56 :

The air felt different. Thicker. Heavier. As if somehow the atmosphere itself had become more crowded, as if the molecules in the air had been squeezed closer together. As if something was happening.

I was no longer alone. I had waited hours and now the mystery was going to unravel. I was acred. But what were they going to do? Kill me? I had conquered death.

There was no sound of a key in a lock. No sound of hinges, unoiled, squealing as they moved. Nothing like that.

Just the presence of something in the air. Like a Geiger counter. Like electricity. Something that lay beyond sound, beyond smell, beyond touch, and sight and taste.

Something was here. Someone was here.

And it had it’s arm around my neck.

I grunted in shock. My body lifted up and back. My feet no longer touched the ground.

Fuck. Maybe I could yet die. It really, really hurt. I felt.

I tried to speak. Couldn’t. If I had a windpipe I would be choking, my legs kicking against air, my hands reaching up to move the arm around me. It was warm. Strong. Thick.

Fuckdammit. Fight. I had to. Been through too much fucking crap to go now. All of this would be for nothing now unless I did something. Anything.

I never thought I’d say this. It was a good thing I was dead. I couldn’t die.

I was going to play dead. See what happened. If you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. There was nothing else to do. No other options. I couldn’t think – couldn’t rationalise, examined the available options – each option slowly reducing in scope of choices, a shrinking circle, until there was only one route left.

The arm around my neck tightened.

How the fuck could something choke me unless –

How the fuck could something touch me unless –

The arm relaxed. Muscles untensed. A whisper in my ear.

“Who. The. Fuck. Are. You?”

Something spoke. Something male. Something ugly. Something urgent.

“Erm-“ I hyperventilated. Breath came in gasps, if I could breathe. Though right now, for a second, even the thought of dying had a certain appeal. To finally be out of this, to finally leave this shitty world behind.

A hand stroked my hair. It was warm. Soft. And hard.

“It’s OK. I won’t hurt you.” He said. The body jerked in the direction of a sleeping form. “Know him?”

“Y-Y-Yes.” I gulped. “He murdered me.”

The arm swiftly disappeared from around me. I gulped, gasped, haemorrhaged air like a drowning man, my heart racing.

“You’re not alone.”

And then I knew. I knew. I wasn’t the first. And maybe I wouldn’t be the last either. How long had he done this. How many people had fallen before him, because of him, in this world. A world where all other priorities rescinded. Where all others are expendable. Where survival is a religion, and everything and everyone else is something to be used and discarded in pursuit of survival.

A capitalist. Motherfucker’s a pure capitalist. Power is the only reality he recognises. Power is the only law. The only thing one can respect. To defeat I had to become more powerful, somehow.

Something walked past me. A man. And sat opposite me in the dawn light of the living room, on the tired, old, holed sofa made of the pale green of the Seventies.

A hard face. A face made of scars and long, hard nights. A face of cold, dead eyes. Old clothes – the large lapels, the old cut of jeans, a jacket cut from the cloth of history. The colours of a lost decade. Hair like a footballer.

“So who the fuck are you?” he asked.

And I told him.

And he told me.

“Why do you come here?” I asked him. This hard face. The face of a mystery. The face of a seventies small-time criminal. Struggling into middle and old age, nails bitten to the quick, a life of hard times, fingers yellowed with nicotine, hair combed and set with gels and waxes.

Just another no one who disappeared into the night one night. A regular Jack The Lad, a man about town, smoking, drinking, propping up a bar like Oliver Reed or Richard Burton or Richard Harris. Paul Thurston was his name. A lush, a vague drunk, an endless stream of easy lays and bad days. Of scraping and struggling. Of knocking on doors of broke housewives, taking cash hands of short loans and promises to pay it all next week after the Christmas overtime, sometimes taking it in kind, those were the days. The type of guy who nobody would miss, because nobody would even notice he was there. The kind of person that sits unloved at the end of the night, looking for an eleven o’clock princess, or whisking one away. The kind of person who wouldn’t be missed, because there’s no such thing as friends, just people you know, no such thing as lovers, only birds, and the type of person who didn’t have pets, so nobody would even know he didn’t come home for weeks or months. Even his mother wouldn’t miss him.

And one day, he disappeared. He found himself coshed over the head, knocked unconscious in the late seventies, in the time of three day weeks, power cuts, and seas of black refuse bags in Leicester Square. Left for dead, his loan shark readies taken from his back pocket, all rolled up, creased, dog eared fivers and tenners, his body thrown away, forgotten, somewhere that people would never look, overlooked, hiding in plain sight.

Every killer has to start somewhere.

Dumped in a traffic island in the centre of town, an overgrown, thorny island of weeds and trees that sat on the borderline of council responsibility where neither borough nor council knew who was meant to maintain it, so nobody did. They found his body in 1981, three years after he disappeared, and only after a Ford Cortina drunkenly ploughed into the traffic light, after one too many Hofmeisters on a Saturday Morning. The car was a write off. The driver asleep, paralysed, unbelted in the drivers seat. A decomposed lump of sagged bones and stale clothes where he’d been left. Two corpses for the price of one on in the dark of a Saturday morning.

The first murder is always the hardest. After that, death gets easier. Death is easy, comedy is hard. That’s a cliché. But it’s the truth. The first murder is always the hardest : the most likely one to discover

The first one is the one where all the mistakes are made, all the traces are left, the fingerprints, the DNA, the fibres and threads of identifiable cotton. Where the bones aren’t fully dissolved or ground up, where the trail of evidence is as glaring as it is possible. To the eyes of an expert witness. By now, maybe I was the fourth, the fifth, the twenty-fifth cadaver.

