Wake Up Dead Man

2006-01-01T08:00:00.000Z

On this blog I will publish my novel. Sometimes.

In the meantime, this is my other blog.

2006-01-01T07:59:00.000Z

2006-01-01T07:58:00.000Z

"Imagine you’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got a job. A girlfriend. An ex-wife. Too many CD’s and some post-millenial angst. Life is perfect. Well, not perfect, but as much as you could hope for. Except for one imperfection : You’re Dead.This is a survivors guide for what happens when someone truly believes, to their final breath, that “Until Death Us Do Part”.

note :
For a brief explanation of the back story and biographical information pertaining to this work Click Here.

important :
This is a uncorrected version of the text. They may very well be minor formatting errors, the odd spelling mistake, and so on. When I have more time, corrections may be made. In the meantime, the text is presented with the author having made no express warranties (oral or written), to you regarding this text and that is compatable with your tastes, operating systems, beliefs, or and is presented "as is" without warranty of any kind. you accept the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the text within your judgement.

1 :

2006-01-01T07:56:00.000Z

"jesus, jesus help me, i’m alone in this world, and a fucked up world it is too."- David Evans

_____________________________________________________________

I am The Invisible Man.

From all corners of the city, people haemorrhage into the station. From the trains and the buses and the tubes and the streets, we act out of habit. We are creatures of routine. We go to the same places we do every day. We see the same people. We kiss the same faces goodbye in the morning rush. We do the same things. We stream in, show tickets on entrances and exits, and we travel to somewhere we don’t want to be so we can leave there and go somewhere else we don’t want to be.

Work is the curse of the thinking classes.

We are cells in a blood vessel. Each of us an individual particle, each with lives, loves, hopes - and some of us secret lovers. Each of whom have lips that kiss, hearts that beat, dreams that dare to breathe, people they hope to see again.

Being alive is being beautiful.

Incredible How I Can.

Camera Nine sees something that no one else has seen. On a greying screen in a control room, a bored man on the early shift notices something strange. He tried to stay awake, tries to stay focused. Work is tedium, but this is more of a punishment. He blearily yawns, takes another sip from a cup of coffee in a brown cardboard cup, and tightens the focus. The blurred edges of a man sharpen, but are still indistinct through neon tube.

In eleven minutes time, he will be dead.

He sees him, but he sees through him. Not someone who doesn’t exist, but someone who you do not see, except as a shape, an object, something to be avoided when you approach it. Not a person, not a face. Nothing.

Do you remember when you are walking down the street, and your on your way to meet your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, mistress, your date, and you’re in such a hurry, racing to get there, that you walk straight past them? That you see them, but you only see the feet, you only see them as a presence to be avoided.

That’s how he saw him. Through him.

See Right Through You.

There are training courses for these things. For a few hundred pounds per day, a seminar could be yours : where you are trained to see things that look strange and different, to detect the telltale signs of malcontents and disintegration from societry.

Trained to look for familiar faces, gestures, and stance. The body language of the mugger. The faces of known beggars, pickpockets, the homeless, the career criminals, people who were threats to others. You aren’t trained to look for people who could be a threat to themselves.

There’s training courses held in anonymous hotel conference rooms for several hundred pounds a day where people are taught how to identify potential problems through these screens. Unusual walking gaits. Erratic, inconsistent, jerky behaviour. Unkempt, untidy appearance. The body is a language to be learnt. Switch back to the station concourse. The camera watches the knees of women. The open toed sandals of summer commuters.

The camera zooms down a woman’s top. Even in black and white, it would be aesthetically pleasing. Contours of flesh, geography of aureole, visible in the braless commuter light. Further down the corridor, the rhythmic tapping of a supervisor walking nearer. Flick back to camera four at the station entrance. Past the Big issue seller, looking for known muggers, truants, cunts all of them. A nation of cunts. A nation of white-trainer wearing, tracksuited, backwards baseballcapped adorned idiots with a ring on every finger, selling stolen phones down the pub to their mates, asking if you’re looking for trouble, and if not, do you want some? Cunts them all. And somewhere on the mainframe, a photofit guide to the persona non-grata went ignored.

When you see this many people you end up not seeing any people. There’s a human overload. Too many people. You withdraw into a selective world. Where most people are simple kipple, flesh pollution, parasites on the face of the world.

You just saw nothing special. Nothing but an unusual gait. Just hundreds of people, a faceless mass, a lump of ever changing flesh in shoes, walking from station to station, from train to tube, from bus to office, travelling to work, as people always did this time of day. Drones for the queen.

In six hundred seconds, he will be dead.

Sure, there was the odd looking guy, but you got used to it. The world was full of odd looking people, doing odd things. Art students hijacking trains to provoke reactions from passengers. Weirdos handing out leaflets proclaiming that Christ is The King Of Kings. Beggars reciting the same tired lines as they try to eek an extra few pence of life. That strange woman who always carried the same 17 bags all day long on the Circle Line. We’re all strange, we’re all unique, we’re all beautiful. And we’re all utterly normal. There is nothing special about you, or me. Or unique. Or beautiful.

We are all alive. And the miracle of life is utterly tedious.

In the end you gave up trying to fathom people out. Instead, you ended up just analysing who could be a danger to others. In the end you zoom in and look down people’s blouses.

Most people walk in straight lines, but this guy, he was walking in broken lines, stopping, starting, as if you could see the thoughts race from synapse to synapse. Someone who clearly didn’t know quite what he was doing. Didn’t know where he was going. Someone who was making it up as we go along. Some kind of shuffling zombie gait.

He was trying to walk properly, but couldn’t quite do it.

Like the rest of us. We improvise through life, trying to fake our way through life, hoping no one ever uncovers the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing, faking our way through. We improvise and bullshit. And then we die.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Somewhere in the building, remote motors whirr and lenses sharpen, zoom in. Controlled by unseen hands. Curious eyes. Watching from darkened rooms somewhere in a building, that sees all. Like God. Who sees everything yet is nowhere. But not on him, on everywhere but him.

God can see you masterbate. God is everywhere. The point is not that he can. But that he is watching something else.

You can never escape yourself. No matter where you go – you will always be there. And no matter what you do, you can never leave. Unless you die.

In six minutes, he will be dead.

You’ll always be your own shadow.

The bored man in the control room taps a button. Camera Eight now. In the ceiling a camera the size of a golf ball rotates to track movement. He was one of them - just another face in the crowd. Wearing a uniform like everyone else - suit, tie, shirt, trousers, black shoes. How utterly normal.

The wounds on the inside do not heal and cannot be seen. The thorns that stick in the soul. The pain invisible.

…. And forever’s a mighty long time.

On a grey 12” square monitor, set deep in a bank of grey plastic buried inside the building, a monochrome figures stumbles. 240 colour lines, 365 black and white lines. Monochrome is cheaper. You don’t need colour to perform a successful ID. Everything’s done on the cheap here. The television monitors with their greys and browns are antique now. Retro, if you prefer. Facial recognition software is cheap now. Vegas has a lot to answer for.

This monochrome man. This clear cut, black and white figure. Nobody really notices. Just another cunt, like everyone else. In the crowd and the bustle of the commuter train they’re all too busy. Eyes elsewhere, avoiding the gaze of others, as if they doesn’t exist. Life is easier that way. In ignorance. Pretending there are things we don’t see. Begging children. Sleeping forms. Stumbling men. The fear and the unhappiness etched into our faces by years of existence.

On the screen he’s just another shape, one is seen, but unseen. And not long from now, he will be a ghost. An Unperson.

We are taught to live with our eyes wide shut. We choose not to see. As long as we have somewhere warm to sleep, something to eat, we can fool ourselves that somehow whatever is wrong in this world doesn’t apply. That everything is alright. We are all guilty of the good undone.

Let there be light.

Deep down in our hearts we know that the world is wrong, that there is something at the core of capitalism that fundamentally does not satisfy spiritually. Any rational person would be loathe to say capitalism has a heart, for it does not, so it has a core. But we pretend we can’t see. We pretend that there aren’t people sleeping on the streets and in shop doorways.

If you sympathise with one, you have to sympathise with all. You shut down your empathy in order to survive. You feel too much or you feel too little.

When everyone else has gone away, you’ll always be left behind.

We are born this way. Taught not to see. Taught to see only things that fit into our view of the world. A cloud of ignorance that hovers over our vision, viewing the world selectively. A presidential world view.

Like Christ, there are none so blind as will not see.

It’s the modern disease. A place where we see only what we want to see, where we believe only what we believe.

Like electricity. I exist without form.

This is the culture we live in that allows our Grandparents to die in their sleep, and not be discovered for two weeks, whilst night and day their TV buzzes like a fridge, and their goldfish starve to death. Whilst their post piles up under the door and their Scottish Terrier starts to eat itself from the inside, yapping to gather their deceased attention, or gently nibbling their flesh, first to try to wake them, then in some kind of desperate hunger, pulling skin away from meat and bone. As eyes shrink inside sockets, as flesh retracts, sags and loosens. Until the neighbours complain about the smell.

Your grandparents are an insects dinner.

Like God, I am everywhere. In everyone.

Three minutes to Ground Zero.

Muscles ache, and the heart, that is, - the soul - feels some vague thing lacking deep inside. The thing that makes us whole. The thing that gives a life a narrative, a direction, something more than just eating, breathing, working. We all need the thing that justifies the acts of being. Even something as seemingly insubstantial as sleep. Inside an anonymous Westminster building, a man counts down the minutes to 8am for the shift change and takes another sip of coffee. He rubs his eyes, wishing he could take them out and wash them, and yawns. It’s no life for a man his age : commuting into work at minimum wage with the drunks, watching the sun rise out of a corner of the office window, commuting out against the tide of employees, daysleeping.

Like God, I can see all.

Commuters bustle past. He barely feels them anymore. They hit him in their rush to get somewhere, anywhere else, and they have no time to think. He barely feels anything anymore. Sleep is the one hit you can never get and never give up. Deprived of it, we will do anything for it. Even kill. After a few hours withdrawal the body becomes agitated, vision blurs, logic fades. The body begins to collapse, like an addict deprived of the narcoleptic fix.

I have all the time in the world.

Without it, one can barely operate, let alone think. One lives as an automaton, a functioning, integrated zombie in some kind of isotope insomniac half-life. A muscle that is reflexive and unthinking. Everything is a low-definition pale imitation. The world becomes some kind of half-lived dream. Sounds are deafening yet muffled, experiences clear but vague. The world looks strange. Drunk on exhaustion. Short-tempered with endurance. This is the way the world is. A world of sleepophobics and consciousnessaholics.

Time enough for love.

Camera Three ignores his irregular slouch and gait. Then, briefly, in relief, he is like everyone else, just another face in the crowd. People crowd from trains, then disperse into bottlenecks at the entrances and exits. And then he is alone again, like we always are.

In a crowd this big, one ceases to be an individual. One becomes a cell, part of the mass, just another organism. Like blood round the body. A heart beat pushes the blood further up the vein for a second. And then the heart stops. Recovers. Takes another gasp. The blood retreats back. And the heart beats again.

Two minutes and counting.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

He counts the nights since he slept, but that takes the type of concentration that’s impossible. Focus, focus. Gimme Ritalin. Strattera. Caffeine. Something, anything. Whatever it is, I need it.

All he knows is that it’s been a long time since he slept properly. A long time since there was an unbroken night. After a while dark and light merge into one. Everything becomes some kind of washed-out grey. You can start hallucinating after just fifty hours without sleep.

It ceases to matter how long it was since you slept. All that matters is that you haven’t slept. And you need it. Like oxygen and water. When the things that keep you awake are the things that haunt you when you close your eyes. When you can no longer sleep because the bed you used to sleep in is empty without her. When you can still smell her on the unused pillows and the abandoned furniture. When everything is falling apart in your hands : when the more you try the less you succeed.

You can’t sleep if you don’t know if you’re going to wake up.

When there’s something on your mind, sometimes nothing else in the world exists.

Because she was perfect. And everything about him was wrong. And without her, everything was wrong.

Switch to Camera Seventeen at the top of the station stairs before the descent down into the Underground. The operator stifles a yawns. Not long now. Twelve minutes to go.

In training courses, all one is taught is to watch for signs. You’re not meant to raise an alarm, interfere, unless there is something unmistakably clearly requiring intervention. Crime mostly. The eyes of fear watch and wait. For our protection we are monitored by unseen eyes at all times.

I know what this feels like.

He fantasises that the voice will leave him alone. Fantasises of a pristine white duvet. He hasn’t shaved for days. Just can’t. A blade is a dangerous thing.

But I’ll never stop.

It’s not yet time. This can’t be happening. The only voice in that head is his. And if the only voice in his head isn’t his, whose is it?

It’s mine.

This peace, this seclusion, this privacy to think whatever he wants. It’s a refuge. You never know when it can be taken away. When someone can unwrap your every thought, your every hidden intimacy, and use it against you is when life becomes fear one might lose the little one has. Without it, your identity itself starts to unravel. One becomes unglued, one ceases to be oneself, but somehow becomes part of everything.

Privacy. A thing whose value you don’t even know you have until you don’t have it anymore. A gift that you couldn’t wait to be rid of, yet no matter how much you want it, you can never have back.

Because even if you have nothing to hide, you hate the thought of someone watching you. Someone analysing your every move for something they can use against you. I am not a commodity. I am not information to be manipulated and controlled. I am someone.

You’re wondering where the voice is coming from.

Forever, this beautiful symphony of silence will be. Like yesterday. Like tomorrow. Like the next thirty years of our lives.

T minus 90.

I’m inside your head. I will never leave.

Huddle and wait. A chill goes through his body. Hands shake. Not even the hands know why. Insert a travelcard into a mouth that spits it out. Descend amongst the rest of them on the escalator. The heat is enough to invite sleep. The beautiful release. Down on the platform. Trying to ignore the voice in his head. No man can fear what he cannot see or touch.

Yes you can. Yes you do.

The world is curved. We often we mistake what we want for what we need. But what we need is different. It isn’t an artificial need, an imposed need, like a fast car, or drugs. It’s more basic, more fundamental than that.

The things that keep you awake are the things that make you want to sleep.

Life is a ghost. Occupying the same physical space as others, but this psychological space, this world we live in, is unique, to us and us only. Even someone seeing the same things, living the same life, with seeing through our eyes would still feel a different world.

To forget.

Any shape of sweet relief, anything that can ease this, anything that can lift the darkness.

Stumble, fall, sweat. Everything feels different. It only looks the same as normal.

Forever is more than you can imagine, less than you can enjoy.

He can feel that he’s being watched.

Switch to Camera Fourteen on the far end of the platform.

A rumble vibrates the air. Air pushes down the tunnel and tickles the hair of women. Rats freeze for the briefest of moments, then scatter to small holes hidden in walls. A light throws itself against a wall inside the tunnel. A dull roar of machinery and petrol. A shape. A train edges nearer, a bullet down the barrel of a gun, slowing towards the end of the platform. As it exits the confines of the tunnel, the train is still at a lethal, killing velocity.

Peace is just a step away.

Statistically, tube drivers encounter a fatality every 11 years. Or 100 suicides a year. The knowledge that every 11 years you will be the deliverer of a lost soul, a killer, the man who stands just inches away from someone as their meat is compressed against the window of your cab, their limbs and torso fall beneath the wheels and are dragged under, as eight pints of blood explode underneath the steel but are held by inertia and momentum to the front of a cab for a second, just a second, propelled forward in defiance of gravity, before gravity pulls the meat down, and under. Skulls explode from the pressure. The flesh is squeezed in a surreal collage of blood, bodily fluids, and internal organs.

These are called one-unders. And 11am is a very dangerous time.

You can’t help looking as their face is pressed against the glass for the last second of their life, see in their eyes that maybe this was a mistake, that if they could go back in time maybe three or four seconds and change everything, they would.

That’s the face some people see when they close their eyes.

Today is gonna be the day I’m gonna bring it back to you

T minus 10.

There are only 9 non-suicide fatalities a year on the Underground. Of the 91 other fatalities, One-Unders are the worst. Given the low clearance of tube cars and the large amount of body mass, cleaning and removing a suicide is a time-consuming, messy detail : it takes an hour at an absolute minimum to return a station to working order. Coroners and policemen need to be alerted. Photographs taken. Evidence collated, identified, reports to be written and compiled from CCTV footage. All these things happen at an instant’s notice.

Sometimes, the smell of meat in a supermarket can bring back for a second – just a second that feels like a year – the memory of trying to pick up all the dissected, random splinters of flesh that used to be a person.

To avert suicides, and also to aid cleaning up, most tube stations have Suicide Pits - deep gulleys of two or three feet deep below the main lines. When the body starts to fall, these initially throw the body at high speed below the wheels, where, whilst badly injured after impact, the passenger stands a 200% increased chance of survival than if there were no pit. Some people look down, trying to assess their chances. 50% / 50%. Take a chance on me.

By now somehow you shoulda realised what ya gotta do

Heads are thrown up, land at commuters feet. The most important thing you see today may be the last few seconds of someones life gushing from their severed arteries at your feet, ruining your shoes.

Outdoor stations are the worst. The head can go anywhere. Two days later, the head may be found. Hanging on the end of a fox’s mouth, or by a cleaner walking on a corrugated iron roof. Soulless eyes staring out at nothing, hung by their hair from the mouth of a fox foraging for food. This is the final exit.

A roar. A flash of light. Looking forward there is barely enough time to catch the driver’s eye, especially at the speed he is travelling. Someone mouths a word at him, trying to apologise for this. A briefcase remains open and unlocked on the platform. Someone’s secrets are in there, the explanations, the final, scrawled apology. The emptied bank statements, impending repossession orders, divorce documents from strange and estranged people.

Most suicides don’t leave notes. Most suicides are mysteries. The great unsolved murders of our time.

I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now

Originally, in the 30’s, tube trains were painted red due to the large number of suicides. You didn’t have to wash the blood off.

Go on motherfucker. Jump.

T minus 1.

Someone walks forward, and a body jerks like a plastic doll thrown against a moving wall.

2 :

2006-01-01T07:55:00.000Z

The front door was locked, which was odd. Maybe she was out. Maybe she’d just gone to the supermarket to get some milk and some bread.

In my bleary state this morning I’d fumbled with the idea of making sandwiches, but had quickly given up when I realised that the bread had turned mouldy. I might call her when I get in and let her know that we need something for dinner. I really fancied a pizza. Anything that didn’t really require any effort on my part because I was tired and it had been a fucking shitty day.

The type of day we hate. Delayed trains. Cramped offices. Junk food. Phones that buzz like flies. Emails that replicate like a virus. The endless chatter of people. People crowded round entrances and exits, unthinking clutter in the detriris of life. Standing like an Auschwitz Jew on a bullet train just to get home. An ugly day.

Cursing without thinking, I fumbled with my keys, pulled out a small bundle and fiddled through them to find the right one, placing it in the lock and turning and pushing at the same time. The door moved, but only a millimetre before falling back on the deadbolt. She must have double-locked the door.

I didn’t need this. I’d had a hard day anyway and all I wanted to do was put my feet up, and tell my girl about my awful day at work. Maybe we could curl into each other and watch some bad television later. I could check my email, maybe drink a beer from the fridge, have an ice cream. I was seriously fucked off. The kind of slow-burning fury that only a genetically mutated cartoon character could match. I didn’t need any more bullshit.

More and more reports. More and more frantic phone calls. More snide comments, suspicious glances across the office, surreptitious phone calls and emails I wasn’t copied in on. I really didn’t have the tolerance for even one more ounce of bullshit. This world is a prison. And I want to escape.

Fumbling with the keys again, I removed one ear from my headphones, where a tinny sound was telling someone to stop crying your heart out. I placed the big key in the top lock, felt the satisfying clunk of metal on metal, then put the other key in the bottom lock, turned. The symphony of sychronicity. As parts moved together.

"Darling, I’m home." Jack Torrance said.

Before you entered the main living room there was a small entrance hall with a Perspex full-length window. I dropped my bag in there, removed the other earphone from my CD walkman, and pocketed my keys in my jacket pocket, careful to switch the walkman off. I looked up.

Something wasn’t right.

The room looked different. Wrong somehow. The walls had the wrong shadows. The light was wrong. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I don’t know quite what was wrong, but something was.

I hung up my jacket, started to unravel my tie, and entered the living room.

But it wasn’t the living room anymore.

There was a hole where the television used to be. A hole where my DVD’s used to be. A hole where my life used to be. The computer desk and her PC gone. As if she was never there. As if she had never lived. Gone.

Burgled from the inside.

There are some moments that one can point to, and know that from that moment on, life will never be the same. That history had changed direction I had just entered one of those moments. I didn’t feel very historic. We, that is she and I, were history. There was no other explanation I could reasonably reach. When you rule out what is impossible, what is possible must be true.

My life had just been derailed and gone sharp left. Fucking fuck. After everything else, this?

My body suddenly uncoiled. A weight left me, replaced instantly by a different, other weight. This one was not the weight of time, but the weight of crisis. A relationship is, after all, nothing but a different set of problems.

My life would be different forever now. My life cut in half. My future stolen. Our children, unborn. Only what could have been, not what would ever be. The fucking cow ripped me off and left me whilst I was out earning money to feed us. I felt amputated. I had been chained to a trap, and I had been set free. But still you miss the limb. Still you feel where it once was.

We weren’t happy anymore. We weren’t unhappy anymore. We just troughed through the days, and thought this was what life was.

I turned to look at the rest of the room. The sofa was still there, tired holes and stains. Not even worth stealing. And on my computer monitor there was a scrawled, yellow Post-It note. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. Life is too short.

I tossed the note that announced the death of my marriage into the bin unread. I tossed my tie over to somewhere in the room, undoing the buttons on my shirt as I did so.

I wanted to wash the smell of her off my skin. I wanted to change my face, my clothes, my life. As if she were never alive. As if she were a mistake I had never made. A lesson I had played truant from. The bigger the mistake, the more you learn.

My shoes hurt. They always did after a day at work. These new shoes, their pinching soles and walls. I kicked them off, not even looking where they landed, because by now, I really didn’t give a fuck at all.

I walked over to the phone and fumbled with my wallet, taking out the bank card so that I may ring the right number. It was on the back in small print next to the legal stuff about how your house is at risk if you do not keep up with mortgage repayments.

I waited. A dial tone. I was now in a queue. The first voice I heard when my wife left me was a recording. Not even a real human being. They appreciated my call and one of their operators would deal with me as soon as they became available, as my call was important to them. Glad I was important to someone.

The first voice I heard in my life was a digitised imitation. A lie.

I am Simon’s raging impotence.

In the meantime, Simply Red were singing about the Stars that fall from your eyes. How callous love can be when one is without. I took off my shirt, contorting against the phone, slipping arms out as I cradled a receiver against a stubbled neck, listening for the sound of real people, sighed. Shit shit shit. There were so many questions that would never be answered. So many things to do. So many mistakes to put right.

“Good morning/afternoon/evening. My name is (insert name here). May I have your name and account details please?” it said on a monitor-prompt someone was reading out to me somewhere in Wales. Or in Middlesborough. Or India.

I didn’t want anyone to ask me anything. I didn’t want to answer anything. I didn’t want to be making this call. But not knowing was worse than knowing.

Two security questions later and I was in. Stuff anyone would know. Mothers maiden name, birthdate. How could she help me? I wondered. Well, she couldn’t bring my wife back. But I didn’t want her, not after this. In five minutes I had gone from loving to loathing. How fickle love can be.

“I’d like to freeze the joint account please. My wife has left me and I would like to prevent the joint account being misused please.”

Of course I wouldn’t like to report that. But I had no choice. I looked at the clock. 5.40. Just after branch closing time. Fuck. Maybe I couldn’t get the account frozen. Maybe she could empty it with her cashcard sometime in the next seventeen hours and twenty minutes. Maybe she already had. Maybe my whole life is fucked. Ruined. Maybe I was the bank being robbed.

“I’m not sure that’s possible. Let me have a quick look into it please.”

There was still time to go out, walk to the nearest Atm, and rob my own bank to prevent someone else doing so. I am merely buried treasure, waiting to be plundered.

At the end of the phone there was a click and an “er” and she asked a supervisor about something. At times like this you can’t think in any term longer than the next thirty seconds. My forward planning had become a goldfish. Left. Right. Clunk. Window.

“I know it’s an unusual request but these are very unusual circumstances. Is it possible?” I almost said into the hold music. For some reason, I was getting pissed off. But nothing pleases a cubemonkey more than having an excuse to terminate the call or pass you on, if you’re being troublesome. And calls are monitored for our own safety and protection.

Because we need protecting from ourselves. Look at the state of the human race, driving headlong into the wall of extinction.

I still had keys. But so did she. I could go out and walk to the bank, withdraw all the money myself if I fucking had to. It was a race against time. There was just enough money to pay the rent and all my wages had just gone in. Maybe –

“Yes, I can do that, I’ll need to take you through some security checks.”

More security checks. More hoops to jump through. Watch me, I am a seal. Reward me with cold fish when I have done well. I would be safe. I hope.

The account was frozen.

“Can I have the balance please?” I asked the girl.

“Certainly. The current balance is £497.51 overdrawn.”

Fuck. I hadn’t paid the rent yet and I had one hundred and two pounds forty nine pence to do it with. It’s not enough.

The fucking cow. She must’ve taken the maximum daily allowance out of the account at some point between my tired steps to the train and my tired steps home.

No money. No rent money. I am fucked.

“Can you give me a verbal statement please?”

I looked around. No kettle. No toaster.

“Certainly. Direct debits from NG Power, HJ Gas, British Telecom, and the County Council have all been paid today. As well as a cash withdrawl of £300.”

I knew it. I fucking knew it. Sometimes, I hated being right. Sometimes I wish I was wrong. So very, inexhaustibly, dreadfully wrong. I wish I was wrong now. But I wasn’t. For once, I was right, and I didn’t want to be.

Three hundred pounds is the maximum daily cash withdrawal you could make on our account. She never fucked me until she left. Then she fucked me as hard as she could.

“Thank you.” I said. My heart was beating faster than a Boeing. In it’s place a black hole of fear. What the fuck had happened? How? How could someone fall to think that leaving someone like this was in any way acceptable? Desirable? In any way anything even near the right way to behave?

Sometimes I think that I can’t relate to people, and when I think that people act like she did, I think that not being able to relate to people is a good thing.

The silence was longer than death and shorter than a heartbeat, as I thought for something to say.

I’d missed her by hours. If only I’d been here, been different, been able to stop this, but the biggest if only was… if only she wasn’t such a fucking bitch.

I fumbled with my mobile. I debated ringing her. Trying to find out what was going on. But it was really fucking obvious. I wanted to know his name. The man who had helped load all my stolen things into a hired van.

I wanted to know who was fucking my wife. I wanted a name.

But more importantly than that I wanted to know what was going on with my life.

I wanted to know where my life was going now. What I was meant to do with my life, Whatever it was, I was going to do it. I had no choice. Life was a speeding jet plane, and I was tied by my wrist to the turbine engines.

She wouldn’t’ve answered the phone anyway. She would’ve turned it off. Or seen my name and cancelled the call. It figures, if she didn’t have the decency to be honest about leaving me, she wouldn’t, couldn’t be honest about anything else.

“Thank you.” I said again. I am a robot. In emotional narcolepsy, I shut down, go on autopilot. Just carry on as if nothing was wrong. A robot, performing tasks that must be performed, because I need to survive now.

“I’ll need to go into my branch office tomorrow and make an appointment regarding the change in circumstances. Can you inform me please what time your branches open please?”

Tomorrow was a Tuesday. Late opening for staff training I bet you.

“Hang on I’ll just check.”

This girl sounded nice. I bet someone looked at her and thought the things I used to think about my wife. Heard her voice and experienced the slightest of tremors in their heart at the thought of her walking towards them.

At some point in my life I would have to – if I was lucky – meet someone new, fall in love again, make love again. But I was still in love with the person who’d just fucked me over and ripped me off. Twenty minutes ago things were different. But I couldn’t see beyond surviving today. I just had to survive. My victory was just staying alive. Living through this.

“Branches open at 9.30 tomorrow, sir. Can I be of any more help?”

Helpful as always. Still, I bet that’s what she was paid for. I bet I was the type of call they hated receiving, and yet always did. They go on training courses to deal with people like me on days like today. I bet this is one of those nightmare calls, the ones they train you to take but you dread, the anguished, ripped off, the desperate.

“No thank you. Can you just confirm that the account has now been frozen and that can be no further withdrawals from the account please?”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t really feeling up to making a joke of anything, but normally I would at least try.

“Yes sir, I can confirm the account has been frozen and there can be no further withdrawals without your permission.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, the kind that exists when you know you’ve only been majorly wounded and not killed. I married a fucking thief.

Tomorrow I would have to go forward and plead an extension to an overdraft, a new direct debit to be set up, a new everything. Just so I could pay the fucking rent. I don’t know how I would do it, I just knew that I would have to.

“Can I help with anything else?” She asked. Fuck it. I had to look in the freezer as well. She wouldn’t have stolen all the food as well would she?

Anything’s possible.

“Yes, can I have your name please?”

“Er….” Maybe she was thrown by the request. Maybe I was trying to breach company policy. “My name’s Natasha.” She had told me earlier, I had forgotten, when she was reading off that on screen prompt.

“Thank you very much, Natasha, you’ve been very helpful.”

Before she could thank me and bid me goodbye I hung up. I really didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. I just wanted to get the fuck away from me, her, everyfuckingthing.

I sat on the sofa, wearing nothing but socks and my work trousers, ten minutes after my wife left me, scared for the future, ashamed of the past, and in the middle of the worst day of my life. And that is how my life changed.

3 :

2006-01-01T07:54:00.000Z

I am not what I own. I am not what I owe. I am not my books. My CD’s. My girlfriend. I am none of these things. But I try to pretend I am. I try to assemble my personality in parts. A record here. A book there. A haircut. These are the things that define me, because there is nothing within. Only that I am without.

I am none of these things. However, what I am, is a mystery to me. An artificial construct. I am an assemblege, a piecemeal of beliefs and tastes. A jigsaw puzzle of reality. I take what I think represents me, what may gain me acceptance and security, and these things become Me. Even though there is no me, no I, no actual personality, just merely a compilation of beliefs, knowledge, information, material that most reflects what I – whatever I am, if there is an I – am.

There are no original ideas. No original ideologies. Only a moral code defined by the information we receive. Everything is a sign. Everything means something. The records we buy. The books we read. The clothes we wear. Even if we don’t care about books, about music, about movies - this too means something.

It means that you don’t care. That there are other things, more important things that music, records, books, ideology. More important things than the real world. Some people don’t care about these things. Some people don’t care about politics. Some people just don’t care. As long as they’ve got the things they want : the girl, the boy, the car, the house, the pint and the packet of fags, some people just don’t care as long as they are comfortable.

Ignorance is bliss.

And so every day, the hour commute between the station and the office, the bus, the train, this moving cell, tightly packed to capacity with strangers, all serving our own eight hour a day sentence, our own job for life sentence, and we have no option but to participate.

And so, in this hour, we sit with eyes squeezed tight, trying to close out the world however we can. Copies of bland novels, sold en bulk at newsagents, She’s Gotta Have it, Girlfriend 44, The Girl With Jimmy Choo Shoes, all of them packed, printed, pulped attempts to escape reality, to run away from the outside world.

If I was a tree, I would be ashamed to die for a book like that. If I was a tree I’d want to die for a masterpiece : a book that changed the world, and not The Bible. A novel that opened people’s eyes : that changed the way people think : the way people act. That changed everything.

Moral judgements are easy to make about strangers. Sit opposite me, reading a copy of Finding Mr Right The Wrong Way or Former SAS General Excalibur Jones’ The Omega Project, and I make a judgement.

How many lives are wasted this way? How many hours a day, a week, a year,a lifetime? Moving from one place to another, like commuter cattle, their eyes inside an imaginary world, trying to escape, trying to pretend that this comfortable prison we are in does not even exist. Where the world is made of wizards and general and deep ops SAS nutters and gangsters call "HardFace" and "Nutter". You don’t want to think about the world. You don’t want to change the way things are. You just want a comfortable prison. You don’t want to think about big things.

And sometimes, it’s entirely right not to want to change the world. But most of time, escapism is not an escape. It’s the temporary haze of oblivion. It’s fiddling whilst Rome burns.

I am not the books I read. The clothes I wear. The music I listen to. I am some vague attempt at a personality by compiling all these things together and somehow hoping that there is a me at the end of it.

And yet without these things by which I define myself, I am nothing.

And this is all we are. Animals in shoes. You don’t see Insects worshipping a big stone insect with white flowing mandibles. If they had opposable claws the world would be very different. Humans would be battery farmed and stripped of fles by white coated animals. You could smell our shit as it collected at our feet on the killing floor. Somehow we try to rise above this : we try to pretend we are not made up of 98% Gorilla DNA. It’s that 2% that makes all the difference.

It only takes 2% Sarin, 2% Tabun, 2% Methylphosphonic Acid for us to leave this planet.

We are all just 2% away from being zoo fodder. 2% away from spending our lives behind glass as exhibits, hunted, skinned, eaten, and sold in the animal trade.

Should the 102% Human arrive, our days are numbered.

Twice as smart and half as dumb.

Some would say that our days already are. That in time everything becomes extinct. Even the universe itself, given enough billions of years, has its survival rate fall to zero. It extends and shrinks, and eventually the universe, having expanded as fast and as far as it can, contracts. Everything becomes sucked into itself.

We are in a time of boom. The human race is endlessly replicating, expanding, and racing towards Maximum Capacity. Critical Mass.

The time of bust is inevitable. It may be tomorrow, or a year from now, or a thousand years from now. In the end, in a few billion years, our lives, everything we say, everything we do, everywhere we go, will not even be history, but will have ceased to even be a memory. As if they never happened. The world will contract to the size of a football. And then it will expand again.

And we will never know that this will happen. The universe will shrink and dinosaurs, God, love, life, everything, the universe itself will be nothing. There will be no history, no memory, no things.

And what does it matter anyway then?

5 :

2006-01-01T07:53:00.001Z

I woke with a start. And imediately wished I hadn’t. My head felt as if I’d had the shit kicked out of me. A type of pain that was almost impossible to see it’s way through. It was dark. I didn’t know quite where I was. Or when. I was, but that was all.

I’d lost maybe an hour, maybe eight. Maybe a day. Maybe two days.

If it was morning or night, I couldn’t tell. Around me it was black and quiet. Quiet as if even the insects were dead. As if there were no birds. As if it were Auschwitz, where the silence was louder than anything else. Where there were no answers, only questions

I was woken by the cold. It was too cold to sleep even when I felt like shit. When I felt like meat warmed up, sealed into a plastic box, microwaved and yet my bones themselves felt frozen. I felt reanimated. A zombie.

What had happened? Jeez. My head hurt. Pounded, as if my brain itself was throbbing. Pulsating inside my head like a cartoon wound.

Had I had too much to drink again? Jeez. I thought I had got past that. I was too old for this shit. Too smart to get fooled by the gentle, slow slide into intoxication. Maybe I had missed the velvet path to being a typical drunk fuck. Maybe I had outsmarted it.

The human body is an amusement park of sense. Each nerve a kaleidoscope of feeling. And most of them negative. Headache. Eyes raw, as if I need to take them out of their sockets and washed. Joints swollen raw. Muscles ache with exhaustion. I don’t remember being out again. Normally I would have a dimly formed memory, even if the details are hazy, of where I have been, who I was with. Normally I remember an anonymous chain pub in the financial sector. A basement bar. The odd joke. A new face or not. Normally I remember my friends, what they were wearing, their work suits relaxed, the ties loosened, the cold satisfying chill of glass and liquid in my hands. The hustle and bustle. People who shout at the bar and men trying to impress each other with hollow boasts. Frightened children in the bodies of men, hoping for some security, for some woman who can protect them the way their mother used to. Pretending it didn’t matter, that there were a million women out there who would have them if only there was the chance, but no, they had chosen you, just you, and if you didn’t want them, didn’t choose him, then there was always someone else they could turn, always another love.

Normally I remember something. Even if it is only a fragment, a splinter, a snapshot of a second.

I remember fuck all. I’m drinking too much. These blackouts corrupt me.

But nothing. No memories of aimless conversation. No memories of Paul bringing some bored, pretty girls from his work to try and pair off with us. Nothing. No attempts at stagnant conversation with hopelessly unsuitable partners by which all you’re trying to do is connect and all you’ve got in common is a sense of loss, and geography. You don’t normally even share the same age range with them, and definitely not a gender. They might not even remember Blue Peter, Godzilla without Godzuki, Scooby Doo before Scrappy came along, Charles & Diana’s wedding - anything. All you’re doing is searching for common ground, or at least enough to be able to have a conversation and maybe convince them that your dog can bury its bone. Love is …. so rare and so common that maybe, even I might find some. Sometime. Someone. Special.

My wedding photographs sit unused, unloved, in a drawer somewhere in the suburbs. In a drawer I know not where, a suburb I cannot name, as someone I do not know even exists sidles up next to my wife and holds her in his arms. Thank fuck I never had kids. Thank fuck I got out when I did. Even waking up now seems better than coming to in her unfaithful arms. It’s a mystery to me how the human mind works.

All we share is loneliness. The central fact of human existence. I’m alone now. Focus. The world comes into focus now. Dim shapes form into clearly defined shapes. I’m lying on something. Grass and dry, cracked mud. How the hell did I get here?

Even when The Titanic went down, everyone died alone. There’s no one else there when your mind goes black and shuts down.

Slowly, using one shaking hand as an anchor, then the next, I tried to stand up and stumbled. It was dark, of a sort. At the corner of night stood a thin sliver of daylight that was blinking its way into the dawn. Thankfully my coat wasn’t wet, despite the condensation of the autumn night that had fallen into the night and coated the grass with dew and made it sparkle in the light. Looking up, I could see stars and clouds. It looked so beautiful. How could anything on this planet matter when we can see entire other galaxies with the naked eye?

