EARTH TONES EQUAL SHIT

BURNOUT.

2010-04-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

I met him at the coffee shop. We caught up here every six months to the minute, to dispassionately reel off all major life changes. It was the perfect spot for such a meeting – busy street, mostly takeout customers with hands-free kits blocking out any chance of us being overheard. Not that we talked of anything incendiary, in fact it was almost always the opposite. The truth is, being overheard would just be embarrassing. We were so dull, but it was an agreement we’d made in the youth we so desperately clung to.
The last time we came here the conversation had lasted 45 minutes but we’d stayed for an hour and a half, slowly sipping our drinks and doing that smile that’s half grimace. The remnants of our undergraduate selves remained if you looked hard enough, but we’d got married and lost our dreams of creativity. We sought pleasure in lie-ins and faux-intellectual documentaries on the BBC. We wore suits where once we wore androgynous blouses. We tried our damnedest not to reminisce, though every new anecdote we shared inevitably reminded one of us of a time from back then, dancing in someone’s kitchen or giddily diving around a children’s play area.
It was when I caught the first glance of him that I realised this time was different. He wore a baggy t-shirt that he’d cut the sleeves off of, emblazoned with an image of Betty Page. He’d lost a lot of weight, was smoking roll-ups and tapping his foot. His face held a gentle smile of contentedness. My initial reaction was shock, but I immediately envied him - the daring of it, to be pushing 40 but dress like a twentysomething, simultaneously screaming mid-life crisis and self-assurance. I approached him with a childlike wonder, and before I could say anything he said ‘come on, I know a pub we can go to. Coffee and middle age are a modern cliché.’
I inhaled sharply to say something, anything at all, but he told me to save it. It wouldn’t be long until we were there, and then he’d explain his extravagant changes.
He galloped along with a musical swagger, people moving out of his way while I fell back and avoided bumping into anyone. Within five minutes we were at the door of a worn old pub that I wouldn’t have noticed had he not stopped outside it, being a few yards ahead of me by then.
Looking around inside at the curious clientele I could not catch a particular vibe. No two people looked the same in any way, and strangely for central London, I didn’t feel comfortable wearing a suit. He ordered us both a cider and blackcurrant, something we’d drank a lot of in the flat of our early twenties. I laughed, shaking my head to cover what was a genuinely unnerving situation. We sat in a booth under a bizarrely terrible painting of a shipwreck, and after a triumphant sip and a glance around, he said only this:
‘I found out.’
He laughed and repeated himself, standing to grab my shoulder as his eyes rolled back into his head. ‘Don’t you see? We thought we couldn’t, but we can. These meetings between us have been dead for years. Christ, we’ve been dead for years! The day after I saw you last, I woke up alone, my wife having gone to get the Sunday papers as usual and I realised. Usual is the enemy.’ He looked pleased with that last line, and took a victorious swig of his adolescent pint. I’d been supping away at mine moderately, savouring it for the memories of feeling it awoke in me.
He explained that he shunned the paper when his wife returned, and instead picked up a photo album from our university years. I turned my nose up at this, knowing in my mind that to commemorate your former self was infinitely dangerous. It made balding men buy sports cars and single mothers have liposuction. He continued, saying he’d found that he looked basically the same physically, but a ghost was trapped in the photos. Some particular essence had got lost in amongst the facts and figures of the last fifteen years and he needed to recapture it. When he’d quickly decided to get dressed and do something about it, rifling through the drawers and wardrobe he felt a hatred for every item of clothing he saw. He began pulling them out, throwing them on to the bed his wife still lay in.
He started laughing at this point, amused by this section of his own peculiar anecdote. I just smiled, the acidity of my drink hitting home for the first time. I wasn’t impressed by his juvenile delirium at this point, and it felt like he was boasting about being so impulsive. I wanted him to get on and share this supposed key to life, which I became more cynical towards with every second.
He told me he found a pair of his wife’s jeans, and threw them on. He found a black shirt of his that he didn’t entirely hate, picked up his wallet and keys and kissed his wife goodbye. Apparently she was laughing, bemused, as I was when I’d first met him that day.
He ran into the street, barefoot because his shoes were nothing he wanted any more. He ran further, to the tube station, and got a train to Piccadilly Circus, where we were now. He had stood across from the advert wall, staring at it, trying to decode something he said. He smoked every cigarette he had left, as part of his baptism for a new life. He vomited into a phone box, all the while staring at the slogans and brand names. And then, without a second thought, he let out a blood-curdling scream.
And nobody batted an eyelid. Nothing happened, when he let out the sound of murder people carried on. He walked on, desperately wanting someone to share his news with, but wandered the street and found nobody who cared to listen to him.
He laughed and shook his head, embarrassed by the messianic mindset he had in that moment. I was still on the fence about whether I liked this new edition of a friend.