Nobody knew. All I knew is that I wasn’t alone.

Practice makes perfect, after all, the covering of tracks, the concealment, the drunken dismemberment of the first body, the application of quicklime with its high acid content, its ability to break bones and DNA down into molecules, the need for long journeys to foreign places to dispose of evidence, the purchase of generic clothing from high street stores, bland, mass produced fibres and a bland, ordinary life so as to prevent a narrow band of suspects, to prevent the eyes looking at you. The easiest way to commit a crime and get away with it is to make the criminal hide in plain sight, vanish in a crowd, not to attract any special attention, anything more or less than just being a completely average person in every way.

Wear mass produced clothes, like everyone else. Have no distinguishing marks. No tattoos. A common blood type. Even if our DNA is unique, have no DNA, have no options, no chance of being identified, fade away to nothing in the broadest daylight, like a piece of paper that disappears when placed thinly in the air, a short turn to it’s invisible side.

Dennis Nielsen, DHSS Claim Vetter, Council Employee, Mass Murderer of several homosexuals in the late eighties, was my Uncle’s dole officer. He’d never met a more average, boring man in my life. My uncle would never have thought that he strangled men he seduced in gay bars, drugged at home, and raped their corpses. People that can never leave always stay. You’re never alone with a body.

The guy sat opposite me was his first murder. And I was not the second.

Caught in a bubble. A place where it is forever the day that he died. September 1977. Punk year zero. The Golden Jubilee. The hair frozen in time. The brown leather shoes.

“I’ve been fucked”. He said. No longer was he what he thought he was, a pretender, a faker in robes. A hard bastard. His face fell, the mask, the pretence of all things dropped, the moment where you see what is on the end of every fork. The entrails. Corpses in our mouths.

This is the way it was. Power was the only thing one could respect. And the power to give, the power to take. That makes one God.

“All my life I thought I was God. All my life I thought I had control.”

Oh God. This has been a long time coming hadn’t it? And I couldn’t leave. Jesus, I was bored. Jesus, where are you? Those footprints were not where you carried me you fucker. They’re where I walked alone. Where I made the long walk from hell to this fucking boredom.

There was no God. How could there be a God, mute, deaf, dumb and blind that never explains, that never alleviates the suffering of this world, that never does one damn thing? How could that be a God?

I was faithless. And somewhere The Devil smiled and God handed over his bet. Job had failed his test.

“It’s fucking bullshit.” He said. “I don’t want to go to heaven. Or hell. I don’t want to be anything. I just want it to stop.” He sighed. “You’ve got all this fucking shit to come, kiddo.”

“I know.” I said.

“What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Think. You. Know?” It wasn’t a question. A statement. You don’t know shit kiddo. What the fuck do you know? It wasn’t aggressive. It was frustrated.

The Old have no respect for the young these days. You haven’t seen it. You haven’t been there.

So I shut the fuck up.

I listened to the man talk. I felt the hours sleep away. I heard the dull snoring and the sound of cars queued in the commuter traffic.

And he told me. He told me all the things he’d seen. With the exhausted, weary voice of age. And Christ, it was boring.

But I knew one thing. There would be more of them. More dark shapes. More angry spirits. Thirty years of hate : of brooding. Of stalking this guy. The Beast. Of unseen eyes watching. Waiting. Calculating. Of tearing apart marriages, of botching jobs, of leaving vital evidence, exposing things. Of raw wounds, poked with curiousity and stupidity, tearing the souls of those around it.

Some people call these things bad luck. A stream of events where everything falls out of place. Where the dark night seems without end. And the only light is that of the stars in the night. The millions of holes punched in the curtain of the evening. Where keys go missing. Where lovers leave. Where bad things happen, not because they should. But because they could.

Some people call these things bad luck. But it isn’t. The unseen hands of dark forces and black actors playing with life as if it were merely a game.

God fucked with us. He fucked with us and some of us tried to fuck him back. And for that crime we had the promise of damnation, the demand of suffering for not believing in an invisible superman from outer space.

And if I wasn’t careful, I had an eternity of this. I too would be some weird, museum piece ghost, trapped forever in a time that slowly, through the inexorable, unstoppable footprint of progress, was slowly fading out of view, doors slowly closing on my time. There was only so long before the lives around me moved on, slowly, event by event, they would get married, go away, die, somehow forget to stay. Everything would change. I would remain forever, a statue, an exhibit, a relic.

Would I be here in four hundred years, a casual scruffian from a forgotten time, forever captured on CCTV opening and closing doors or alphabeticising collections of audio-visual data tablets? Witnessing the impending Apocalypse, the Armageddon of the seven signs at the hand of a President who awaits eagerly The Rapture? The fall of all things, unable to act, to cease, to influence it, as everyone I’ve ever loved or hated falls to the actions of the religious, the devout, the fundamentalists who would rather see all of us extinct than living in harmony?

All of that of course was to come. But when? Next year? Next century? Would I be here when these things happen?

Time to get off this goddamn, flea-bitten radioactive bowl of a planet and evolve.

I had to get out of this. And maybe he knew how.

Next door he coughed. Next door his throat filled with phlegm and his voice rasped against the cough of a smoker. We both sprung to attention.

It always got him like that. Always, he jerked to attention, hopeful, fearful. And so did I.

“One day that bastard will die.” He mused. “And maybe I’ll be set free.”

Maybe we all would. Again, it wasn’t what he said, but what he didn’t say that mattered. If you love someone, set them free.