It makes me feel small. So small that I am not even an insect, an amobae on the face of the universe. What change can I make?

Fuck. My head hurt. Hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. Ached with that dull, constant throb of tedious pain that indicates some serious, painful injury. Waking was a struggle. Movement even more so. My muscles ached like split, strained tendons. My head throbbed like a pulsing, swollen sore.

Someone fucking switch my head off.

I was in the deserted grassy lot at the rear of some industrial estate. Around me in the vague distance, red brick walls, chimney arches, and monotonous grey fencing I could dimly make out in dawn’s shadow. CCTV cameras and guard dogs lay silent as tombs. An elevated railway line with hollowed out arches stretched from one end of the horizon to another. The dull grind of metal on metal of commuter trains, or the goods trains of late nights and early mornings, shunting nuclear waste and unyielded plutonium to Northern towns where the sky glows like distant fire. Streetlights at corners provided dim light. They twinkled like small fireflies or moths in the distance, half a mile away, peeking over the top of a low wall. I looked right.

The shilouettes of the ghosts of cranes, fifty, one hundred feet high, silent as tombs stretched into the sky. Illuminated only by the lights of streetlamps and dawn bedrooms on the other side of the river. It was earlt. I knew this because it was still dark. And before 5.43am, when the first train to Victoria came past here.

This was of course on the assumption that I knew Where The Fuck I Was. That I didn’t.

Jesus. How did I get into this mess?

This is London, right? Then where the fuck was I?

And more importantly, what the fuck happened?

Everybody knows this is nowhere baby.

Standing up unsteadily, I felt in my pockets. There was nothing. No wallet. No cash. No phone. No keys. Nothing. Nothing made sense. I still had my watch. But that was it. How much did I drink last night?

Had I been mugged? I don’t remember that. The last thing I remember was coming out of the tube station and turning left, but that was after closing time, on the far end of the line, one of the last, deserted tubes, at one end of the train, where the only people were drunk, confused, asleep, tired, their eyes half-closed,where the soft rocking of the tunnels is a lullaby to sleep.

My watch said it was 4.13am. It’s precision engineering, from the Swatch factory of Switzerland, tolled like a bell of the dead. The only sound that echoed in my head.

What the Fuck?

Had I been abducted by aliens? I felt the back of my neck with aching, torn muscles. The dull, evil stretch of tendons, so that my hands moved slowly, my breath coming in odd, stolen gasps. I couldn’t feel the three raised marks below the hairline, those normal indentations that are the only marks left behind by the survivors of a visit from the Little Greys. So what had happened?

I didn’t feel tired anymore. Or hungry. Or thirsty. Or anything. Just aching, painful. And with a splitting headache. There must be something terribly wrong with me. As if every part of my body was somehow broken and wrong. But what? I didn’t recognize this place. Where the hell was it? Suburbs are full of these conurbations, these anonymous grey places where people work and try to fulfil the promise of capitalism in their little empires. And where the failure of capitalism leaves small vacant lots of wasteland at the edges of town. And where developments rise out of rubble, to be sold to people who can barely afford the mortgage in times of spiralling inflation and uncontrolled interest rates.

So this, this was nowhere. This was no place like home. An industrial estate outside a suburb, down a road, a series of anonymous grey buildings with numbers and bland corporate names on their doors in red plastic on white. Somewhere with a fax machine, but without a soul.

For hundreds of yards around me there were a multitude of these places. Vacant lots. Empty space. Empires for rent. New flats being built, cranes reaching to the skies. Derelict, rusted solid cranes of abandoned dockyards, and faded, tired cranes of newly constructed apartments that are beyond the reach of even the most affluent of employees.

Around us house prices are rising like the army of darkness, the infidels, yet here are miles and miles of empty space, the unoccupied rooms. Yet a house, a home, even a flat, are beyond the reach of even those who earn well beyond the national average. One day everyone will be homeless, and nobody will own anywhere. We’ll all be hiring our homes, and all we need is one letter, one notice, and we will be sleeping on the streets.

I’m such a happy camper sometimes.

Slowly, democracy is taking back everything it ever gave us, and pretending that it’s still ours. Democracy is the right to choose. But the choice that is exercised is never by us, only onto us. And the only democracy there is, is the will of the law and the corporations. People exist only to consume and spend money to feed
corporations.

The real programming on television is the adverts. The programmes you think you are watching : they’re just the bait to lure us in. We are the product being sold to the advertisers.

I’m too hungover to think like this. At least I think it’s a hangover.

When the impossible is eliminated, whatever is left, however unlikely, could be the truth.

In these lonely hours, these abandoned moments, left with nothing but our thoughts, our minds race through all the possibilities, and land in the strangest places.

There was a padding noise. A flash of colour somewhere, out of the corner of my mouth. I could detect more the movement than the maker. A fox skittered passed me without even a second glance foraging for food. A KFC bone was wedged into its mouth, grease dripping onto hungry teeth, returning to Fox Base Alpha. I shivered. Even a fox cannot escape the encroaching, inescapable corporatisation of everything. The apocalypse will be sponsored by Barclaycard. Famine brought to you courtesy of McDonalds. Pestilence courtesy of Schlemburger-SEMA. War courtesy of General Motors and EMI Weapons Division. Death courtesy of the Oil Companies and the President.

I could see a dusty dirt track to the left of me, complete with what appeared to be fresh tyre tracks. The air shivered. I need to get out of this shithole. I need to find the way out. I turned around.

Fuck me.

It was huge. I mean, enormous. The type of size that makes you realise that six foot is not tall. Sixty foot is not tall. This. This was tall.

Behind me, about one hundred yards behind me, stood a massive wall. It was about one hundred feet wide and about two hundred feet wide. At the sides the wall protruded forward slightly. The windows set into the wall were dusty and cracked. Many were smashed through. Derelict. Vacant. At ground level, only a handful of pillars stood, supporting the weight of this shell, this wall. Behind the wall was grass and dust. Small trees. Fencing.

I was a dwarf. An insect on the face of the world.

It wasn’t just a wall. But something empty. A building with it’s heart ripped out, and nothing in its place. At the far end, about 200 metres behind the wall, stood another wall.

I looked up. Two huge white cannons, pockmarked, dirty with age, rose forth from the wall, three hundred feet tall. They reached to the sky impassively. They had seen many things. The rise and fall of Germany. The fall of communism. Their very own enviseration at the hands of architect butchers and years of neglect.

Chimneys. And behind them, two more identical chimneys, set on the far side of the building, this enormous shell.

So this was what 188 Kritling Street, London, looked like up close. Like a great natural cliff face, neutral, enormous, imposing, blank. Sad, faded, and yet more than any of us could imagine. It didn’t care if you were there or not. It was just there.

Fuck me. How did I get here of all places?

I gasped involuntarily. Stared for a few seconds at this huge, impersonal thing, towering above me. This ghost building. Watching and waiting for my next, improbable move in a day of improbabilities. It scared the shit out of me.

Stepping back, I tried to comprehend the size of it. A grand madness. Being this close to something this big made me feel suddenly, very very small. And, as if the architects were daring God with the size of their audacity. As if we were insects crawling on the face of something huge.

It’s not good to dare God when one is merely mortal. Whatever is immortal will always outlive you.

I turned round. I looked for a way out. In the distance, the sun was breaking over the shilouette of the estates.

4 :

2006-01-01T07:53:00.000Z

I will never be king. I will never be President. I will never be James Bond. I will never be a millionaire.

Despite what we’re told. You can be anything. You can be anyone.

In a land where anybody can be a millionaire, everyone’s going to try. And almost everyone is going to fail. And as time goes on you realise that you can’t be anything. You’re lucky if you’re anyone. Let alone someone.

There are always those who serve and those who eat.

There were things I knew I wouldn’t see - the Eiffel Tower at daybreak, the public execution of Margaret Thatcher, the inside of a Bond Girl’s apartment, but this was something that was beyond my imagination - even beyond my comprehension - as a possibility.

Something that you don’t even rule out as a possibility. Something so far beyond the possible that it is not even imagined by most people. Unimagined by me.

And here we are. Somewhere beyond imagination.

One thing I never thought I’d get to see is my own funeral. To see a casket containing my corpse consigned to a fire. I am ash. I am fire. I am burnt wood and rotten fibre. I am smoke.

With that event, there could be no rebirth, no revelation, no thing. No resurrection, no chance of my body crawling forth from the ground alongside the millions of others, our resurrected eyes blinking softly in the morning light as civilisation ground to a halt around us. No four horsemen of the Apocalypse, their stars aligned, their prophecies fulfilled, the fire and brimstone promised by a God that doesn’t exist.

There might be for the reanimated grey skeletons of the dead. But not for the army of the cremated. Not for me. Not unless every cell of our ashen cadvers were sucked back out of the air, out of the bodies of the doomed living, back to their component parts, back to form skin, flesh, bone, soul.

And I know that this was too soon, that something went wrong, that somewhere, something happened, that God, if that invisible superman-alien exists, forgot me, and all he (or she) needed to do was forget for me for one second, because it only takes one second to die.

And he has bigger things to do, more important things in his life than my life. Though life, time, none of these things are linear. What happens happens. There is no great reason, no grand architecture, no master plan. Things happen, things change, and what is real for me now is no more real to you than the events of five hundred years past or hence, or events five hundred miles away.

The human psyche just isn’t designed to accept this information. I. Am. The. Dead. My body is no more. I’m just a bunch of atoms and thoughts swirling around the room, around this world.

We live our lives as if we are immortal, invincible ; sure we all know we’re going to grow old one day, maybe die, but never until we stand on the edge of mortality, with the racked, stolen breaths of the dying, do we ever consider that it really is going to happen, and now. And then we repent. We find God, or maybe he finds us. And we beg forgiveness. Trying to cling to the last few seconds, minutes, hours of life. And always wanting more.

Just one more breath of acrid, polluted air. Just one more meal of modified, reformed dead animals and chemicals.

The repentant are always those who can feel their bodies growing numb, their heartbeats fade, the last trickle of blood travel around their bodies and everything grow cold. As the last heartbeat pulses round those thin, old yellow arms, that last minute as the blood makes it’s final orbit around the flesh, you know. It’s time. And nothing can change that fact.

You always believe in God when you no longer believe in life. The last minute rush for tickets to the resurrection. I have sinned. Father, forgive me.

In those seconds, as the body dies, as the flesh grows cold, as the soul desperately clings to even one more second of a life, that’s when one becomes repentant. Or suffers the furious impotence at a life wasted. That when one finds out what one believes in.

I pledge alleigance to fuck all. I believe in coyotes. And time as an abstract. And as that day comes, as our stomachs expand, our hair recedes, our vision fades and our wrinkles grow, until then, we believe that we are invincible : we can do anything, go anywhere, fuck anyone, and it doesn’t matter, that nothing will change, that we will never age, that we will be immoral immortal forever, because we are alive.

And life itself, just being alive, that is a victory. And I has lost this battle. There was still a war to be won. And like all wars, one day it would either end, or everyone would be dead.

We believe that whatever we do won’t kill us. The we are invincible. Superfuckingmen that can drink, fuck, kill and that there is no consequence. We will never die. There is no future. Only now. Whatever it is, it will just make us stronger. That we choose when we die. That we make the decisions. That we have the choices. But we don’t. Our choices are controlled by prisons : our ways of thinking, our limited options, so that we, like rats in a maze, follow the path others want us to. We are rats in a treadmill. Animals in an experiment of limited choices, watched by unseen eyes.

Death is invisible. We can feel it’s presence. We feel it walk in the room when our backs are turned. We know it is there but we don’t – can’t - see it. We block out the thought, the reality, death becomes some kind of impossibility in the mind of someone living. The complete negation of the self seems impossible.There will always be some mark to indicate that there was a me, there was an us, that I was here, and we all leave our own frail attempts at immortality : creating a new life, writing a great book, even something as flimsy as a good song – all these things are our ways of leaving footprints in the sands of time.

All these things are our way of trying to scratch a little immortality onto this planet. The planet that will be caught up in a black hole, sucked away by life, as the universe shrinks, as the sun shrivels to a burnt rock, and we are reduced to something less than memories. As if we never were.

The body that I had shaved, the body I have controlled, the hair I had meticulously combed, was going to be burnt like a piece of fucking trash.

At what point do these things cease to matter? At what point does one cease to shave, to wash, to clean, because we know that one day it will cease to matter, that we are all finite, mortal, flawed. When you’ve rocked your last roll, when you’ve reached the end of the line. A week before? A day before? The hour before?

When do you know that you’ve rocked your last roll? When the human race is run?

There’s a black hole in our core, where the knowledge of the inevitable death sleeps. A cloud of ignorance descends. The knowledge that one day we will die and all the things we have done will be meaningless is incomprehensible. You, me, every person sat in every room in every street in every country - everyone. Gone.

Fuck it. I’m dead. That seems impossible.

I’m. Dead.

It never gets any easier to comprehend. You can say it. Repeat it until the words become meaningless, irrelevant, like the endless, infinite habitual I love you’s of the suburban marriage.

You just kind of move through it. You can’t accept it – you live through it. Well, you don’t - you can’t live through it. You just try to find a way through. You always thought there might be something more, that death is not, can not, be the end, and that somehow there will be more, that something is beyond death, beyond life, but whatever it is, no one knows.

That whatever comes after death is a bigger, better experience. Better special effects. Life : The Sequel.

When I try to sleep, I still dream of life. I still dream of love. I still dream of nights spent out dancing, or mornings driving tanks or spaceships, wrestling sharks, punching snakes, playing guitar, or saving the world, or flying like Superman. Typical boy dreams, even when I age, and my flesh grows wrinkled and my hair pales to the colour of snow.

We know what we could see if we opened our eyes. And we keep our eyes wide shut so we can pretend that the monster that lurks in the dark under our beds isn’t there. If it cannot be seen, it cannot give us fear. A wilful ignorance of the fact that we’re feasting on carcasses, living an economic lie, deluding ourselves of our importance on the planet.

These hands, no more. These lips that kissed, no more. These loins that brought forth life, no more. The teeth that smiled, the fingers that shivered - gone.

That’s why I didn’t want to be there.

Sometime you don’t know where you want to be : but you know where you don’t want to be. Here. Anywhere but here.

But I knew I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting not going. And I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting going. There really was no other option - whatever choice there is, whatever action I took, I would regret it. I wanted to be somewhere else. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else I could actually be. Wherever I would’ve been my mind would have been here.

I don’t want to be brave. I didn’t want to make these kind of decisions. I didn’t want to be a leader. I wanted to be a chickenshit conscienmtious objector hiding in the trenches and charged with cowardice. Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in. Sometimes knowing what you don’t want is as important as knowing what you want.

Sometimes there is no such thing as a choice. The options become so narrow and restricted that choice is not possible. Devil. Deep Blue Sea. No choice. As much of a choice as the one between Pepsi and Coke.

Fuck man, I was scared. Scared in my soul. The type of terror that one could not see. When one feels things that one cannot see, when one fears what one can only feel.

I was scared in the way that you are when you have the taste of fear on your lips. Your heart in your mouth, on your knees in the dark with a man standing above you and a gun in his hand. And you’re spitting blood through your teeth.

I was wondering about the bacteria on the cold steel. I was hoping he’d washed that gun recently.

Sometimes you lose all sense of perspective. Sometimes only the closest thing can be seen in your vision, even as something far bigger in the distance is obscured.

I walked through the plots of graves around the church as if I were a ghost. No one has a grave any more. These days our lives are consigned to footnotes. Small plaques and names in guestbooks. Small vases and Tupperware boxes holding dust, which is seven/tenths is just incinerated wood.

I had time to kill. I was in no hurry to do anything ever again. I felt cold under my coat, despite the spring sun. The cold wasn’t on my skin. The cold was within my very veins, as if I had been immersed in ice - the type of cold that can never truly be escaped. Deeper than flesh, permanent like the scar of memory. It permeates the skin, permeates the blood, into the very cells. Of my soul. Like a wound. The doctor can sew it up, but they’ll always be the tear.

My soul was weary. My soul was cold. Cold like winter.

My grandfather served in the Second World War. He was a gunner in one of the British Regiments stuck deep in the forgotten wars of the African Deserts. After his return, he would always sit by the fire, tired and cold. Wrapped shivering in a jumper at the height of summer. The heating blazed like an annex to the afterlife. The cup of boiling coffee steaming by the table. And always, always, he was cold.

When the war was over, they sent him home. A man trained to kill with nothing to kill is a man lost. In the absence of a purpose, a man seeks a purpose. A soldier defines himself by his war. There must always be a war, for without a war, a soldier is without meaning. There is nothing to fight but himself. Without a centre, a void. We define ourselves by our enemies. We define ourselves by what we are not, not by what we are.

Every culture needs enemies. Every culture needs to be opposed to something. War is good for business. After the Boche was vanquished, there were the Commies. After the Vietcong, the Argies. After the Arabs, the Muslims. And finally they will come to the invisible demons. Those inside. The gays, the fags, the jews. The war was eternal : there was always something to war against that no amount of Playstations could fill.

To declare that there was no enemy was to declare that our culture, our society, is fundamentally unable to satisfy. That the enemy is ourselves. That we are the demon. And that our unhappiness is ours. It is not caused by anyone or anything else.

Therefore, our sense of unhappiness always came from those outside, those who threaten our way of life. So we always have an enemy - and if there is no threat outside of us, then we find one inside. We find immigrants. We find children who swear. We find music and movies are to blame for society’s ills.

We define ourselves by our enemies. When we have no enemies we turn on ourselves.

Men trained and bred to kill - to act as Gods emissaries and deliver the curs to their creators. Their sole purpose, with God on our side, missing, still had to fight a war. His war was against the cold. But the cold was on the inside. It was beyond the flesh - it was a spiritual cold. The kind of cold that allows a man to override any consideration beyond that of duty and murder another man.

That kind of cold. Cold as a tombstone. Fold open your wings, Uncurl your flight, Cease the pain and suffering, Know that redemption comes in heaven, You are free, Others will miss you, Until we are reunited. Yeah, death, fuck you death. I survived. But is this survival? Because it sure as hell wasn’t about being alive.

All these people, all these lives. Each name with a face, a love, secrets and memories. Each one a person. Each one whose actions could change the world, and whose actions would vanish in time. All that’s left is what we leave behind. Our children. Our actions. The love we make must be more than the love we take.

One of these stones could be my great grandmother. A woman, whom I never met, will never know, but without whom I could never be. A woman born in love, who died in love, more in love with life itself than anything else.

Died 1896 aged 36. "Brought back into the arms of the Lord." It made it sound so graceful, so peaceful, being separated from your body in the most permanent fashion. A grey stone, weathered and with its indentations worn thin with years of climate, overgrown by neglected weeds, for a family united again. These are my neighbours now.

I glanced at my watch, the time in a slow sweep of a long arm. Each second is just a second, but some are longer than others. Time is meaningless, when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do. And all of eternity stretches before you like the longest sentence there is. Maybe death – true spiritual death – is the sweetest release. To transcend into something else, to evolve. To truly leave it all behind.

I was a freak of nature. A stunted evolutionary growth. A missing link.

Ahead in the distance, two hundred yards away, through a thin grey mist of rain was a hearse. Black and elongated, reflecting little in its obsidian sides. A brown casket above, with gilt edged handles. Around it my brother, my friends, and two pall bearers. Just doing a days job, sir. My brother buckling under the weight of my flesh. Poor bastard.

I wish I’d lost a little weight before I died. I remember carrying my father out on a casket. That shit is heavy. There’s a physical weight no one warns you about. And even deeper inside, another kind of weight. The spiritual one. That when your parents die, there is no innocence. You can’t run away home anymore after that. Home is the clothes you wear, the life you make. The life other people take away. You can’t go back to your mum and dad, because there is no mum and dad.

Across the wind and chatter of insects I could hear music. This funeral, this was for everyone else to sit around and feel sorry for themselves. This was for everyone else to say their farewells. This was not for me.

I bet she’d chosen some gawdawful song I never loved in my life to consign me to my premature grave. Sombre, religious stuff I never cared for in life, and even less after death. The tendency these days is for people to play modern hymns at their funerals. "Angels", "My Heart Will Go On", "Highway To Hell".

With shit like that no wonder I didn’t want to be awake in there when I had to listen to it. God bless my Mum, but this funeral wasn’t for me. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in Heaven.

I was supposed to be anywhere but here.

And there she was. Dressed in black, wearing those flat heeled shoes that she wore under long skirts, not because they looked good, but because they were the only comfortable shoes she could ever wear formally. Her heels were the wrong shape for the shoes they sold.

And there she was. With her eyes brown, dark as pools of blood glinting in the moonlight, hurt but trying not to show pain. Just get me through this, fo fucks sake. It was a duty. A horrible ugly duty. Not even trying to show a brave face. Just to show her face. Trying to lift one’s head up in the face of a cruel world. A world that is not cruel, but one that does not care, a world that will continue wether you are there or not.

Eyes dark as the night, deep as oceans, beautiful as the black polished stone of obelisks. Numb to this world that has fucked her over.

Thank God I had changed my will. Let my bitch wife inherit nothing.

If only we knew before, we’d be able to make our peace. But the things unsaid, the thoughts unsaid, the love ungiven in the haste of life, we cannot claim those things back. Not one extra chance, nor one extra second to whisper in a loved one’s ear. Not one moment to brush aside the trivia, the bullshit, the detritus that we call our lives, and say "I’m sorry" for all the pointless disagreements, the screamed declarations, that ultimately don’t matter when the Power Of Love comes to sweep it all away.

And there she was. Hidden behind herself, eyes pointing down to concrete. Sleepwalking through this. As if she were a zombie : as if she were merely someone who did things. Sleep. Eat. Drink. Walk. Work. I missed her. I just wanted to hold her in my arms and tell it was OK, that I wasn’t really gone, that I was just somewhere else, in another oom, a room she couldn’t go to, and it really wasn’t that bad.

The great unknown is somewhat frightening. But you cannot fear what you cannot change. There was nothing to fear anymore. I have seen the great unknown.

I wanted to do something to make it better. Anything, even if it wasn’t something that could make a difference. Something to make me feel as if I could change anything. Anything to make me feel less impotent. Anyfuckingthing at all. Please. Just give me a chance to heal this. To mend the hurt.

I prayed to a God who wasn’t there, as I had done when I was alive. I do so even less now I am dead than I did when I was alive. Then I didn’t know if there was a God or not. Now I know if there is a god, and if there is, he is a cunt.

And after this, when she gets home, slowly the books on the shelf, the text messages on her phone, the notes under her pillow, will be moved somewhere out of her daily orbit. I will become a unperson. A memory, history, a possible past. A son who never grew old. A father to a child she never had. A lover she never watched grow crinkle and fold in time. And slowly her sorrow will become normality, normality will become confidence, and someone will hold her in his arms and as his hands will stroke the skin of the woman I love, the thought will cross his mind : this, this could be love.

And all the time, at the back of her mind, the thought, dimly formed, that those hands should have belonged to someone else. My hands instead of his. My eyes she glances lovingly into instead of his. A future unlived. A life cut in half.

She will walk across a room as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if she was never broken, never beaten, never kidnapped. But it may only take a second, a glance in the eye, a familiar phrase, the smell of stale urine, and then all of a sudden, she is there – in an instant, the blink of an eye – back to the world she tired to forget. When she opened her eyes and saw her husband murdered, face down in a pool of blood in a dark room.

Eventually the snapshot of us taken at someone else’s engagement party will be moved from the mantelpiece and become an ornament in a cardboard box in a loft in a row of suburban semi-detached houses. To them all, I am already a memory. Someone who used to be here. An empty space in a family photograph.

They will never see me laugh, never see me irritated again. Never tell me not to mix my drinks, or suggest that I really don’t want even more junk food at closing time. Those things will never happen again.

I hear someone mutter that I died quickly, and now I am at peace.

Oh, I fucking wish. You only die once, and for each of us, unless we are stolen in the dark pit of sleep, it cannot be anything other than violent, anything other than protracted, as we cling to life for every last second, as we fight the numbness running through our fingers, racing over our bodies, hoping for even one more instant. I’m not in a better place, and I wish to fuck I was. I’m here. Stuck in limbo. Neither flesh nor spirit, but caught in an infinite waiting room. Looking for a door.

I didn’t - I couldn’t - go in to the church during the service. I couldn’t bear to hear some man I had never met relay anecdotes about me to a room full of people who are somewhat awkward, anxious, who don’t want to be there. Much like me. I pace the car park. I look through the window of the hearse. There is no reflection.

As if I was never there. As if I never was.

Not having a reflection scared the shit out of me the first time I ever noticed that particular fact.

I see the place where my body lay fifteen minutes ago. I see my brothers average car. The baby seat in the back. I hear the distant sound of a crying child, hushed by my brother. As I am consigned to the dark. I hear my brother shushing someone in his arms. Someone has lost an Uncle.

Fuck. I feel so useless. Why did I come here? I’ll only end up regretting it. I regret it now. If I hadn’t gone I could pretend that it didn’t happen.

If I could cry I would. But without a body there can be no tears.

My death was old news to me. It didn’t stop hurting. The sting of an old wound. But it had been months. A week before they found my body, and months until it had been released. And this, this was just the beginning and the end.

The end of my life. The beginning of a new one.

6 :

2006-01-01T07:52:00.001Z

Then one day, without warning, my life became a song by The Clash. I wasn’t Joe Strummer. I wasn’t even Mick Jones. I was Lost In The Supermarket.

The most terrifying place of all to be lost. I, alone like a child, surrounded by strangers, marooned in a sea of people who looked as if they knew what they were doing, where they were, who they were with. I was a big boy now, everything looked too small, and nobody would help a grown man. It wasn’t as if I could walk up to one of the checkout girls and hold her hand, tell her I was lost, that I had lost her, that I needed her back. Nobody would listen to a thirty three year old man.

I was lost in the aisle. I knew what this place was, but not where I was, let alone how I get out of there. The one thing I wanted was the one thing they wouldn’t sell.

I want you back. Another song.

Admittedly, I didn’t actually want her. I wanted what we had, what I lost. No. I wanted what was taken away. I wanted love. I wanted the knowledge that somewhere, someone who wasn’t my mother loved me, and that that someone somewhere didn’t just love me for my mind. I wanted to be safe ; I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be standing alone at 31, in the eye of the storm of people, lost in the supermarket.

I stood there, alone in a crowd. A walking cliché. Go on now, I thought, go, walk out of the door, just turn around now.

I could do this. I could live alone. I could be brave. But this wasn’t being brave, this was survival. No less. No more. Around me, children played, babies ran, mothers choose between brands of corn puffs, and fathers sighed and their minds dwelled on football. Trollies crashed, phone buzzed. Old ladies – The Octogenarian Army – sleepwalked through their retirement, and I, my Lord, may I say nothing?

I know this place. I’d been here before. But I couldn’t find what I needed, let alone what I wanted : I knew I needed to do the daily things I had to do, I needed the mundanity of life, the comfort, the order of boredom.

Bread. Milk. Bacon. Where was the Bacon? Dammit. I used to know this. I’ve been here before. I used to know who she was, I used to know how to make love. I only needed the simple things, but even those seemed a lifetime away. Break. Milk. Bacon. My impossible dream.

And then someone came when I wasn’t looking and changed everything. Everything moved and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

I no longer knew where I was. What I wanted, I could not have. And I didn’t know the way out. Stuck between Haberdashery and Heartbreak, this was my limbo, the loneliest layer of Cupid’s Inferno.

I was lost in the supermarket. Neither going backwards or forwards, I wanted a love of my own. I didn’t know where I was I was, or where I should go. From despair to where. There were no answers, just more and more questions, and I needed to know. I was lost, and I wanted to be found.

7 :

2006-01-01T07:51:00.000Z

7:

You’re just a girl. And I am just a boy. Just like everyone else. Just like me. You’re, say, somewhere between five foot and six foot tall, and so wide, and like me, like everyone else, you’re an individual. An selection of personality traits taken from supermarket shelves and factory assembly lines. Maybe you’ve got a tattoo – a flower, or a animal on your ankle, or a star on your belly. An individual, like everyone else. And we all stand, like the rest of us, in our hundreds, our thousands, the three and a half million of us that commute into the Big City every working day, streaming into the heart of the country in cars, carriages, trains and tubes, we all stand, yawning in the morning, waiting to go, to find somewhere to sit for fourteen hundred pounds a year, and not even knowing if you’re going to have somewhere to sit.

And sometimes, if I am brave, if I think I can somehow pass for something other than a jaded insomniac, I try to sit near you. I try to catch your eye. Find out what book you are reading. How it might influence you. What you might do about it. What that says about you. Hoping you might notice me as more than just a shape that you have to avoid when the train gets into the city. Hoping that this Commuter Bullet, that shoots us to and from our places of work, might just be the place that our first moments of love blossom.

And there you are again, with that coat, with those shoes, those dull, tired eyes, that squeeze shut, trying to block out the world, and so I realise that there is probably some special someone somewhere , who sees your face each morning, each evening, each night, who kisses you hurriedly whilst he too races for the morning train, each rushed morning kiss and each sleepless kiss of dreams, and he may not even know how lucky he is, how lucky we all are, to live in this world of comfort, privilege and Playstations.

I knew this would happen, someday, one day. I just didn’t know when. When we would part, as all of us eventually do, be it death or work, without ceremony or tears, when you would move to a path different from I. And you slip away, out of view, no longer headed to the same place as I, no grand farewell, we both disappear. And I know that today, like yesterday, like tomorrow, will not be our first day as lovers.

8 :

2006-01-01T07:49:00.000Z

This is how I fell in love again. After too many lonely, directionless nights, not really knowing where I was going, or what I was doing, just blindly improvising my way through life, I started to think that maybe I could love again,

I would love to say our eyes met across a crowded room, but they didn’t. In fact, I don’t even remember the first moment I became dimly aware of her existence. In a crowded jostling pub, at about 6 on a Friday evening, I suppose my life took the first steps to changing.

Before that I was living in a dull greyness I used to call freedom.

I could get up whenever I wanted. See anyone I liked. Go anywhere I wanted. Fuck anyone I wanted. If they wanted me. I was king of a small world.

But that type of freedom was a prison. The one thing I wanted to do more than anything I couldn’t do. The one person I wanted more than anything I couldn’t have. The one love I used to cherish had gone away.

It’s the same old story. Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Girl likes Boy. Girl goes home with Boy. Girl and Boy decide to live together. Girl moves out one day whilst Boy is at work and pretends Boy didn’t exist, was never even alive, was never a part of her life. Boy find it’s difficult to trust human beings again. Yeah, the usual.

The usual story of suburban heartbreak and emotional abuse. Everyone’s got one.

That’s how I became a divorcee.

Divorce isn’t something you plan. It isn’t something that happens willingly. You don’t get divorced - divorce is something that is forced upon you. Like violence. And divorce, the twist of separation, that’s the kind of violence no one can see. That leaves no bruises. Only scars on the inside. The worst kind of violence.

Divorce is inflicted upon you.

Who could love a thirty something divorcee? A man who made the ultimate commitment, yet been spat out the other end? A man who pledged the rest of life to someone who changed her mind?

Could you love someone else’s rejects?

I don’t know who could love a man like that. A man like me.

Of course, she has her side of the story, and for her, it makes perfect sense. But not to anyone else. Whatever her mother tongue is, it doesn’t make sense. I’m so glad she left me though, even if sometimes I don’t necessarily sound it.

And so I drifted on the current of life, moving from situation to situation, tide to tide, as if I were a free agent. A loose cannon. A vagrant looking for a direction.

Free I was, but freedom includes choice. I had no choice about the situation I was in. I wanted us to be a continent, a united state, but I was an island. I’d had enough of these things. Too much freedom. Too much time.

There were still papers to sign. Arrangements to be made. That type of thing. A divorce is having to be polite through gritted teeth to someone you do not wantr to have any contact with ever again.

There was so much I missed, as if it had been rent from me, as if it was just a part of me that had been amputated. I missed her hands. I missed the wobble of her cellulite. I missed the smell of freshly washed hair, of talking in bed, of arguments over the distribution of the duvets, of accidental nudges in the kitchen whilst cooking, of holding hands in public places. I missed the casual security of knowing that somewhere out there was someone who cared. Someone who would leap unthinkingly in front of a bullet for me. And knowing that I’d do the same.

I didn’t miss who she was. I missed being in love.

My senses had become dulled by a lack of stimulation, by an overdose of solitude and poverty. Things had turned grey, cold. And where I live was no longer home. It was a house with bad memories and bad debts. I was the Dead Man. My heart, so full of love and trust, felt aborted. Cut short.

I knew about the glory of love. About the new colours and different shapes it gives life. But it was bullshit. Love was, is a weapon. The power of trust means the power to abuse trust. And I felt fucked by love.

So I wasn’t exactly looking for it, but I knew it was out there, somewhere. If only had her phone number. If only I had the details. The email address. The inside leg measurement. The bra size and postcode. If only I had some way I could let words fall out of my mouth that could convince her, whomever she is, to collapse completely in my arms and admit that I was the way, the truth, and the light. And there was no way to happiness except through me.

Instead I ended up crucified on love. With the nails of bankruptcy, loneliness, poverty, and hurt hammered through me. Self-pity is my drug of choice on lonely days.

But I believe. I believe in the power of love to change. To transform darkness into sunshine. To transform night into day. To make sad into unsad. To make me love again.

It was then that I met her. Only the brave love in world so cruel.

I could only hope that whomever she was, wherever she was, she could show me a world I’d never seen before. The glory of domestic shopping. The beauty of sofas. The bliss of joint accounts and of Sunday mornings choosing fridges, washing machines, third rate remote control packages and commuting. The joy of meeting her friends, her relatives, her nieces and nephews. All that stuff I craved.

Craved like an addict who’d overdosed, been brought from the dead in the back of a speeding ambulance with a heroin shot. Knowing that I couldn’t take anymore. Knew I was dying. Killing myself with love, yet I couldn’t help it. I needed one more kiss. One more affair. Another lover.

This was my world, but not of my making. I craved something else.

But I daren’t appear desperate. Women can smell desperation at a thousand paces. The sense that a man is looking for someone translates as a man will accept anyone. And a woman is always someone. She is never just anyone. And a man who will have anyone will end up with no-one. That’s why we say we’re looking for someone special.

And so, in a loveless state of grey freedom, aware yet wary, scared yet hopeful, I met her. I don’t even remember meeting her. I don’t remember being bowled over by her. I don’t remember heavenly choirs of angels, massed chords of Hendrix, and a heaven-sent shaft of light beaming down. I remember Paul saying to me "and this is Helen" at the end of a sentence I was half listening to. I glanced over, caught her eye, and rolled my eyes to the heavens in the unspoken gesture of greeting.

Love is so prosaic. It starts in the most mundane of places.

Paul was just some guy I worked with. Helen was just some girl he knew who knew some of his friends, people, friends of friends who used to work at the same place Paul used to work. Paul went onto work somewhere else, as did his friend Paul. And Paul worked with Helen. I liked her hair.

Everyone knew Paul was a tit. I’m not sure exactly what characteristics exactly make someone a tit, but I know for a fact Paul was one. The smell of desperation reeked off him. Years and years of renting in Central London, years and years of failed relationships and so-so jobs, years and years of waiting to be plucked from obscurity into the fame he so rightly deserved, years and years of masturbating like a bastard and failed chat-up lines had given him a scent no aftershave could remove. He drifted like rubbish in the sea, too strong to sink, too weak to swim.

This man needed marrying. And the first man, woman, rock or fish that would say Yes would get the accolade of Mrs Paul. Helen knew it. I knew it. The world and his dog knew it. You knew it before you even knew of him. Because he wasn’t the only one. The world was crammed full of millions of men like this. Millions of us with hopes, dreams, aspirations, and no chance of meeting the woman who would spark our souls on fire. The scent of despair ran into his very soul.

This is why, when Paul was talking crap about something or other I’d already tuned him out of my mental radar and was concentrating on something else which, whilst highly boring, was infinitely more exciting than whatever Paul was saying. Honey, he could bore for England. These people aren’t my friends. I just happen to know him. In the same way as I know my dad, but he isn’t exactly someone I’ve got much in common with.

And so, when Helen was introduced as ‘yet another pretty filly in my harem’ (except Paul pronounced it Hah-ream, I think he thought he was posh or something), she did the same as I, inwardly she shuddered, outwardly she smiled, and we caught each other’s eye. I rolled my eyes, and we both knew what it meant.

Take me away from this horrible place full of beer, fags, and desperate men called Paul.

I now have telepathic powers. That’s my secret X-Men power I wanted when I was younger. Telepathy. Then nobody could betray me. I could see their thoughts form in their mind. And I’d never lean forward to kiss a woman who’d silently be thinking please don’t try and kiss me.

And with that, I just fell in love. I tried not to, but slowly I did.

I didn’t want to be hurt again. Love hurts. Love hurts, because you’re exposed.

The kind of love that comes from slow evenings. The kind of love that comes from stolen glances across crowded pub tables when your mutual friends surround you and all you really feel like doing is getting to know someone a little bit better without the babbling of fools and drunks crowding you. When it gets too much, we all retreat into our shells, detune from the static, find the internal monologue. When someone else is talking very loudly about something completely meaningless you cease to hear them. Whatever they’re saying just ceases to exists, gets detuned, disappears.

We were both lost in thought. For a second. She smiled. And we both knew. A silent click was heard. I wanted to get to talk to her a bit. And so when Paul wandered off to visit the gents after regaling her for a few minutes about his new Hire-Purchase Car and his Mobile ring tone, I slowly, nervously slid across and sat next to her. I don’t know what I said next. Nervous. My hands were shaking more than Michael J Fox on a rollercoaster. But whatever it was, she smiled, she still spoke to me, and sometimes the rest of the world just disappeared, went dark and quiet, as if we were alone under candlelight.