At this juncture I went to the bathroom. Must everyone have a breakdown to reach what he thought was ‘enlightenment’? I was afraid of him, afraid for him and most of all afraid of myself, hanging on his every word. The bathroom was down a little corridor fashioned from MDF boards, and the bathroom itself was a single toilet, no urinal or sink. It had a thick shag carpet, peppermint green in colour that showed up all the stains of what must have been years of business. On my return I gestured from the bar to him to see if he wanted another drink, and jitteringly gave me the thumbs-up. I ordered two more of the same, and the middle-aged guy behind the bar poured the drinks from a bottle he pulled out of a fridge from below. The drinks came to £4.00, which is obviously ridiculously cheap for central London. It was like buying drinks at some art student’s final project fundraiser - no till, receipts or card machine. In fairness, this was the least bizarre part of the day so far.
When I returned he carried on from the exact same point. I had to run through my mind to remind myself of what he’d said, and I was a little bit wound up that he expected me to remember every detail.
He said he’d wandered into this pub, disheartened by nobody’s interest. He pointed nonchalantly to the man behind the bar, and said that he’d struck up conversation. The bartender could see in his eyes he needed someone to engage him. He poured him a cider, and then offered him blackcurrant in it. The two made eye contact, and he said it was this eye contact that transported him back to a night we had back at university.
He gave me a moment to think about what night it could’ve been. There were infinite nights where we would drink cider and black, but I was sifting through all the most memorable times. Times we had reached something more than drunkenness.
‘Do you remember that time, when we were at Jane’s?’ he said, and immediately it came to me. I felt foolish for thinking it would’ve been any other night the moment it came to me.
It had been Jane’s 21st birthday, about two months before we all left the bubble and graduated. It was about five in the morning, and we were sitting in the conservatory, listening to Japan and becoming more and more subdued. I remember I was still drinking through the quiet. Earlier on it had been manic, with everyone sledding down the stairs on sleeping bags, throwing cake at each other and coupling up through insecurity. I was wearing black drainpipes and this weird corduroy trench coat I’d found at another party about a year back, and a t-shirt with Charles Manson in black and white on it. We all shared clothes and jewellery back then, and our group had a vibe of incest like so many at that age. We sat in silence, some of us nodding along to the music, some of us lying on the floor holding each other. It’s funny; that’s such an alien scenario to me now, but back then it was totally normal.
Jane brought up the fact that we were all leaving soon. It was always a black cloud of conversation, and people exaggeratedly groaned at her. Jane told us she wasn’t going to leave this house until the day she died. We laughed at her quietly, but we knew what she was getting at. Other people slumped down, saying they wished they didn’t have to go, but me and the man I was currently talking to in the pub - we didn’t do anything. For a minute it felt like we were avoiding each other’s gaze, as though if we looked at each other some cruel realisation further than the fact that we were moving away would hit us. But then we both gave in, and for that second’s eye contact it felt like we would be doing this, here, until we died. And we genuinely wished that we could. You could see another girl welling up at the thought of us disbanding, and we refused to do the same. We were so afraid of the future; so afraid of what, I guess, I eventually had become.
Within sixty seconds we were going back to our flat in silence. We were torturing ourselves being there, I thought at the time, knowing that we had to grow up and become our fathers. We didn’t talk until the morning, and we never mentioned the moment at Jane’s, even though it was obvious it had affected us greatly.
He started again, after I’d recounted this to him.
‘Get out. Jump out of modernity. Rediscover those old clothes, rediscover those albums, cut all ties and come and live here. This is Jane’s pub. The old guy behind the bar, that’s her husband. He started this whole thing, looking for his friends from back then. Jane’s been trying to find us for years. They started this project about ten years ago, the rest of the people we knew back then are here or dead. Dead from monotony. Wouldn’t you love to live in Jane’s house? Upstairs is almost identical to the old one. This front, we live off the money we make at the pub. We spend all day here, everyday, and it’s magical. It’s like we never gave in. It works, and we can survive in happiness. You never need to see the dull or criminally pedantic again.’
And with my approval, he showed me my room.

