cold to the touch, for balance.

I felt as if I were dying, as if my blood was turning black. And then –

He was gone, through me, past me, without even knowing what he had done. And I had nothing to do but to cling helplessly and hope. And it was gone. Dimly I was aware of wetness on my knees, my footprints of old, unreal shoes forming onto pools of warm yellow piss on the bathroom floor.

Dirty fucker. But I felt somehow – stronger. I felt as if I were becoming real, true, alive. As if I could touch, as if I could feel again. Slowly I pulled myself up on the radiator, an inch at a time, and stared at my reflection in the mirror. And I was real, for a second. And I was. My hand too reached out, touched the cold metal of the mirror, and didn’t pass through.

If I could breathe, I’d be dry humping deep gasps of oxygen now. I’d never felt so cold. And yet, he was alive. Even as dead as his soul was, he was more alive than I was. And I wanted that. I wanted the things he took for granted. The feel of flesh. The dull ache of tired muscles. I wanted it all.

Dammit. I was doing this, I was becoming me again. I pushed against the mirror and it moved. And it seemed so easy. So much easier than it had done. As if this were normal, right, correct. My reflection moved out of focus, a finger print mark left in a dull smudge on the mirror.

Oblivious, a figure walked along the flat, unseeing through life, and set down on a chair. I picked myself up, slowly, stumbling on unsteady legs, but I was real. The radiator was taking my weight : even though it was probably only 21 grams. I still had form. I still was something tangible. I was.

After death, the body is 21 grams lighter. 21 grams is the weight of the human soul. I stumbled, like a hesitant animal, to stand on two legs.

I walked through the flat. Cheap deodorants and travel toothbrushes. A bin full of chip wrappers, cheap pizza boxes. On the bedside table a cup of slowly turning coffee. Empty boxes of microwaved curries and discarded wrappers.

This was his life without her. This was his life in waiting. Incomplete. Unable to start again, move on. Always hankering for a time that never was. Hoping for a time when things were perfect, when love was true, when nothing was wrong. When I still knew you.

Since she went away. He let himself go. With no one who cared about him, he ceased caring about him. She loved him. She just didn’t know.

Maybe he wanted what we all do. Love, warmth, security. A home. A love. To come through his front door, to see her, maybe looking tired, maybe looking happy, maybe with the curl of a smile as he comes through the door.

And now I was no longer a rival for her love, there was, of course, only one answer. She would come back, on bended knee, through broken glass, humbled by love, back to her true love.

Like Fuck she would, but until death us do part.

He sat down, turned on the television. A sigh pulsed through his body – the ring of a warming neon tube as it projected lines of colour information at a screen. A typical, mid week, soulless, brainless piece of trash starting 11.35pm on BBC1. Starring Pierce Brosnan as a Jewel thief, Patrick Stewart as an evil mastermind, Martin Sheen as a grizzled old cop breaking the rules to bring his man to justice. The usual shit. He sat there and he watched it. His eyes dull and deadened, focused on some point somewhere in the distance, seeing things that weren’t there.

He too had his thousand yard stare, the shellshocked gaze of a man who had seen too much. Seeing a room around him where she slept, her head in his lap, his hand stroking her hair, a place he used to know, a place he used to be.

And I could see nothing within him that betrayed anything else. Those years banged up, with the hope that somehow it would all work out keeping him going, and now knowing that somehow its not working out.

And I could see nothing within him that betrayed any other life. Anything that showed that anything moved him, touched, made him think, made him feel. Like a dog with it’s teeth locked around it’s victim, eyes focused determindedly on just one thing. Blind to anything and everything else.

That was his weakness. And his weakness was my strength. Like the bullied, I became strong because I had to carry the weakness of others.

I sat there. I watched him. His neck slipped back, his head tilted into his neck, his lids closed slowly, twitching with sleep, as he vanished from consciousness. His eyes sunk into his skull, the erratic spasm of dreams.

I wish I could sleep. More than anything I wish I could sleep. I wish I could just lie, my legs kicking in dreams, my mouth leaking saliva as I lay, oblivious to tis shitty non-life. I wish I could kill him as well. In time. And I had all the time in the world.

And we were alone. I could put my hands around his neck. I could choke him, if I could only forget for a second that I was dead. But I needed to choose my time, the right time. Life is all about timing. The time you live, the time you love, the time you die. And how much time there is.

I had the bastard and he didn’t even know it. He never would.

I had time, but not enough. Never enough. Even if I had lived to a grand old age, pissing my pants, senile, forgetting the names of my own fucking children, dying in the arms of my family, pining to be back with my Helen or my Brenda or my Lisa or my Whoever, my forgotten grandchildren playing at my feet, it still would never be enough. I’d always want more. Another decade, another year, another day, another five minutes. Give me five more minutes, five minutes of boredom, five minutes of pain, five minutes of staring at ceilings waiting for trains, and I would give it all away.

But I didn’t. I gave him all the time in the world. I walked through the rooms. The cold walls, the spartan, empty rooms. I rifled through papers. And it was easy. So much easier than it had been before, I could just lift things, if I didn’t think too much about it. I didn’t think about it, I just felt it, did it.

What am I doing here? What am I waiting for? Some sign? Some divine guidance? Would I even know if I was waiting for anything? Would I even know I was waiting?

Maybe a shaft of brilliant, blinding white light from the heavens would show the way. Maybe I would just know. Maybe without even thinking, everything in my life would just change on its axis in the blink of an eye. Maybe there are no answers.

But some things are certain.

I knew he knew where she lived. He knew what she did. He knew where she went. Her credit card details. When she left the house, where she went, who she saw, what she did. He knew too much.

My hands were shaking. I was alone in a room with my murderer. He slept like a baby. I couldn’t sleep at all, even if I wanted to.

I knew what I had to do – the one thing I couldn’t do – become the one person I didn’t, couldn’t be. To defeat a murderer, one must become a murderer.I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t just kill a man in cold blood as he slept.

Even if the bastard had killed me.

I wasn’t going to let my superhero power be that to kill. I wasn’t going to be running around with a cape as The Invisible Murderer. Yet.

His breathing rose and fell, shallow as a river stream. The undulating of unconscious waves. Fingers twitched with dreams. Even in the still waters of sleep, dreams ran deep. His leg kicked and his body rolled in time. Seconds, minutes, hours passed. I no longer knew the time.

But I knew, time was running out.