Unlike the rest, I didn’t have to try and talk to her. She just seemed to know about what I was saying. Conversation fell naturally. Everything lead neatly to the next thing. Every nugget of information was quietly stored in my mind for future retrieval. Age, gender, likes, dislikes, music, football, where she worked, what she did. All thrown into that confused filing mechanism called my brain and kept for future use. In case I ever needed it. And Paul? He just started talking about cars with a bloke from my office called Steve. Boring for England again.

Heaven take me away from this babbling circus of fools.

9 :

2006-01-01T07:48:00.000Z

evening
darkness and music girl
check my lips in the mirror
I want to look so good for you
music bar and lager
you look so good
and I hope you think the same of me too
its dark
I always look better in the dark
I’m not really an evenings person
time is a prison
then freedom. heaven.
I want this so much
my lip to yours
I can read your thoughts
they’re not like mine
I’m just a student
not an angel girl
you must remember I’m new to this love stuff
like a small bird
circling the coast
I’m unsure
do you know what I mean
your self self self. and nothing else
in blue Adidas and your hair
I’ve grown to like you
can I be yours girl?

10 :

2006-01-01T07:47:00.000Z

I had a life before her. I had dreams, hopes, ambitions. And I have a life of a sort after her. I’ve never understood people who kill themselves when someone leaves. It’s just a heartache. An event. Whatever happened, you can get back to where you were first. It can’t be the same. You can sow it up but you still see the tear. You can’t get the time back. You can’t get those long hours of silence, contentment in the same dreams, those short whispered nothings in bed, the secret names we have.

Without her I had to survive. To not survive would be to let her win. She could not win.

Now that she’s gone, life has taken a different shape. I used to live in a film with a happy ending. Where the guy got the girl, killed the baddies, and saved the entire planet. Where good triumphs over evil. Where those with black souls were cast away, banished into a pit of fire by those pure of heart and divine of soul.

Now I’m the fallen preacher, whose wife God cruelly took away. Now I’m the old man without faith. The man who screams to the heavens "KAHN!!!" at the randomness of the universe, at the cruelty of people. This is my middle act, my moment of doubt in the test of faith, where the stasis at the beginning has gone, the redemption has yet to arrive, the Carbonite moment at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

We all have our secret names. She called me Han Solo. And she was my Princess Leia. Starcrossed lovers who met in the most unusual circumstances. I was the handsome bandit, a man of good heart who fell at the hurdle of a bad world, trying to job my way across the galaxy, who met this princess in the most unusual circumstances, with her strange hair and her regal gait, the woman who was so far out of my league she was a completely different game.

What could she want with a scruffy looking Nerfherder like me?

So whenever anyone says the words "Han Solo" now I’m transported, warped back to a dead time. A galaxy far far away and a long long time ago. A land where the power of love can conquer all, cross galaxies, defeat empires. And when she told me she loved me - I just told her "I know".

At least I wasn’t strapped in, surrounded by Ugnauts, and with a wildly varying set of black waistcoats that disappear mid-conversation then reappear, about to be tested in the Carbon freezing process. I’m worth much more alive.

But I can’t do that now. I can’t even tell anyone that "I know" when they say they love me. Not only does not anyone say they love me anymore, I don’t even know that I know that anyone does love me. Apart from my mother, whose the only woman in my life.

Mention of Han turns me around. I can’t watch my favourite trilogy anymore. And Paul is my Chewbacca, scruffy, hairy, uncommunicative, and he owes me. Lots. So he makes it his mission to find me stray princesses who I might get on with, who also need rescuing from a dark, evil fate. Spinsterdom.

What a strange word. Spinsterdom. Being a bachelor sounds glamorous. It sounds as if you are somehow jetting over the Pyrenees in your own 4 seater Locklear as I type. Finding, Bedding, and Killing young beautiful women with a licence to thrill. (Though not always in that order). But a Spinster? A spinster is the abandoned widow. The sad, lonely black clad Scottish Widow, endlessly walking the long lonely mile across Devil’s Causeway.

Of course, after the end credits, Han and Leia lived happily ever after. My impossible princess inherited me a kingdom and a title, we had children, and grew old together.

Life isn’t like the movies. One day Han Solo came home to find Princess Leia had left whilst he was out saving the world from the remnants of the Dark Empire. I had no princess.

All those things are gone. The secret names. The private jokes. The final moments before sleep where logic goes fuzzy and quiet, where conversations take a surreal turn, where a nudge in the ribs for some imaginary crime committed in a dream (what? I was sleeping with Kylie? In your dreams? Why not mine?) spreads out for weeks into a silent grudge, where arguments over whose going to pay for the shopping, all gone.

Those long weeks where sex was used as a weapon. Where the simple things couples take for granted, the gentle caresses, the coldness and remoteness of sleeping in a bed with a lover whose becoming minute by minute a stranger to you, slipping out of your orbit, over the event horizon, into history. All gone.

As if I had never existed. As if I had never even been alive.

11 :

2006-01-01T07:46:00.000Z

I was not taking being separated well, to be honest. Takeaway pizzas I couldn’t afford and alcohol was my staple diet. That’s not the kind of life I wanted to live. I had too much time, spent too long immersed in the Internet, not enough time trying to meet people I hadn’t already met. Though, one admits, I did want to. I was just very scared. And money was tight. Life was starting to slow to a lonely crawl.

There’s an emptiness at the heart of life. A human being needs stimulation, movement, action. A shark that ceases movement will drown because it is not moving. There’s no movement through its gills – it quite literally drowns through inertia.

A human being is like the shark. I am. I need something to prevent my mind from wandering. If my mind wanders –

I start to contemplate the emptiness of leisure time. I start to realise the void at the heart of my life. I start to crave somhething to fill the void.

There’s no answers. No big solution to the puzzle. Nothing but the eternal questions. Why? How long? Who? When? And she would never give me the answers I wanted.

Just simple questions. Does he have a name?

The hands that crawled over skin I loved. Who did they belong to? Would I like him, if I met him? Would I approve. Or would I think that she could do better? What did he have that I didn’t, except her?

That’s why we go out. We escape the cold facts. We escape what’s inside. We break free from the prison. A prison only needs four walls and the mind is the smallest prison of all.

So I broke free. I tried to escape. Inside or out, we create an alternate universe.

I went out. I wanted to meet people. I wanted to forget that life was largely boredom, fear, and poverty. There is a better world out there – I knew there was. Finding it was the problem.

In the panties of drunken fumbles. At the bottom of a glass. At a midnight train station shivering in the cold waiting for the slow train to dawn. The day after, I woke with the cruelty of an early morning.

I had slept the sleep of a drunk. Not the flat, REM vegetative state where the body recovers and is refreshed. But the perpetual state of kicking that intoxication and dehydration have. Like a cuckoo clock, I announced each hour with a startled grunt as I woke during the night. My heart beating like a fucked clock, my dreams broken like an old, stolen car.

I was fucked. I was alive yes, but not living. This was some kind of weird, fucked up, middleground of non-death.

It wasn’t sleep, but some vague imitation of it. I woke up tired. I couldn’t remember my dreams. All I want to do is close my eyes. There’s a small line between Being Drunk and Being A Drunk. It’s only a letter, but a gulf wider than an ocean. Being drunk is so glamorous. So much more than waking up like this.

I knew I was getting old when I no longer felt the highs, only the lows.

I stumbled in my shorts I slept in to the living room. I fumbled for my glasses, found them, and then wondered what the hell had happened here? Newspapers strewn all over the place. A half eaten bowl of cornflakes stagnating on the table. My phone abandoned on the desk alongside a mountain of unpaid bills. Unfiled, just opened, and direct debits set up, so I never have to think about these things. It’s easier to live a lie than a harsh truth.

It was coming back to me. Junk food dinner. A quick drink that turned into a few pints that turned into an all-nighter. An attractive princess way way out of my league, just like the rest. A final last attempt to do more than just stroke her fingers and put arm around her slender waist. Paul’s protestations about the last tube home, falling asleep dribbling on the tube, a hasty, rushed drunken bit of junk food, and deciding since it was after midnight, a new day, a new morning.

Breakfast. That explains the half-eaten cornflakes. I’m sure there was some logic that since we were past midnight, and therefore technically in the morning, that breakfast was a completely acceptable name for whatever it was we were eating. But I came home alone as normal. We are all individuals these days. All of us, with over one in four of us living alone, lonely islands drowning in streams.

I picked up the bowl, drained the milk with a spoon (somewhat messy, I wouldn’t recommend it) and poured the sodden sludge of last nights breakfast into the bin. Lost, without direction, I turned my phone over from where I left it on the sofa.

“1 message received”.

If somebody didn’t want to tell you something they wouldn’t would they? They wanted me to get the message. So I opened it.

“Morning. Hair of the dog for breakfast? x”

I didn’t recognize the number. And I can’t remember giving it out to anyone. A stranger.

We’re all strangers – even if we know each others names. All we know about each other is the surface.

I debated if I should reply. Was it someone I had given my number to? Was it someone who had given them my number? Someone else who made up a number to give to someone somewhere in Huddersfield?

It could be a girl. It could That Girl.

12 :

2006-01-01T07:45:00.000Z

I dreamt I was wrestling snakes.

I dreamt I was making love.

I dreamt I was happy.

Dreams are just dreams. Dreams are bullshit. I dreamt I was wrestling snakes, or running from tidal waves. Or happy. Dreams are bullshit.

The 7.12 train, into the morning sun. Into a dawn that looked like fire. A mouth dry like a desert. A shirt with buttons undone in a sleepwalked rush.

I hate going out and not having brushed my teeth. I hate this. The dull throbbing of leg muscles as I walk to the station. I became all the things I swore I’d never be. A commuter. A worker. A slave. What I wanted to be when I grew up – astronaut, train driver, fighter pilot. I was none of these things.

I was a soft machine : I woke like clockwork, every day at the same time. No matter how much or how little sleep I needed, no matter how much or how little I got, no matter when I went to slept, I always woke at the same hour. And often I could not squeeze an extra second of sleep when I needed it. My body defied me. Consciousness was my punishment.

This was my routine : years of commuting had made a creature of habit and insomnia. I slept like a child : in fitful, stolen moments. Fractured in seconds. Just getting some sleep - any - was a luxury in itself.

A sleepless world was possible, feasible. Like an addict, I functioned, addicted to consciousness, desperate to live every last second. And I could operate heavy machinery such as my legs. But focusing on an object was difficult. The world always looked as if I hadn’t put my glasses on.

Medically, mild insomnia is only two or three weeks of sleep deprivation. Two or three weeks of spending an eternity with your face buried in a pillow. Two or three weeks of staring at headlights over ceilings, two or three weeks of listening to the silence of the streets, counting the minutes between cars passing, projecting your place in the bed in a straight line above you and trying to work out exactly how many years at light speed it would take before you hit another planet.

This is called Transient Insomnia. It is a temporary war, a brief interlude against unconsciousness.

Even if one night feels like forever. One night is bearable. One night without sleep is hard, but not insurmountable. Like a dust mite climbing the leg of a sleeping woman. You can survive it. You do it because you have to - at the basic level, all humans are animals, fighting for survival. Insomnia is just another predator. You fight it.

After a few weeks of sleeplessness, even Transient Insomnia, one night of fractured, absent sleep seems like some improbable, distant dream. After the first few years it gets easier. Constant exhaustion becomes almost normal, in fact. You forget what its like not to feel exhausted.

Even my insomnia was normal, dreary, and off-the-shelf. My neurosis were unexceptional. Without my neurosis, what had I to define myself by? Nothing.

One night of lost sleep was nothing. By the time I graduated to three or four days of lost sleep I was a champion daysleeper. I was neither asleep or awake - the whole world became the same, dull grey monotone without highs or lows, a bland, featureless landscape of stasis. Days and nights ceased to exist. I survived on junk food. I was terrified at the smallest affront to me. I was regressing to the womb where there was neither day or night, light or darkness, just a featureless mass of barely distinguishable events, pleasure, pain, indifference, all rolled into one. I was turning numb : consciousness was my anasthetic.

By the time you get to night twenty one, night twenty two, you’re starting to experiment with it. Fuck with it. You’re starting to bite back.

When I was younger I wondered why we didn’t have switches to move our eyes like Action Man. I spent evening, weeks, looking for a switch at the back of my neck that said ON / OFF. Logic is curved in the small hours. The world suddenly fills with short cuts and back routes. Things that previously seemed unconnected connect. The whole world is a dream you cannot wake from, because you are already awake. Edges blur. And sleep becomes the drug. Gimme gimme gimme. I need some more.

I needed sleep. I was an addict, and this was my cold turkey. All I needed was a hit of sleep. I need it in the way some people need oxygen or smack. I need my oblivion.

In exhaustion everything becomes exaggerated. It’s no longer sunshine. It’s a violent assault on the eyelids when all we crave is the peace of permanent darkness. The Icelandic 24 hour darkness seems like a pipedream from heaven. The Alaskan 24 hour daylight some kind of Danten punishment.

Gimme darkness and silence. I need my fix.

Even the smallest creaking of the floorboards becomes an unsufferable, unbearable jarring rape of the senses. Things become blurred, fuzzy. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Words become indistinct, vague approximation of meanings. Even simple concepts became elastic, slippery, a word like “Yes” as vague as a “Maybe.” What have I done to deserve this?

Fuckdammit. Switch the world off.

I started off the wrong way. There was so much left to be done in the world. So much left to feel. I was extending bedtimes by an hour, getting up an hour earlier. Pushing it an extra hour or two, slowly extending my days from a 66-34% ratio of consciousness to sleep to a 80-20% ratio of consciousness to sleep. I was aiming for 100%. Like Vodka, it was a physical possibility. But probably fatal. And I wanted to defy God. Defy sleep. Control my own destiny.

Youth is so wasted on the young. I was a self-righteous prick and I wasn’t even smart enough to know it. My employers should’ve got me at the time when I knew everything and was paid nothing.

Insomnia was an advantage at University when I needed to submit essays and was running out of time. I needed to keep going once I’d reached my optimum writing speed. The speed of writing is such that you need to build momentum up and maintain that, but once you are at that speed, you can keep at it for a seemingly infinite space, subject only to the muse and your bodily demands. A twelve hour period could easily see 12,000 or even 24,000 words thrown down onto paper. Some of them weren’t very good, but with everything within arms reach (drugs, coffee, chocolate and CD’s) you spend a whole day in the same place without even moving your legs. A time lapse photo would see a static body with a blur where the hands used to be. A relic of old Victorian photography, a single frame exposed over an prolonged period of time.

So I played an experiment to see if the mind ruled the body or the body ruled the mind. I stayed up for days. Day and days. I felt like I’d volunteered myself for some weird scientific experiment without actually any benefits.

Time became an abstract concept. The outside world shrank to a tiny point of light that seeped under a door crack. I was awake in the middle of the night, the middle of the day, and I was the only person alive on a planet of dead people. Sometimes I actually wanted a break, both physically and mentally from a state of enforced consciousness.

I forgot how much of a relief it is to have a holiday from reality - sleep, obliteration of consciousness is a state of temporary coma. I couldn’t achieve that feeling by consciousness, no matter where I went, consciousness came with me, a black dog nipping at my ankles. I didn’t feel like I was made out of flesh. In my state of heightened sensory perception, I felt like I was made out of rock and balsa wood. Strong and fragile. Impervious, brittle.

I wanted to emerge from my waking death. I felt like the only man left alive.

It's a lonely feeling: when you're awake in the middle of the night, it feels like you're the only person in the world not peacefully asleep and dreaming. All around you the sweet sleep and silence of the unconscious masses taunted me. They didn’t know how lucky they were.

There are 60 million insomniacs in America alone. 60,000,000 broken fractured nights of sleep. 400,000,000 lost hours every night.

Every night, the rest of the world became The Night of The Living Dead. Where other people moved in full hyper-speed with a fully compos-mentis set of reactions, motor reflexes, and digestive tracts swollen with fuel, I moved in a sleek military world. My mission : consciousness, an advanced state thereof. I tried to turn my addiction, my illness into a virtue. A quest, a holy quest, a pilgrimmage, a jihad against the sleep of the masses.

By remaining fully conscious I could experience everything - read every book, hear every record, see every sight. In my state of advanced insomnia I became hyper sensitive. My fingertips glowed and sparkled with the vibration of individual air molecules moving over them. There was too much going on out there for me to miss any of it.

If I concentrated I could feel dust mites crawl across my skin. I could feel bacteria growing within me. I would mentally trace where my cancers would be and where the bacteria would reside. I would count the number of bacterial strains in my mouth and try to remember their names. I last remember getting up to two hundred and thirty seven. And each with a name.

To outsiders I was moving sluggishly, a zombie with mogadon reflexes, and probably a desire to eat only live human brains for nourishment. To me, they were babbling rushing fools too busy doing something as to miss the actual experience.

I became jealous of the sun. Even that seemed to get some sleep, though it too suffered insomnia - the orbit gave it a fluctuating sleep pattern, and in places like Iceland the sun did mammoth six month binges of light and then dark. I wanted that kind of stamina. How many does the sun bench?

Imagine half a year without sleep. I felt like I was doing it already. Every night I tried to sleep. Honestly I did. I slowed my breathing, released endorphins, ceased eating so as not to be awake by digestion. I fasted. I renounced alcohol. The breaking down of the component chemicals steals the necessary deep sleep when you drink too much. I lived as a monk. I reduced myself to bare components - a body, a machine. All I needed was fuel.

We need dreams to survive. We all need dreams and nobody knows why. Maybe its a mental scandisk / defrag at the end of a session as the Human Machine. Maybe God’s fucking with us. If there is a God.

I couldn’t remember my dreams. The alcoholic comas I achieved failed to satisfy like a string of cheap handjobs from the sleep fairy. The quest for sleep on furtive street corners, burgling my soul and selling whatever I could find to fuel my addiction. The logistics of this were simple. If pushers sold sleep on street corners I’d be feeding a narcolepsy habit.

If sleep were a religion I’d be there living in a commune wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and channeling 90% of my earnings into the Cult Of Infinite Sleep.

It wasn’t the quantity of sleep I needed : it was the quality. My sleep was diluted and broken. I wanted, needed my fix of Class A oblivion.

I worshipped a pristine white duvet. I fantasised of sheep jumping up and around over my head. All I need was the sweet oblivion of the drug I was addicted to and couldn’t get a fix of. All around me, the normal sleepers pushed their comfort onto me. Like a single man at a wedding, my face was being rubbed into the shit of other peoples contentment. And I wanted to be a fly. I wanted to eat the sweet coma-tasting shit.

The problem came when I stopped whatever it was that I was doing. The essay was completed. The book finished. The project over. Like a touring rock band, a juggernaut that just keeps going, the train kept going - powering over the barriers, jumping the tracks. With a momentum that big, that strong, I got the bends. I needed to decompress. If I came up too quickly I would swell and explode. I was headfucked.

I’d fooled myself. I claimed I could quit anytime I wanted. But I couldn’t. I was addicted to exhaustion. My body buzzed with the perpetual state of kicking that was. I looked like a junkie on cold turkey, but this was the buzz I craved.

Years of sleep abuse and consciousness addiction had resulted in permanent damage to me. I thought the world was meant to look like this. The world was meant to be grey, tiny, fuzzy at the edges, with everything pale and lacking. Where minor infractions were meaningless, where physical pain, hunger, exhaustion were overcome by a mantra of weariness. The whole world was smothered in insomniac vaseline. My stomach ceased rumbling - I cannibalised myself. I was eating myself from the inside. My eyes became red, angry roadmaps.

At the sleep bank I was always overdrawn. I was always owed a few hours. A few hours became a few days. Became years. And those missing years take their toll on me. Each of us only have so many heartbeats. Each of us only have so many orgasms. So many hangovers. So many late nights in our souls, before we expire. Nobody knows how many there are. but each of us has a finite number. Every late night I steal now, I take from my future.

The half-life of insomnia is permanent and infinite. Like nuclear waste, it could last to the end of our lifetime, or five hundred, a thousand, a million years later.

In my sleepless state, the world is fuzzy. Consciousness starts to curl at the edges. Sound and vision becomes distorted. Broken. Sleep starts to infect my waking life. Every second I am awake the world begins to resemble my REM-state. I need sleep, yet I am at war with myself. The one thing I need I can’t have, and the only thing stopping me, is me. I’m out of control.

Being unloved has dangerous side-effects. Sleeplessness, self-pity and chronic masturbation. The problem was I couldn’t quit anytime I liked, anytime I wanted : I could only quit when someone else liked, when someone else wanted. Sleep and love were the two things I needed, the two things I craved, wanted more than anything, the two things I could not provide for myself, the only two things I could never take, but could only be given. And however much I had, I always wanted more. More. More. More.

I read the message again, trying to work who it is, and how she got my number.

13 :

2006-01-01T07:44:00.000Z

Our first kiss. Do you remember it? A wide screen romance, a moment where the rest of the world shrunk away, where all other things ceased to exist. Where our bodies joined, where I could taste you on my lips, where we became one, and this happened in a second, where we were strangers, we had become lovers. And it was only a second, a moment fuelled by alcohol and recklnessness.

And it changed our lives.

14 :

2006-01-01T07:43:00.000Z

Friday.

Train station. Race to an obscure part of the platform to secure a seat so that I may work on the way in. This reduces my chances of being late at work and increases my perceived per-hour productivity at work. Achievements come in small steps. So small you don’t even know what you are doing.

You always start at the bottom when you start anew. Slowly but surely you become like all the rest. Inevitably you think of buying a house.. well, it’s cheaper than renting, isn’t it? And the most rebellious thing in your life is your CD collection.

But in my sleepless state, all this in an endurance course. A never ending stream of bullshit I have to wade through, in order to be able to go and do it again.

Waiting for the train I imagine her naked and on all fours. My eyes scan the other commuters and I mentally tick off those to whom I would fuck if I had the chance. It’s more than you’d think. When the dick is hard, the mind is soft.

I did this every day, like a mouse on a treadmill, a rat in a cage, an experiment made flesh.

Insomnia is my curse.

The train has seven stops and takes 34 minutes to reach the city. I am gently rocked to sleep by the cheap, hardbacked seats and the thin blanket of exhaustion. But sleep never comes. I have to count the minutes and the stops so that I can change for the tube.

I can’t relax. Even in my sleep, I can’t switch off. I’m a broken record in a world made of MP3’s.

After I change, work is thankfully only 238 yards walk. Good pedestrianisation of the walkways and a lack of congestion means I can do that in 4 minutes. Pedestrian congestion is the next epidemic to gridlock the city.

I am able to clear the station in 52 seconds, though my personal best was 40 – that was when there was a bomb scare. Could Inspector Sands please report to the Information Desk? The PA asked, its monotone, dull and pre-recorded, talking in the code of evacuation. Those forty beautiful seconds, escorted straight from the train to the crowded street outside, the flurry of yellow helmets and fire engines, uniformed officers and frantic, fearful commuters, all of us, in a veiled sense of quiet panic.

Normally, people who can’t walk straight, tourists, the old, the sick, the lame, screaming idiot children add those twelve seconds to my life. Or, in event of emergency, cost me my life. There are too many people, this human virus, and I am just a cancerous cell in the world.

Then it’s 4 minutes to the office, assuming I am not distracted by tourists, beggars, or girls. I love the summertime. All the pretty young things wear skirts and flimsy material and open toed shoes. There can be no greater glory God made than her skin.

Sloth and lust are sins. God made these sins for us to share and enjoy.

I’m just a man. Nothing less, and nothing more. I’ve been shackled to an idiot all my life, and I can never cut myself apart from my cock. I wonder what life would be like, no longer crawling and following the black demon of the flesh. And often it puts the strangest, stupidest thoughts in my head. I’m sat there, minding my own business, content to think about something and then all of a sudden – there’s nothing I want to do more than fuck the living daylights out of something, anything, someone, anyone.

That was the life of a frustrated singleton. That was my life. No man is an island and I was lost at sea. There was little respite from things. Akin to the way of pre-historic man, life felt like a constant battle. We’d just changed what we were fighting for : no longer was it survival and existence. It was a fight for seating. And expresso.

There’s a fight for seat. I stand at the end of the platform, where there are less people. I wear headphone, so that I can eavesdrop conversations of listen to music. I read my book, whatever book it is. Sometimes I read reports, newspapers over peoples shoulders, stare out of the window, try to steal an extra few seconds of sleep, something, anything. And this is another slice of our lives.

And sometimes I stand. I pay over one hundred pounds a month and I can’t even get a seat. I stand like cattle, shunted form A to B and back again. And that is my life. Shunted to my slow, spiritual death.

Cannibals are a theory you are what you eat. I am a mutated, battery-farmed chicken bred for profit.

Every morning I arrive, if I am on time, at 7.56am. I am at the mercy of the Franchise Holder for the rail network. And sometimes I am late, the type of late that could get me a warning in a less-relaxed office. The type of late that I am hopelessly irresponsible for. I am hostage to the ineffiency of the modern nation.

Normally I share the lift with Catherine who works on the fourth floor. I think she takes the same train as me, but I have never seen her on it. We breed familiar faces, our alien community, recognising faces on platforms that we never speak to, and sometimes it feels odd to be there and not see these people.

Rumour has it that she fucked the guy who works in the office next door to mine, but I can neither confirm or deny these rumours. Little things. Tiny minds.

Every morning it is like this. A production line. A conveyor belt of wage-slaves. I haven’t sold out. I bought in. I want this. I want the rewards. I want the house, the wife, the dog, a decent TV, and some comfort. But the rewards seem disproportionate to the investment I make.

I’m going to get to the end of it and tot up my victories : a failed marriage, a mortgage, maybe children, a car, and 2.4 pets. That’s not a victory. It’s a lament.

A minimum of 37 hours per week, and just to maintain this fucking charade. Just to buy more food to get more sleep to get up to go to work to do it again. I am a fucking treadmill office rat. I don’t know how someone could design a life like this. A big machine built on bullshit.

It’s a fucking lie. Life lied to me. At school. At work. At the altar. They lied to me. They fucked me so they could treat me like a puppet, pull my fucking strings. Get me to do whatever they wanted. Trust is the most dangerous weapon of all. I wanted to believe.

We are all taking order, we just don’t know it sometimes. Sometimes we think that the ideas are our own. The greatest temptation of them all.

The numbers crawl up, 9,10,11,12, and a ping, and the doors open and the lift arrives at my floor, and I enter the cocoon bubble of employment. I am sucked back into the black hole of slavery. A flicker of recognition passes over her eyes, our faces, as we recognise, as we daily do, each other, we do not know each other, we know of each other, our eyes meet, a flutter of chemistry, and then it is gone. Catherine is, until tomorrow or eyes meeting in corridors, a memory. And what is a memory but a moment that can never return?

One day I will be a memory. You will be a memory. We all will be a memory, then we will be forgotten, history, nothing but some distant ancestor, some ancient relative.

For all this will one day be wiped away. Not just you, or I, not just our lives, our loves, our hopes, our fears, all the things that we thought mattered, but don’t – its beyond the ego, the identity. All of it will be wiped away. Everyone’s hopes. Everyone’s fears. Every single moment of love, every dream, every fear, every hope, everything.

All gone. Not even dust, but wiped clean from the records like a footprint in the sand. As if it never existed.

Everyone who reads this will be dead one day. You could even say this book is cursed. All of us are cursed. Life is a fatal condition. No one gets out of here alive.

15 :

2006-01-01T07:42:00.000Z

I wake in silence. Like normal these days. Most days I wake before the alarm. I wake before the sun. Before the dawn. Before even the chirrup of birds and the crack of light. Sometimes though, I don’t wake up, because sometimes I haven’t been asleep.

Silence is a beautiful thing. It teaches you to listen, not just to hear. I can hear the heating creak and the radiators fill with water in the darkness. I can hear the winds and cars far away passing by. I can hear birds fly and foxes run. I have missed those sounds.

I can’t sleep anymore. My sleep is broken – the calm waters before the storm have forever been torn. It’s as if what I know, what I dare not say for fear of making it true, has broken my nights in half, and in the middle where the would tore the two apart I wake in terror and fear.

Last night I slept properly for the first time in months. I had dreams – nonsensical, nonlinear images that reflected the inner me.

My dreams are scarred. I see visions of the way things could be. I see the sky black with smoke. I see buildings collapse. I see swarms of insects in fields modified by Man, spreading like a cancer, covering the earth, eating everything they can find. I see the moon red and violent with fire that falls from the skies. I see men in suits talking as they kill their children in foreign lands. I need to tell someone. Warn someone. Do something. But I can’t. I am trapped here and powerless in my dreams. When I wake, these visions are wiped clean.

My dreams are bullshit. I don’t know where they come from, or why. They aren’t visions from the future. They aren’t anything to do with anything.

It can’t be a secret unless you tell someone else and it can’t be a story until it is told to someone else. Even the Devil needs someone to boast to about how clever he has been. Evil can’t keep quiet. There’s no fun in being the architect of the Apocalypse unless your work is recognised. Evil has vanity too, doesn’t it?

And the Devil is going to boast about what happens next.

In six months time I will be dead.

I’ve realised that we are just made in another’s image, wind up toys, with no real freedom. Rats in shopping malls and drones at desks. Any concept of free will, individuality, is just a concept. This is an experiment, we are controlled by forces unaccountable, motives unseen. Our choices are artificially limited to a few set outcomes, our control reduced to the TV channels we watch and soft drinks we consume. Behind the field of vision, we are being watched, our responses analysed, our whole very civilisation is an experiment.

Pepsi or Coke is no fucking choice at all.

Somewhere God tumbles a dice and decides I will be gunned down in a back alley by a man with a handgun. Or under the wheels of a speeding car. Or in a bungee jump where I failed to connect myself to my harness. Just another pointless, meaningless demise.

Everything is out of our hands – at any moment we could be innocent bystanders in a war we neither support nor understand.

We are in that war now. Good and evil are wrestling for control of the universe and there is nothing we can do but watch and wait for the outcome.

You never value your sense of control, your freedom, or your sanity, until it is taken away. They tell me I’m insane, but the point is, you and I both know better. I’m not insane. Hitler was insane. There’s just ways of looking at a situation. Perspectives. Reality is just a set of perspectives from a certain point of view. There is no definite : just the consensus, the hallucination of the majority.

Imagine you are a caveman, sat at the roadside. You have no idea, or understanding of modern technology. You don’t even know what a car is. All you can see are reflective flashes of colour screaming past at incalculable speeds. That’s when you are in a situation, sat on top of it. Looking right at it. Can’t see the wood for the trees I believe is the exact phrase.

And so, if you step back and look at the situation from a distance you can see things the way you thought you’d never see them. You can see the road. You see the hills, the sand, the dusty wind-raped vegetation, and the vehicles moving from the crest of one horizon to another. Planes overhead and clouds.

From that distance, you can see a perspective that you might not be able to understand, but to be able to comprehend. This is my life. I cannot understand what is occurring. I can comprehend that the world outside my room is fucked. I can understand that the Apocalypse is coming. I can feel it in the wind. I can feel it in the air. I can feel it in the brittle whisper of the leaves.

These are the thoughts that keep me awake and break my sleep every single night.

I’m exhausted. I just couldn’t sleep. No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t sleep. My body had staged a one man mutiny against itself.

I wanted out.

And somewhere, someone wants me dead.

16 :

2006-01-01T07:40:00.000Z

And then there was love.

We came together slowly. There was you and I, me and her, not a we, for far too long. Our respective orbits were too far apart to meet. They crossed over occasionally, but that was really it.

The night we met we paired off together, talking for either far too long (if you ask Paul), or not long enough (if you ask me). Paul was pissed, and pissed off. Secretly, I think he brought her out so he could charm her into bed.

The problem is he can’t charm anything into bed. Not even a hooker if he waved notes under her crack-addled nose. Though he later told me to get my hands off Helen. After all, he did see her first.

Between you and me, what a fucking prick.

As I said, we were getting on very well. And she was fucking gorgeous. The type of woman whose not even out of my league, she’s in a completely different game.

So what the fuck is she doing talking to me?

We were brought up in a world where we were lucky if any woman spoke to us. That’s the way things were. At school Mary Jane Rottencrotch honoured us by even acknowledging us. We were ugly, we had bad skin, and we had no pocket money. Life was shit. To us, getting laid was the pinnacle of human existence.

So beggars can’t be choosers. And when we were young, we were beggars. Women chose us. Occasionally. We would fuck anything that gave us the chance.

So Helen was way out of my league. She was the kind of girl who looked like all the boys would ask for her number when she was younger. Now, even. I certainly wanted it. But I thought it best not to try and chat her up. There was just no point. If I came onto her I’d be like every other man in the country.

Rejected. Substandard.

It must get boring when everyone in the world wants to fuck you. You end up not talking to people because you know all they want to do is fuck you. I deliberately tried not to fuck her. Not to even want to. Maybe then she would see that somehow I was different from everyone else. Even though I am just another slave, just another person, and just like everybody else. T

So we talked. And that was all we did. But in the conversation, in the words, something clicked. Souls connected at some level. I felt like I’d met a friend.

And I had.

The text messages got flirtier. I found every time the phone vibrated in my pocket I reacted as if I was a new-born father reacting to the baby monitor during a period of silence. Instant panic. I still found it somewhat astonishing she was interested in me. Had Paul paid her or dared her for a laugh? What dirty little secret did he have on her? Did she used to be a man?

In the end, six days later, I took her out for a meal.

17 :

2006-01-01T07:39:00.000Z

I am a creature of habit. There is comfort in being sad.

When I come back there’s no-one here.

After she left I was faced with months of boredom and poverty. I came back one day from work. And she was gone. Just like the Song.

As if she were never here. As if there was never love. We are the Divorce Generation. Our parents taught us by example. They split up, so we believed that that is what people should do.

When things get hard, just walk away. Pretend they don’t exist.

No long term relationships. No grand love. No happy ending. Just a series of stuttering liasions, repeated mistakes. Some of the mistakes lasted for years.

We were taught that there are no consequences. That you can get out of any situation. It’s not like Herpes, which you carry around forever. We were taught that nothing is permanent.

You can walk out on a marriage just like that. Pack your things and drive away to some better day. Let someone else pick up the pieces. We’re Generation Fucked. Our parents taught us by example.

They shit in the water they make us drink from. They pollute everything they see. They cannibalise the earth. And they get away with it. Because they have letterheads and mirrored buildings.

We just inherit this shit, and live with the consequences. You can’t flush away a turd the size of a planet. By the time the planets blackened edges reach us, our parents will be dead. So they don’t give a fuck what happens. Its Someone Else’s Problem.

This is the generation that has no consequence. Whatever happens in the next few hundred of years is irrelevant. We’ll be dead by then. Our childen will be dead by then. Our childrens childen too, if they are ever born.

We’re the dustmen of history. We will inherit your shit, and you will teach us that only the corrupt, only the liars, and only the hypocritical will survive. Teach us by example, and lament the state of society. Blame the parents : blame yourselves.

She was her parents daughter. Just walked away from the car crash, leaving the smoking wreck in the road, and pretended it never even happened. Life was not what happened, but what you could get away with. And how fast you could get away from the scene of the crime.

This is the unseen violence that is the new war, the new battleground. No longer do we fight wars on the streets. We fight them in our banks. The violence that assaults out psyche. Our finances. Our ability to put food on the table and electricity in the meter.

I survived. It’s what we do. We survive. We fight against the bullshit. And by not dying, somehow we live. And that makes us survivors.

Like the sun retreating behind the Icelandic horizon.

I’d tried sleeping longer, but my body didn’t work anymore. Exhaustion was burned into my retinas in thick streaks of light always found a way in. I couldn’t escape daylight. Exhaustion was the skewer upon which I was spit-roasted.

Life is by its very definition cruel.

It didn’t care if you were there or not. It had nothing against you personally. Life just went ahead and did it anyway. Like the waves of the water. If you were in the way, you either got out of the way or you suffered the battering of the tide.

In my hermetically sealed container of a flat, I feel like an astronaut. The whole world is out there, and I can see for miles. The problem is, I have to pass through a multitude of doors, airlocks, lifts and corridors before I reach the rarified atmosphere of ground level. Down there it’s poison. Every breath of air is poisoned with pollution, exhaust fumes, and noise.

Insomnia is the unseen enemy that hangs over me every night. Every night, as exhaustion battles consciousness, I waste minutes, hours, day, months of my life, just trying to work out how I can switch off. How I can get my hit.

Sometimes if I’m lucky and manage to snatch sleep, something wakes me in the night. Normally around 4am. Sometimes it’s the fear of a disaster. Sometimes it’s something else, something more elusive. The feeling that somewhere something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is, or why, or what I can do about it. The feeling that someone is missing in my bed.

My next memory, every morning bar Sundays, is the alarm clock. I stumble to gain conscience. It sounds like my burglar alarm. Where is the fire? Shall I call the fire service? Police? Ambulance?

I contemplate being woken up by a man holding a gun to my head telling me to turn over so he can kill me before ransacking my home for consumer goods to sell on street corners and backrooms. At least I would have slept.

There must be something very wrong to be woken by an alarm, some emergency somewhere. A semi-conscious, automatic limb reaches out, decativates the sound, collapse sback into stolen sleep. And seven minutes later it happens again

This is my life. Every day the same old torrent of bullshit. Food. Sleep. Travel. Work. Queues. Debt. The game never changes and it is never won. Every day is moulded and stamped in the production line called employment.

Whatever order of distractions, the bathroom sees me wash with soap, comb my hair, brush my teeth – but only after eating breakfast, so as to allow the active ingredients to do their work whilst I do my work – apply various moisturisers, deodorisers, and perfumes, before emptying myself of the nights produce. Soap is normally a vintage purchased enmasse from VAT-free foreign holidays, as is my Greek only deodorant, an essence of a fragrance called “Homme Boy” which indicates strength, yet softness. It’s cheap shit I purchased in order to survive.

I am a machine.

Appearance is everything. So whilst I appear, on the surface, to be successful, it’s an act.