JOHN, PART ONE.

2010-04-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

I am Batman. I am the neighbourhood watch. I am the amalgamation of a culture turned to sex - sex as sport and oxygen. These streets I walk on, they’re covered in sin. Sometimes I wonder if there is a square foot of this town that hasn’t been fucked on. It’s Friday night and as I pass The Crown’s Peak, sanctuary of the weak-willed and genital-led, I can foresee the events of closing time – a man getting blown in the back alley, a woman getting fingered on the dancefloor, newly formed ‘couples’ hiring taxis to houses they’ve never been to.
I, Martin Bruise, do solemnly declare to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and the truth is that the gene pool is filled with used condoms and trolleys. It’d go stagnant if it weren’t for the forgotten birth control shaking it up every once in a while. It’s nearing closing time, so I’ll get off this street before the future parents of unwanted bastards flood it with their crude double entendres and vomiting.
I’ve heard of people throwing up their birth control pill before, I think that’s really funny. In my opinion, you shouldn’t have sex when you’re so drunk that you could actually vomit up those ‘essential’ chemicals anyway.
Next point of interest: the place of work, Freelanders. It’s a small chain of supermarkets that haven’t spread much further than the south coast. People go to the ASDAs, the Morrissons and the Icelands. Managing such a modest establishment is good for me – we mostly sell to the elderly, to whom food shopping is a pastime. We don’t sell condoms or cigarettes. The cigarettes thing annoys me, because so often I will run out whilst on the job and have to spend some of my break journeying to one of the various corner shops that we undercut. Thinking of this, I light a cigarette and carry on walking.
This high street I unwillingly inhabit feels like an advert for broken Britain. People think that because we’re in a seaside town full of pensioners, Frailmouth doesn’t have any crime. The truth is quite the opposite – we have lots of crime, but as long as the criminals keep to themselves, it seems that it’s no big deal to the appropriate authorities. Here on my left, for example, in the access road to Freelanders’ car park, stands a man in a cap exchanging some form of chemical for a fistful of banknotes with a skinny, acne-infested twentysomething. I actually have no problem with drugs, or drug dealers, or drug users, because Frailmouth is no place for the young to live. Had I grown up here I have no doubt I would have turned to some substance. The pubs are filled with absent-minded nine-to-fivers stuck in their instincts: fuck and kill. If one of those scenarios doesn’t occur you can bet the other one will, and these people thrive on the youth and those damaged in appearance.
Coming up on the left here folks is the street where I used to live with my ex-wife and daughter. Those glory days before the teenage years kicked in were spent in number 59 Gordon Street, with the luscious garden and good vibes in general. I always thought it strange that a place of such happiness and innocence could exist so close to this high street of tack and hatred. If you don’t mind I’m going to take a little breather on this corner. It’s hard to smoke in a balaclava, and although I’m getting better at it, I still need some breaks.
I look down at my outfit. The balaclava and green parka have IRA connotations, which are probably worrying for those I encounter, but the dirty Adidas and the bootcut jeans tarnish the whole look. I could do with some Chelsea boots – these Adidas don’t really mask the pain that is kicking some cunt in the ribs.
It’s cold out tonight, so I continue down the track I know so well. Cold nights for some reason seem to bring out all the perverts. I think it’s because they think the prostitutes might be less picky, or even give a discount or something, happy for the warmth of indoors. The unofficial red light district is just up past these crossroads now, so I’ll slow my pace. Sometimes you can catch stragglers; it feels like the Frailmouth red light district is expanding forever. Other times, the prostitutes are new, and so aren’t too clued up about where is best to get picked up. I’ve often bumped into young girls on my walk here, dressed in glitter and miniskirt looking for customers, angered by the fact nobody is coming for them. Some of these girls, they’re as young as 15. Everyone thinks only orphans, drug addicts or the criminally poor prostitute themselves, but it isn’t true. It is a fact that if you are collecting housing benefit and job seeker’s allowance, you can live happily without degrading yourself. Many – mostly on the right – believe that prostitutes whore themselves for psychological reasons. I don’t think it can be true of all whores, but for some it must be. The idea that your predetermined genitalia is something men would pay money for is probably quite empowering, however soulless and vacuous you appear to everyone with morals.