A shit and piss later, and I’m ready to start the day. Breakfast is a ritual : cereal and milk, prescription pills, water. Hurriedly, every second watching the clock, the countdown until I need to appear like magic at my office. Breakfast devoured, I check my e-mail, before dressing in whatever suit I have ready today. Sometimes I don’t have one ready. Sometimes I pick out the first thing I can think of, improvising. I hope the tie matches the shirt, the clock is ticking. There is no time to change my mind later.

There is no time anymore. The countdown has begun.

I always have a pack of mints ready so as to appear fresh and clean, and eager to please. This is after breakfast, before leaving the house. The office has washrooms with vending machines that dispense toothpaste/brushes, and individually wrapped deodorant portions, but I have yet to sink to such levels. Such things are a luxury I can’t justify. £3 for a personal freshness kit is half an hour’s salary, before tax.

I prefer to shave every evening, so as not to risk the groggy blunt end of unconsciousness to nick my flesh. Leaping from oblivion to 24 blades at 500rpm chewing your keratin cells within the space of a few minutes would be enough of a shock to kill a pensioner.

Ambition bites the nails of success apparently.

It’s always a rush in the morning. Always racing to meet certain points of time before waiting. Today I walk briskly to the train station, performing a mental competition with the other commuters, working out if I came first again, which ones I beat since yesterday. Trying to find the shortest acceptable routes over roads, roadworks, car parking and traffic lights to reach the destination.

My muscles ache with use. Unused, virgin muscles stretched with activity.

Dressed, shaved, and fed. I am ready to battle it out in business. Whatever you may say of the rat race, it doesn’t matter if you come first or second, you’re still a rat.

On a sinking ship called Earth.

18 :

2006-01-01T07:37:00.000Z

A world without women is the world I used to live in. They used to be here, in this plane, the world I lived in, and then one day they ceased to be on my frequency, faded away with only a dim memory of where they were, without even a trace of evidence bar a fading recollection.

Women are the ghosts in my life. They haunt my every second, define my existence. They are impossible, untouchable, and whilst they exist in the physical space and time as I do, they simply appear not to exist on the same physical plane. Unable to interact, their absence is like a presence.

I am haunted by women I used to know. The imprint of their body against the bed I now sleep alone in. The tampons left underneath the sink in the haste to Abandon Relationship.

I didn’t want to be in this world. A world without soft edges. Without internal decorations. Without warmth. A world without feminity. A world without softness. A world without love. The world no longer has soft colours. Without excitement, companionship, trust or curves. A world of hard sharp edges, a world of sole functionality, of black shelving, a world of right angles, alphabetical filing. A world of remote controls and war movies.

Designed by men, everything is harsh, and strictly functional. Made of square edges, greys and blacks, full of knobs and buttons. A world of concrete, of harsh deadlines, faxes, emails.

My room is a single mans room. Everything has a purpose, a shape that defines it. Everything is there for a reason. There is no pot-pourri, whatever the fuck that is, no decoration, no softness. No Just For The Fuck of It.

Without a balancing touch, you try to define your personal space as an extension of the self, a space without softness, a space where things are there because they have to be, not because they should be. A house is a machine for living in.

In this land without women, only the masculine exists. Its not that I don’t want a woman, I would trade all this for the soft placebo of a relationship in the blink of an eye. It’s just... this is my empire. And even if I don’t particularly like it, its the way I’ve made things. My little empire. I walk the line. A delicate balance between solitude and soulmates. Between method and madness. Between love and hate – constant warring factions battle out for control of my life, and all I can do is to try and prevent either side from winning the battle. I tried to keep it my life from veering out of control.

It didn’t always work. I was falling. And I wanted to.

19 :

2006-01-01T07:36:00.000Z

I tried not to fall in love. I tried to be strong, aloof, an island, wary of being hurt. But I wasn’t succeeding. I fell in love, despite myself. And then I tried not to let it show.

A studied trickle of text messages, a hint of suggestive comments had grown into something else. Time had unfolded her name, her age, the fact that I was sat next to her that night. And, time had lead simply to a suggestion. A way to meet.

I debated various options. Where should I take her? A swanky restaurant? Or shall I send her to a rural pub for a down-to-earth meal? A sports theme bar near the industrial area? All you can eat Chinese buffet for a gritty moment of low-flying poverty tourism?

What message was I sending out? What message did I want to convey? Keen, but not desperate? That was the one for me.

I was wary. I’d been fucked by love. We all have been at one time of another. I wasn’t planning on being in love again. No way. Before one can love again, one must no longer hurt from the love before. At some point, sometime, in some vague, possible future, maybe I was planning on meeting someone, sometime, if things work out well, seeing what happens from there. I wasn’t planning on being a monk forever. And she wasn’t even my girlfriend yet. Just someone I wanted to know better.

She ate Spaghetti Napolitiana with parmesan cheese and a sprinkling of black pepper. Avoided the Garlic bread, but had Ciabatta with cheese. I read great significance into the absence of Garlic Bread. I don’t quite know why. But I do. But I didn’t want to admit to that.

Dammit, stop thinking. The world is not an experiment to be analysed. Don’t think too much.

I noticed she didn’t eat food. She seduced it. And she didn’t splash any on her metallic blue shirt, the top two buttons undone, the pale flesh of a soft neck. No, not shirt, a blouse. Like the French, items were sexualised. Blouse with soft, inviting vowels for le femme, Shirt (with all its hard consonants) for Le Bloke. The softness of her skin.

You can tell a lot about someone by their fingers. This is one of the reasons that summer is the most beautiful season. I can look at a woman’s fingers – if they are immaculately groomed, bitten, or nicotine stained with years of tension – and immediately I learn something about what makes them tick. It’s a sign beyond the simple raw materials, that of hair, clothing, and stance that may be conditioned by employment or other outside factors. A woman’s fingers never lie. Raw bitten fingers show that underneath everything else, someone is worried about something. Something is eating them inside.

Summer is good also for feet. I am able to look at open shoes and with merely a glance, I can read them. Sometimes what they do not say speaks louder than all the words in the world. If the finger and toenails are the same colour varnish, you can be fairly sure that underneath all things there is some insecurity – or at the very least a consciousness of the self-image being projected. If they are different colours, or different coloured nails on each digit, we are dealing with someone who is either selfconsciously weird or just plain unco-ordinated. Or lazy.

Sloth and lust are sins.

But just toenails? It probably means a woman who isn’t really that bothered. It might be that they are using what’s left in the bathroom cabinet, or stolen a friends for a moment. It might be they got bored.. It might mean they like to show their sexuality quietly, to show that they have the power to lure, but discreetly, almost as if you wouldn’t know. A subtle seduction. Or it might be they know strangers are sat next to them and looking down. There are plenty of attractive young women here, like anywhere, if you know where to look. The lure comes in all forms. We are all programmed to respond to signals. The angle of eyes in the face. The crook of a smile. How she walks into the room. Sometimes true love is forged in the eyes. The purity of the soul. It’s in the blood.

I’m programmed to think this way. We do not make errors : we execute erroneous programmes. God is a poor coder.

My eyes moved over her body as if I was admiring a work of art. I looked at her and I thought, yes, I could love this woman. Or a rough, physical approximation of it.

Her hair looked amazing. I tried to look beyond that. I tried not to let it influence me. Our conversation was deeper this time. Deeper than text messages and flirtatious emails. It was not spiritual. But it wasn’t the kind of desperate fumbling conversation that the unsuited have. More a type of union, a meeting of similar souls, an alignment even. Like the stars before the eclipse.

We were not fumbling for some kind of love. We were falling. Like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like I had met a long lost friend. Like I was coming back home.

As she spoke I watched her lips. I imagined them dong things unprintable in a family newspaper. Wrapped around my cock at bedtime. She spoke with the tongue of angels. I tired not to feel lust. All men are weak. I had no choice.

In the rhythm of her voice, the bad things in the world ceased to exist. It was beautiful. A cloud of infatuated ignorance descended. I suddenly started to believe that songs by the Carpenters are not the deluded fiction of the naïve, but the hymns of the priviledged. That whenever she was near that the sky filled with birds.

If I ever had it in the first, the plot was rapidly being lost.

Conversation ran from the mundane to the soulsearching. From the trivia that men fill their brains with to hide from emotions, to an indepth dissection of the nature of life and what it all means. We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew what life could be. Beautiful again.

We were trying to build a connection. Those desperate pauses, those seconds of building something. But what? A regret? Or a new future? Except we weren’t trying. The connection was made without even trying. As if it came from nowhere. As if it was always waiting to be made, and then finally, it happened.

I had her phone number. And her email. And maybe the path to a better life. And we kissed as the evening drew to a close, in a windy alcove on a train station, as I waited for her train home, and I prayed that every second, every minute, every time I saw her, wasn’t my last, but the first of many more. And in that moment of kissing, as our lips met and our souls leaped into each other, I knew that at this, us, was not forever, that at some time we would be apart, victims of age, or cancer, or the dull embers of separation. But even though we know that, from the moment we start to live we start to die, that from the moment we start to love we start to feel alive, and that as we start to live we also live with the knowledge that nothing, not even love is forever.

When you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right now.

I thought, I hoped, I knew I could trust again. I was scared of love. As anyone would had been hurt would know. But I believed that someone, somewhere could cure me of that. Like the title of a bad Hollywood movie, she could be the one.

I sleep like a baby now. A baby that has finally conquered pissing its pants in the middle of the night and waking with a soft helpless cry. Never before have I craved oblivion and absence so much. Never before have I found it come so easy.

Of course, the one time when I actually felt happy, at more alive than I ever have, I promptly fell unconsciousness.

20 :

2006-01-01T07:35:00.000Z

We were born ordinary people. Ordinary lives, not especially rich or poor, not ugly, not beautiful, not exceptional, just plain and simple plain and simple. We learnt how to stretch the merest fractions of cash into a meaningful, if meagre, existence. We learnt how to subsist on the Value food ranges that were as tasteless as our homemade haircuts. Our evenings – knowing that the pretty ones we desired were well out of our reach – became exercises in depravity. Not being depraved, but in deprivation. In the absence of things.

The pretty ones were taken, swayed by those with money, charm, and guile, spirited away from us. Knowing we could never achieve the art of beauty, we began to find the ugliest women we could, and win her affections. They had something I could never have, and they used it to get someone I could never have.

Ugly women never ran from us – some were snotty – some knew our game – some were flattered – but all knew that in an age built purely on surface and appearance, that those without Mother Nature’s soft influence weren’t even a pretty face. They had to make up for this in other ways – having a personality, an open mind, or something else that distinguished them. A pretty face can get away with being vaccous, stupid, a trophy. Those who do not have the benefits of selective breeding have to find an alternate talent – something more. We had to rely on our wits and gile to get by.

The day after the evening before, where we all chase the least attractive lady there is, we meet up, discuss our success at being failures, and start all over again. A gang splintered by age, by time, by children, by work. We meet in our twos and threes, quietly, to post-mortem. To discuss. Embarassing text messages are often enough to prove (or not) your relative success at the task. Sometimes you even get sent a text message, although it arrived on someone else’s phone.

Maybe he didn’t like her very much anyway. Maybe when they were making love, in the early hours, he knew that this, this wasn’t love, but something near enough to do for now. Maybe nobody was fooling anyone.

Sometimes, we find that purely by chance, we actually like the person inside. We actually want to talk to them again. We actually want to meet them again. After a time, we even think about the future. It’s a long time to be alone, the future. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we agree to pair off, join the great adventure with us, breed, conform. It’s what we do.

Slowly we become our parents. Slowly we become everything we thought we’d never be. A process of a thousand small steps take us away from what we thought we were, and turned us into everything we hate. You can’t fight it. You can’t even outrun it. Time always wins in the end.

Most of us live for today, not tomorrow. What if there is no tomorrow? What if there is no future? What if the Mothership lands or death comes raining down from the sky?

That’s the way we live our lives these days. Struggling to get by, without a big picture, a long vision to hold. There is no big picture. We’re obscured under the trivia, the shit of everyday life, trying to survive, trying to pay the gas bills, the electricity bill, the water bills, the council tax, the rates, the rent, the phone bill, the television bill, the food bill, the bus pass, the train pass, the credit card, the personal loan, the pension, the car. There’s always one more thing we have to pay for that keeps us perpetually just out of reach of financial security.

And all so I can keep going to work to keep earning money to keep going to work. I don’t know who it was, but the fundamental emptiness of leisure time is the lie that keeps our lives going. The time we aren’t working is the time we’re just empty vessels waiting to be filled by something. Love. Sport. Music. Movies. The Internet. All distractions to keep us sedated.

To keep us from thinking about who runs the world, and why. About who’s running the world, and who’s making the decisions, about why those decisions are being made, and why they’re genetically breeding a better tomato, because Nature And God didn’t do a good enough job.

God in heaven help us, because we are too dumb to help ourselves.

21 :

2006-01-01T07:34:00.000Z

Love is a sedative as well. It’s the greatest con-trick ever invented. All you need is Love. Love is all you need.

Forget world peace. An end to hunger. A clean credit record. Forget food. That’s not important.

All you need is love. The love, the unconditional adoration and companionship of
someone. A kindred spirit. To dream, the impossible dream. To love, pure and chaste from afar.

Love is an impossible dream. My lovers were parasites. They fed off me. I trusted. And I was betrayed. Trust and betrayal are two sides of the same coin. You always learn the hard way.

Isn’t it human nature to hope for a better life? To believe that if I open my heart, you won’t put the knife in? People aren’t actually like that.

Oh yes they are. It what makes man the worst animal there is. You don’t see Dolphins fucking each other over for percentages. You don’t see Whales debating the best way to enslave other whales. Tigers selling other tigers with different coloured fur.

We’re the worst animal there is. A cancer spreading incessantly over the planet. A black tumour of civilisation cannibalising our own lifeblood. We won’t be happy until we kill the host. Until we mine every seabed. Until we eat every animal. Until everything is gone. Until the fifteen million mobile phones that we throw away every year begin to form their own island of obsolete gold chips floating in the sea.

So no, I don’t believe in love. I don’t believe in the better things.

Where was I going? What was I doing? What was my life going to mean? Anything?

And then she came and changed everything. And then she came and gave me the answers.

22 :

2006-01-01T07:33:00.000Z

The third date was the big one. The first time you go on a date, there’s no pressure. You meet someone. You talk. They don’t mean anything. Neither do you. Just people. Just humans. Being. You can walk away from that date, and you’ve lost nothing. There was nothing to lose. You can’t invest in something that means nothing. You can’t be disappointed by what you never had.

The second date is just as important. By now you’ve established a few things. How we meet. How we part. A kiss on the cheek? A vague hug? A wave farewell? And then out of your life forever?

Or just until the next time?

A seasoned dater will know the rules. Know the rituals. Know the inner rhythms of the game, and how to play it. The times and the venues – when and where is just right to escalate the affair to more than just a fling. Or how to extricate himself from it.

And I was an imperfect dater. I was out of practice.

So second date was a meal, this time on a Friday night. Whilst around me millions of people were frantically trying to celebrate being alive by finding someone, I was trying to feel alive by knowing someone. Not just anyone, but someone.

The more I talked to her, the more I tried not to feel the familiar chemical rush that signalled another attack. My hormones were dancing around like the Mardi ;Gras on poppers. I couldn’t help it. Sunshine was in my blood.

There was something about those eyes.

Those eyes were another world. Like a black hole, the iris sucked in everything and everyone in its path. You were hypnotised by a simple girl. In past centuries this woman would’ve been turned into a siren to lure ships onto rocks.

This is how it always happens. I try not to fall in love. But I can’t help it. Just like the fucking Elvis song. I can feel it happening again.

If it happens it means I’ll get ripped off again. But what it?

What if she’s not like the rest?

She’s talking about her ex-boyfriends. I’m listening but not listening. I don’t want to think of other mens paws on the skin I want to be mine. So I nod and mumble supportively. I’m paying attention, but somehow distracted. I don’t quite know why or how. My mind is elsewhere.Somewhere and on something else. I was tired, but somehow the adrenlain of desire was keeping me awake. I was hoping that somehow, in someway, this would keep me through this. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore. My insomnia had yet to be cured, and yet, at least now, I hoped there was a reason to be awake. I was jealous. And it felt good and bad at the same time. I fumbled my way through sentences – desperately paying attention and failing to make sense of it all.

“Huhuh”, “Yeah”, “Really?”, “What a bastard.”

Followed by supportive glances and eye contact, soft murmurs. The gentle flirtation of brief touching over Italian food. I hold her hand for maybe a second too long as a gesture of support. A statement that I am, in some way, better than the rest. That the things she had suffered in the past are over. Ythat there will be no more tears, no more sorrow.

We like Italian food.

Sometimes I feel ashamed to be male. Not because being male is a bad thing. But because people tar me with the same brush as everyone else. I’m not all men. Men do bad things to women. Women do bad things to men. I am not all men. I am just one man. I am not That man.

For every great person I meet there is normally a shitty ex-partner behind them. Someone who broke their faith in love. Someone who fucked them over and hurt them. An abused child becomes a child abuser. An abused lover becomes an abusive lover. But for some, for the strong, we still believe in love. We are strong because still we believe in love. Because the corrupt have yet to corrupt us. We are stronger than them.

They tried. And they failed.

And yet most people are so much better than that and it happens not that way. Some people do just stay good, stay beautiful, in the face of an ugly world.

The endless circle of life stumbles on. All it takes is one of us, one person to be brave and try to break the cycle of abuse and treat people better than they have been treated by people.

I’m trying to be that person. I’m trying to change the world.

I’m trying to look beyond someone’s gender as a defining part of their personality and see the person underneath. But I can’t help it. Women are still my target. I am programmed to breed. To replicate like a virus. To set up franchise.

I can’t help but notice her tone as she talked of other men. She seemed sad. Not now, but sad for what could’ve been, yet was not, could never be. How could something that once burned so bright, been so beautiful, suddenly be perverted and ugly?

How could someone stub cigarettes out on her arm?

How could someone punch her so hard that her nose had to be reset?

How could someone do that and look himself in the face with anything approaching pride?

Maybe because women are objects to be treated, mistreated, used, and abused. Maybe because some women are cruel, or stupid. Maybe because some men are cruel and stupid too. Maybe there are no answers.

Maybe because he’s a fucking idiot who needs to learn a lesson.

We are strong because we have to carry the weakness of others. We are proud because we know that the values that others lack, we have. The problem with that strength is that we carry the others because they cannot carry themselves. We become strong by necessity.

We never wanted to be that way. But its all part of Generation Fucked. The one that walks out on things and lets someone else pick up the pieces.

Her life was in pieces. Her home was her prison. Her lover was her torturer.

She never explained the large scar on her forearm, the scar that looked like a chemical burn. I never asked. I didn’t fucking need to. It’s nothing something you should ask. Not something you want to know about. Not something you even want to admit happened. A reminder of a life you want to forget. Like the stain of an old tattoo.

It was the one thing, the one chink in her beauty. Like Marilyn Monroe’s mole, it accentuated the rest of her, because you had beauty ruined by the beast.

He already had a name in my mind. Not a name, like Steve, or John. He was just The Beast. An animal trapped in a man’s body. One that did a remarkable, convincing impersonation of a human being, but whose morals were so far removed from any form of empathy or reason that the only connection he had to a human being was purely physical.

Of course, the easiest way to reduce any emotional connection is to dehumanise the victim. The Jews became Der Juden, became animals with hooked noses. Became some form of vermin it was acceptable to destroy as one would an infestation of insects.

So although he had a name, a name she had once cried in the throes of passion, a name that once was love for her, and now was a ghost of a life past, a life that should never have been. I was never to know that name. And I never wanted to know it. I never even wanted to know that he had ever been.

He was far away now. In prison. She’d changed her name, changed her hair, changed her town, changed her friends. Trust is a weapon and it had been used against her. Never again. Sometimes you know you are a person living the wrong life, as if somehow your life has been transported brick-by-brick to an alien land that was nothing to do with you - and you must change everything about your life in order to survive. Survival is what it’s all about. That is what her life became about. Distance. Distance from her past. As much as distance as she could put between them was still not quite enough.

Even a lifetime away is not far enough,

I couldn’t relate to this. A person with a moral centre so far away from mine – an inhabitant of the same physical space, the same world, the same upbringing – who could be so morally removed from empathy, understanding. So cruel to someone else. Instead of people, they saw victims. Instead of a world, they saw treasure to be ransacked and vandalised for their own amusement.

What was it? Every man destroys the things he loves. Or everyone loves the thing they destroy. Some men just loved to destroy because they love themselves more than anyone or anything else.

We’d reached a plateau. It was only our second date and she’d confessed to me her darkest secret. Not majorly. She’d hinted at it, offered just enough information to explain yet dissuade further investigation. It was a closed door. It was the past. I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to know more.

Speaking in detached fashion, it was almost as if she was talking about another person. In some respects she was – another person, another lifetime. In a different city, a different name, different hopes, and dreams.

But here she has been strong. She had broken through. She had survived. She had built a better life.

I wanted to be part of that life.

23:

2006-01-01T07:32:00.000Z

The people with nothing to lose are the most dangerous people in the world. They have nothing they are afraid of. It’s like negotiating with a kamikaze. They win : you lose.

Mankind is a kamikaze race. We’re trying to destroy the earth as fast as we can in an act of collective psychosis. Consuming every last scrap of everything in a frantic race to leave nothing left for our ancestors.

That’s why I don’t want to bring children into this world. What will the world look like in fifty years time? Will there even be one?

We won’t be wearing silver suits or working on the moon. We’ll be doing the same old things. Commuting to work on ancient trains. Scraping by in threadbare rooms rented from unscrupulous billionaires. Eating Frankenstein food and Soylent Green.

People won’t meet anymore. We’ll all be in Cocoons. We’ll only leave the house for face to face meetings that are unavoidable and for sexual recreation. We’ll be scared to touch people. Bacteria will be the next epidemic. Our stomachs weakened by the impurities of Frankenfood, we will be allergic to anything.

There will be a time when the oil will dry up. The food will dry. And the power will thin until there is none. As the fridges warm. As the world shrinks. As the only light is that of candles, the only sound that of insects. As mankind becomes a dinosaur, wiped out by something they could never predict. As our ancestors, a world of insects, lock madibles and talk in clicks about our extinction in incrediulous tones.

They did what? They wiped themsleves out arguing about something they call God? No wonder those dumbfucks didn’t make it, the insects click.

Mankind could be wiped out by the common cold. We’ll become a nation of hypochondriacs. Loaded up on a psychedelic combination of drugs just to survive. It’ll be the modern addiction. Instead of crack, it’ll be Ultrapanadol. Instead of amphetamine-sulphate, GBH, or Rohypynol we’ll be addicted to Acicclovir or Ieophotomene. Whatever that is.

That’s why I don’t want to bring children in this world. There are too many children anyway. The world population expands by a million a day.

Mankind is a cancer. A virus with shoes.

But when I look at her, I start to change my mind. Maybe more people like her will make the world a better place.

25 :

2006-01-01T07:31:00.001Z

Work was routine. Always has been, always will be. I am, like everyone else these days, now that the manufacturing industry has largely been outsourced and the service industry relegated to those who still live with their parents, a desk jockey. King of all my pedestal can capture. King of all I survey, which is just a screen, a plank of wood, a two or three drawer cabinet, and nothing more.

I hang up my jacket, steer my desk around me, and boot up my PC. After an indeterminable age and another warning message from the corporation that all my activities may be audited and monitored, to ensure I am not designing nuclear weapons behind my desk, I enter my log in. I am not a name, I am a number, an ID card, a nonsensical password “hunjezbon”, a role, a team player, a neighbour, a cipher, a happy fucking consumer.

I am all these things but most of the time I forget I am anything except a mouth that talks, a hand that moves, a body that works, a stomach that needs, a person that owes. I am a wallet. And so the email, and voicemail, and snail-mail, and anything else I might need to respond to, anything else that may require my no doubt essential attention. I am all that stands between mankind and certain destruction. More of which later.

I don’t want to be uncovered. I want to get through life like a spy : unnoticed, my contempt for this world I despise hidden, a quiet life, a handshake, and carbon monoxide. This is my game plan. Remain unnoticed.

Despite all this, I, like all others, attempt to conform, to fit in. My life shaved and poured into a suit, a uniform, an image I am not. Hair regulated. The cut of the jacket correct. The biting of the tongue when necessary. The tolerating of powerful idiots.

It’s a game. It’s a race. There can only be one winner, and despite all other things, I am not one of those. If I can fool people into thinking that I am all the things I appear to be, that is, professional, competent, strong, well-balanced, maybe then I can climb the corporate ladder high enough to see the wreckage that we have spawned.

I’m a faker. I bluff my way through life, awaiting the great unmasking.

They say that procrastination is the thief of time. But we all know, work is the thief of time. And there is never enough time.

Work is able to stretch or squash time in infinite ways. Certain people have to stretch and expand seemingly tiny responsibilities into full time posts. Like a vacuum the time is filled by how much – or little – work there is. It’s an art learning how to appear busy when not actually achieving or doing anything – how to increase a minor act of deliberation into brow furrowing, vitally important concentration. I once spent an afternoon procrastinating the meaning of a single word in an e-mail. Work and time became elastic.

Or vice versa. Some people have so much responsibility, so much to do, that it becomes a sysyphusian task to overcome the state. Endlessly one pushes a rock up the hill, to push it down the hill, to push it back up. Either way, the effort or lack thereof, is normally unnoticed by those who can influence it. We are all slaves. Trapped in routine. We run in circles and wonder why we get nowhere.

Work is a control mechanism. Overwork or underwork, is deliberately controlled to influence behaviour. In Japan, the ancient art of Constructive Dismissal is another weapon. A common business practice of reducing a worker’s workload to nil - they leave of their own accord. Career suicide. And once, after years of corporate-controlled boredom, after hours and years of underutilised employment, there was one they had to push. Who would not jump. Fired. Others are overworked to leave.

Either your manager sees you as someone who is either overworked or underworked. Your desk says more than your mouth ever does. A messy desk of papers cannot meet their deadlines. An empty desk is an underworked desk. It’s not how good you are at your work. It’s how well they think you can fit in with their safe little Status Quo.

A good consumer. A happy worker. A drone making money for the fold. You pay us. We buy things. The money goes back into the economy. Profit. That is simple economics.

Those who’ve had a good idea – even just once – can make it last their lifetime. The man who invented the Post-It note? A simple, easy idea – to stick adhesive onto paper – and able to dine out on it for the rest of his life. His working day is probably expanded into a series of concentrated daydreaming, surfing the Internet, and living off his few seconds of inspiration. His manager probably will never even notice is work productivity is minimal. In fact, his manager probably encourages him to write bad novels on corporate time.

At any one time in any organisation, approximately 0.3% of the workforce have a second rate corporate novel locked somewhere in their profiles. IT Managers enjoy reading them. Thank God for the Internet though – the less people writing drivel and absorbed in conspiracy trivia, the better. Everybody’s writing novels nobody else will read. The laptop turned us all from readers on the morning train, to writers, trying to type our way to glory. Trying to convert our rented dreams into bestselling slices of printed immortality.

There are different ways of doing this. Typing bad novels, ill thought emails, or just working hard. Today, like any other day was a mixture of boredom, stress, and confusion.

Something was different when I entered the office. The air crackled. Something other than electricity. Something had changed. Something big, so big that it couldn’t be seen, or even comprehended. Something like, when you stand on the face of the earth, you have no idea that’s it round. It just looks flat. It’s so big that you can’t really comprehend the true size.

Maybe they knew that last night I, the eternal cynic, made love for the first time in ten months and five days.

24 :

2006-01-01T07:31:00.000Z

Her hair smells of strawberries.

Every woman’s hair smells different. It’s as individual a smell as the musky tang of her cunt.

After she had left I’d be victim to an intense craving. A desire stronger than anything whenever that smell haunted me. Sometimes I’d be stood in the kitchen and a vague trace of it would come back.

I was a victim anyway. A victim of her. A victim of cruelty. But a victim also of loneliness. A victim of desire.

Instantly if I closed my eyes, she’d be there in the same room as me again. It doesn’t matter how long it had been. Years sometimes. When I was a different person, living a different life. But it only took one moment, one odour, to bring it all back.

It came at the strangest times. Sitting at work. Walking past girls in supermarkets. The brush of bodies against each other in Woolworths. Suddenly I’d be as hard as a rock.

I’d be 19 again. I wouldn’t be a thirty something trying to pick a path through debt to the future. Improvising his way to a future.

Her smell was unique. No-one else in the world had it. And yet, it was just a combination of shampoos and conditioners from the High Street. And that’s why I had a strange compulsion when walking past a girl in the frozen food section, to curl my arms around her and nuzzle her neck the way that Samantha used to like me doing.

Helen’s hair was a new thing for me to get used to. A new smell. A new style. It was difficult. It was what I wanted, but difficult. Something new. Something different. Something I was scared of.

Wasn’t that just really fucking weird?

Intimacy is a weapon. I was scared of being hurt. I breathed deeply in her hair when it was freshly washed. It smelt like strawberries.

All of us grasp for hope. In our lovelessness, our greyness, our boredom, we hope for more. We grasp at straws. We hope for more.

More than this. More than life. More of a life worth living, of a life where one experiences what it is like to be alive, not merely surviving.

With her, I felt a glimpse of that life. I felt the heat in the sunshine, not the cold of the wind. I felt that the whole was more than the sum of the parts.

I wanted to make love again. I wanted not just to make the physical act, but to build love, create love, make love, out of a world where there was no love. To fill the world with joy, with optimism, with something more than the void there was before. Make the whole of our lives more than the sum of the parts : for there to no longe rbe merely a me or a you, but an us, a love.

To not fill the world with love where one can is almost a moral crime. To not bring happiness into the world where there is so little of it seems, to me to be wrong. We can make love, make happiness, so easily. All we need is someone to react against. In the same way as Styrofoam is a neutral ingredient, all you need to do is mix it with 1/8th gasoline oil to make napalm.

All a fire needs is a spark. All love needs is a kiss. All I need is something more.

I was really very nervous on our fourth date. It was a Friday evening. Deliberate even, making it a Friday. I took her to see a film. We sat in the darkness. Our hands moved within each others. I studied her when she wasn’t looking. When she was engrossed in the film.

The choice of film can make all the difference. I wasn’t about to take her to some skin flick like Robert DeNiro. I chose something funny, literate, romantic, and yet exciting. A difficult combination. Especially as the majority of films on the cinema are Hollywood shit – mass produced rubbish to gather money and advertise toys.

Afterwards, we came out squinting into the harsh light of an early summer evening. Like an animal brought to air after weeks underground, the light hurt our corneas. Conversation was small – her arm crooked inside mine, her head tilted into my mouth, and we debated the meaning of the film. What did you think of it? Ah, it was alright. I liked the bit when…. Really? Hmm. I thought the effects were a bit shit.

This is, of course, the best part of seeing any film. The talking afterwards. The discussion. The debate. She was my intellectual equal – able to see the film in a similar but different light to myself. Offering alternative interpretations of events and imagery. As I said, reality is only the hallucination of the majority. Shivering in the cold as the wind from outside came through the lobby doors as the huddled masses braved the elements.

We exited the airlock of the cinema into the cold. She shivered, and I wrapped my coat around her. The cinema was not far from her flat, her rented, hired room in the outskirts of the Urbanopolis, where she shared with a girl she went to school with and one she didn’t really know. She must have left her old relationship in a hurry. She must have left behind her clothes, her furniture, her hopes, her dreams, to escape him when the abuse had got too much.

Some people externalise themselves. Some people abuse others and claim that they are the ones that have been abused. The circle of abuse goes on.

But she? She was a victim. I wanted to repair that fear. I wanted to heal those scars.

I wanted to make her my lover. And in slow steps, we were becoming so much more than friends. Inside her hurt soul was a trusting, loving girl, wanting to get out. And I wanted inside there, inside that beautiful soul.

Late at night, we went up the steps of her flat, she unlocked the door, and she spirited me past the two girls, both of whom were smoking in front of the television. They muttered something and returned to the bottle of wine they were nursing. It was, after all, the end of the month, and there was too much month at the end of their money. Sadly, this was not some chickflick cliché. This flat was the last resort of the twenty something spinster. It smelt…. Unloved.

She hung up my coat and her leather jacket, before offering me a drink from the kitchen. Under the striplight, the harsh exposed neon set in the ceiling, I could see every flaw in her skin, every crinkle in her white shirt, every strand of her sweet hair. The white outline of stray, soft keratin cells glinting against the 60watt bulb.

I took her offer of a drink – a flaky, bitty pure fruit juice.

She didn’t offer for us to sit in the living room. There was no point. I would end up being mentally examined by the two girls. They would sit there stuffing me full of passive nicotine distracting me from Helen and her hypnotic eyes. I would be grilled. Questioned. Interrogated. I could do without that bullshit.

Is this the man I became? Sat in a strange house, and far far too late to get home safely, surrounded by people I didn‘t know, hoping for some form of salvation. Maybe I could find it inside someone else, because salvation, happiness, was not inside me. Apparently so.

In her room, a cramped, harshly lit box, we sat. And talked. She sat cross legged on the bed, her back against the wall, the flesh of her legs glinting in the light of a overhead lamp made by a leading Scandanavian company.

The time was growing short. The unspoken rule made it clear what the future held. But first, we would talk. We would talk of anything, of everything, Of all the things in the world. Except the fact that as surely as night follows day, as surely as sunrise follows sunset, we would fuck. Except it wasn’t fucking, it wasn’t sex, it was something else… something more that that something that wasn’t quite love. But it could be.

It feels weird to talk about the woman I could love in such base terms. There’s more to us than that – there’s something beyond the meeting of flesh. The meeting of the flesh is a connection, a way of achieving some deeper intimacy.

Sometimes the only connection is a mutual fear of loneliness. That’s not enough for any relationship to last. Making love should be the ultimate expression of trust and affection between two people. Not a weapon. Not a leisure option to stave off boredom, shave off moments of time.

There’s more to us than fucking. More to us than making love. More to us than just flesh grinding against flesh, trying to fuck our way out of the grim palette that life gives us.

To Helen, making love was more than just physical, it was metaphysical. Beyond flesh. True lovemaking only came from a mental connection – the place where two souls meet made real through the body.

Yes, I’ve fucked people. But its not the same – its just an imitation of love – a Xerox, a photocopy, a ghost of what love could be. Physicality without the spirit.

I could see her feet. I wanted to kiss those. But patience is a virtue. And I knew I must wait and let it mature.

Careful. Careful. Don’t say the wrong thing. Don’t say anything that may possibly stop this. I need this. I need this the way a fish needs water, the way humans need oxygen, the way a junkie needs a hit.

Between us there would shortly be the connection. Two souls in one form, with the blinding white aura pouring forth from our souls, into each other, from each other, of each other.

With talk like that I was starting to think that perhaps I’d drunk a little too much in the pub earlier.

In the meantime, I had to talk with her for just long enough to convince her that I was worthy of her. I knew I was, but did she?

We edged closer on the bed. She was tired. It was after all, after midnight. And I was in danger of turning into a pumpkin at this late hour. Slumped under the half-light, she spoke of her youth. Not of the tedious, sweaty fumblings. Not of the abusive shadow that hovered over her. But of her hopes, of her dreams. Of how life has cheated us, but despite it all, we believe, we hope, we strive for love. For the better things life keeps just around the corner from all of us. Of how she had wanted to a poet or an artist, or a musician, or something, anything more than she feared she would be.

Her lips taste like heaven.

27 :

2006-01-01T07:29:00.000Z

Venus is the goddess of love. There are Gods for everything. Tedia, the goddess of boredom, for example. Agonia, the goddess of pain. And Cocoa, the prosaically named goddess of chocolate.

One day I hope to take Helen to Venice. The city named after the goddess of love. In time. Hopefully.

I shouldn’t hope too much. I shouldn’t want to show her everything. I shouldn’t dream my life away on possible futures that will never arrive. Everytime I did it before, my high hopes were scattered to the wind.

Ask for nothing, and that’s exactly what I’ll get. Hallelujah. I have seen the light. A pessimist is never disappointed.

But us? We were brought together for a reason. The same reason others were torn apart. The same reason that all things happen. Because power is able to be exercised. Because power is there to be used. because life happens. It is not cruel - it doesn’t care if you’re there or not. It just carries on irrespective of you. If something bad happens to you, it is inconsequential. One death is a tragedy. A million a statistic.

Because the Gods made decisions to squeeze our lives down set paths. Like lab rats, we’re an experiment, all of us. We run around down corridors, following set destinations, taking choices (or what appear to be choices), responding to stimuli.

Godzilla. Godzuki. Typhoons. Hurricanes. Kisses from strangers. Being randomly abandoned. We twitch when poked. Our job is to react. A reflex. In loneliness the reflex is to love. In poverty the reflex is to seek security. In life our reflex is always to seek that which we have not.

Somewhere in another dimension, God and the Devil made a bet. God would only grant to heaven those whose behaviour showed virtue. And the Devil believed that Man was, by his very nature, corruptable, weak. And it was time to prove it.

And so, goaded on by the Devil, God tormented a man, with a life of misfortune. A life of debt and penury, a life of servitude to repetitive tasks and menial comforts. I felt that sometimes, just sometimes, he tormented me.

These are our lives. How we live them define our salvation.

God’s fucking with me.

What I didn’t know is that this love was just a chink of light in the night before the cloud fell. What I didn’t know was that God and The Devil were fucking with me. Rolling marbles around on the floor of Heaven in Boredom, closing doors in my face to see my reaction.

And of course, those who are made powerless by the corruption and cruelty of others have no choice. You can’t walk away. You can’t turn your back on God - for when he is everywhere, all-seeing, and all-powerful. And he can spite you in any way he sees fit, at any time, for any reason, yet dare not show his face when injustice raises its ugly head.

The Devil tossed a coin. God shrugged and thought better of influencing which side he landed on. It was about time he had some fun anyway. And to test the strength and faith of a flawed human being.

And with that, my life started to fall to pieces. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know it for a long time.

28 :

2006-01-01T07:28:00.000Z

You can’t keep a secret forever. Whatever you do, wherever you go, someone somewhere will always know your dirty secret. That’s my secret. For so long I got used to not discussing my life so my life became a secret.

Sleeping with someone again, for the first time in a long time, is one of the most alien experiences you can have. This was my big secret. One that the few knew and only the few would ever know.

Not just the sexual aspect of things, but the act of sleeping itself. The act of lying next to someone. The act of closing your eyes and voluntarily drifting into unconsciousness. The act of laying yourself open to someone else, defenceless. Knowing that if someone were so inclined you could wake up with a gun in your mouth, and that would be the last sight you see. The act of moving together with someone, where two bodies move to become one whole in two parts.

To sleep, just sleep with someone, is the first act of trust.

The way bodies move together, the space they occupy in the bed, the shapes they make. All this has to be relearned. All this has to, silently, instinctually, be discovered.

She could reach over and kill me in her sleep. I don’t know how, or why, my imagination had failed me, but she could. Should she so want.

I was no longer blind. I was no longer lost. I knew the geography of love. I knew the map. The contours. The rise of her breasts, the curve of her flesh.

No longer would I look at strangers and wonder. What did they have that I did not, apart from her? They had nothing I wanted anymore.

I knew the way her body moved - the curve of each muscle, the movement of each sinew. The way her fingers curled inside mine as the day became night.

The warmth of her flesh. The touch of my arm as I wrap around her in the darkness. The heat of her body that lights up the void on an infrared camera. The rise and fall of her chest as dreams soothe her shallow-breathing. The warmth of her feet as they wrap around mine in the blanket of dreams.

I got used to sleeping on my own in a fractured sort of way. Now I have to get used to sleeping with company. I didn’t sleep last night - I was sharing my bed with an alien presence. But I wanted to. And somehow, sleep seemed easier than ever. Sleep was no longer a foreign land. No longer an adversary to be battled into submission until I could possess it, until I could rape sleep.

It was what I wanted. This was the man I wanted to be. A continent of united states. Not an island. A lover. Not the lover who admires from afar yet is unable to connect with the object of desire. But a warm, flesh-real, actual lover. A man who loves and is loved back. A man who can change the course of our lives with the power of a single, lingering kiss. A man who can bring new life into the world with his partner, and who can change history with the strength of our love.

That’s the man I wanted to be - a lover.

29 :

2006-01-01T07:27:00.000Z

I woke with a start. I always wake with a start. Often I try to pull myself out of bed, but it fails. I am not awake then : merely I am conscious. In some way aware.

There’s no easy way to wake up. You can try and hide, try and remain submerged in a dream world, but you always get pulled back up.

Gravity works. It always pushes you down. It always pulls you up to the surface. And those first moments of consciousness always feel to me like The Bends. A world bent out of shape, being forced to suddenly submit to a new, ugly pressure.

I woke in a strange bed. That’s why I woke with a start. I didn’t recognise this place. From the dim amounts I can see I can make out a television, a dresser, a bedside table, a make-up cabinet. A small CD player. An alien world made of familiar objects. And yet something I could never find in myself to recognise as less than threatening. Not yet.

The trick is not to panic. I hear someone’s heavy breathing.

I remember. I couldn’t forget - but for a short while, the first few disorientated seconds - I had no memory. The amnesiac Generation. The one that walks out of things and pretends that nothing ever happened, that there was no history beyond last nights TV and Star Wars.

This is her room. I turn around, and see the dim outline of her sleeping form. Her hair has fallen halfway down her back, the sheet covering our bodies. I tried not to move to let the draught into her and chill her. Her hair was the first thing I saw. The outline of her back, the softness of her skin.

We made love last night. I’d forgotten what it felt like to actually make love. I’d forgotten what it felt like to go to bed with someone and do something other than empty, soulless, animal fucking. To do something other than meet strangers, and to be fucking a stranger. What it felt like to do something that felt like it meant something, as opposed to two people wasting time and devaluing the most sacred gift that you give someone, turning love into some kind of sport.

What it felt like to be with someone who could love you, who liked you, who gave the gift of their body as an act of affection, not an act of boredom and ritual.

Afterwards we slept.

When you’re asleep - truly asleep, not just stealing moments from a world of stress and employment - time is elastic. An hour passes in the blink of an eye. And so, between my eyes closing and them opening, hours had passed.

I felt newborn. As if an old life has ended, a new one had begun.

The next morning we slumbered in her room. Her flatmates were oblivious to the world in the surrounding rooms, unconscious, having stayed up too late watching bad television and smoking.

The world was hazy. I slept like a child in the womb; warm, protected, ignorant of the darkness. Thin shafts of light cut through the darkness, through the cracks in the curtains. I didn’t see them.

Consciousness came in slow, lonely steps. Mumbles and odd words. It didn’t feel right holding her. It didn’t feel right not holding her. I had been out of practice.I had forgotten what it was like to love.

For a short while, for a golden hour, a golden day, a week, months, years maybe, our love would blossom in the honeymoon period. A flower.

Everything was right. Sunlight brought in new colours. All those who didn’t love were deprived, living in madness. If only they had someone else, some chemical they could react to. Something that they could mix with, some walking chemistry that for a while could glow, and then maybe explode, leaving nothing but damage. Every relationship of mine had failed : every one of the others. With that high a failure rate, the future doesn’t look good.

The future never looks good. Dry oil wells. Recending hairlines and icecaps. Expanding waistlines and debt payments. But maybe, just maybe. Maybe every little thing is gonna be alright. Like the song. Maybe it wouldn’t be. But if it wasn’t, then the hope of love, the false dawn that could cure all ills, would not blind them.

Love is just a different set of problems. But a set of problems I would always accept.

In the morning she stirred gently. Mornings are always the worst. Where you have to face the wreckage of the night before, the consequences. Waking up next to a strangers face.

This would not be a regret, but a glorious moment of love.

Be cool, take it all in your stride. Act like you’ve done this before. She fumbled in the bed, rolled over, and wrapped an arm over me, dimly coming to consciousness. This is not some disastrous mistake. Unlike so many other mornings. Today could be beautiful.

She didn’t recognise me either. It’s the way of the world. Instead, like me, in the haze of halfsleep, she rolled over and embraced me. Her eyes blinked open slowly, her lips blew me a kiss. Through half-opened eyes she spoke.

“Morning, darling” she said, half slurred in the haze of consciousness.

“Urrrr” I replied. Eloquence was always my strong point. I said the first thing I could think of, something useless. “Morning”

I blew a kiss back. How cheesy. I am King Cheese. Master Of Cheeses. Cheesus of Nazareth.

She smiled, looked over at the cabinet. Half yawned, half moaned. Through habit, her hand reached over, looking for a small piece of plastic with a red LED display that read four numbers.

It was a good thing it was a Saturday morning. She ruffled my hair, called me by my secret name, the name that lovers share between themselves that means nothing to anyone else, but a word that is changed forever. A simple obvious word.

We all have two names. One for the two aspects of our personality - the lover, and the unloved. The light and the dark. The duke and the messiah. The man I was, the name I was born with, and the scruffy space pirate, Han Solo. The man I would never be, for the love that that secret name belonged to was no more. Another secret name. A new name.

I smiled. We were already building our mythology. We were already carving out our history together. We were already building a new future.

Instinctively my arm snaked out behind her, my fingers stroking her back. I was still stealing glances at her body, the curves and the contours. Even after seeing your twenty third naked body, the novelty never wears off.

I took her offer of a cup of tea, and wondered when exactly it was going to be made. I couldn’t take my eyes off hers. I held her gaze for five, maybe six seconds. She leaned forward to whisper something silly to me.

And I stole a kiss from her lips.

Her face crumpled in a smile, as the sunlight caught her arms, and the tell-tale slashes of healed skin on her forearm glinted. As did the mysterious scar.

I tried to put that thought out of my mind. That was a different life. A different name.

A different girl in the same body.

What else to do on a Saturday Morning with a new lover, except stay in bed, sleep-in, talk the talk that lovers talk, and help her with the shopping and a romantic lunch?

I had no better ideas.

30 :

2006-01-01T07:26:00.000Z

Over the weeks, slowly we fell in love. We didn’t want to. We tried not to. We were both shy. Scared. Fearful of letting down the defences. We feared the greatest thing we could ever have in our lives, because it could also be the worst thing in our lives. And we knew not which way the chips would fall. A chance that the dice could fall either way. Risk was always part of the game.

But there were times we built together. Futures. Mythologies. The names of future children were mentally formed in our minds, but these thoughts went unspoken for the fear.

Fear of everything falling apart, as often it does as soon as it is vocalised.

We drove down to the sea one summer day. It was the best day of my life. As far as summer days went it was disappointing. Cold, biting wind and occasional sleet.

But it was when I was happiest.

Happiness can last only a second, and then there’s the moment when you realise that you are happy, then that bubble bursts. I’d forgotten I was happy, because knowing that you are happy means the knowledge is infected by the acknowledgement of unhappiness. There is no love without hate. No joy without pain. No night without day. No fish without chips.

We parked on the seafront, next to a pebbled beach and some bungalows. Next to some beachside huts and a small, abandoned, pier. A hulk of steel, abandoned, burnt out, falling slowly into the sea. Askeleton of rust. We had to drive for a mile before we found a parking space. Sandwiched between an old, yellow rusted Volkswagen and a dull blue estate.

Space. We always need more space. Its what people need. There’s the right amount of space. Rooms are always too small. Overdrafts are always too big. Sleep is always too short. We’re always trying to find the right amount of space.

We explored the alleys and the lanes. We explored the amusement arcades. She sat bored eating vinegar-drowned chips or drinking £5 chocolate milkshakes whilst I looked at obscure CD’s in back rooms, and she dragged me round bookshops to gawp at faded paperbacks and cool kitsch clothes. She opened up art books and showed me vast reproductions of works I’d never seen before.

It was beautiful. And what was most beautiful was the thought that maybe this wasn’t temporary. Maybe this wasn’’t some passing fad. Maybe this might last.

We laughed into the rain and sat The Smallest Pub In The World for an hour. 6 seats and a bar. It was quite literally, a 14 foot alley, with a toilet and a door. We sheltered from the claws of wind in its doorways before running, laughing, falling over.

The world opened up before me in a way I had never seen before. It was as if life had suddenly become widescreen : I could see the big picture. She showed me the strange statues sat on the beachfront : the 10 foot marble doughnut, the black monolith with the precise 1:4:9 dimensions. I was tempted to bang rocks together and watch the moon.

We tiptoed in the sea when the sun came out from the clouds in the late afternoon. We stumbled on the pebbles and I picked one out at random and presented it to her as if it were a jewel of the highest carat.

I fell to one knee and offered her a jellied sweet as a wedding ring. I was naturally delighted that my offer of such was graciously accepted by my princess.

Snapshots from these moments still sit on her shelf now. In frames. The two of us eating candyfloss at the amusement arcade, our hair windswept like a rock video. An out of focus multi-coloured sugar jelly sweet on her wedding finger. My hand stretched out, focus set to 1 metre, because that’s the nearest we could get and my hand didn’t quite reach that far.

We chose the tackiest thing we could find, bought it, and framed it as high art.

A postcard of a traditional British seaside scene. A man with a hankerchief on his head, his moustache distended like a Dali, an expression of shock on his face as his fat, bloated wife admires the view, and he admires a view of his own. Saucy Seaside Smut.

With that kind of repression, I’m stunned anyone in this nation ever has sex. The English aren’t concieved. We’re manufactured in a factory outside Hull, where everyone is on temporary 3 month contracts. A country of shy glances, innuendo, and unspoken agreements.

The world, with its danger, its absurdity, its stupidity, became an amusement park of the ridiculous.

Of course it wasn’t perfect. Nothing can be. Even the best day of your life comes to an end. As the angry pancake of the sun set, as we drove back, to my rented flat, to my hired hovel, a strange sense came over me. Things could never really be the same again could they? With every day hat passes, you can never go back. You can never exercise the “System restore” option and bring things back the way they were yesterday. Or last year. Or three years ago.

She parked in the garage underneath my flat whilst I opened up upstairs. In the traditional manner, I’d brewed and presented a cup of tea for her (just the way she liked it) before she’d got the lift to the fourth floor. She opened the door I’d conveniently left open, and her smile exploded.

I learnt how to drink tea for her. Scented, spiced tea : Jasmine-flavoured magic in a cup. I became a magician and learnt how to conjour up

This has become routine. Love had almost felt... normal. The way things should be. Not some novelty to be cherished, as if it were a flower that blooms for a handful of hours every decade. We had all the time in the world.

Of course, these things never last, but we hope. It’s almost as if, by recognising that everything can die, that somehow our love begins to die from the moment it was born. But we hope for more. We hope for the lie drip-fed by television, of the true, sickening, perfect love.

It doesn’t exist. But this was a very convincing imitation.

Of course, as she slipped away the next day, to get ready for the inevitable work on the Monday morning, the dream fell, but I had something more.

About 40 minutes later, the phone rang. She was crying.

31 :

2006-01-01T07:25:00.000Z

The sound of someone crying is one of the cruellest sounds in the world.

The sound of it is the worst thing in the world. It’s a statement. A finger jabbing at you, exposing your impotence. You can’t control things anymore. Things are beyond influence. Whatever happens now, you’re strapped in, and you’ve got to follow the ride until it stops. You can’t make it better. You can’t even do anything that comes even near making it better.

The sobbing gulps of heartbreak, the stolen, short asthmatic breaths are nothing but a cruel poke at your pride.

Jesus, I wanted to hold her. I wanted to do something, anything. Even if it wouldn’t improve things, the very act of doing something would make me feel better.

She wasn’t breathing. Just short, scared, panicky gasps. I was worried.

What the fuck had happened?

“Listen, listen, close your eyes, take deep breaths, calm calm.” I tried to reassure her. Everything would be alright. I was here. I would look after her. She was safe.

“But I’m not safe.” she said.

“What do you mean you’re not safe?” Think, boy, think. “I’m here. Nothing bad will happen to you. I’m here for you.”

Words came out like bullets. Faster than I could think.

Already we were so deep into each other, and it hadn’t been long since we met. Only three weeks. Maybe too deep. Crisis brings people together in our times of doubt. It accelerates relationships in their early stages. When you’re just getting to know each other there is a reticence to get that involved, because a relationship is a journey, and when you’re just starting off, its not that far to turn back.

This would bring us together, telescope our love.

And then we lost cabin pressure.

“He’s found me.”

Outside there is silence. More than silence : a complete lack of any sound. The wind, the birds, the cars and plans and trains have all ceased to exist. The air has been sucked out of things. Life won’t be the same again.

“What?”

Jesus, I’m fucking stupid. I say the dumbest things sometimes. But this is shock. In shock you become a retard - able only to react in the broadest brushstrokes, the stupidest reflex actions.

I knew what she meant. I knew who she was talking about. But how?

“He’s found me. You know.” Gasp. Breaths. A Sob. “Him.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, I mean, who the fuck else were you talking about? But that matters not.

“How the fuck....? Are you Okay?”

Of course she wasn’t Okay. But what do you say? “How fucked up are you then?” of course not.

Don’t lose it. Be cool. Keep your shit together.

“I’m safe. He’s not here. But he has been. He left a rose and a note.”

A black flower. Five small words, written in that distinctive scrawl. Words sprawled apart, yet together, letters that looked somehow wrong on the page. And breaths that punctuated the words like punches.

“Til Death Us Do Part.”

She never told me what those five words were. I’m sure that if she wanted to tell me, she would’ve. I was biding my time. I would find out. Everything unfolds, unravels in time. All secrets become known. All mistakes become clear. Everything becomes clear.

Time is the greatest healer – every wound heals in time. But some wounds always leave a scar. Always on the arms. Always on the noses. Always on my mind.

She was calming down slightly. But not much. The kind of exhausted, resigned calm. The kind that comes only from not being able to be scared anymore. But this was fear. Raw, animal fear. Naked, scared, alone in car headlights fear. Pissing-your-pants on your knees in the darkness with a gun at the back of your neck fear. The stage of exhaustion that is beyond fear.

“Ok, listen. Get your bags. Pack them. I’m coming over and you’re moving into mine now. He can’t find you there.”

I’m an emotional narcoleptic. Extreme emotions exhaust me. I just want to retreat. Hide. Run away. And sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you have no choice.

Love makes decisions the brain cannot ever explain. But this was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Anything else wasn’t an option. I had to do this. To not do that would be a disgrace as a human being. I am not a hero. Heroes are not heroes. They are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, doing the only thing they can think of.

I picked up my land line and dialled a number that was scrawled on a post-it note on the kitchen noticeboard. I gave my address and booked a cab. It would be 15 minutes. It takes 40 minutes to get there in normal traffic. 30 if you rush.

The taxi would rush. Because it needed to. This was an emergency.

This is the control tower to flight 26-02-79. Hold on. Be strong. We’re going to land this plane together. I had to bring her down. Talk her down from the height to safety. Put on the oxygen mask. Keep calm. Don’t panic. Fear is the killer. Fear kills everything.

I had 45 minutes to keep her safe. Talk her through everything. This wasn’t an evacuation. It was an emergency.

I packed my wallet, plugged my phone in to recharge so it could keep going for the next few minutes, grabbed a coat and paced up and down the room in a state of anxiety until the taxi came. I was waiting for the obnoxious stab of the taxi horn from the car park downstairs.

Heroes aren’t born : they are forged through crisis. We just respond to circumstance, and if circumstances demand that we do brave things, then brave we are, but brave we have always been.

I talked her through everything she needed to do. Pack your clothes into bags. Pick up all your bank statements and credit cards. Leave nothing that could ever be misused. Get your toothbrush. Remember socks and underwear. Remember to write a note to Charlotte and Sarah and tell them that you’re OK and will contact them.

Packing up your life in 45 minutes is near enough impossible. Something always gets left behind. But I had to try. The big problem was bags. Cardboard boxes. Things to put things in.

Shit. I forgot to pack any boxes in my hurry. We’d have to come back, but the most important thing was getting out alive. That’s why I kept her on the phone for every second of my journey. If I couldn’t hear her I had no way of knowing she was safe.

Normally she was really smart. Not calculating, but clever. Always knew the right thing to do. I was (I admit, I know, it sounds crap), a little in awe of her.

This was the first time I’d seen even a chink in that armour. And I was scared.

32 :

2006-01-01T07:24:00.000Z

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.

34 :

2006-01-01T07:23:00.000Z

We still lived a life. I still took her to the cinema. We still dined out. She sold her car, bought another one, so that it couldn’t be traced. Eventually she changed her mobile number. But this peace didn’t last.

Peace never does. Love must have hate. Day must have night. Romeo, his Juliet. And Peace must have War.

We were at war, and we didn’t know who or where the enemy was. We were a state, in a state of constant fear of being terrorised.

The phone rang. Her looked at her mobile, which brought just the called ID “Private Number”. A business call, as these always were - no doubt from a call centre, a herd of equi-distant desks and rows. Of headsets, and idle time. Of time toilet breaks and minimum wages for struggling actors living with their parents and just-out-of-Uni McJobbing twenty somethings.

She picked it up, said “Hello?”

I wasn’t really paying attention. We were cuddled on the sofa - I was at one end, my feet tucked under her bottom, her feet tucked under mine, leaning against the headrests talking and discussing the television - a documentary about the 100 Greatest Action Films of all time. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen Aliens.

Her face went white as if she had seen a ghost. It took me a second to notice. It was only when the phone dropped into her lap with a dull thump that I even noticed something was wrong. I turned my gaze from the television and it was as if someone had died.

“Darling?” I said, questioningly. I had no choice. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. In shit and in joy. That was love.

I knew something was wrong. Wrong in the way things can only be when a phone call brings instant, unexpected doom. When the sun suddenly disappears from your life, and when what you thought could never happen, happens.

I remember coming back home from work just before my ex-wife left me, and her expression said it all. Her brother had cancer, and I’d had a bad day at work. That was the first of many nails hammered into a coffin.

She tried to mouth words, but nothing came out. Her bottom lip trembled in fear.
I picked up the phone. Society teaches us to be brave. To take problems and face them head-on. I had to do something. Be strong. Behave like someone I wasn’t - someone brave. A hero.

“Hello?” I said. I tried to assert myself, but I just came out as if I was scared. My voice went up slightly at the end of the sentence. I hated it when it did that and I couldn’t control it.

There was a voice at the other end. A man’s voice. And whoever it was he was angry.

“Who the fuck’s this?”

He sounded agitated. Bored. Almost as if I was the signal that indicated he’d reached the end of his patience. Whatever he wanted to talk about, it was something or someone that I wasn’t.

It was Him. I had no idea how I knew, I just knew. I had no idea how much of what she told me was true. I had a mental image built up of him. It wasn’t a good one. A man, tall, dark, greying, strong, unafraid. Cold. Surely someone so removed from humankind, absent from feeling, couldn’t get angry.

“Who do you think this is?”

Reflex. Bravado. A stupid thing really, but often we act without thinking and I wasn’t thinking. Despite the fact that wherever he was, it was probably miles away. But I felt as if - almost - he could reach out, down the network, and touch me. Hurt us. Hurt my girl.

Immediately I became possessive. Even though the concept of ownership of a girl was absurd, she was my girlfriend, that was the role she wanted in my life, and the role I wanted her to have in mine.

It had been a while since we’d heard anything from him. But never quite long enough.

“Are you enjoying her?”

He asked as if she was merely on loan. As if he could take her back anytime he wanted. As if he could separate us in the blink of an eye. Over my dead body.
“Listen to me,” I said.

And I was off. My veins flooded with adrenalin and fear. With pride and yet also with something more animal. Something I couldn’t even describe. Indignant anger.

How fucking dare he think he can just waltz back into a life, when he’s plainly unwanted. How fucking dare he continue to live in the past. Though that’s where he belonged, as an ancient, extinct dinosaur running out of time.

“You’re history. Your life with her is over. You will never see her again. “

He snorted. I wanted to hang up.

Helen was watching me. She was trying not to, but she was trembling slightly. I could see her fingers jumping in tiny vibrations against her legs. Her body language was tense, like a coiled, frightened, trapped snake. Maybe she knew what happened when you spoke to him in that tone of voice.

The thing she had thought for so long but never said.

But I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say, my mouth did the thinking and then it happened. Maybe because I didn’t know him I said what felt right, not what what was the right thing to say.

“No, fucko. You’re history. Your life with her is over. You -”

I hung the phone up. I looked at her. The corners of her eyes were wet with two small, nervous tears.

Just when you try to break free, just when you think you could get out, they pull you back, and you can’t get out.

What the fuck could I do? What the fuck situation was this? Why had this happened? Why us?

After all the bullshit I’ve been through, why this?

Sometimes there are no answers. Only more questions. Sometimes though, I sought not answers. But just to understand the question. Why is the smallest question there is. It has the biggest answer.

Underneath those tears lay a valley of pain. The water was the river. I looked at her, I could barely keep my eyes to look at hers. I switched the phone off. And tomorrow we were getting her a new mobile number.

“Come on Helen, we’re going away.”

I held her for what seemed like an age, what seemed like years, before the soft, silent sobs retreated to managable convulsions. Despite myself, her warmth gave me an erection.

Oh Jesus, not now, not now of all times.

As I said, I’ve spent all my life shackled to an idiot. Thinking with the little head and not the big one. Now it seems the biggest idiot in my life is not in my trousers.

I lost track of time. I didn’t know how long it was. Every second felt like an eternity. The older you get, the less precious time is : the old are in no urry to go anywhere, because they know there is one place they never want to go to. After about twenty minutes, we did what we had to. I picked up my wallet, Helen following me, went upstairs and we packed our bags. It was dark outside.

Like fugitives, we crept out in the dark, in fear, scared of what might happen. Scared that men would seize us and take us away. Frightened, scared children. That’s what we are. Despite everything else, at heart, all of us are frightened children.

We crept into her new car. Quietly, as if we were fearful of waking anyone at 9.20 on a Wednesday evening, she drove with trembling hands, and we vanished into the night, into our first evening at a hotel. Any hotel. The first one that would take us, and in cash. Now.

34 :

2006-01-01T07:22:00.000Z

Life carried on as normal. Or, as near to normal as circumstances would allow.

It’s never going to be a normal life when you might have to give up your home, your life, your friends, and walk out with thirty minutes notice. You try not to get attached to anything : not your friends, nor your lovers, nor your possessions. You are not these things. You are not what you owe. Or what you own. Or your family. Or your friends.

You. All you are is you. Soul. Spirit. Feeling. That’s what you are. We are not what we own. Or what we owe.

And even that, if you are normal, you leave behind.

I didn’t know quite how long we could live this way. How long credit cards might last. They could be traced. We had to pay cash. Change names by deed poll. Destroy records. Anything to survive.

We were thinking of moving in together anyway, the unspoken pact, a thing that couples do after a while, and maybe one day living a ‘normal life’, whatever normal is, and maybe even being happy. But it was not to be.

Trouble accelerated us. Strangers become friends through necessity. One does what one has to do to survive. When faced with a crisis, the human spirit bonds and we turn to anyone who may be able to help. Anyone.

Crisis brought us together.

She didn’t know how he got the number. Or where he was. Or what he was doing. Was he out there right now? Looking through a zoom lens at number plates. Analysing mobile phone bills obtained from private detectives. Checking credit references and wage slips. I didn’t know. Nobody knew. All we could do, all we could try to do, was try to deduce his motives, his thinking, his actions, and in some way, try to guess what he was doing. I didn’t want to second guess him. I didn’t want to get under his skin, think like he did, just to understand him. I didn’t want to understand him : I wanted to avoid him.

You can’t place yourself inside the mind of a killer, a murderer, a psychopath unless you yourself are one. Sure, one has an imagination. Sure one can try to think in the way you might think one might think, but there is no way you can think as one unless you are one. It will only ever be an imitation, a simulacra, a recreation of the real thing.

But we couldn’t think like that. She couldn’t think like him. In the way that nobody truly knows you, me, us, or who we are, she couldn’t think like him. We had to try and guess based upon what we knew, and what we knew was only betrayed by his actions and words. You can’t read minds. You can’t try to predict what’s going to happen next.

If only I was someone else. If only we had a different life. A life without clouds.

We were in the dark. Lost. Unknowing of what was going to happen next. Not knowing who the next knock at the door might belong to. Not knowing to whom the unseen eyes belong, what they see, or what they think.

The worst thing was the fact that we were now living in siege. At any time we could be observed, watched, attacked. We could never relax. Every face we see. Every person walking behind us. Everyone, everywhere. Could be a killer. Could be the last face we see.

Every day. Every minute.

And what do you do? How do you live? Is it even a life? This survival, this, where each morning alive is just another morning where I didn’t die.

You just carry on. There really isn’t any other way. Do you live in fear? Hide in a corner, waiting for the world to change, waiting for the threat to be lifted, and yet you could never see that threat, never know when it would be lifted?

Whatever situation we’re in, whatever life you live, you try to make it normal. Try to make life liveable. Instill routine and discipline and control.

That’s how you survive.

We still went out. We still made love. We still walked hand-in-hand. We still lived. But always looking over our shoulders with every second. It only takes a second. To fall in love. To lose life.

If you don’t live, you die.

That’s how we stayed alive. We lived as if we were alive. Not living in fear of dying.

Everything changed. And yet, everything stayed the same.

We still went to work. We took different routes. Found a different place to live. Worked in different offices. Changed our mobile phones. Our bank accounts. Changed everything but our names and our memories.

Found somewhere new to live. Found a new way to live. A new way to stay alive.

We went out. We carried on as normal. The victory lay in being alive. We will not stay cowed by fear. We had to be careful. Sure. One always has to be careful. One always must do as little as possible to put oneself at risk. But always, always, we lived, because we were alive.

Our love was too strong to die. Too strong to falter. But somehow too young to realise. Too young to know. Too young to understand. Our love was like a child. Too young to stand alone. All this, us, from our first kiss to this impetuous co-habitation, to this bizarre, self-imposed, fearful, fearless exile, had taken only a few months. We had built our history, our own mythology, our secret language, made of noises and gestures that are meaningless to others, yet somehow mean the world to us.

Our world was changing. We had a new flat now, made of boxes and cardboard. We had taken all our possessions, all our belongings, and strangers had boxed them and removed them, placed them back in our new life, our new world. And, in a far distant suburb, hidden from unseen eyes, we hid. We tried to carve out a new life from this wreckage. We tried to pretend we weren’t always on the run.

We were living a lie, but doesn’t everyone?

35 :

2006-01-01T07:21:00.000Z

My breath crystallised the moment it left my mouth. I was hunched down on my knees. My body wracked with bruises from where unseen boots had connected with my ribs.

It looked as if I was praying to a God made out of blood.

I spit blood out and it slopped slowly in thick lumps onto cold, wet concrete. Above me I was dimly aware of rain splashing against my hair. Hair that was thickened and matted with blood. Rain that felt like a shower, but somehow, it wasn’t the main thing on my mind. Nor the mud on my knees or the damp, heavy wetness of rain as it slipped off my coat.

In the moonlight my blood looked like a thick black pool that was growing over the ground like a weed. That was the main thing on my mind. Exactly how much blood did I have left?

I gasped and tried to catch a breath out of my mouth. It came in gulps – a haemorrage of oxygen. My bones ached. I fumbled for air. My lungs grasped for even an extra cell of air.

It does get worse, you know.

An unseen hand yanked my head up to face someone’s crotch. Yanked my head by the hair. Felt like they pulled out clumps of it from the root with the violence of the thrust. Imagine if God herself had kicked you in the balls.

Fucking fuck. You’d have to invent new words to describe how it felt. Like someone was pulling the skin off your skull. An operation without anasthetic. Every fifteen minutes someone wakes up during an operation. Every fifteen minutes they come to, paralysed, unable to open their eyes, their mouths, to move, and yet fully awake. They feel every naunce of the scalpel.

And involuntarily, I swore. FUCK!

Next thing I was aware of was the sharp, stunned sting of flesh against flesh. Someone had slapped me. And not just gently, but as hard and fast as a hand could move. My teeth flapped inside my mouth like the limp hand of a dead man moves when kicked by a victorious soldier. My fillings rattled inside their cases. I was coming undone. The inside of my mouth was torn with the outline of my teeth as they impacted against sullen, slow flesh. I drew blood again.

It tasted warm. Salty. Rich, like a milkshake. Some vague trace of bile leapt up my throat as I swallowed my own blood. I swallowed a small globule of stomach acid, bile, and vomit. Fuck. I needed a drink. I need water.

The aluminium taste of fear filled my mouth again. A nugget of acrid, hot bile came back into my mouth. It stung against the wound. A reflex. I spat it out, landed on the cold, wet concrete. It glistened on concrete. In a few minutes it would dry and be brittle, like dust.

Amazing isn’t it, the things you notice at times like these?

Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. The lengths human imagination can reach. Not quite as far as my nerve endings. I felt as if it was impossible to feel any more fucking pain. I felt as if I was having glass rammed into every pore of my skin. As if my skin was being torn apart by someone with their bare fucking hands. As if I was an experiment to see how much pain a man may take – and then see if he can take that any further. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had, and I hurt more than I ever thought I could.

It was like I was a kneeling experiment. How much pain can a man take before he blacks out? Is it sfae? IS IT SAFE?

And I was thinking this is it, this is the end, I’m going to die like this and no one will fucking know where or when or how, only that at sometime in the future someone will find me dead. MAKE IT STOP.

Maybe even death was better than this. A voice spoke. Deeper than the sea, sharp, as a hunting knife.

“Shut Up. You Dumb Fuck!”

I tried to place that voice. Who was it? I knew it, but from where?

And I knew and didn’t want to know the answer to that question at the same time.

God looked down from thousands of miles above and remained mute as I asked him why me? He never had any answers. God rolled dice and asked a question. And the Eight-Ball said ‘don’t count on it.’ The Devil smiled. He would win this bet.

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to swear you fuck? Not to spit in public?”

What do you do in this time, in this place? Our natural response is to bow and kowtow to authority – to agree with anything that might be more powerful that we are. In the hope that it will be merciful. In the hope that it will show some hitherto hidden act of kindness.

Sure, people can say they’d rather die on their feet than live on their knees. But right now I’d rather spend a thousand years in slavery to the God That Did Not Kill me than another second living on my feet in this way.

The scared. The weak. They bow to events and try and slip through it, like a reed that bends in the wind.

I am the reed, but the brittle thing that breaks before it bends. I am the scared. The weak.

But even in the smallest fire, the weakest flame, there is still a spark. A spark of resistance.

I wanted to disappear off the face of the planet. Be anywhere but here. But instead I swallowed my own puke, and choked.

“Yes, sir.”

The natural reaction. Politeness. Humility. It’s how us fucking English are trained. Please, sir, thank you.

Another slap. Another perforation of the skin inside my mouth. This time it felt colder. Harder. In the distance I could see a brick wall. A hole where a door used to be. Some cracked glass. I was inside a building. An abandoned one. I was empty. And alone.

“Good! Mummy’s little boy is learning some FUCKING MANNERS!”

Laughter. A wave of laughter that came around the several anonymous bodies around me. This fucking world, that teaches kids that other people are just things, objects to be manipulated and used in their quest to survival. One religion, one creed, amongst these evil fucks. Kill Or Be Killed.

I don’t blame video games, or violent movies, or dead rappers. I blame their own boneheaded stupidity. Ain’t no cure for being dumb.

Rain. Drip drop, drip drop, was falling onto the ground behind those steel capped boots. I wanted to see who they belonged to, so I moved my neck. I caught a glimpse of a red sheet of brick and two white pillars in shadow. Which wasn’t far.

The breath left my body faster than a soul exits the body.

Up above, the Devil smiled - I was starting to doubt the existence of God, his betting partner. Job still believed in the face of everything. But I didn’t. And that meant the Devil was winning. Evil was that which disproved our faith and crushed our belief. Not just in God, but in all good things.

What use is an omnipotent God if he never does anything, never says anything, never offers any proof of his existence? You might as well believe in the existence of the Tooth Fairy or an 80-foot Santa. An deaf, dumb and blind God that never explains isn’t even a statue. At least you can see a statue. At least you know it’s there. I don’t believe in God.

But I believe that the steel toe capped boot that just impacted my bollocks is far far too fucking real. I collapsed onto the concrete, as empty as a burst balloon. I was losing my will to live, if this is what life is. I was losing my will to anything except wanting to be somewhere – anywhere - else.

You don’t even know how much pain the body can produce until you try really hard. The scars you cannot see that run the deepest. The worst type of pain is that which cannot be healed by pill and scalpel.

Fuck. Shit.

Sure. All perception consists of synapses and electrical signals in the brain. And this could just be a blown fuse, some overloaded circuit in my brain. But it isn’t.

Was it a boot? Or was it a gun? I have no idea. But I never, never, want to feel like that again. I was gasping for breath like a diver running out of air. I felt as if I was drowning in the air, like a fish.

The room seemed to be spinning ; as if I was drunk. But I wasn’t. Sure, I’d had a drink or two earlier. But not enough to do this to me. I felt… disorientated. Disconnected from the world around me. As if I wasn’t here. That this wasn’t happening.

I was retreating inside myself to a place without sorrow, or pain, or any form of feeling. Somewhere inside me where the world could never get. As distant from the here and now as a star in the night.

But I’d never felt more sober. More alive. More aware. And it wasn’t a room. Rooms have a roof. But there was no roof. That’s why it was raining in here.

How did I get here? I remember walking home on the last tube. I remember the sound of a car driving behind me. Then pain. Something very hard, and collapsing on concrete in a back alley. A grunt, a shout, a jolt of surprise. In a half-conscious state, I remember being strung up and a something being pulled over my face. I dimly remember being bundled into the boot of a car, carried like a corpse, and shifting around in the boot. Seconds like hours. Minutes that felt like years.

I don’t remember those things anymore. At the time I knew it was happening, but it felt like a dream. Like it wasn’t really happening. It faded like a dream. I can only piece it together. I can’t imagine how else it could’ve happened.I presume I’d been knocked cold. I didn’t feel my body collapsing onto the concrete of the car park. But I filled in the gaps. There was no other explanation.

I was jarred awake inside the boot of a car by the rocking of the wheels on tarmac. By the loud guttural buzz of the engine ticking over. By the fumes and roar of a bus parked inches from my head at traffic lights. My legs cramped as they’d been bent back double inside. Blood swollen in the veins.

My first reaction was to open my eyes. Pitch black. I couldn’t identify the noise. It sounded like a car. My leg muscles weakened and cramped. Spasmed like a fit, kicking like the last jerk of muscles slipping into seat. And instinctively I tried to sit up.

And – shit.

Smacked my head against steel. A second bruise rose like an angry fist and my head pounded. Pain. Pain is really fucking pointless. It made its point, yet continues to ram it home. At this point, anaesthetic is now my religion. I believe in it’s power to correct everything.

Human beings are fucking stupid. I acted on instinct. Instinct knows nothing and is below thought. In the year I met my true love a man I only met once tried to kill me.

Involuntarily, unthinking, I shouted in pain and swore under my breath.

There was nothing I could do. There are times when our options are so limited that there is no choice. Our impotence, our powerlessness, our insignificance in the enormous world, is the only factor.

All I could do was wait to be shot in the back like a bad Mafia movie. This is how they do it. Dragged into an open grave and opened at the back with a bullet. I tried to stay awake. I started counting, but always lost count. I tried to follow the route the car took, left, right, two seconds and then I lost count, wait, traffic lights, fumes of a diesel tanker behind me, it’s engine growling in fear and distrust. The car turning left, stopping. The engine ticking over. A door opening. Some laughing. Something opening. The creak of an unoiled hinge. A slow drive on gravel.

And I was born again in rain and darkness.

I squinted, trying to adjust to this gloom. I couldn’t see much ; traces of outlines. Murmurs of voices. I remember being thrown out onto concrete from an idling car. I remember numbly trying to stand up, stumbling and running, my muscles weakened, my blood haemorrhaging in my veins after the dull, relentless cramp of the steel box I had been prisoner of. A car revved its engines behind my stumbling form. I tried to take this fucking beanie hat off so I could see. My hands were tied with industrial strength black gaffa tape. I stumbled. My ankles were still feeling the novelty of blood running through them. At least I could feel.