It is never the women that I have an issue with, however. Those men. Those men in cars with tinted windows. Suit and tie undoing their belts whilst the prostitute gives them a preview. These men are the absolute scum of the earth.
And you may disagree, and say that murderers and child molesters are worse, and you’re welcome to your opinion, but I disagree. Child molesters – okay. But I think ‘johns’ as these men are known are at least on a par with child molesters. And murderers, well, I cannot possibly agree with you. After all, in the strictest sense of the word, I am a murderer.
Now I’m mere metres away from the red light district. I can see the man I want. The fool has gotten out of his car.
He stands there in a heated debate with a whore over the price of oral sex. He says he’ll go no higher than £15. Standing there in his leather tie, beer belly far and away overflowing his belt, he makes me sick. I lift the balaclava up to void my mouth of the taste of acidic bile. I stand patiently on the other side of the road, listening to their conversation for hints of which car is his. His eyes keep darting at this hatchback Volvo, so I manoeuvre myself to stand in front of the driver’s side door.
Standing here, I can feel the crowbar that lines my parka pushing into my hip. I’d rearrange it but it’s presence builds the excitement within me. He’s walking back now, empty handed; there are 50 metres between me and him and he’s shouting ‘get away from my car.’ I laugh inaudibly.
25 metres and he’s getting ready to push me out of his way, back to the house with an aging wife and 2.4 children. I pull the crowbar out, and he freezes just out of reach of a swing of the crowbar. I decide to take on the car – if he does go home tonight (unlikely), there will be signs of danger and worry for his unassuming wife.
And I’m really going to town on this car now. No windscreen, no mirrors, no fucking headlights. The prostitutes that line the street don’t move at all – they know I wouldn’t touch a hair on their head. And he’s screaming and screaming, calling me a cunt and threatening to call the police, when he signs his own death certificate with a push to my chest, like I need to be provoked.
I swing the crowbar, and it lands perfectly between his fat head and his fat back, making him fall to the ground. He’s too slow to break the unexpected fall, so his nose is bleeding and he’s wailing about his broken glasses and his car. Classic of these upper-middle class deceitful husbands, to care about possessions over themselves. I swing the crowbar into his back like a guillotine’s blade until he makes no more sound. He’s coughing blood; critical internal bleeding I suspect, but it’ll be the last thing on his mind in about five minutes.
I turn the monster over to lie on his back, so I can see the look on his face. He’s dazed and bloodied. His face is still mostly intact, minus the broken nose, so I prepare to take a running kick. I back up a few steps, spitting on this living and breathing corpse, and as he pleads with me to spare him, I both dislocate and break his lower jaw. The lower half of his face hangs to one side, the jaw’s split visible to the naked eye.
Again, the kicking hurts my foot. I think a few killings back I broke a couple of toes on this particularly hateful man’s perineum, so although the kick has done the necessary damage, it is at a cost.
At this point I’m leaning over his body, as he shakes his head from side to side nearing unconsciousness. I’m dragging him to my usual alleyway to commit the finishing move on him. He’s making no sound; they never do by now. Once we’re hidden far enough away from the streetlamps, I reveal his genitals. I take out my knife, and stab him as hard as I can in the perineum. I’m putting on my latex gloves as his eyes roll open. He won’t make a sound. I’ve seen them do this before.
Through the wound created with the knife, I dip my finger in a little bit of blood. It’s only recently I’ve started numbering the victims in this way – by painting the digits on their eyelids. It stops me losing count, which would be far too easy in this blur of vengeance and violence. ‘27’ say his eyelids. In life, he was a lying, cheating pervert, but in death, he is just another number.
When Robert DeNiro says ‘you are looking at a man who could not take it any more’ in Taxi Driver, I know exactly what he means.