I stumbled and fell over. Instinct, stupid instinct tried to put my hands out to cushion the fall but I couldn’t. Tried to right myself but I couldn’t use my hands. I remember the dull welt of skin scraping off my palms. So I stumbled on knees when I heard footsteps running on gravel and a rushing of air near me. A boot connected with me. I collapsed like a burst balloon.

Behind me, someone laughed. And I heard that voice again.

“Shut Up!”

And a whisper. Sullen, young, chastised. Like a naughty pup or a scared animal. But that laughter belonged to someone. Someone who wasn’t very old, who was seeing, tasting their first mouthful of power through violence and fear, voice trembling with adrenalin.

“Yes, boss.”

I heard the steel toe-capped boots crouch in the rain. It was difficult to see as I was crying in fear, my eyes trying to decipher the stream of liquid from a sudden sense of jittery hyperawareness. Nobody could see in the rain but me, what a coward I was. Common sense told me that right now the one thing I should NOT do is try to fight back, because I know, I know, as sure as a Catholic believes in God, that I would lose. But is it better to fight and lose than plea for leniency and pray?

My hands were still gaffa-taped around my back. But whomever this was, they seemed keen on a fair fight. The hat that had been stretched over my face was yanked off.

And this was where we came in.

Something was pulling my hair. Holding my chin inches from the ground. Something was going into my mouth. Something cold, something wet, something steel. I could see the gun barrel as a blur, as it was far too near for my eyes to focus upon in anything but the most ill-defined of shapes. Behind this I could see a dark coat, and something stretching into the sky.

I’m going to die. I’ll never see Helen again. I’ll never get out of here alive. Whatever it is, whoever it is, I’ve seen too much.

Him. That’s where I heard that voice before. A tiny little fuck at the end of a mobile phone call.

And God – with the power to kill in his hand – was asking me a question. His voice adrenalised with excitement and with some demented form of justice in his veins.

“Who’s history now, bitch?”

I couldn’t talk in anything but vowels. But I think I said something like “yewar”. If you’re going to go down, die on your feet, not on your knees. But I was on my knees. Meekly going down, my spirit bruised but stupidly, defiantly resisting. Custers Last, Vain Stand, and nobody could see it but me, these fucks, and a God that couldn’t even care about anyone.

But I knew that they would never destroy the purity inside me. NEVER. A pure corpse. What a fat lot of fucking good I was going to be. I still had a lot of phone calls to make. I still had to make things up to my brother. I haven’t spoken to him in 28 months.

Stupid little bastard should never have stood us all up at his own wedding ceremony.

Someone giggled. The gun felt cold in my mouth. I wondered if it was sterile. You think the stupidest things sometimes. The metal connected with my fillings; a frozen chill shot through me. I shivered. A thousand feet walked over my grave. Though I could the feet I could dimly see. Myself including, only ten feet were due to walk over this grave, two of them being mine.

This time his voice was lower, directed away from me. Calm in the manner that only the truly furious can provide.

“Shut The Fuck Up.”

“Y-“

“DID YOU HEAR ME? I said SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

And with this kind of controlled anger, this coiled, vile poison in his heart, I knew there and then that I had seen my last sunrise, kissed my last girl, made my last love, and now I was going to meet whatever came after death. Whatever that was.

No one gets out of here alive. No one gets off this earth alive either. There’s only one way off. The box.

Not the abstract knowledge of death we all carry, that one day we will no longer be here, but the sudden finality of death as the here and now. Today.

“So…..” his voice uncoiled, in a moment he had no doubt rehearsed. “You little shit. Are you enjoying my wife?”

What the fuck?

I tried to answer him, but again, it was difficult to talk. “Shenotyerwif” I said. Well. I thought I said that. What it actually sounded like was shntyrwef.

A gloved hand stroked my hair. It spoke.

“Tut tut.” He smiled, the smile of the doomed, like the face one sees when one knows he is about to die. “You were doing so well, until you started lying to me.”

I could make out the line of his face from the moonlight, I cold make out - just - some of it - in shilouette. And this wasn’t the last face I wanted to see.

He leant down, whispered in my ear. I was prone, gaffataped at the wrist, with a gun in my mouth. My hands behind my back. And he whispered.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a lie. A lie poisons the world around it. It infects us with deception, and teaches us to live our lives without virtue. It insults me, because you think you’re smarter than me. It insults you, because you think you can fool and mislead me.”

His voice never rose above a whisper.

“We married six years ago on May 26th. She’s never divorced me – and I’ll never divorce her.” He said. “And you are a fucking liar.”

Shit.

If I could speak, I’m sure I’d mention the Five Years Separation Without Consent rule. But I could neither speak nor think. I could only feel, react, respond. A reflex. A jerk.

“Because true love is forever. Let no man put asunder what God hath put together. Til death us do part. Remember that when your hands paw my wife. Remember that when your lips invade her mouth. True love is forever. And I will always be there for her. Always.”

I choked on the gun in my mouth. Saliva dripped down the barrel. A finger tensed on the trigger. The hand moved imperceptibly. The rest of the body was doing something I could not see. The gun lifted up in my mouth, and I strained my neck to follow it’s angle. I could see him. An ordinary looking man, but with eyes as blue as the sky, as cold as winter. And scars that glinted in the moonlight. He wasn’t very tall either. A small yapping dog in shoes.

I think I get the message.

“Longer than you. Not just for an hour, or a day, or a month, you little shit. But forever.”

I will never be able to forget that face for as long as I live. Or the twin chimneys of the derelict power station in Battersea that towered dimly above him.

About thirty two minutes then.

I’m going to die here, and the witnesses to my death are going to emaciated foxes, insects, and this handful of evil fucks. Even the cameras don’t see this far.

Hands roughly ripped the gaffa tape from my wrists, pulling hairs out by the root. I swore again. Involuntarily, by instinct. FUCK!

In an instant the barrel was out of my mouth, and the steel butt had rapped my cheek again. I felt a tooth dislodge, grow loose inside my jaw. My tongue ran over the tooth.

“Now now flyboy. Run home and go back to her. But if you’re still with her in twenty four hours, you’re history.” He turned away and walked back to the car, with its engine running, a dull prosaic vehicle, the banality of evil. Behind him, his goons followed at a distance. They stood, watching, some idly talking, small murmurs, puffing on soggy fags shielded by stubby fingers. The one of them that was sat in the car revved the engine.

I choked trying to get my breath. I was alive. ALIVE. No-one could take that away from me.

But they could, and ten seconds ago they very nearly did. It’s only when we face death that we feel most alive. When death has been cheated, evaded, risked and evaded, that some feel alive. But I felt truly alive in Helen’s arms. Her husband stopped, turned, and faced me. He said one thing – one thing I could never forget.

“Oh, and remember this, fuckface.” Voices echo in open spaces. Bounce off buildings like radar signals. “I’m only warning you because you don‘t know who you‘re fucking with. Most people don’t even get that. I’ll be watching. I know where you live.”

He got into the front passenger seat. The car door slammed, the reverberation of the sound echoing around this wasteland.

I was free. My hands burning with the raw, exposed skin. My hair stinging, the clumps of ripped out roots hanging uselessly in the wind. But somehow, somewhy, I had been spared.

Air stung my skin. A bruise was riding like an angry sun on my skin. Knelt forward, my prone body unfurled. My eyes blinking to adjust to the ambient, background light, my fingers uncurling as if some arthritis had just been reversed.

The engine roared somewhere behind me. The wheels spinning on the dirt track.
The noise getting louder. Two thin streaks of light illuminated the land around me. The patches of grey concrete, the clumps of unkempt grass and overgrown weeds. The stains and graffiti left by the young and dispossessed.

Instead of my life flashing before me, I saw concrete.

In some kind of primal instinct, some unthinking moment, I ran. I pulled my cramped, distended muscles and in a moment of pure, desperate adrenalin, I ran.

The nearest I had come to exercise before was running for the train. Jesus, my muscles hurt.

Something touched me. My knees buckled, my body bent, curved. The roaring got louder. My body rotated, my knees bent, my spine impacting against glass, my legs thrown up, my neck leaning forward, my head rotating on its axis, my body crashing against the roof with the dull thud of an old episode of Starsky & Hutch, my body crucified upon steel and pain. I was Jesus, the Devil, I was a voodoo doll, I was all these things. I was the prince of pain. My body exploded with a thousand cold needles of terror. My muscles tensed, relaxed, a stream of urine shot out of me in a dark patch on my crotch.

For a moment I was weightless. I was an astronaut. I was Buzz Aldrin. There’s no air here.

As if I were some urban ballerina, watched by none, I could fly. I felt something crumpled, something crunch. For a fraction of a second, hung in space, my body turning through the arc, the car accelerated on, before I could see, shooting away, two red streaks of light.

My body crumpled. Cracked. I felt something break, somewhere.

A screech of brakes. An engine revving, gears crunching, tyres spinning backwards. Four large weights shot over me. My ribs cracked, collapsed, my insides, I could feel them being rearranged. I could feel my lung burst like someone had trodden on a bug. For a fraction of a second, I could fly.

Four large weights drove over me from the other direction. Splinters of white bone were fired across my body, penetrating my lungs in a thousand small shards. My lungs, gasping, haemorrhaging for air, began to slowly fill with something that condensed and turned black when exposed to oxygen.

I was drowning in my own blood. I gasped for air.

The world went black at the edges. To the centre of everything .Then everything went white from the edges. Like snow.

36 :

2006-01-01T07:19:00.000Z

Sometimes it’s impossible to sleep. Sometimes it’s impossible to wake. Sometimes it’s impossible to make sense of life. Or anything.

We often slept apart. The cliches is that we die as we dream. Alone. Even next to her in bed, we slept alone. Even making love, I was alone.

Sleep has always been my enemy : her friend. Sleeping was an enemy to be wrestled and defeated, beaten into submission by the exhaustion of wills. For her, sleep was a comfort, a place to be embraced and enjoyed. Rarely does she feel that though. Even in her sleep she knows she could wake and face the man who could kill her. At any time.

She awoke with a start. Ripped out of sleep by some sense of something somewhere being unright. Of the world being wrong, awkward. Of misplaced, missing pieces of sleep, of fractured stolen moments and broken seconds. That somewhere, something in the world was wrong.

That’s a normal feeling, But this time something somewhere was very wrong.

She turned over in that temporary state, the one of some cosseted confusion, eyes glued shut with sleep, unfocused. A delicate hand of perfect fingernails reached over, fumbled with a small plastic box, turned it over –

Focusing slowly on a series of zeroes and ones. The time. 1.44am.

Dammit. That’s late. Any minute now he’ll be coming back. The taxi will be dropping him off outside. That familiar, reassuring hum of car engines running at low revs, the slam of doors, the rustle of changes and tips. Any minute now.

He must have missed the last tube. Must have stayed out too late for once. Been tempted by that one drink too many. Everybody does at some time. Everybody does that. It’s only human to be tempted. Only normal.

One drink becomes one drink too many. For recovering alcoholics one drink too many is always the last drink they had. For others, one drink becomes two, becomes more than two, becomes just one more, becomes one too many.

That was it.

But this is so unlike him. He’s never done this before. In the early days of love, in the first blossoms of youth, always each side attentive, keen, hoping not to place that foot in the wrong place, to guide love’s arrow true and fair.

But not like this. He’s never done this before. Never been this late.

She dialled his number. Blinked slowly. Waited for that familiar voice. The way he always said the same thing, the familiar words, the reassurance that felt like home.

Ring. Ring. The cold electronic burr that leapt out across the atmosphere, a radar signal pinging into nothingness.

No reply.

She looked again at the clock. Three small red figures. One. Four. Six. She yawned. And disappeared back into the womb of sleep.

3.12am.

A sudden jolt of adrenaline. Something was wrong. Rose from the bed, her naked skin cold to the chill of the air. Opened a window and looked out into the darkness of the night.

She fumbled in a drawer. Found a box she’d hidden there for emergencies. Tried, trembling fingers tore at sellophane and flipped a lid.

She lit a cigarette. Fuck. She’s been doing so well. Trying to give up for so long now. Three months now. A day at a time, but still, everyone relapses sometime. You never become a person, never break free, you’re always an addict in recovery.

Once a junkie, always a junkie. The memories don’t wipe clean.

She inhaled. That sweet rush of adrenalin to the veins. The unclenching of muscle. The wide opening of the pupils as the body wakes. A yawn. Another call. A long slow wait.

An endless pinging into nothingness again. A prayer to an empty sky.

Something’s wrong.

What if? Maybe had? How come? Possibly?

Sometimes it is not the answer but the question that is important. To get the answre syou need to know the questions.

Time crawled. Seconds felt like minutes. Felt like hours. With every unanswered question, every new possibility, every moment of fear and uncertainty, options narrowed to just one thing.

Her hands trembling, ash flicking involuntarily from shaking hands, she dialled another number. Three short digits. One she knew would reply.

And then she collapsed into sleep some time in the near future.

37 :

2006-01-01T07:18:00.000Z

“This wasn’t supposed to happen, you know.” said a voice a few feet away from me.

I ignored it. The last thing you need, at anytime, is someone talking to you. Especially in a city like this. Especially after a night like mine.

We’re brought up scared. We’re brought up in fear. We’re brought up paranoid. Everyone you pass on every street could be a killer. Every man. Every woman. Everyone white. Everyone black. All of us could be a killer. A thug. Even our bodies are against us : in these veins sits cancer.

Evil is banal. It sleeps in the same beds as we do. It eats the same food. Walks the same streets. But it sees a world very different from us. It sees a world full of opportunities to be taken, exploited. A world full of potential victims.

Much like the salespeople flooding our streets, selling us Closed Circuit Television. Preying on our fears and our insecurities.

But fear is a gift.

One day you will meet the last face you see. It might be a lover. A doctor. Someone whose name you don’t know. It might be mine. I might be the killer. I might tick your name off a list, writing the words “Natural Causes” into a box and there the story ends.

The definition of agood day for a doctor is simple : No one dies.

That’s why I don’t like talking to strangers. My mother taught me well. Divide and conquer was Hitlers motto. There is no such thing as society. So when people try to start conversations with you, you ignore them. Safety first. Fear is the invisible ruler.

Especially on a cold concrete train platform waiting for the first train. When your breath should freeze in front of your face. And there’s no one else here.

“Hey man. I’m talking to you. Things shouldnt’ve happened like this.”

Oh, please do fuck off.

I step back a little. I try to move away from him slowly. His voice is deep, assured, lively. It sounds friendly. But when someone I’ve never met before starts a conversation with me I get the fear.

Unless she’s young and pretty. And that was a lifetime ago. When I was single. When I got a fear that was altogether different, and much more terrifying. And he’s neither young or pretty.

He stood in front of me. A black man, about an inch taller than me. His black eyes swallowed the light and his face belonged to an old, kind, weary man. A man who looked, more than anything else, fed up, and hopeless. Exhausted.

A sigh. “Look, I’m talking to you. I know you.”

When you’re surprised you freeze. You don’t do anything. You just stand still analysing the situation, trying to polite, or your instincts kick in an instant and you move. Move like the devil himself is biting at your ankles.

The ghost under the stairs always thinks of a suitable response – miles away from the moment of terror.

“Look. You don’t know who I am. I don’t know who you are. You don’t know me. So piss off.” My voice was trembling. The way it was when you’re scared. My heart was pacing, beating like a fucked clock.

“Look, I’m late, and I’m busy. I know who you are, so lets not fuck about any longer.” I tried not to look at him and missed. He held my glance and held it long. The force of his gaze was as if everyone else in the world had ceased to exist. Everyone else on the platform, the tired commuters in their scattered groups, yawning and clinging to plastic coffee cups fell out of focus in the distance.

“Look mate, I’m – I’m really not in the mood.” I was looking at the beret on his head. I couldn’t meet those eyes.

I shouldn’t’ve said anything. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want dialogue of any kind at all. If you ask a question you get answers. And I didn’t want answers off him. He held my gaze.

“Nobody ever is. You were born thirty three years ago in St. Mary’s Hospital at 5.33am on July the 12th. Your name is Jack Simon Wilding, but you tell people your first name is Simon. Your parents chose your name because it was the most popular boys name the year before you were born. You have a mole on your right knee and a scar on your left from playing football when you were 12. You’ve just been in a hit and run.”

We have just lost cabin pressure. I have just been punched in the gut seven times. Seven things I have never told anybody.

And. How. The. Fuck. Did. He. Know?

I was growing weaker and he was growing stronger. My breath left me. What was going on?

He sighed.

“Time for introductions. I’m Samuel.”

He held his hand out. Nervously I shook it. It felt cold. He was wearing leather gloves.

“I’m-” I started.

“Hey kid, I don’t need to know your name. I know your inside leg measurement. And we’ve never met. So pay attention. I‘ve got an hour so listen carefully.”

Talk about no bullshit.

I really should’ve asked how come he only had an hour. But I didn’t. We all think the strangest way when we’re confronted with the information. I’m told I’m not standing on a train platform. That I’m not here. That nobody else can see me. And then when either of us talk our lips don’t move.

“How do you know this? How do I know I can’t just start talking to anyone else on this platform?”

The air was cold around me. Time seemed to have ceased.

Samuel put his hands over his eyes and rested them there for a second. He muttered something. Something like jeez, I hate this. He leant his hand forward and placed it on my shoulder.

“Do you really want to talk to anyone else on this platform? What would you want to say to any of them about anything?” He shut his eyes for a second longer than he needed to, the type of insomniac blink that gives you enough information to get by for another few seconds. A minute at a time. “Another ultra mocha frauppucino?”

“Look at them. You’re just another face in the crowd to them. “

He muttered. “This isn’t going to be easy.” He walked me forward to the bench. I looked at the time on the station billboard, in yellow fluorescence. 5.14am. Fuck. I was tired. First train of the day wasn’t even here yet.

“See this? All of this? It’s not real. It’s perception. Its just sensory input. It’s just electrical signals firing through your brain. It’s just what we believe is real.”

A pause. I got the feeling he did this a lot. I don’t know what it is, but it sounded like someone reading off a script. With talk like that he could be in a bad Sci-Fi film.

Maybe I was in a bad Sci-Fi film.

“Ever had a disagreement with someone?”

I do not want this. I want to go home. Someone get me out of this.

“You can’t go home anymore, Jack.”

How the fuck did he know what I was thinking?

I don’t want to know where this is going. And it scared me.

“When you disagree with someone, its because we can never feel the same way someone else does. Say you’re in a car accident. You both saw the same event happen. But you didn’t see the same thing.” He was gesticulating with his index finger. “Even if you both saw the exact same event, your line of sight could never be identical. You could never see the exact same thing.”

His hand came out to span the whole of my line of sight.

“None of this is real. Its just signals in your head. Microns and synapses buzzing. It’s just electricity. You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. This only exists in your head.”

Well, I’m going to unimagine you, fuckhead. I don’t know what he’s selling but I don’t want it. When I get chance I’m going to look under his arm to see a stack of Bibles he wants to sell me. If I wanted Bibles I’d go to a hotel and get them for free, placed there by the Gideons, from Gidea.

I snapped. “I’m going.” I stood up, walked away. I took three steps before he spoke and changed my life. His voice was deep and had a ringing air of profoundness I hadn’t heard in anyone’s voice since I was a child. It resonated the way a voice does when you’re being told off by your parents for Doing A Very Bad Thing. For once I was being decisive. Step by step I walked away from my life, whatever this was.

“Bullshit. You’re not going anywhere.” Man, this guy was almost in as much of a bad mood as I was. I carried on walking. One foot after another. “You’re Dead, Simon.”

If someone could stop me with a bullet, they couldn’t stop me quicker. I paused, turned round, unwilling to accept the latest bit of bullshit from this space cadet. Fuck him, fuck the horse he rode in on, fuck the fucking fuckers, fuck all of this.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. I didn’t need this bullshit. I’d had a gun pointed at me. I’d been run over. I hadn’t slept. I was probably bruised and battered and Helen was wondering where the fuck I was.

“Why aren’t our lips moving when we talk, Jack?”

And he was right. His lips had stopped moving. How the fuck did he do that? Nobody calls me Jack anymore. Not even my mother. It was a rhetorical question. No need to wait for answer.

“We don’t need to. We haven’t got vocal chords. This is telepathy - this is how we communicate. “

My mind formed a sceptics response. “Bullshit.” Though it did seem a little odd. And his voice did sound strange. It didn’t sound natural, but it sounded different. In the way that listening to a recording of your own voice never sounds quite right. That’s how it sounded.

“Lift your shirt. I want to show you something.” He stared at me in a way that was compelling. I didn’t want to look. But something kept my eyes glued to him.

“This isn’t funny.” I was scared. My heart was beating faster. In my mouth, the dry taste of fear and exhaustion.

“It’s not meant to be funny. Just lift your goddamn shirt.”

“Why?”

Fighting a losing battle. I wanted to lift the shirt. I had no choice - in the same reluctant yet compelled way that when you’ve drunk too much, and you know you shouldn’t drink more, a little voice keeps making you drink more.

I felt as if he was hypnotising me. Using the slow, gentle power of persuasion to get me to do whatever he wanted me to.

“You’ve been involved in a hit and run. Your ribs are broken in six places. Your arm is fractured. Your neck was broken when you fell on your head onto the concrete after the car hit you at 30 miles per hour. You can’t feel it because you’re dead. You’ve got internal bleeding and severe bruising. Now,” and with this he gave a deep exhale of breath that failed to show in the cold, “Samuel says, lift your shirt.”

I opened my coat, lifted my jumper and unbuttoned my shirt. I didn’t feel the cold. I should’ve done but I didn’t.

That was funny.

When my hand reached inside the shirt to undo the first button my skin brushed something cold and hard. Pulling my hand away I noticed it was covered in something thin and sticky. Something black, like tar. Blood.

First one button, then two, then three. I still wasn’t feeling the cold.

My chest was a black tapestry of bruises, cuts, and scabs. Dried blood lay around the punctured skin just to the left of my belly button where my ribs had snapped and broken through with the force of impact. I could see thin white powder on the skin. My bone had disintegrated after the force of impact and had broken the skin. I dimly remember this happening. In the midst of about ten million things happening at the precise same moment.

And I felt fine. I felt healthy. I felt as if nothing was wrong. It didn’t hurt when I touched it. I didn’t wince in agony and collapse as my nerves did their vicious work.

I looked up at Samuel.

Either I’m alive and in deep shit, or I’m dead, and these wounds are psychomatic, psychopathic, psychosomething. Am I dreaming?

He looked at me cold and hard and long. His voice never rose above a tired monotone.

“You died this morning at 1.44am. You were unconscious for 28 minutes after the accident. A mixture of internal bleeding, severe injuries and extreme cold killed you.“

There was frost on the concrete of the platform around me. I never thought about it, but I should have been able to see my own breath in the air. I should have been able to feel something, anything. Cold. Tired.

I haven’t yawned since rising from my coma in the shadow of the power station.

My brain told me that all this was wrong, that my body could not move, with the blood flowing, but it moved, I talked. Just like before.

“How do you know I’m dead?” I asked. This didn’t seem right.

Samuel sighed. Rolled his eyes.

“I’m a suicide. A self-murder. I threw myself under a train four years ago, right months and twelve days ago. This is my penance. I walk the earth, every day, every hour, every fucking second, and my job is to tell people like you you’re dead.” He sounded tired, exhausted.

That was definitely a question he’d been asked before, because he rattled off the answer the way a teacher tells a child something Really Fucking Obvious. But it still wasn’t right. How could I be dead? Seriously. How?

He must have a moment like this with everyone he meets. Some awful realisation. He started undoing his shirt. The muscle beneath the skin I could hear.

OK, so I’m Dead. Fuck no. I can’t be.

“Prove it.”

He opened his shirt. Instead of a stomach he had a gaping hole. I could see the back of his shirt - dark blue - through it. Across his chest, from his crotch to his right nipple in two thick diagonal slashes lay the trackmarks of standard 56.5 inch gauge railway wheels. I could see yellow, rancid flesh, I could see his internal organs, rearranged poetically as if he were a Rubik’s Cube and the doctors had to put him back together, I could see –

I could see too much.

His flesh underneath looked as if it had been mowed. Raw, exposed, brittle. Soildified upon exposure to oxygen, the way a wound crusts and hardens.

And the wheels cut several inches deep. If I had a body, I would’ve puked. I felt the bile rise in my throat, then hover at the edge of my mouth, as if I couldn’t complete it. Not because he was dead, no, but because I was dead. I gagged on empty air.

But no smell.

The second trackmark ran from his armpit up the back of his neck. I hadn’t seen that before.

He was silent.

“Do you believe me now? Or do I have to take off my hat?”

The air hung heavy and cold. I didn’t know how much of a head he had.

I didn’t want to know.

“Jesus Samuel. I’m sorry.”

He scratched his face, out of habit. He couldn’t feel anything. A nervous twitch. Excess energy.

“You can touch it if you don’t believe me.”

My hand reached out slowly. What I thought was a heart was beating too fast.
he reached out his hand, black gloved leather and stopped me just before I contacted the skin tissue with my shaking, numb fingers.

“You can feel my skin because I’m dead too. You can feel everything dead or inanimate. You can pick up a pen, switch lights on and off, open doors. Because they’re inanimate objects. They have no free will. No life force.“

“The same rules still apply. Doors open when you push them when you expect them to open. The more time you spend here, the easier it‘ll get. You‘ll learn the normal rules do not apply. Watch.”

He let go of my hand. And walked through the pillar holding up the roof of the station as if it didn’t exist.

When he came out the other side, he beamed.

“See, that’s my magic trick. It took me years to do that. When I believed that I could walk through things, I did. If there’s the slightest aspect of doubt in your mind. You can’t. Your mind still perceives it as real. You’ve got to forget everything you’ve ever known.”

It’s not what’s actually real. Its what we perceive to be real. Maybe I’m not really -

“Dead? Yes you are. But it wasn’t your time. You’re not due to die yet. Something went wrong. There’s unfinished business. Your soul is not at peace. I can see into it. Before you become free, you must finish the business you have. “

He glanced at his watch.

“Times almost up. I’ve got to meet someone. Come for a walk if you like.”

And with that he started out of the station. I had to find out what the fuck was going on with my life. I had to find out what the fuck was going on with my death.

38 :

2006-01-01T07:17:00.000Z

There was a knock on the door.

Stumbling, nerves sick with worry, she ran to it. Maybe it was him. She opened the door, half hopeful, half full of fear, sick and worry.

And at the door were two people. A policeman and a policewoman. Younger than her, older than their years, and when you see that when you open the doors, you know it means one thing and one thing only. A future had closed.

And life had changed forever.

39 :

2006-01-01T07:16:00.000Z

He told me too much. More than I could remember. More than I wanted to know. About the long hours of boredom. About the fact that you can’t ever sleep. That there’s no such things as dreams anymore. That you’ll never feel hunger. Never eat food. Never be able to kiss a human being again. There’s so many things I’ll never do again.

I’ll never be happy again. Even if I could be happy, I couldn’t forget this. I can’t wipe my memory clean. Even when you delete something in a computer it’s never deleted. There’s whole industries geared towards Data Recovery. It’s still in there. An unwritten patch of memory. A nought or a one. A negative or a positive. That’s all there is.

Death. Life. So was I dead, or alive? Was I alive in a form beyond the physical?

You never see nude ghosts because they have no physical form, and what you see is formed within the observers eye. If I want people to see me, they will. But sometimes, when I want people to see me, they don’t.

I don’t know what I am. Neither living nor dead. I’m somewhere in some netherworld. A place without feeling. With neither heat nor cold. With neither day nor night. What is a ghost?

What am I? An image? A sound? A smell? A feeling? A state? Some bizarre force that causes the movement of objects, a drop in temperature? I’m still alive. I’m not ready to go. And yet, I have already gone.

There’s so many questions that will never be answered. So many things that scientists can’t explain. How a mind without a body can somehow reach or touch anything else. I am the voiceless. Without vocal chords, communication is speechless. Between minds. I’m told I can appear with far less effort than it takes for me to speak.

I don’t look like some white-sheeted figure. I look like me. I seem pretty solid, though Samuel tells me I sometimes look faded, opaque, fuzzy, blurred, around the edges. This might be how I see myself. It might be because I don’t yet know how to make myself visible. I don’t even know how it works.

You don’t need to know about the combustion engine to drive a car.

Theory is that a ghost is simply a part of the human mind that can coexist in the physical world outside the physical body. Either whatever it is that constitutes my intellect, my spirit, my soul is split off during life, or somehow survives, transcends physical death. I could have become an energy field that exists in a pure, psychological sense. I have become electricity.

Is it then when mortals see me in the future, if they are to ever see me, that somehow that image of what they see, who I am, is who I remember being? Am I sonmehow telepathically reaching forth and placing my self inside their mind. That I simply do not exist at all, that somehow whatever I am only exists within their perceptions as a set of electric impulses. If I’m somehow, involuntarily projecting telepathically, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and anything else can be impressed into the minds of those around me and translated into sensations and perceptions, giving rise to experiences interpreted as "real."

Some people are more receptive to ghosts than others. Some of us have a heightened snese of smell. Some of us have more sensitive responses to having our ears kissed. Some of us a more acute sense of spatial awareness. Some of us too, by the same token must have a heightened perception, a heightened awareness, a more receptive state for paranormal activity. Some people - who don't even know they have this – can see what people do not normally see. Feel what we don’t normally feel. Hear what no one else can hear. Some people call these things a ghost, a haunting. Some can witness a record of events trapped in time playing back at some time in their own perception.

Some people wish that God would strike them blind of this unwanted sight. This ability to see what has been, not what is. A hotel room where a gruesome murder took place will one day, forever, be doomed to endlessly repeat the traumatic event. The human mind is uncharted, unknown. Sometimes it leaves haunted footprints in the sand. These haunted steps. These haunted bricks. These haunted stones.

I’m haunting myself. Neither live nor dead, I merely battle, suspended in limbo, for one or the other.

I was not alone. Samuel’s punishment was pretty vile considering his crime. His wife left him after his business collapsed. He’d been fucked over by everyone. His partner embezzled funds and the business collapsed. When he realised that he and his wife and children had to give up their house and move into his parents whilst he tried to refloat his finances, she left him.

Not without tears. Not without screaming and shouting. Not without reconciliations. Not without long dark nights of the soul. But without any money, for sure.

Living at your parents at 47. As poor as when you were 16. Not even the hope of a better life ahead of him, as his bright future just hadn’t worked out. So one day, whilst returning from the dole office, and without much aforethought, he jumped in front of the tube in Zone 1.

For this crime, for doubting like Job when everything fell apart, for realising the ultimate emptiness of life when everything you ever believed, everything you ever trusted, is a lie, he walks the earth in a resigned, foul temper.

Lifes what you make it. Death even more so.

I could see who he used to be. A happy, hopeful man. Who through hard work and perseverance had slowly pulled everything together, risen above the confines of his upbringing.

And it was all gone. Through the deception, the fraud, the malice and cruelty of others. The Devil and God had tossed the dice, decided to fuck him over, see if he would lose faith.

When you do everything you’re meant to do, everything you’re told to, and life never turns out the way you expect it to. You lose faith.

How can you have faith in something when nothing computes? When your actions and their effects seem to have no correlation whatsoever? When life has lied, been unfaithful? A moment of weakness, a moment of doubt, and your soul is damned.

Not for eternity. But for long enough to regret it. Long enough to know that the Devil definitely exists, and its just another face that God wears. Why would you spend your time in this dull afterlife, this first level of Hell, for losing the will to live after all God’s put you through? You wouldn’t bow down before him and thank him for that type of cruelty. You’d demand answers.

God didn’t see it that way. He saw in Samuel a good man who suffered bad things. After taking his money, his wife, his children, his reason to live, his life, he gave him just one thing - a second chance. To deliver lost souls and point them the direction.

Every ghost is looking for redemption. To do the things undone, so they can get out of here.

What he found hardest, was the knowledge that all the souls he had to process could redeem themselves. Could, when they’d finished their undone business, somehow be lifted out of this level and into the afterlife.

And yet he was here, stuck. He didn’t know what it was he had to do. He just knew he had to do something. But he didn’t know what.

And the afterlife was crowded. Think of how many generations of humans there were. One hundred at least. One hundred ghosts for one of us.

The number is, of course, far far less than that. Probably one in ten. But the fact is, these ghosts are bored. They have nothing to do, nowhere to go. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Can’t even get drunk.

Some of them actually like it. No work. No money worries. But no love. No home. No-one. Just aimless, drifting. The invisible homeless. A life without responsibility.

They’re fucking nuts. The solitude would drive me mad. I hate it. Knowing that here, on this planet, right now, the woman I love is worried. Wondering where I am. She doesn’t even know yet that I’m dead. She hopes that those footsteps in the hall, up the stairs, the key in the lock could happen right now.

Knowing that soon, she will be visited at home by policemen who have to tell her that I’m dead. That she’ll never hold me again. Never kiss me again. Never complain about my unshaven skin giving her a chin rash. My roll-on deodorants will never again be used. And If I wanted, I could go in and see her cry, see her fall to pieces, see her curse God for taking this one good thing away from her after such a short time - a matter of months.

Just when life comes together, it falls apart.

I don’t want to see her pick up the pieces and rebuild her life, start again with someone else, to look at another man with eyes of vague hope, to feel her skin against his. For them to move together in the same room, and for one of them to think that yes, this could be love.

To be one of the unloved.

Tell me what it is I need to do. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. It’s not a case of choice - in life options narrow down so much that there is no choice. You do things you don’t want to do because you have to. There is no choice in a world where Pepsi and Coke are the only options.

It’s what happens when we downgrade from Life to Existence v1.0. This world is my prison. I’m free to do anything I want. Able to go anywhere, yet never be able to do the one thing I wanted to do. Live.

Samuel told me something, something he knew may damn him for all eternity. But what the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. If he’s already damned, whats the risk? When you’ve lost everything, you’ve got nothing to lose.

“God sometimes make mistakes”, he said. “That’s why you’re here.”

It didn’t make sense.

A normal conversation has ebbs and flows, highs and lows, responses half-formed by us before we open our mouths, trying to say something, whilst the person we’re talking with is talking near to the subject we are, but not in response to what we actually say. It’s how every conversation works. People don’t listen - they try to convince other people that they’re right.

I never understood that comment. In time I would. In time I would learn that what he said was right. God, whom-what -ever he/she/it was wasn’t infallible. Nothing is perfect. It’s an impossibility. Everyone’s definition of perfect is wildly different, and besides, look at the creatures, the Lord God made them all.

The aardvark. The wasp. Useless, pointless creatures. Wasps don’t make honey, or die after a single sting. They serve no purpose in the ecological scheme of things. God is an engineer. To a sentient computer, a programmer can be God.

God made many mistakes. Being God he doesn’t have to admit to them though - whatever we believe he is. But an omnipotent being without accountability frightens me. Especially when there’s no way of anyone wronged ever getting a satisfactory conclusion. God is a dictator - we are his prisoners in a world not of our making.

But we try. We try to make it better from the things we have and can use. Mankind has Guns, Drugs, Weapons and the portable MP3 player. Maybe that’s why the dolphins are superior.

“You weren’t meant to die. You weren’t meant to die there, and not that way.” he said whilst we spoke. How did he know that? Did he have a hotline to God? A telephone number? Fortnightly Soul-briefings? Did God e-mail him?

“…. It was meant to be a warning. But God took his eye off the ball for a second too long. He lost concentration, and screwed up. And that’s why you’re here.”

So this was what life was like as one of The Living Dead.

We’d been walking for quite a while. It was raining - the cold grey sheets of rain that exist in movies and newspaper headlines, but we were as dry as a bone. As dry as an Ethiopian field in the drought. I did not feel it.

The physical world did not affect us. No cold, bar the cold inside. No rain, no hunger, no sleep.

Going without sleep was the hardest thing. No dreams. You never got tired. You could lie down, try to sleep, but it was the worst case of insomnia there is. A whole night sitting in the darkness, bored, waiting for dreams that never come, and occasionally looking at massive red letters as they tick over to 4:44, 4:45, 4:46…

Jesus. The Time! I never had enough of it when I was alive. And now too much. I could see the Twelveth Of Never and be none the wiser. There was no sleep. No respite from this world.

Never sleeping again, but resigned to endless, long, dull nights without any sleep, any excitement.

As comedians say, dying is hard.

had a mission. Though admittedly, I actually had no choice whatsoever in the matter. It wasn’t a choice - it was an instruction. When the options are so limited, there is no choice.

Whatever it was was my unfinished business, whatever my raison d’etre for remaining on this awful immortal coil was, I had to find out what it was and close it off.

The world was full of millions of souls like me. Millions. And in his years, Samuel had met hundreds of them. The first one he met was his redeemer, his deliverer, if you like - his spiritual midwife. This guy was so pleased to see Samuel - because he knew he was being replaced, he was going to ascend to the paradise awaited.

Samuel waited too, for The One. The next one, the next deliverer of souls to relieve him of his post. Who knows how long he would wait? The gentleman before him, had waited twenty seven years. Nobody seemed to know quite how it was calculated, be it on an accumulative bank of spiritual misery experienced, on the heartache he delivered, or simply, like a prisoner awaiting parole, on His Time.

Samuel had stopped counting the days. Time is meaningless when it’s infinite.

Some of the ones he delivered didn’t want to take this quest. They wanted to remain on this earth, with what they knew, even if they didn’t know anyone to start with.

It would’ve been easy to join them, as they silently lived their lives in the spaces where we were. The unused bus seats were occupied by souls without flesh. Those empty cinema seats? Only physically empty. You could watch movies forever in the afterlife and no one would know.

Of course, discretion is the better part of this existence. Any soul stupid enough to show off instantly gets damned forever. Samuel saw it happen once.

Black Shapes that could once have been human took him away. They arose, four of them, from the ground, ascending through the concrete.

He ran. But they glided effortlessly, as if they had all the time in the world - which of course, they had, and they secured this brave, exhibitionist soul, and took him. Nobody really knew where or what it was like. Nobody who went there had ever been seen again. A glimpse of its gatekeepers was enough to convince anyone who had seen them that you didn’t even want to look there again.

You don’t fuck with the afterlife. You don’t show off. The two worlds are separate for a reason.

Samuel tried to stop them - standing in their way. But the Black Shape had travelled through him. And he realised that to these, he was Nothing. A powerless little insect on the face of the world.

The cold, the despair, that belonged to The Shape that ran through him for that brief second was such that he knew, instantly, whatever doubts he may have had, however long he had to wait, he would wait rather than risk another second of that. Cold like death. Despair like suicide. Without empathy - as if the soul itself had been burnt black by cancer and chemotherapy.

This explained why I hadn’t seen any other ghosts yet. They hid away from others, from people, unless they were exceptionally brave or exceptionally stupid. They walked the earth, amongst us - sorry, amongst the living - and yet were invisible. Like electricity and radio waves, they were around us, surrounded us, and we could not see them.

Everywhere and nowhere. Like God himself.

My eyes had been opened before, and now I could see everything. I couldn’t look away and pretend I couldn’t see it - my eyes were so open I had no choice but to receive, uncomprehendingly, everything. I craved my long-lost ignorance of this world.

We were walking down the back alleys of early morning. Past closed pubs and inns. Past rapidly filling carparks, past hurrying commuters - and we glided through them without haste or discretion. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have to go to work on Monday Morning.

Being dead has its benefits.

And this was the first one. He looked at his watch. He smiled and we stopped walking - I was not tired, not out of breath, hadn’t even notice the effort and strain that normally went into walking. I imagined that was what astronauts felt like without gravity. Their muscles atrophied and shrunk through neglect until they were as weak as a baby and unable to lift even a pencil in normal gravity.

This was one weird day.

He looked up. We were stood outside an old-fashioned building in the heart of the city. It’s traditional, offwhite stone entrance, the wooden and glass door, left open by the students, surrounded by these twenty somethings, these beautiful people with their enormous loans, their bedsit flats, their cheap coffees and bar jobs, their student ID’s. Kings College, London.

It was one of the new, 24 hour colleges, barely sleeping, closing at 3 thanks to a burgeoning nightclub trade that oversaw the river, the city, Big Ben, all seen with the insomniac eyes of a drunk, a desperate young soul hoping for love, or a fuck, or some last celebration of not going to work, opening at 6 in the morning, the red eyes of sleepless youth. Built around creating another generation of the indebted to please the bank manager, another generation of the young, qualified, and skint. All that studying, all those exams, for a career working in HMV, or Lloyd Bank, or Starfuckingbucks.

As culture shifted to a state of permanent, demented acceleration and never stopped even for one second, I found that everything stayed open twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Like hospitals, shops and colleges were now judged the modern essentials. Cinemas, all night malls, and restaurants.

A nation that never sleeps is a nation of zombies. The only difference being, I didn’t want to be dead. Just my luck.

“Wanna go back to school, Sport?” he said, and opened the door, gliding into another world.

I followed. In the foyer, we were the only lost souls there. I can’t explain it. But one looked around, and you just knew when you saw the dead. They looked different. As if they somehow didn’t belong. I couldn’t really ever explain it, but you just knew. As if they were a cardboard cut out in the real world. A world that I could never go back to.

The security guard did not see us. He never even looked up from his newspaper and his cold coffee.

He ducked and dived through the rows of students. Past the girls in their cool, tight jeans and youthful jumpers, gabbing into mobile phones, trying to find the meaning of life in a cup of double espresso fraupuccino filter, past the boys in their baseball caps, their scruffy retro jumpers, their immaculately sculpted, random haircuts.

We passed through the restaurant made of a handful of tired, morning bodies and the stench of a thousand cups of brewing coffee. Past the security doors, into the kitchen, into the pale white tiles of the early morning breakfasts, the roar of a thousand rashers of bacon, of boiling lumps of fat, of carbohydrates, toast, milk, and vegetarian sandwiches. Past white uniforms, chefs hats, rows and rows of buns, stacked, frozen meats, ledgers, forecasts, orange juice fountains, sterilised chefs hats, workers lockers, to the walk-in-freezer.

Samuel looked around for a second.

“Mortals don’t like this.” He said mischievously. “We should be glad this place is mostly deserted this early in the morning”.

He opened the door, for a fraction, for a fraction of a minute, and walked in.

I looked at him as he were mad.

His head popped out. Looked at me, exasperated, annoyed.

“Well, what are you waiting for? An invitation? Get the fuck in.”

It was the most annoyed I ever saw him. But what was I going to do? Freeze to death?

His hand grabbed hold of my jacket and he pulled me inside the walk-in freezer. The door slammed behind me.

I started shivering. He laughed.

“Jesus Jack. Don’t be such a fucking pussy.”

I was shivering out of instinct, not out of any misguided sense of loyalty to a reality I was no longer part of. I wasn’t actually cold. There was no breath to solidify and crystallise. No cold to be felt.

It wasn’t that dark inside. Although somehow there was no actual light, no way out, I could see perfectly. It wasn’t as if I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the light or anything. I just had to see.

Rows and rows of shelves. Rows and rows of stacked high, long life milk, of frozen meat, frozen pizzas, tins, cans, and the bodies of animals stacked on hooks, their necks severed, kosher, halal, whatever, murdered facing towards Mecca, or Battersea.

“OK. Let me show you something”. His voice didn’t echo in the chamber. There wasn’t really a voice and I only heard it in my head.

He opened a door, letting a shaft of thick, yellow light through.

And inside I could see something. He walked in and I couldn’t help but follow.

40 :

2006-01-01T07:15:00.000Z

Just another sunrise over London, beautiful and mundane. Tendrils of light crept over from the east as the earth raced back to meet the sun, this massive ball of flame 93 million miles from this small rock that was racing through space in an enormous circle, rotating on its own axis at 1,600 miles an hour, pushed constantly into a permanent state of rotation by the opposing forces of gravity.

I saw my first sunrise as a corpse.

My new life. Whereas once I was a pupae, now I was the caterpillar, now I was the moth. Clouds parted, passing slowly overhead. Trains and planes and cars passed me by. Nothing, nobody saw me.

I wondered, is this what life was like as an old lady, dying, alone, in her flat, unloved, unknown, unnoticed until the two weeks have passed, until the flies eating her food in the kitchen have massed in black sheets on the windows, until the boiling water of the bath has eaten away, boiled her flesh so that her skin would slide off as soon as any investigating policeman forcing open the door with a crowbar could touch it? Is this what it would be like, to die alone, unnoticed? Unreported except by my granddaughter, who would come around every two weeks to do my shopping, wondering why she hadn’t heard from you? Maybe she’s gone out.

Is this it?

At first, one could barely detect that I was dead. My flesh, still warm, cooled. Rigor Mortis, the stiffening of the bones, set in within twenty four to forty eight hours. I wasn’t able to check my watch so I couldn’t really tell when I was due to experience rigor mortis, but it was definitely after the first night and before the second, when my body felt like the old bones of an arthrithic man who had spent far too long watching television in one position, my bones stiff as statues. They contracted slowly. My body tensed into itself.

My hair still grew, my nails still grew. Except that they didn’t. My flesh, old, and cold, contracted in on itself, giving the impression that I was still growing. Imperceptably, by a matter of a fraction of a percent, my body shrunk. There was nothing I could do. My muscles atrophied, grew weak, my stomach, already a disorganised mess of fractured bone, flooded lungs, dried, cold blood, began to collapse in on itself. I was coming undone.

Christ, I’m freezing at night. These lidless eyes see all. Sometime on the first day a small orange dor, a fox, approached. It sniffed my body. Nipped gently at my foot, tried to ascertain if there was any food worth scavenging out of me. Leather is not a taste they enjoy.

Foxy Loxy left me untouched. But natures ravages were not as kind. My body was a feast. Insects, ants, cockroaches, god knows what, things I had never seen before, didn’t know what they were, couldn’t pronounce, they explored me. They crawled into my half open mouth, burrowed down my throat, up my nose, searching for food, for nutrients.

If I could puke, if I could do anything, I would. I would get up and walk away from this.

From the earth we come, to the earth we go. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. How could one believe in God in a world this just?

I felt small teeth nip at my flesh. I felt my skin ripped off, chewed and devoured by small incisors and mandibles. Another nip. Another chew. The sound of a million miniscule feet and claws on earth. Then another. Then I lost count of the number of feet and claws and incisors and mandibles that devoured me. I gave up counting.

I’m not here. This is not really happening. I’m somewhere else. Anywhere else. I’m on a beach. I’m dancing at home on a Friday night. I’m at work. I’m anywhere but here.

No one ever told me death could be so boring. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do but experience myself being eaten from the inside. Feel my flesh sag and fall off my face, my clothes rot, my insides harden and petrify, my flesh turn black as I was eaten inside and out by things seen and unseen. Bacteria feasted upon me. I felt time pass so a second felt like an hour, a minute felt like a lifetime.

I had all the time in the world when I was alive. Now I have none. If only I’d known. Life is wasted on the young. And whilst I had spent most of my youth wasted, that surely was not a waste of time. But this, this was some new torture. This was some new life without God.

I waited. I had all the time in the world. Too much time. And sometime, someone would see me for the first time. And I? I would be no longer a memory. I would be an investigation. A mystery. An inquiry. A late night news item. A yellowing file in an archive in Birmingham. A set of photographs stamped “unsolved”.

I would be history.

41 :

2006-01-01T07:14:00.000Z

Welcome to the Army of The Dead.

Look at them. This ragged army. Like pressganged mercenaries. Like useless old men who found the coin at the bottom of the cup and then realised they were at war.

These were the rejects of heaven.

They’d given up trying to get ascension. They spent their time like homeless bums - wandering in and out of cinemas, watching television in department stores, sleeping on roads, and eavesdropping private conversations. Occasionally they’d sneak onto a train and go for a day trip to the sea side.

And we, the Dead, were the only ones that could see them. We were the only ones who could see our fellow spirits, our kindred souls. To those who had not yet died, we were the invisible. As if we were never were. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.

Being Dead was a holiday to these people. A plentiful existence where you could have everything, never pay for it, never sleep. A holiday yes, but the worst one you have ever been on.

Some standing, some sat, this collection of souls. Far far more people than you’d ever imagine you could see in a room like this, and yet, at the same time, a room deserted, empty yet full. Truly, the Lost Souls.

As we walked there were jeers and laughs. I began to notice something. All these people were Dead. I used to pass through places like this all the time. I never saw anything like this. One never does. One always sees what one always has, more out of a sense of familiarity than reality. The normal, dull, bored tube station, a place of tedium, of the same, sickly cream walls, of the same, dull bored barriers, of escalators and trains and long minutes of waiting.

Black walls that raced past as I closed my eyes in exhaustion on the way home. That was what I used to see. But I was blind. Now I can see.

I was in a place of dead roads. I was inside the immaculately preserved ticket hall for Aldwych tube station. Born 1917, died 1994. A useless station now, condemned by its antiquated lift shaft mechanism, destination of only a handful of commuters a day, now used only by film crews for irregular jaunts making films and adverts and music videos – and The Dead.

Around this room, mocked up with 40’s era adverts for a recent TV show, immaculately clean, lay the prone, the relaxed, the loose commune of the East London Dead. Like a bunch of bums sitting around late at night, these ghosts, these lost spirits, clung together. Because there was nothing else to do. And if you’ve got forever, you better have company.

“Hey Samuel! Who’se ya new boyfriend?” said a voice behind us.

“Simon, this is Clive.”

Clive shook my hand. He smiled. An affable, likeable drunk, Bobby was just a sizzled old man. A dry drunk. Like a President. A man who had spent so long drunk that even when he wasn’t drunk, he was a drunk.

“Looks like Bobby De Niro, doncha think?”

Clive’s face creased up, the whiskers on his chin turning in on themselves. Looked like someone was screwing up a paper hedgehog. He winked at me –

“You looking at me?” He asked.

And before I had time to respond, his soft brogue –

“There’s no one else here.”

Bingo. His face cracked up. I stood, mortified, looking at him. Is this what the afterlife was? A gaggle of jokers and clowns? Happy fucking zombies?

Clive held my hand. I could feel the warmth of flesh, even though I knew – or I thought I knew. He touched my shoulder and whispered.

“It’ll be alright,kid. It probably a bit of a shock now though”

I said nothing. This was too much. Too much information, too much stimuli. Someone, stop this. This shitty nightmare, this crap, perverted soap opera called my life. My death.

“I’m here if you want to talk.”

I didn’t want to talk. I wanted out. But you take what you can get in this world.

I was scared, but I knew that he was trying to help. I don’t know how, but I just knew. I felt it. Bobby turned round and waved at a girl. Pale, sallow. Lank dark hair. And very very bored.

She looked up and waved back. She didn’t really smile. You don’t tend to have much to smile about when you’re dead.

“That’s Karen.”

I raised my hand in polite habit, reflex. Her mouth turned up slightly, but still not enough to be called a smile, and without thinking, so did I. She had lovely eyes. If I had a cock it would’ve twitched slightly. But I didn’t. And its hard to desire someone when you still love someone else.

Clive turned away and said softly : “It’s not so bad, you know. You’ll get used to it”. He winked. “I’ll see you later.” And he turned towards Karen, rescuing her from the amorous affections of some other spirit that she was looking thoroughly bored by. She was the type of girl that always had someone talking to her that she didn’t want to, and never had someone talking to her that she did.

Samuel looked me in the eye.

“I know it’s a lot, flyboy.”

Jesus, I wish he’d stop calling me that. It’s starting to fuck me off. On top of being murdered. And probably never seeing Helen again. And being trapped forever in some shitty fucking hellish afterlife.

I needed a drink.

“He’s only trying to help, you know. He’s a bit fond of boys your age, but he remembers what it was like when he first came here : he’s been around for ages He just doesn’t want anyone to hurt the way he did.”

A pause. The way he did? To be lost alone in some fucked up place you can’t understand or explain? Yeah, sure. Or to live in a world where everyone jokes about the fags burning in God’s Hell, and you know you’re one of them? The love that dare not speak it’s name.

“But you know, it’s not so bad. Everyone goes through this. I can’t bullshit you – it’s not easy. But it gets better. Come on, let m-“

A hand grabbed the back of his shoulder and he turned around by instinct.

I turned around and recoiled in horror. My immediate reaction was to puke, I felt my gut tighten, but nothing came out. I didn’t even have air to puke. I had nothing, as I was nothing. There was nothing that could reflexively respond anymore.

“Hey Hey Jumper! How you doing?” Samuel broke out into a smile.

I wanted to see my girlfriend. My love. I didn’t want to live in this world. This weird underground world of tubes and suicides and ghosts.

I’m living in a fucked up world of ghouls and monsters. And I’m meant to fit right in. I’m meant to pretend that this is eays. That it is normal. That I’m not freaked out.

I was about seven hours into my life as a zombie, and it was shit.

He was called Jumper for a reason. Nobody seemed to know his real name : at least, nobody mentioned it. His face was distended. He looked completely normal, except for the part of his face which had landed in a grate when he jumped from a tall building. His face, at intervals of one inch, was pushed back by the impact and flattened to a stone, obsidian surface. Grates one inch thick, every inch, made his face look unnaturally accelerated like a cartoon character or a Horror movie outcast. As if someone had ironed his face.

One eye was fine. The other was in shrunken retreat behind his nose, and set back about three inches. The rest of his body was fine, bar his stomach, which suffered an unnatural kink at a 30% degree angle where the flesh had intersected the pavement curve at the force of impact. His stomach receded by about four and a half inches at an angle running roughly from his fifth left rib to his second right rib. If he had ribs.

He smiled, and a set of broken teeth and squashed bone structure came out to play.

“I’m having a great time. Haven’t seen a movie this funny since Ghost,” he said. He looked at me and caught my glance with his one working eye.

Some people go mad here, underground. They think their life is a movie, and they wait patiently for the credits. For the time they can leave and go home.

Everyone copes in different ways.

“Hey kid, you new?”

Samuel intervened.

“Yep, he’s new.” Samuel warned with the tone of his voice. “Be gentle with him”. He called my name.

So this was what life was like as one of The Living Dead.

Jumper’s real name, as much as any of us had real names, was David. Without love, there is a life, but not a life worth living. I can’t live, if living is without you.

Maybe that Carpenters song was about money. Not about a girl.

Just another obituary. Just another unreported suicide. Just another wasted life. I’d never heard of him myself. Go figure.

He wasn’t all right in the head to start with. Even less so now. Typical man. Most women commit suicide in discreet ways. The overdose. The sleeping pills. The open wrist. Men are more aggressive : the subway train, the tall building.

Too laid back to be a suicide. A suicide comprises of tension. He had changed then, at least in this life. Still, time is a great healer. Death does kind of put everything in perspective. It levels everything, and one then sees only what truly matters.

People mellow with time. The ideals that we held, burning brighter than a thousand suns dim imperceptibly with each passing moment as our lifeforce is slowly but carefully extinguished. This guy was a shell, a shadow, an empty vessel, of what he once was. But what was left, once his old self had been scooped out, was the human being that remained inside us all, the child that had been slowly chipped away by years of responsibility and decades of experience.

So Jumper admits these days that jumping from a high building after losing his wife and his company a few hundred million pounds was probably the stupidest thing he’s ever done. But as he says, the view coming down was wonderful, even if the journey was short.

Hindsight is a great talent. If I were a Superhero, maybe I would be Hindsightman, able to see forever into the past and wish I’d done things slightly different

It’s easy to regret impulsiveness. It’s easy to regret stupidity. It’s easier to regret the past than it is not to make that mistake. But regrets are meaningless. You can’t change yesterday or today, only tomorrow. Do the best you can tomorrow. Just trying to make the world a better place is enough to make a difference.

About a quarter of the way down from the Tower, he changed his mind. One third of cadavers attributed to “Suicide” show signs of severe muscle tissue damage in their upper arms where they reached up to the sky and grab back hold of the ledge they had abandoned just a second earlier.

Reflexes. You can’t avoid them. Even those who try to hold their breath so that they suffocate eventually black out througha lack of oxygen and the body kickstarts their breathing mechanism automatically. This is known as the Auto-Protection Reflex.

Like most male suicides, he put his hands up in front of his face to protect himself from an impact speed of a few hundred feet per second. Didn’t do much good. So these days he wore gloves. It avoids the need for unpleasant reminders and awkward questions. Except when he tried to pick his nose.

These people, they didn’t look like people to the naked eye. Even under the harashest, most powerful of cameras and scientific equipment, all one would’ve seen here were orbs. Dozens and dozens of white, floating orbs. And each of these orbs meant something, was somebody, someone loved, someone hated, someone’s son or daughter.

And most of them were male.

And through this Dantean inferno, this moronic babble of fools, I wondered.

What the hell was I doing here? Why am I here? I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be with her. My love. My life. The life I no longer had.

Jumper broke my dumb gaze for a second – and that was all I needed. I took Samuel to one side, and asked him a question. He mumbled something – and I had to wait a second or two longer. I got my answer, the one I wanted, and set off on the long walk.

42 :

2006-01-01T07:13:00.000Z

I was in the street. Sat down, my head in my hands, and it felt odd – but not entirely unwelcome to be sat in a storm without my hair matted by rain. I keep having to remind myself – I don’t actually have a body. This – the things that I see and feel – is my perception of what my body is. Warts and all. I feel my own body when I touch it. I feel the touch of others when they too are ghosts. I feel the cold of the concrete wall I am sat upon even though I can’t actually feel the cold. Because I expect to feel that. Not because I actually am.

But that’s not what bothers me. I’m sat alone. If I ever want to see my new friends, those tragic, grotesque fucks living out what’s left of their afterlives in dull mundanity like homeless bums, I know what to seek out. They stand out a mile.

They’re windowshoppers through a life they wish they still had, and never appreciated when they were alive. But I knew how lucky I was to be alive. Each breath, each dull moment of commuting, every time I stubbed my toe was a reminder that I was not just living, not just existing, but alive. I may have hated it, but I knew what it is.

These people, these dull ghosts, just walk through life, and yet – they don’t look right, like characters that have been optically added in the cinematic blue screen process. Around them their circumstances just seem false, cardboard. And yet I too, am one of those. But I feel as if I belong. I’m not deluding myself that I’m alive – I know I’m not. I’m just trapped here, trying to find a way off this planet.

And I am alive again, born again, in the blinding headlights of a car crash. But not alive, not living. I exist, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I am.

And that’s not what worries me. I know I’m dead. I can’t open my front door. So I’m sat on a concrete wall and listening to someone cry.

I’m listening to the wracking sobs of my girl as she screams at the senseless, pointless, waste of my life. It isn’t even a human sound, but some kind of guttural, angry, desperate sob from an animal. A hurt, defenceless animal.

From somewhere beyond human, somewhere where pain is the only real feeling. I used to think I rather feel pain than be numb. I was wrong.

All of us are animals at times of our lives. We just fool each other that we’re better than cows and insects. We’re not – just better dressed.

Outside the flat, a police car. Inside, a heartbreak. Soft calm voices of two officers, their black and silver lapels, their trained, rehearsed lines of comfort. They’ve seen it all before. Murder is more common than one might think, but still not as common as prime time ITV detective shows will tell you.

Right now there was no body. They were still scouring the nation, trying to find me, just another one of the disappeared. No longer was I a missing person, though its very likely that without interference or warning signs I too might have been just another one of those thousands that walk out of their lives every day and never come back. It’s only thanks to his poor planning that I was even anything more than a statistic and a “Case Pending” file.

The fucker murdered me. And she’s probably next. If I could find him. If I could change anything.

I can’t do anything. I CANT DO ANYTHING. Goddammit. God Damned me. What did I do to deserve this? I’m wracking my brains. I can’t think of a single thing, nothing that could justify this happening to me and my loved ones.

If you want to hurt a man, don’t hurt him. Hurt the people he cares about the most. Hurt his lover. Hurt his family. Hurt the thing he loves.

Each man loves the thing he hurts, and hurts the thing he loves. Steve most certainly did. He did this to me. Because in my arms was the heart he had betrayed, the heart he had hurt so much and had lost through his cruelty and malice.

He knew how to hurt her. He knew how to hurt me. He more than hurt me. He removed me as if I were never even alive. My crime? I loved.

I couldn’t let him do this again. The world would be a better place without him. Safer. Helen would be safe again. My girl would be able to walk through the streets without fear of a familiar, ugly voice. Without fear of those dirty, killing hands and that dangerous jealousy.

I didn’t want to spend my immortality like this.

Furious at my impotence. Furious at everything I couldn’t control. But I wasn’t impotent was I? I could change things. See into the things other people could not see, look beyond these things, change the world, go anywhere I pleased, walk invisible through the halls of power. Walk invisible through His Front Door. Protect my girl. Get my revenge.

Did I want to do that?

And how would I do it?

And even if I could, would I want to?

Fuck yeah. Of course. I had to learn how to change the world. How to feel objects again. How to see myself in mirrors. How to open doors and how to whisper in someone’s ear. How to appear in dreams and how to make this world a better place.

I had no choice. He would do it again, and where would I be? Nothing can bring me back to earth. Nothing can save me – only I can save others now.

There is no such thing as choice.

The fucker terrorised me. He threatened me and my love. He risked my life. Made our lives hell. Oh yeah, and he put a gun in my mouth and threatened to pull the trigger. Instead he merely ran me over, and sent my body cartwheeling like a statistic to fall unconscious onto concrete in the rain of England.

Whatever, whatever, happens to him isn’t enough.

I’ve got the Hard-On of Infinite Justice.

But what type of man would it make me? Yet, he would fights monsters, has to fight like a monster, has to become what he hates to vanquish the things he hates. Lest ye become a monster. So I had no choice. To defend my purity, I had to defile. To allow beauty, I had to do the things I despise the most. I had to find a way to murder a man.

As I said, sometimes the choices are so limited that there is no choice.

Who knows what he would do now I was dead?

I know what he would do. Without proof, he’d be free to walk the streets. I remember he was wearing gloves when he held a gun in between my mouth and I could speak only in vowels.

The worst thing Helen ever told me about him was about what type of man he was. He’d never killed anyone. Or more correctly, he’d never pulled the trigger, but merely, merely, ordered it. He was meticulous. And after the last time he’d been sent down after choosing the wrong man for the wrong job, what choice did he have. He chose the right people this time.

Like the perfect serial killer, he’d leave no trace that he was ever there. He’d only get caught if he chose to, if he left clues for the police to find. And this? I was just another dead man. The world is full of them. People who live and die, people who just vanish off the face of the earth everyday. Without a body, I would not be found. I’d just be another of the thousands who did a Disappearing Act, who took a left turn out of their lives one day without a reason given or an explanation. One of the Disappeared.

Even if they found me, I’d only be an unexplained corpse found on an industrial estate by a nightwatchman or a morning caretaker. Without motive, without reason, without anything to say why he was dead.

Just some guy who got hit late at night by some speeding teenagers on a joyride through an Industrial Estate. Just another drunk who collapsed of having had one too many.

The question no one can ever answer belongs to those three simple letters, why.

There was no choice at all. No why in his mind. Merely an exercise of power. There was never any right, merely an exercise of the fact that he had the power. The rule of the jungle – those who have the power, those who can give or take a life, are God. And he wanted to be God.

In his loins the power to give life. In his actions, the power to take it. He was God.

But I was God. I had been murdered, yet I still lived. Even in death, I could not die, could not sleep, could not do anything but mute and dumb, watch the world around me and wonder how to make a change.

Life came down to survival. I had to do this. I had to save her from the designs he had, the fate he planned for his bride. She’d suffered enough. If not for me, then I must become – reluctantly – that which I set out to destroy. A monster. A killer.

I made up my mind – I had to kill him to save others.

It really was that simple. There was no debate. No fucking choice. Just do, or do not. I had to become a monster to destroy a monster.

So be it.

I couldn’t bear to hear my best friend crying anymore. It hurt me in a way beyond words. I cannot, cannot, ever describe how much it hurt.

I stood up.I couldn’t bear to hear her anymore, these wracking sobs, these evil stabs at her happiness. Walking down the street I lashed out, and kicked the green plastic dustbin.

My foot connected. The bin shook.

The bin shook.

I was learning. I forgot that I was dead. I expected this to happen. And it happened.

I could move objects.

And that meant that I was Master of The Universe.

And I could kill him.

I wanted to. The reluctant killer. The coerced murderer. Helen’s Protector in life and death. The Guardian Motherfucking Angel.

There really was no such thing as choice.

43 :

2006-01-01T07:12:00.000Z

Sometimes the life we live is not the life we choose to live ; merely the life that is imposed upon us by circumstance.

Whatever we are, whomever we are is defined, not by what we own, or what we owe, but by what we do. The eternal question is, is evil something you are, or something you do?

Am I intrinsically good, or am I good by doing merely good things?

The problem with questions is that there is the assumption that someone somewhere has an answer.

There were no answers to these things. No answers. No masterplan. And so, here I am. Trying to work out a reason when there isn’t actually a reason.

There was no reason.

But I had to do something. If there was no reason why I was here, why I was stuck, then I had to make a reason. Give myself something to do. I couldn’t just sit around and wait for something to happen. Wait for me to somehow ascend to heaven.

But more than that. That cunt murdered me. I can try to be circumspect, thoughtful, rational. But fuck it. Anger is an energy. Revenge, hatred can be as pure, as divine, and righteous as love. One cannot know love without knowing it’s opposite.

Somehow I was going to take that bastard out. Stop him doing whatever it is that he was planning to do it. Make sure that he could never hurt again.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t know the where or the when. Being dead doesn’t open up a world of knowledge – you’re just as ignorant, except you know about death. If you were an asshole in life, you’re just a dead asshole. If you were a good person, you’ll be just another good, dead spirit.

Time was running out. I don’t know how long I had, or how long she had. All I know is that no matter how long it was, a week, a year, a lifetime – it wasn’t enough. Somewhere, someday, someone was looking for my love.

And here I was. Alone. Powerless. Possessing only a paranoid wit and a rising sense of panic. Panic is always irrational. If I could keep my head clear – If I could somehow think clearly about what to do – If. Is the middle word in life. Life as I knew it ended some time ago. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a life. It wasn’t even an existence. It was just some kind of odd state, neither living nor dead, but something else.

I had to get to her. I had to get to our home. I had someway to guard her. I didn’t know what to do, what the right thing to do was. But doing nothing wasn’t an option.

Even if I did something, even if it didn’t work, at least I would’ve known that something had been done. Worse than doing something that failed, was doing nothing.

And so, I left the cinema. It was surprisingly easy to slip out from there, with these drunk, apathetic bums, these broken souls that just drift through life, aimlessly on the tides of events. Sure, some of them were my friends, in so much as one could have friends in there.

It was a prison. You didn’t choose people. They didn’t choose you. You were just stuck into this.

I didn’t know how to get out of this. How to get off this plane of dull existence. Samuel didn’t know either : if he knew how to get out of this, he wouldn’t be here now. Neither would I. There is the theory, that a spirit remains on this earth until it completes it’s unfinished business, but none of us knew what that was, and what to do. I figured I knew what my unfinished business was, but I didn’t know if I could finish it.

And so, I knew the only thing I could do was somehow try to make things better for others. It’s not as if I could direct my energies towards improving my own life : I didn’t have one.

I could never get over the feeling of life without a physical form. I still did the same things I always did. I still tried to pick things up, sometimes. I still tried to turn doorknobs, sometimes. I still tried to fumble with travelcards and wallets and keys. A gamut of things I didn’t own and couldn’t use.

Somehow by expecting to touch these things, by expecting to feel, sometimes I did. My hand occasionally no longer fell through the steel, fell through the wood. Sometimes I touched. Sometimes I felt like myself again.

But, in my own way, I had a superpower. I could walk through things. I could pass through walls. I could travel through locked doors.

But I didn’t want this role. This power. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted all the things I didn’t think I wanted six weeks ago. I wanted, needed, craved debt, boredom, and commuting.

What a strange life we lead, where the perverse becomes the normal, and the normal suddenly becomes the strange. And it always felt strange to do this.

I was standing at the foot of the stairs that lead up to our front door. Seven hundred yards from the local tube station, down a side road and an alley, round the back garden, and before a wooden gate, I stood looking at that most innocent, yet most terrifying of things.

Our front door. The cream painted wooden door, with its shrunken letterbox, the small, double glazed, frosted opaque window set at eye height, the chipped wood and the old, seventy year hinges.

I fumbled the key in my pocket. I could feel it, but it wasn’t real. Not real the way that anything tangible, anything physical was real. The key in my pocket was just a fantasy ; a series of electrical impulses across synapses, but yet not real. And if it wasn’t real, yet felt real, was I hallucinating? Was I really here? Was I really me?

And if I wasn’t me, who am I?

The key was meant to be there. I remember it being there. Even if it wasn’t actually there, there it was. As real as I was. That is, not very.

I haven’t got days to think about that. I know what I fear : knowing that I have to go through there. Know that my heart, leaping within my chest, my hands shaking with a fear that I, who has somehow conquered death, cannot conquer.

I stared at the front door. An ordinary door. An ordinary life. Just like everyone else. And yet, it seemed so alien. It could be a happy family on the other side of that door. It could be anything. You just don’t know.

And whatever was on the other side of that door, I had to be there.

I took a deep breath, knowing that whatever I was doing, I wasn’t actually taking a deep breath. My heart wasn’t actually racing. My hands weren’t actually shaking. I wasn’t actually walking through the door.

I could never communicate, I could never really accept how this worked. I felt as if I was being sucked through the door. Could feel every splinter, every shard, in the way that a body could feel a dentists needle, as if somehow I wasn’t really here, that this wasn’t really happening, that as if I was an observer in my own life, watching my own self as I was no longer myself.

And so I walked through the door. I felt the cold, frozen brass of the doorknob grate against my fillings. That cold chill that travelled through my every vein, my every pore, and made me involuntarily shiver and shake. At the same time, every last splinter, every last shard of wood was somehow being poured through me, passing through me, and somehow coming out through the other side. I felt the way that I was a human pincushion, I could feel, in a time that felt like seconds and hours at the same time, thousands of tiny wooden lances pierced my soul. Sucking me in and pushing me violently out.

And then I was free. I was out the other side. I was looking at our hallway wall. The neutral, pastel cream. The anonymous, characterless décor. Naturally we rented this place. We didn’t own it. Who could afford to buy these days?

It looked lighter. Emptier. I turned right.

I was looking at an empty hallway. An empty bedroom. A bedroom, with the backwall some twenty feet away, the door casually laid open, stripped of everything. No wardrobe, no clothes, no television. As if the house had been stripped bare, as if everything had been sucked out of existence by a black hole when I wasn’t looking.

She was gone. My girl had vanished again.

Never live a life you can’t walk out of in thirty seconds flat, a wise old man once said. She had done just that. Always on the run. Always looking over her shoulder. Always waiting for the unknown stranger in the hall.

It’s no way to live a life. It’s no way to be alive.

“Hello?” I asked. I don’t quite know how I could make a noise without vocal chords, but I did. My voice reflected off the empty walls. The echo came back at me, no longer absorbed by material possessions, such petty things as televisions, sofas, books, and CD’s.

Nothing here. No one here.

At my feet I felt a strange, musty object. Some post. Dated until five days ago. Spam. Junk mail. Loan offers and phone statements. She must have got a postal redirection notice. These of course take seven working days to come into effect. And therefore –

I must have been dead twelve days. She must’ve moved out – or decided to move out less than two weeks ago. So near, and yet so far.

There was nothing in the kitchen. No post it note spinned to the chalk board. No “I have moved to : - “ sign. Not even any fucking Pizza shop leaflets. Clearly she had stripped this bare of traces. Any last trace of her existence stripped clean.

If I hadn’t known better I would never have known that anyone had lived here. Let alone that this was the place we had once chosen, once hoped, would be the building block, the foundation, of our beautiful life together in a future we never had. The place where we would love and live again.

I stood, waiting for something to happen. I could wait here I suppose. I could sit in the corner, bored out of my mind, waiting for Him to pay his respects. I could hope and pray that he would arrive.

And there’s no guarantee he would arrive anyway.

And then what would I do? Fuck all. I didn’t know how to do anything. I didn’t know how to touch, I didn’t know how to grip. I didn’t know how to feel, or to throw, or to hit. It could only happen when I forgot I was dead. That is, not very often, and what I least expected it.

He probably had a better idea where she was than she did.

I needed to find her. He was out there right now, breeding contacts, making connections, looking at bits of paper, emails, trying to find her footprints, her trail in a world made of credit card purchases and CCTV footage. There was always a trail. We always leave a mark even if we do not mean to. The infra-red glow of a warm footprint in the sand, no matter how heavy and thick our boots are.

Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she was running out of time and she knew it. I had to do something. I had to find out where she lived.

But where to look?

I looked down at the envelope below me.

Everybody knows their local postman, right?

44 :

2006-01-01T07:11:00.000Z

Eight hundred yards from either railway station, sandwiched at the top of an undistinguished hill, at an intersection made of traffic lights and traffic jams, it sits.

A large, grey, undistinguished building. Two, three stories of brick and concrete, pale, dusty glass and cold, wooden slats. Of close corridors, tall and thin, of tight corners, of the smell and taste of hospital wards. Of footsteps and heeled shoes clicking on cold, sterile, inorganic floors. Of a maze of walls, corridors that lead to corridors and other corridors that lead to locked rooms and closed offices.

Through these three floors, cutting through them like a blade through the entrails of the building, a sharp gash of two massive parallel escalators. Leading down to the depths of the earth, or up to the glory of the heavens. Up, into a world of panel and glass, of sunlight and reflective surfaces, of offices and the shine of new enterprise.

Built on a mountain of rubble and shit, the elegantly named Mount Pleasant sorting office sits. Built on a waste dump, a landfill, a hole in the ground made of dirt and detritus, they took dirt and they made something out of it.

Every day, every hour, this building sits, a hive of activity. Between midnight and eight AM, every day a stream of cars, postmen cycling to work, red and yellow vans stream in and out. Like a torrent, like a flood. Without a minute’s respite, a minute to sit and wait, an endless row of worker ants. Receiving mail, sorting mail, delivering mail. Machines spitting out endless rows of identical letters, envelopes, mail written by computers that never gets read. The roar of machines that is silenced only by daylight.

Mail should be delivered somewhere between 7am and 11am. Unlike the United States, where mail arrives any time it feels like, the postmen deliver within the early hours, sleeping whilst we work, working whilst we sleep.

Down on the basement floor, set below the earth, the floor of the Sorting Office. Rows and rows of sorting machines. Millions of letters. Dozens of trucks carrying bags and bags of mail, parked in rows, letters lined up and dispatched, thousands per minute, to a fine tuned set of postcodes. A few minutes later, a different programme, another borough sorted.

A machine for delivering mail. This building is just a machine.

I wandered through the Mount. I was searching. I was trying to find her. She was somewhere here. But where? They don’t exactly put up road signs directing you to the Redirections Unit. Oh, the irony.

It was difficult to find her. Difficult to avoid the bodies, frantically moving through the corridors, through the rows of pale blue uniforms and fast moving trolleys. This was not where I thought I would find her.

Admittedly, I didn’t know where I would find her, but I didn’t think it would be here.

I walked around the side of the building, through a side door, ducking under a barrier. I tried, as always, to avoid travelling through walls or anything solid. I can’t say it got any easier or any more pleasant with time. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped, but it never got any better.

I tried my best. But as we all know, best intentions don’t always work. It wasn’t as if I could relax, and after all I’d been through, my nerves felt a little fractious to say the least. I suppose I could’ve picked a quieter time, but it wasn’t as if there was time to waste. My nerves were jumping ants.