*

Of course, I know such actions are not those of a healthy mind. A background becomes necessary at this point, if you are to ever think of me as anything other than a maniac.
Every time I feel torn up or regretful of my actions, I write a letter to my ex-daughter. How she died is no glamorous James Dean/Marilyn Monroe affair; simple deterioration was the manner in which she left us. She is, as I am sure you will have worked out by now, the reason I carry out these premeditated yet random attacks. The personality-type is a constant, but their faces, mannerisms and dress differ. The letter is composed, drafted and finalised on Basildon Bond’s stunning champagne stationery, I visit my daughter’s grave, read the letter through to myself for a final time and burn it. It is, as are the majority of the set pieces I carry out in my unenviable duty, merely ceremonial. I of course don’t believe I have any contact with her. Though my actions are insane I do not have the audacity to believe something watches over me; religion is the final hurdle in making this world a tolerant place, as antiquated as racism, homophobia and sexism. My actions play into a believer’s hands of course; ‘well he’s a murderer, of course he doesn’t believe in a heaven and hell situation’, but think what you will of me. God-fearing people kill everyday.
That was an awkward belief to explain to the vicar when we booked the church for Danielle’s funeral. Although, under the circumstances I don’t think he could possibly have denied us his facilities, we were all over the local newspapers. It isn’t like the Catholics need any more bad press.
I wish I could say that the funeral was a modest affair, or even that we treated Danielle as well in life as we had in death. My then wife and I’s parents got involved, to keep up appearances more than anything, and so went to town on the ceremony and headstone. Whenever I visit the grave I wince at the marble cherubs, the beautifully carved scroll on which the text is carved. Danielle was not a saint, or a believer in angels. It’s the small town mentality penetrating my parents’ and in-laws’ pockets to appear righteous and just in the wake of a heroin-addicted relative’s death.
They knew she was on it. How couldn’t we have? When she came home intermittently between her leaving and death, she would show every possible sign. I visit every few days because I know that her death was in no small way to do with me. I could’ve cut her off, locked her in a room, fed her and made her well. But we disconnected. My wife and I turned our backs on our only child as she went to live a life of addiction, emptiness and criminality.
Criminality – well, if you are taking heroin, you are breaking the law. The criminality did not stop there, nor did her addiction start there. When she moved out of our house we split on amicable terms. She went to live with friends, had a job as a receptionist at an IT company on the outskirts of town. We were proud of her; she was happy, we were happy to see her happy, it was for about six months a world of pride we lived in. I don’t know how she came into the heroin, but the police said that these ghouls often leash their franchises in by building a physical dependency in them.
I hate to use abstract concepts like ‘franchise’ and ‘ghoul’ to describe human beings, but you must understand that once Danielle had fallen into this world she was not a human being. These men who use women in the way that they used Danielle don’t see her or the other franchises as human beings. They’re a masturbatory aid: they’re Kleenex, they’re lotion, they’re a fucking porno. And when you aren’t treated as a human being, you don’t think of yourself as a human being. I have no doubt in my mind that once fully dissolved among the piss and semen, Danielle saw herself as nothing more than a modern convenience.
The tragic thing is being a father. Being a father of a daughter just is tragic. Imagine that feeling of seeing your daughter go on a date. The guy could be the kindest, most romantic man to have ever walked the earth but you still reckon that he’ll corrupt your sweet child. That guy, you want to pound his face in. But you don’t. A little bit of anxiety is usual for a father to experience when a daughter goes on a date. Well now imagine that you know that guy is going to fuck her. And he won’t be the only one that evening. And none of them will use protection. Sure she didn’t operate out of our house, but with children, it is never out of sight out of mind. Every night, I went to bed knowing that she was out there. Out there strung out and dazed, while another man pushed himself into her numb self.