I’d wasted enough time already. I’d wasted enough chances.

The bodies moved with a mission. Dozens of people, a babble of voices, a hive of activity and straining muscles. Of packages being tossed in boxes, and of the sudden feeling as a large brown paper bag stuffed with CD’s, or clothes, or medical specimens passed through me without warning.

If I could retched, I think I would’ve. But obviously without a stomach, there was nothing to give. I just felt as if I’d been stretched. Yanked. Pulled out of shape, as if somehow, my body were elastic and it almost snapped back into place, though not exactly the same. I don’t understand this either, I’m hardly an expert on biology let alone supernatural biological physics.

It sure is weird to experience things happening to your body that you don’t understand. And you know that your five limited senses won’t ever be able to comprehend or explain, let alone accept.

And so, in this corridors I ducked, I dived, I skittered and tried to hide. I hugged walls to avoid the urgent yet imprecise rush and haste, yet always felt, at the least moment, the wrenching of paper, or steel, or flesh through me. And each of these people, these anonymous, fleeting men and women, who flew through me with the intimacy of a one night stand, I felt their DNA, I felt their bones, their flesh, their blood, move through me, and they too, felt something odd. Something that told them that they shouldn’t be there. And they never paused to find out why they felt that way. They just moved onto somewhere else, as quick as they could.

This world is wrong and I am trapped in it.

Past the trucks that held the mail. The useless old bills, the unread junk mail, the valuables, the divorce papers, the probates and repossession orders, all. Past the trucks loaded with millions, billions of pounds worth of diamonds. The jewellers queuing up to pick up their stock every morning, having mailed it to themselves the previous night, so that no stock was to be held on the premises.
So that no budding Michael Caine’s bulldoze their shopfronts in the dead of night to win their own, illicit lottery. The Kensington Job didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

And so, each day, the queue stretched out to the collections office, as postmen and women passed small packets worth more than they would ever earn in their sixty years to men who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

And I passed these.

And I passed the bomb bins. These half sized, bomb-proof bins, designed solely to contain explosions. Suspect packages of all shapes and sizes would be deposited here with urgency. Analysed, picked apart by specialists for possible threats. These rotund tubes, cocooned within inches of absorbent, scientific materials. Their yellow and black necks bulging with menance.

Everything in here, every package, everything anyone touched could be a bomb. With the gift of fear and paranoia, thinking like that could rule countries.

And I passed the religiously segregated toilets. The urinals that face away from Mecca. The Muslim Prayer Room. The Gym room. The abandoned, closed rooms in a dying building. I wandered lost through all these. Not even aware that I was moving, not even aware that I was anywhere different, so universal was the old paint regime, the green stripe that turned to a contaminated, flecked grey at shoulder height.

I wandered lost. Unable to ask questions, unable to find her. And she was here. Somewhere. On a board. On a queue. Somewhere.

First I had to find Postal redirections. And then her postcode.

There wasn’t even a Postal Redirection Unit here.

I was lost again. I wasn’t here. I didn’t know where I was, but I wasn’t here. I was trapped again in an alien world.

She wasn’t there. I stood in that office and I tried to find her, but she wasn’t there. I looked with keening eyes, trying to find a name, a number, anything, any trace of if she was alive, around, anything.

But nothing. Zilch. Denada. Zero. Nothing.

And it wasn’t there. No matter how hard I looked, no matter in which place I looked, no matter where it was, I could find nothing. There was nothing to find.

I needed to be somewhere else.

But where?

45 :

2006-01-01T07:10:00.000Z

“Hey Hey Motherfucker how you doin’?” he asked me.

I walked into the abandoned station, into the deserted foyer, and the first pair of eyes I saw was Samuel. The look on his face was hopeful, drunk even. A smile split his face like a sunrise.

I’d failed. A failure. Just a fucking bum.

Hoping for some good news for a change.

He was sat on the steps leading up to screen 6, next to Clive’s semi-comatose figure. He actually seemed to enjoy being in a bad mood. But right now I think Clive was drunk. Dry drunk. That is, drunk without the alcohol.

I don’t quite know how a ghost gets drunk. I presume it must be something to do with perception. Something to do with thinking you’re drunk, and expecting to be drunk, and then, somehow being drunk. At the moment he was in his rare state of vegetative, intoxicated half-sleep. I suppose the best thing about being a ghost was that you never had hangovers.

Sometimes you need to do anything to take the edge off being alive. Sorry, take the edge off simply being.

“You ain’t exactly a happy camper are you?”

I grunted. Damn fucking right. He stood up. His clothes rustling with neglect. Long slow steps came towards me as I stared, for seconds at a time, at an unfocused point somewhere on the red felt wall.

His arm came around me. His voice subdued, a slow whisper. Upstairs I heard voices. Karen giggling about something. Karen was another one of the ghosts I’d met a few days before.

“Look man, it’s not so bad up here.” He said. His voice soft, the rolling syllables lulling me into a false sense of security. I knew he didn’t mean me, or anyone, any harm. He wanted us to be happy. All of us. He as Shepard, we as a flock. All of us. A motley crew, a rare assortment of mismatched souls.

We were a community. Naturally at first everyone in the community, every new soul, was reluctant. We clung too much to our past lives, the worlds that no longer existed, the place we could not forget, but could never return to.

And this too, these were my awkward first steps.

“You soon get used to it. It isn’t easy you know.” A pause. “The first few days, the first few weeks are the worst”. His eyes went somewhere else.

He knew what I was thinking.

“I know, you don’t want to let it go. You’re still too near to the world to accept you’re not part of it”. His hands wide, an expanse, one day Simon, all of this will be yours, “But this is your world now. This is where you live. This is Your Home.”

And each word was a bomb being dropped on my head. This is my world. Of fucked up, undead ghosts and permanent limbo. This is no way to live. Or die.

“I know, I know. You don’t want to be here. But listen up Buck, nobody does. We’re all exiles. We’re all refugees. We live in this world now.”

And so that was it. My choice. Live here in some fucked up community of losers and dead people or somehow try to find another way. I didn’t even know if there was one.

“And you know what? You’re not unpopular. We like you. We like to see new faces.”

A pause. A second or two – but long enough to make a point.

“Karen likes you.”

I barely knew her. I’d met her a few times. We’d sat, talking. Trying to understand what was going on. She was new as well. Not as new as me. She’d been here a few months. Going through the same things as I was. Fear. Denial. Boredom. Loneliness. The story of the waking life.

We’d spoken - properly - once or twice. Plenty of casual chit-chat, but it always dried up. What was there to talk about? So,what do you think of being dead?

But I needed friends. I didn’t know what else I could do. Who else I could talk to. When you don’t have to sleep, time becomes largely meaningless. We’d spent hours, far too many hours, talking the kind of bullshit people talk. The kind when people sit around for far too long. Having all the time in the world can be a sentence in itself.

If you’ve ever been stoned and talked shit as the sun rises you’ll know the type of conversations. The type of conversations between people who don’t share much, but share something. Share a proximity. A loneliness. Some kind of vague hole in their lives that they are trying to fill with something, knowing that they are lost, wandering aimlessly, meaninglessly through whatever this experience was, hoping to meet someone else, and simply bored and talking shit.

And so we got to know each other. We were both lonely souls. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want anything special. I just wanted her back. The old girl. My girl. Not the new world, the new way, this bizarre alien way of life, whatever it was.

We were trying to make a connection. Fool ourselves that there was some meaning to all this. We assign the meaning from what we do.

She placed her hand on mine. It was warm in the night. I felt something. I don’t quite now what but I felt it. Warmth. Heat. Skin. I didn’t quite understand how I could feel flesh that didn’t exist, but I was getting used to living in a world that didn’t quite make sense.

I was trying not to feel anything. In this world, the one that tore people apart because it could, not because it was cruel, not because it was kind, but simply because that was the way things were, I didn’t want to meet anyone new. I didn’t want to find a new life.

I wanted her back. I was the dumped. The abandoned. I was free, to do whatever I wanted, but for the one thing I wanted to do, I could not do.

I could not hold Helen in my arms again. I could not grow old with her.

I would never age. Never grow old. I was always going to be the age I was twelve days ago. Never older. Frozen forever. A fucked clock poised permanently on the edge of the past.

Karen was strikingly pretty. The type of woman who made your head turn when she walked past you. The kind of beauty that intimidates you – the kind that you catch her eye and you know, she’s just a girl, just a woman, just another person with hopes and loves and lives, but the type of beauty that makes your heart race in your mouth, your hands shake, your soul tremble in fear, and your eyes have to look somewhere else with a sudden rush of adrenalin to your body. The type of woman that some people don’t even see, with the type of beauty that makes some want to serve their heart on a spoon, and others serve dinner. The individual beauty we all see in our loved ones that no one can see. She had that.

She was older than me. But when you’re going to be dead forever, a few years really doesn’t matter. Well, not that much anyway.

I admit, if I wasn’t so tied to my old life, this new one wouldn’t look so bad. Life is all about making the current situation acceptable.

What if?

Never. Don’t stand a chance. Never have. Never will.

She was that type of girl.

And so, she liked me. Those dark eyes, like pools of water glinting in the midnight, that sucked you in with a vision of a beautiful world. But a beautiful world that was so very wrong. Beautiful, but not my world, not the one I chose.

“Yeah but –“ I tried to cut him off.

“But nothing flyboy. This is your world now. You can’t leave it. We have to live within it. You can make a beautiful life here”.

He glanced around.

“Look at this. See these sad, lonely saps here.” He pointed at Clive, his sleeping form that was angry even in its comatose, ignorant trance, his body twitching and jerking with an unspoken, infinite fury. “This poor bastard’s never going to find love – or even anything near it – here.”

He shrugged.

“Now, there’s nothing to say that he did when he was alive. But I’m not like that. The thing is, right, that too many people live in this world alone. Too many of us. We are all born alone and we die alone. But we don’t have to spend the time inbetween alone. You don’t have to be alone.”

Fuck it. I was almost convinced. But before I could look to the future, I had to solve the past.

I know. I was lucky. I was blessed with the chance of something, something more than the loveless life, the empty tedium that endless hours bore into your soul.

But I did not want that. I didn’t want more. I was not greedy. I just wanted something else.

Is it wrong to want more?

47 :

2006-01-01T07:09:00.001Z

I didn’t know how to find him. But I could find her. And if I could find her. I would find him.

So he will never hurt again. So he will never kill again. So that ….

Fuck it. I just wanted revenge.

It was heartbreaking. There was that old cliché, life goes on. But I could only bear that weight because whatever happens, whenever she leaves, wherever she goes, life goes on where you can’t see her. Your life goes on, your life continues. But so does hers.

When she leaves, at that moment, that instant, she becomes a stranger. Someone travelling a different path, a path that with every step moves further and further out of your orbit. Someone you know less and less with every passing day, a person who not only do you not know, someone you don’t recognise. Whatever she used to be, whatever you used to know, that person shrinks away with time, and passing days, until you longer recognise her. A stranger.

But still, I loved her. Still, frozen forever in time, she was. My girl.

And life goes on. Her life went on, where mine didn’t. Not only did she grieve, so did I.

I had to follow her. Stalk her. Watch her with unseen eyes. Tread her hurried, furtive steps. Her face hidden from the light, her life packed up in boxes, hastily assembled from Supermarket packing, from IKEA, Argos, from anywhere. A life on the run, living out of boxes, always ready to leave.

I was turning into him. I would sit outside her front door, waiting on cold steps, hearing the tap of shoes on stone or enamel floors, the rustle of letters in postboxes, the sounds of her flat breathing, the rush of water through pipes, of lights flicking on and off in shadows that hang off the wall. And I stared at that door. Waiting. Trying to see if I could come in.

From time to time an old man or a woman would knock on her door. People I never knew, never met, people who’d known her longer than I. Her mum and dad, their lives rent again by that man, their eyes tired, deadened, exhausted by her broken life.

A murmur of voices, low and soft. There was someone else in there with her. But who? I don’t know. Another of her friends? Another one of that long list of long suffering friends, always tired of her continual bad deal from the deck of life.

I wanted through that door.

I waited. I thought. I wondered. Lonely again.

And this time, I couldn’t see it changing. I didn’t – couldn’t – love again. Oh, that was a lie. I’m sure I could at some point. But never to know when or who or how or why or where. Would I love a ghost, would I fall for another kindred spirit, without flesh? Oh, in time. But let me put it this way. I wasn’t planning on falling in love. But not ruling it out.

I had all the time in the world.

I walked around her area. I memorised the layout of roads. The familiar parked cars. Number plates. The location of every flat, every door, the faces of everyone who lived around here. The times they left for work, the times they came back. Where the shopped – the Safeways, the Tesco’s, the Aldi’s. All these things.

The front doors, the back routes, the fire escapes and alleyways. The dogs that froze and barked, looked at me in rigid fear, their eyes locked on my shapeless form, their barking rising from a erratic whine. The old lady next door, the couple upstairs, the divorced man downstairs, trying to eke out a quiet existence on a single wage, grappling with a mortgage and lawyers costs and maintenance payments to the woman he found in love with another man.

These were my neighbours now, my routine, and I waited, I watched. I hoped and feared that one day I would see that face, that numberplate, a pair of eyes I glimpsed in shilouette. And yet, I felt watched.

Time. It always takes time. Not long. However long it is it was too long and too soon.

A sigh came from next to me. I looked up and matched a pair of dark eyes. Samuel.

He sat next to me. The air was warmer, the vibrations of him felt good. I felt like a car alarm. Triggered by minute, invisible changes to the air. And in my stupid way, I’d missed the old bugger. He was the nearest thing to a friend I had, and it’s easy to forget how much one needs a friend.

“Don’t you ever get bored?” he said in that familiar, slow drawl that only time and boredom can breed.

“Yep.” I didn’t feel much like talking. And I didn’t feel much like being alone.

“So,” He paused. “What’s the plan?”

I didn’t really know actually. I hadn’t quite worked that out. I dunno. Hang around. Think of something. Save the world. Or at the very least, save her, somehow. Kill him. Save the entire planet.

I didn’t know.

“I don’t know.”

He put his hands together in silent prayer, his head bowed, his knees drawn up around him.

“Still love her?” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

He thought again.

“You know what you have to do.” And in my silent way, I did, not by knowing what I had to do, but knowing what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t allow it to continue.

He looked off into the middle distance. He told me what I needed to know.

“He’ll be here tomorrow. Four O’Clock. She’s safe until then.”

He stood up. “Come back home. We need to talk.”

46 :

2006-01-01T07:09:00.000Z

There was only one way I could find her. Only one way I could trace her. Only one way I could follow the river upstream. I had to learn how to walk again. I had to learn how to walk backwards. It felt like I was going to crawl back into the womb. It felt like the hardest thing in the world. And I had to do it.

The only way I could this was to find her name. Her address. This new place she was living. Find her new life, the one she had built without me, on the run, without warning. To do the thing that He was doing. Trying to find the one who had run out of my life without warning. Try to find where she was, what she was doing, who she loved. Who was not me.

She was gone. Two weeks. That was all. I’d only been gone two weeks. But she can’t have been gone long. Just long enough to set up a postal redirection service and vanish off the face of the earth. Even if she left the day I went missing then it still takes a week for the redirection to kick in.

She was probably here today. This morning. Picking up a handful of envelopes. Picking up junk mail and hate mail and dull, normal, boring mail.

So close. And so far. Even if my hand crossed through hers, I’d never hold her again.

I had to find the local Post Office. I didn’t even know where it was. In the short time we’d been together in this flat, alive, I’d never been to the Post Office. I’d never needed to. I still hadn’t managed to unpack all my CD’s.

Every second of my new life I was aware that she had lost another second. Come another second closer to the end of hers. Possibly dying peacefully, in bed, surrounded by her grandchildren, going to join her departed husband, someone else, some other fucking lucky man, in his heaven, sixty years from now. Possibly at the hands of some fuckface called Steve few weeks from now.

I didn’t know, but I had to.

I walked up and down cold morning streets. I wandered down streets of parked cars, down past the near comatose, near zombiefied figures of commuters, our own living dead, as they sleepwalked through exhaustion to train stations and traffic jams. I cursed the lack of time I had spent investigating the local community. I didn’t know where I was or what I was looking for. I just knew that when I saw it, saw that fateful red and yellow sign, I would find what I had been looking for. I think. And then I would changed my mind. Be looking for something else. It’s what humans always did. It’s what we all always did. You find what you want and then you find you want something else instead.

The cold, grey light of dawn made this exhausted monochromed world beautiful. But beautiful only because I could never have it, never experience, never touch flesh again with a warm, unwashed palm.

I saw a streak of red and yellow, a mail van, and my eyes followed it intently as it travelled down the main road in deserted streets, delivering mail from the centre to the Post Office.

I followed it. Minutes passed as I tried to follow it. Like a plane chasing a sun that’s always sinking.

I stood at the steel shutters that sealed the Post Office branch in. The steel padlock at the bottom of the door, locked into the ground. The cold, imposing door. Cut by grey, invisible sunlight.

And I needed to be on the other side of it. I needed to do the thing that I always hated, the thing that I never wanted to do.

I needed to walk through that door.

I never got over the shock of it. The strange, alien feeling, as if I was being sucked in and pushed out of the door at the same time. The feeling that every shard of this was passing through me.

I took what I thought was a deep breath and jumped through.

In the longest second of my life I felt more and less than I had ever hoped.

I felt the cold, frozen steel pass through me. I felt the atoms of ice metal and the space inbetween them, so small that you could not detect it even with a microscope, pass through my flesh, my bones, my teeth, as if I was being injected into a needle, poured into a cage, ripped from a metal womb.

My fillings grated, felt as if they were somehow being dragged slowly across miles of open nails. My world shrank to a vaccum, a black hole, pulling me in reluctantly because it knew it had to pull me out.

And behind the steel shutter, the 5 millimetres of compacted glass, the letter box, the handles, the steel door frame, the lush, soft carpeting that felt as if your veins were full of cotton wool, your arteries full of melted sand, the spaced between your skull and your brain full of dust and grit and dark oil.

And then.

And I was inside the Post Office. I was slumped, fallen, on my knees, before the counter. Aware that the tips of my feet were still, at a molecular, sub-atomic, miniscule level, still inside the steel shutter. I yanked my leg, my dull, unresponsive limbs, out, and it felt as if – that sudden feeling of pain and relief that one feels when you find the world biggest splinter and yank it out of your leg. Like a soldier pulling a bullet out of his wounded side in the trenches.

And I was – of a sort – alive.

And here I was. Involuntarily I yelped. And nine feet above me, the sleeping form of the Post Office Manager, curled into the voluptuous limbs of his wife, started, opened his eyes briefly at some sound he probably couldn’t have heard, and his lids resealed themselves with the exhausted last effort of the weary.

And for a second, I forgot that I was dead. My sleepless limbs weary, my tired body drained. I reached up, my hands limply, desperately connecting with the nearest, lowest shelf. I pulled myself up on it.

I pulled the shelf off the wall. It came crashing down.

Oh fuck. Fuck. Fucking fuck. Fuck Fuck Fuckety Fuck Fuck.

I’m rumbled. I’m busted. I’m grounded.

I stood up. My heart was beating like cannons in my head. All I could hear. The frantic, stuttering thump of a heart that no longer worked.

I couldn’t hear the dull mumblings of the sleepless on the floor above. I couldn’t hear the dull creak of a tired, wooden bed and cheap floorboards and thin carpets as someone sat up in bed, rotated, placed tired, cold feet on creaking floorboards.

I froze. Hands shaking. Nerves jerking like the body of a convict frying on an electrified, Colditz fence in the rain. Breath came in short, stolen gasps, lungs unable to fill themselves with air, drowning in short bursts of oxygen.

And from upstairs a mumbling. A tired, soft voice. A gruff, weary voice. Someone was up.

And I had to disappear. In the darkness of this room, lit only by a thousand thin strands of light streaming through the steel grating, the air moving in effortless circles of dust, I tried to find somewhere I could disappear. Somewhere I could hide. Somewhere I could not be seen.

Even though I did not exist anymore.

I tried to slide against the wall. I tried to blend in. I tried to disappear through the concrete, hid in plain sight, be visible to none.

And I waited.

A strip of yellow, naked light shot through the windows inside the room. A spotlight, like a camp searchlight from a Steve McQueen movie. From the naked 60 watt bulb at the bottom of the stairs, through the reinforced glass window set inside the locked, steel door that led to the inner office. That led to the counter and the back room where Helen’s name was written on a piece of paper.

I had to be in there.

A step creaked at the top of the stairs. I waited. A baseball bat that normally lived underneath an old bed was being gripped tightly, too tightly, by tired, sweaty hands. The air moved, vibrated, with each swing by a nervous wrist.

Another quiet creak.

I didn’t know how many steps there. I just had to wait until there was no more creaking. Or until the door opened. Until I was found. I heard the dull mumble of a tired shopkeeper talking to himself. I heard the tick, the tock, the tick tock of the seconds that dropped like hours from the old, plastic clock that hung from just above me.

I heard the slow creak of someone in slippers trying to avoid the bad floorboards, trying to avoid the seventh step, trying to slip down the steps un-noticed.

No cries in the dark of “hello?” now. No one telegraphing their appearance, warning their assailants of their whereabouts, telling their killer where they were. This guy had seen too many bad horror movies to know what he should and shouldn’t do.

He should’ve changed that stupid lock, he should’ve taken back that key, he should’ve stayed in bed and slept until it was time to get rise for work.

Creak. Shit.

I could smell his fear. I could hear his breathing, controlled yet uncontrolled, tired yet awake, fearful yet brave, scared. He tiptoed down the corridor, the longest nine feet in the world, waiting at every millimetre for something unseen, something dimly heard and not understood to come out of the shadows.

I heard a door open. Another think shaft of light distended, projected starkly against the far wall. I could see the pale yellow of tired walls that were last painted years and years and years ago. I could see a grey shadow, two limbs, a bulging shilouette, a thin white stick against it.

And even though I was not here, even though nothing could touch me, I felt fear.

The head moved. Eyes scanned the office, looking for signs of disturbance, looking for any trace of anyone here who shouldn’t’ve been. Hoping not to find these traces.

Silence. Tick. Tock.

I could hear breathing. I could hear the machine gun patter of my heart.

The creak of ungreased hinges. Through the window of the locked steel door I could see his shilouette, each wild, unkempt, uncombed hair, upright in the insomniac minutes of early morning. A face peered through, trying to see with eyes blinded by light, trying to peer in the darkness. Trying to see me.

I waited. I had to get through that door.

I heard the jingle of keys. My heart, my mouth. The steel taste of fear. Slowly, a lock ground to a halt, unfurled, a latch opened. And streak of light arced down and out into the room I was in.

The bat entered the room first.

And suddenly I saw it. The door was open.

This was my chance. And, my heart beating in my mouth, forced me to move.

He couldn’t see me. Could he?

And this faceless man moved into the room. Quietly. Slowly. Step by step. A nervous face creeping into the room. And first, foot by foot, he moved across every inch of wallspace. Moving closer toward me.

And all I could do was breathe. All I could do was fear.

So slowly. Toward me. His face, tired, his eyes unfocused yet focused, streaked with the red of exhaustion. I could feel the heat of his breath, the stench of his breath having sat stagnant for hours in his prone form, his eyes trying to focus yet unable to see.

Surely he would’ve seen me by now, if he could see me. If. The middle word in Life.

And Maybe he could. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he could feel me, feel some change in the air, some odd perversion of the atmosphere, his hair standing up on end, whenever he came near me.

Maybe not.

But I wish he’d stuck some deodorant on. There’s nothing as vile as the smell of stale flesh and dried sweat. He passed in front of me, his face hanging for a second in front of mine, pausing on something vague, undefined, something that he couldn’t identify in front of him, something he could not see, something his senses could not find, but something that was not right.

Breathing in short, sharp gasps, my heart thumping in my head like the ticking of a bomb, I saw right into his eyes. I saw a mixture of confusion and exhaustion and acute awareness that lasted only for a second in the eyes that were merely inches from mine.

He saw through me, as if I was not there, as if I were one of the dead.

And then he moved on.

Spurred into action, in a second I was movement. I was gone. My soul darted through the thin sliver of open door, into the inner sanctum, behind the counter, in the thin, small nine feet between the door and the staircase, inside the white anaglypta funnel, staring at the shut door beyond which I would find my destination.

I had to be in there. And I listened to the sound of feet moving through rooms feet from me. The sound of a dull, racked cough from a throat that had not drunk for hours.

Footsteps coming closer. I leapt through the door that sucked me in. I was going to find my love. Find my heaven.

Here I was. Where was she? All mail from the main mail centres was only re-directed when it arrive here. All that effort, all that hard work, and all for nothing. Moved at the last minute to another place where it really belonged.

I stood there, trying to decipher the scrawled numerals, the digits, the imprinted, ingrained details, typed, printed, shot out by laser, by inkjet, forced on by inked imprints, trying to find someone.

Looking for her postcode. Looking for our postcode.

Forgetting that I was dead, that I had no form, nothing, I stood there. Floorboards buckled imperceptibly under the weight I suddenly gained then lost. I waited until those footsteps had creeped up the stairs, each creaking floorboard, each tired, exhausted exhalation by old lungs, I waited until the bat had been put down slowly underneath the bed, until those slippers had been shaken off, until those tired mumblings had been exhausted and the rhythmic breathing of sleep had resumed. Like the tides, the rise and fall of each wave, the rise and fall of each breath.

I waited until the world had fallen back into its blissful sleep again. Slowly, my fingers fumbled for the light switch, tried to bring back some light, tried to activate the switch without the conspicuous clack of a metal switch clicking over.

Let there be light.

47 :

2006-01-01T07:08:00.000Z

48 :

2006-01-01T07:07:00.000Z

“It’s not safe here. “

I didn’t understand it. I had to do things, other things, important things. I had to learn how to touch, how to feel, how to move. Did he not know this? Was he, in some way, messing me around?

We’d had the conversation before. He knew what I had to do. He knew that I didn’t want to do it. He knew that I had to become a Black Angel Of Death.

We both knew, without speaking, that I had to kill a man to set her free. In order to defeat monster, one must be a monster. And one who is a monster must be defeated.

The greater good. That’s what I was thinking of. The greater good, the good for the many outweighing the good of the few. But we all know, sometimes the needs of the few are more important than the needs of the many.

I couldn’t get perspective. Or I had too much perspective. Whatever it was, I’d lost my sense of scale.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Annoyed, irritated.

“There’s someone else in that building. Someone like us. Something bad.”

Oh great. Another hoop to jump through, another one of Job’s trials.

“And?”

And I am an experiment. A lab rat. Put this person through all these things, test their responses. Left and right, up and down. Jump and crouch. Like a computer game, like a case study.

“And he’s been watching you. And they’re not always as nice as you or I.”

I am Pavlov’s Dog.

“?”

I didn’t quite say a word, some sub-vocal, gutteral mumble of confusion.

“The world is full of people, good people, bad people. But people. And it’s full of people like us. Good, and bad. He’s not one of the good guys.”

We were walking away from Helen’s apartment block. I turned round, seeing it shrinking with each step, slowly folding in on itself. I saw something dark and person shaped move within it.

“He can see you. “

“Who is it?”

“Not who, simple Simon. What. Used to be a person, a very long time ago. Before there was even a you or an I. Now, trapped forever here in this limbo, this fucking thing has just become so angry at being trapped here, unable to move on, it just hates people like us.”

So, my girlfriend has gone from being stalked by a psychopath to being haunted by an ugly spirit. Great. There is no end to this particular joyride?

“What do I do? I can’t just,” moving my hands around wildly, frantic even “stand here and watch whatever’s going on. I’ve got to do something.”

“Oh, you will do something.” Samuel said. I got the feeling that he was tired, tired of all this, tired of holding my hand, tired of being here, spiritually exhausted. He needed a holiday. “But it can’t be here.”

“It feeds on anger. It feeds on hate. The stronger it becomes, the angrier it gets. Every domestic argument, every screaming match and child’s tantrum feed it until it can do nothing but act-“

It’s a poltergeist. I must not hate. It liked me here. I fed it. It was a vampire and I was it’s transfusion.

“See the flat below Helen? Remember those children? Well, when little Tommy hits thirteen, I can guarantee that that house is going to be bedlam. Hell on earth. Especially when his little sister joins him a couple of years later.”

There’s always someone who knows. Someone who knows something you don’t. Something you want to know.

“Sure, you can do whatever you like there. But I’m warning you – it doesn’t like us, it doesn’t like you, it doesn’t like anything, actually, and it doesn’t mind letting you and anyone else know.”

There was a reason I didn’t want to go into her flat. A reason beyond simple chickenshit fear. It didn’t want me to. But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t just abandon her.

“You won’t abandon her. You’ll wait. Bide your time. Find her. But not here.”

I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t face either of them, not here or near here. Somewhere else. I had to wait. I had to see what would happen. Where people would go and what would be done.

Waiting is sometimes the biggest punishment of them all.

49 :

2006-01-01T07:05:00.000Z

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.

50 :

2006-01-01T07:04:00.000Z

“You’re gonna like this boy. You need cheering up.” He said as he lead me into the walk-in freezer.

I always hated going through walls. The worst thing was forgetting that I was dead – my body sticking in the stone and the concrete. And then remembering that I wasn’t and slipping through, being sucked out of the other side into whatever was on the other side.

It never got any easier.

We were on the other side of the freezer wall, inside the immaculately preserved lobby of Aldwych tube. On the walls, restored, repainted, recreation posters form the forties. A thick layer of dust.

It didn’t look like this the last time I was here, it just looked… dishevelled. But then again, Aldwych rarely looked like it did the last time the public saw it. Every month it changed. Every month the floors were dusted, cleaned. Every month technicians from the BBC, and ITV, film production companies and advertising firms opened these gates, trawled in their cameras and lights into this building, hand carried every camera, every light, every generator and frame of film, down hundreds of steps, to the depths and the caverns.

Last week they were filming some BBC drama from the forties. Couples huddled together as technicians dimmed lights and shook dust on them, as children wailed in improvised bomb shelters called Tube Stations. Never knowing if a bomb would land on them, never knowing if, when the shaking of bombs stopped, there would even be a tube station to crawl out from. Would they crawl out from the platform, hoping to see stairs, and face a wall of rubble?

That explained the noises and lights that we ran from. It disturbed us. Even a ghost needs a home, even our status as permanent exiles, we had to have somewhere we go to and call ours. But there was nowhere.

We paid attention closely, we always did, to the comings and going of the public. On the rare occasions a bolt opened, a shuffling member of staff peered in, a thin shaft of light cut through the darkness, and a thick cloud of dust swirled in the air, we always took notice. There was always someone in the foyer. Always, even when most of us were sat, talking shit and hanging out down on the platforms, bored, fed up, there was always one or two of us who liked to sit away from the others.

Every class and office has it’s token Weirdo.

Recently I’d been spending time, when not trying to save the world – or at the very least Helen – talking up here with Samuel. But he was a popular man, the informal ringleader of this elastic band of outcasts, and he always had someone new to usher in. His absence was a presence as much as when he was here. When you feel you’ve found a friend you also often lose something else.

When Samuel wasn’t here I practiced alone. I sat. I thought. I tried to pick objects up. I tried to write in the thick layers of dust on the floor. My boots never left footprints, but sometimes I crouched down and I drew a line in the thick dust.

When I brought my finger I looked at it, and there was no dust on it. As if it had fallen off the tip of my finger, like snow, when I wasn’t looking.

I stretched time out, worked whilst He was sleeping, honed my skills, what little of them there were, tried to find my way through them, work out what they were, what I could do, if I could do it. I did things and I didn’t know how, or why, and could not replicate them. I moved cups. Opened doors. Lifted discarded bits of paper and put them back down.

Someone somewhere must have noticed this at some point. People always do.

Sometimes Karen came up to see me. Her lank, tired hair, cut to her shoulder, her face that creased with the smile of a woman who’d lived a life full of laughter, and her eyes. I liked her. I liked her a lot. When she smiled it looked like her face had finally found its purpose.

In another life? I could grow to love her. But not in this life, whatever this was.

But we were lost. Both of us stuck in some weird limbo, some empty, dull state neither of us could understand, like being stuck in someone else’s nightmare. And all our hours of talking, we couldn’t work it out. Why us? Why were we singled out, chosen, excluded from the afterlife, the one that we’re told from school is our birthright?

Hours of talking didn’t bring any answers, only more questions, and with each questions, another answer we were never to have. She too bored, frustrated, confused. And like all of us, we just survived whatever this was, and we tried to bring meaning to – or from – a meaningless state and make it somehow important.

Sometimes we would hold each other. She was warm. And somehow, in our community of the confused and the lost, we felt just a little less alone. There is comfort in finding your fellow victims.

Sometimes we would talk. Sometimes she would watch me as I did these things, these dull hours, where I somehow transcended the world around me. She understood why I was doing these things. To try and forge out of the nothingess, something. Where there was nothing let man bring forth something. Meaning.

I needed to do this. I didn’t want to. But I needed to. In a place where one tries to make sense of the senseless, hope of the hopeless. Because our minds are automatically drawn to construct meaning from the abstract. My life, of whatever this state was, was a Rosarch inkblot test, and it was not what was there that mattered, but what sense we brought from it.

We make meaning out of activity. In life, its known as hypermania.

She understood this was something I had to do. I couldn’t necessarily explain it, but I knew I needed to do this, I needed this, and when I had done it, I would never need do anything again. And maybe when I had done it, whatever our lives were would be very different. Some spectral romantic paradise, or some dull loveless state. I didn’t know. Admittedly I didn’t know very much at all about this current state – after all, they didn’t have handbooks, and it’s not as if I’ve been dead before.

And it wasn’t just something I had to do - the human desire for revenge is not inconsiderable. The first thing one always wants to do is settle the score. Get even : not take more than one had taken, but ensure that whatever happened can never happen again. And the satisfaction of revenge is important. The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

Though, if you are going to kill someone, its not exactly going to hurt to make sure they truly are dead.

After all, that fucking cunt murdered me. It was time to restore the balance. Time travellers have this theory that where one timeline is altered, another different event of equal import occurs elsewhere in the world. To restore the balance.

I’m only human. Well, I was only human anyway.

Where hours of co-ordination and practice and dull meditative thought brought not tiredness, not exhaustion, not the strained tension of tense muscle, but brought a sense of purpose. As if somehow I knew what it was I had to, what my purpose was. In all this time, all those dull years alive, those years I would trade anything for just one more second of, I knew that whatever I was I had a meaning. A role. To make the world a better place, to act kindly, to –

And sometimes I thought too much.

She would sit and talk to me whilst I tried to do these things. The things we often take for granted – picking up a pen, opening a door. I had to train myself to think through these things, to learn when to be solid, and when to be opaque. It wasn’t easy. I still hadn’t got the hang of it. I often forgot. I often kicked cans in the street and pass through them. It still stung, the cold, paperthin aluminium shooting through what used to be my foot. Often, but not always. I was learning. Samuel was my Yoda – and he was proud of me – I could see the pride within his eyes.

So often I saw the first chink of light and the dull clunk of the lock being released. We stayed, skulking in the shadows, listening to the conversations. Our eyes blinking too in the sudden flash of the old, flickering bulbs as the tube guy escorted some video director, TV show guy, photographer, or a gaggle of occasional train enthusiasts through our home. We listened carefully to the mumbled conversations, the agreements to film, the conditions, the redecorative costs of the Props Department, the flashes of digital cameras as someone decides where to put the old, reproduction posters, change the logos and repaint the foyer to match up the dreadful cream and brown colour scheme of the era.

But today, there was an entirely different set of visitors.

And in the corner, five dishevelled figures.

Humans. Mortals.

“We have to talk quietly,” Samuel said.

They’d noticed. Missing items. Moved cups. Doors open a crack. Fingerprints on the surfaces.

One of the figures, in a blue uniform with the familiar logo of the London Underground, shook his head nervously. Around him, a tense, shaven headed man. Holding a boom mike. Another, with a camera on his left shoulder and a battery pack. A woman. And a nervous looking man in a tired leather jacket.

Yep siree. London Underground had brought a cable TV channel’s very own Ghostbusters to come and check us out.

Aldwych was, like many a tube station, a place of not just history, but a place where unseen footsteps walk through ceilings. Where Roman soldiers appear where walls used to be and where shadowy coats stand nervously by entrances and exits. Where the memories of commuters live forever in the shadows.

We knew these people, they just didn’t like us.

Naturally, being closed to the public, this was easily the most accessable and easiest one to bring a camera crew to.

Samuel spoke quietly.

“Man, we love this shit. They can’t see us, but we can see them.” He pointed to the guy in the tired leather jacket. “He’s the psychic. Probing our minds right now as we speak.” I nodded. I watched his ruffled, greying hair, his nervous fingers twitching in the half-light.

“I’m gonna think about being a World War 2 Veteran called James who died in a plane crash during the Blitz.” Samuel smirked. “Fuck with their heads.”

The guy in the leather jacket turned round and mumbled.

He said something I couldn’t really make out, but mentioned the words Jack, Blitz, and fighter pilot.

I felt an evil, prankish smirk. Samuel was right. We do love this shit.

The camera focused on two small, slow moving orbs that passed in front of them. Us. I remember watching programmes like this when I was a student, growing up in Leicester where TV reception was dreadful, and everybody had cable. Long night watching bad television in freezing rooms, and now it was our turn. I remember sitting in circles with my posse, talking shit, drinking and smoking, and laughing our heads off at Ghostwatch as they pranced around haunted castles on Halloween. Fucking plonkers.

I felt a mind crawl into mine. I felt the guy in the tired leather jacket try and feel his way into, through me. I think I should’ve been thinking about something stupid. I decided to play along.

Hitler, has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert Hall…

I wish I knew more of the words. But it made me laugh. And it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Samuel laughed.

“There’s joy in this place”, said the guy in the leather jacket, “Jack feels happy he’s home.”

Samuel glanced over at me. He knew I was getting the hang of this. They were gonna have one hell of a TV show.