And Danielle was fucking beautiful. She was a beautiful and intelligent girl. The boys she dated whilst at home were always really nice people, and she could’ve had anyone. We did a great job on raising that girl, and every time I saw her after the first heroin-addled visit was like death by a thousand cuts. The pain was as constant for me as I am sure it was for her. Knowing that she was out there, no longer living with friends. Not knowing where she lived. Not knowing if she lived, until that final reminder of her existence in the form of a call from the police.
I left my wife Marion in the dark on the matter. She needn’t know. If it hadn’t been Danielle’s body I was to identify, then she would never have needed to know the police had called at all. When I walked into the morgue I felt nothing but acid. Seeing red can be a sign of intense rage or a burst cornea, but when nobody else sees the red that is so magnificently present in you field of vision, then your cornea is healthy.
I haven’t stopped seeing red since.
Since I saw Danielle’s broken nose. Since I saw her crushed eye socket. Since I saw her jaw, detached on one side. I don’t know who had called in the discovery of her body, but that person must have found her in the death throes, because these were new breaks. The bruises were still discovering their palette. The swellings were still in the changing room. The liquid blood was finding its resting place, just as I was about to have to for Danielle.
The policeman handed me a cigarette and held me. He said that I was the first parent to ever have had to identify a dead prostitute that he had known of, and how he couldn’t even begin to imagine how I felt. Tears ran down both of our faces. It was the last time I am aware that I felt anything. The positives of emotion are never worth the negatives, and so feeling nothing is a glorious freedom for a man in my position.
They had a man in custody, the owner of the car backseat she had been found lying on. He told me that he was responsible for her death, and would never see freedom. Her DNA would be all over him, and vice versa. He was a damned man, but it wasn’t good enough for me. It was odd, but it wasn’t him I hated. In the way that it isn’t the matador who kills the bull but the institution of bullfighting that people are against; that is how I felt about prostitution.
The policeman drove me home in my car. He said I shouldn’t drive in my state, and that he would help me break the news to Marion. We shared the solitary sound of the car engine. Neither of us dared break the silence of that journey.
I held Marion tighter than I ever had as PC Dunblaine broke the news to her. The action was instinctual, and although I appeared distraught, I was planning what you now know me for doing. I thought about the IRA imagery of my potential costumes. I thought about keeping track, and how I would discover where the prostitutes operated. I thought about every single detail: the knife, the crowbar, the numbering of the ‘victims’, the symbolic deaths they would all die. I thought about how I would be doing the world a favour, to rid it of the waste of blood and bone marrow that is the prostitute customer, AKA ‘the john.’
What I didn’t think about was backlash, press coverage, the controversy of my actions. When Jack The Ripper killed prostitutes, behind closed doors he was praised for cleaning the streets of disease and the scum that were hookers. Back then prostitutes were self-employed; they had no ties to anything and it was quite simply what they chose to do. However, knowing as I do that the modern day equivalent rarely has a say in being fucked by these power-hungry perverts, I would never target the women. They are not the problem. The problem is the pimps. My approach destroys the house of cards by taking out the bottom storey. If the users are fearful of death, they won’t use. If they don’t use, the prostitutes won’t make money. If they don’t make money, the pimps don’t make money. And if they don’t make money simply because nobody shows up to the shop, then they can’t blame the women. And if they can’t blame the women then they’ll have to keep the women in check with their drug of choice, and when they stop supplying the women the drug they have chosen to leash them with, well, the women will find other ways to get heroin. I’m sure there are more than a few crooked medical students with an access to medical-grade opiates. These women can go back to having normal jobs, keep their heroin addiction but of their own accord. That’s the world I want. I don’t want these pimps - these stockholders of sex to get money when all they’ve invested is murder and a laissez-faire attitude.
When I’m done with the ritual graveside letter burning, the cigarette that walks me home feels like the milk I was born to suckle on. The irony of smoking, that something that makes you feel good will eventually kill you is not lost on me. Be it love, drugs or entertainment, it’ll all kill you in the end. It’s a tug of war between which will die first: you, or your enjoyment of the thing. With Marion, it was the latter.

DOPPELGANGER

2010-02-25T07:10:00.000-08:00

I've been looking for your features
In each woman's face,
Hoping you're the evil twin:
A crooked nose, oily skin,
Empty enough eyes to read
Intelligence in.

Lose yourself in populist fiction
Because of girls with perfect diction
Torture myself with visions of you
Entangled in spotlights of darkest hue
Cover intrigue's cage with a blanket
Hope it dies of starvation.

OIORPATA: PART ONE.

2010-02-16T18:17:00.000-08:00

He was a good kid, Paul. One of those guys on the fringe of your life in a polo shirt with good intentions. Not a crowd-pleaser, but a people-pleaser for sure. At this point we’re singing some hymn or other, and I’m staring at the closed coffin to avoid the gaze of anyone I know. Two weeks ago none of us gave a shit about Paul. We would see him out, and we would talk to him in brief stints not qualifying as conversation, but we never gave him a second thought. No invite from us, now standing at the back of his funeral done up to the nines. I don’t think the formal dress is out of respect. I’m almost certain the majority of guys here are in suits to pick off horny mourners later. Why else does a 19-year old travel 40 miles?

And we’re singing:
Where shall my wondering soul begin?
How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin,
A brand plucked from eternal fire,
How shall I equal triumphs raise,
Or sing my great deliverer's praise.

We men sing it like a football chant, we’re so afraid of showing humanity. The girls sing it like Mariah Carey, a finger on one ear. We’re all using this funeral as a way to boost social status. At least I’ll admit it.
Paul was a huge Portsmouth FC fan, so a flag hangs over the coffin. It looks so tacky I want to shake someone. A football club can surely never be the biggest aspect of someone’s personality, can it? It seems crass that the parents would think it a good move. It looks as though they agree with us: ‘yes, Paul wasn’t outstanding, and, if he’ll be remembered, it’ll be for his one love: Portsmouth.’
I feel atrocious being here. I shouldn’t have come. It’s a mockery of teary relatives for us to be here. The last time I saw him alive was in some sleazy pub/club place, where drinks are cheap and women are cheaper. He looked like he was having the time of his life, hovering on the edge of a circle engaged in conversation without him. He waved to me, and I waved back. He was pathetic. I remember thinking, ‘that guy there, he is pathetic.’ Even as I remember this a chill of anger runs through me. Why are we here?
We are here out of guilt.
We are here out of fear.
We are here because there’s a wake with an open bar.
We want to seem empathetic. We want to show ourselves what we’re not – a dead nothing. But most of all, we want one night stands. It sickens me to be here. I feel itchy noticing the company I’m keeping.
The guy on my right, John, he’s a cunt. He’s told everyone we know here he’s wearing his Grandad’s suit from the ‘50s. That’s his approach: the ‘quirky’ lay. He might read a book you haven’t heard of and tell you it’s oh so romantic. He might take you to see an art installation that means nothing to anyone. But that’s fine. Better a cunt than a snake. Nobody wants romance any more; women watch Sex And The City and forget it is fiction. How many times have you heard someone say ‘oh we are so the Sex And The City girls’? And how long have you then taken to speak to the one who identifies with the bookish wallflower? You go straight for the slut. Nobody is above what John does. John looks like every pop-rocker ever, but mostly Bryan Adams. I use this against him in most of our confrontations.
On my left we have Luke, and he is a snake. He’s a stalker, he uses small observations about women to his advantage. He’s all about the long game. The ‘oh you like that band? Let me play you their new album as we slowly descend into hatefucking because you think it’s fate or something.’ Luke is the most normal looking person you could ever be unlucky enough to meet. I wish someone would slash his face so it was less of a wallpaper.
That’s what Paul had. Paul had innocence and looks. Paul needed no tactics. Paul didn’t know he was going to get laid until the chick asked him if he had a condom. He got laid by being trusting and friendly enough. He wasn’t overloaded with women falling at his knees, but if more than ten women were drunk somewhere, it was guaranteed he was having regrets the next morning.

On the other side of the church are the girls. About twenty girls from our university bothered to come. I think at least fifteen had to see the boy they’d fucked this year’s descent into the mud. Six of them lived together – the five that hadn’t slept with him, and another one. Emily was the crossover girl, bawling her eyes out into Kleenex after Kleenex - one of only three girls consistently crying. She had this beautiful blonde hair like a 60s model, and even as she cried I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted with all my heart for her to mean those tears. I just don’t think she did.
Of the twenty women that came, I’ve fucked five of them. ‘Fucking’ and ‘sleeping with’ are, in my eyes, entirely different. I slept with Emily, the sixth. I wouldn’t say we ‘made love’, that implies a creation of something wonderful, and I don’t think I’ve had that experience yet. But we didn’t fuck. Fucking leaves a bitterness. When you sleep with someone it’s middling. You can say hello after sleeping with each other. I wanted to say much more, but that wouldn’t be very appealing of me.
She was the only girl who’d done anything more than put on that ‘little black dress.’ I hate that women all have a ‘little black dress.’ It’s boring. It makes it hard to distinguish between those you have and haven’t fucked - the five here of which would be entirely interchangeable with any other five women in the room.

And I’m a terrible person for thinking all this as the priest does his ‘ashes to ashes’ bit, and I should really be remembering Paul, but it’s too much. I light a cigarette as the coffin descends into the pit, and I think of what my first free drink is going to be. Regardless of what I’m thinking, I’ll double it. So will everyone else. And we’ll avoid the question on everyone’s mind. Why didn’t we notice he was missing?

Untitled Extract From Something Bigger And Seedier. If Possible.

2010-01-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

He looks to the left, searching for the culprit who stained the bar’s air with that poisonous perfume. It could be any one of these women, with their hair curled and enough lipstick to stain the cocks of the men they would meet later.
As he looked these women over, trying to conceive a picture in his mind of the kind of woman who would be so self-righteous to believe she had the right to invade the stale stink of the establishment, he would constantly catch their eye. Each time they aggressively looked back, a sting would come into his eyelid, giving him the appearance of having a nervous tic. Or worse, winking. A particularly hateful redhead in black lace that just covers her vagina starts towards him.

Oh fuck, he thinks.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet my future ex-wife.

And sometimes it’s like that. You’re hatefully attracted to people who, if of the same gender, you might think about bludgeoning. He grips his tumbler harder now, as she approaches to sit on his lap licking her lips. If someone doesn’t die tonight, his spirit will.

PAREIDOLIA: PART ONE.

2010-01-05T06:11:00.000-08:00

It sounds both childish and harmless. Pareidolia, or seeing specific things within surfaces where no specific things lie, most commonly means the sufferer envisioning faces in places like the grain of wood, expanses of material, or the texture of a wall. It’s what causes people to scream messiah when they stare at an inconsistently cooked tortilla, to see a face in the ridges of the moon, or children to see monsters in the dark. That last example defies the scientific explanation for why so many people see faces everywhere; psychology has theorised that it is a human’s necessity to find a pattern in something to comfort you, and your mind is rigged to recognise faces in the form of a triangle. It’s supposedly the same thing that instantly makes you decide whether you find the person you’re looking at attractive that makes a huge amount of people see faces everywhere. But how can a child seeing a monster in shadow formations be explained through a necessity for comfort?
I remember as a child, my grandmother and I would point these faces out to each other. Only we were ever interested enough in the phenomena, and to this day we still find it very strange. Back then it brought a comfort. None of those faces were crying, or sad or violent. They were cartoons set in the carpet, friends of the family in fleeces. Nowadays they’re all her. To me, anyway.
I swear you could give me a perfectly flat blank page of A4 and I’d find her in it. Her pale blue eyes and crooked nose staring back at me from pulped trees is a guarantee. Since I started writing this I’ve spotted her in the dust on my mirror, the wooden door and the crumpled sheets of the empty double bed. Our empty double bed. It’s an obsession now that she’s gone; I am synonymous with those retired widows who set two places at the table. I wish I could say that I held this woman in such reverence that this was my motivation to see her in everything – as though her presence in the everyday was a comfort to me. It is everything but that. It is a shiver in the spine, a fearful double take. It is the plague that I have had to come to terms with in the four years since she went.
She’ll remain nameless, if that’s okay. I feel that vocalising the syllables that form her name or even committing those letters to paper may worsen my condition. For weeks after her funeral I would find letters addressed to her, and the patterns forming her face that I could see in the corner of my eye would have seizures, coming entirely to life silently. I remember the first time it happened, when the cards of condolence came through from those absent from the funeral. Addressed to me and outfitted just as any other letter, I opened the first one from ex-colleagues of mine to the message ‘so sorry about ______’, and her image in the doormat’s fur grew in size, screaming silently at me, contorted beyond reality but still so abhorrently her. The onslaught of moving faces lasted until sundown. I tried to escape her under the sheets of our bed but it was impossible to block out all light, and the fractured beams that broke my haven projected her into my field of vision over and over. This continued for as long as the condolence cards came, and until recently I had the phenomenon almost under control, only seeing her in surfaces perhaps 11 or 12 times a day. That was until they reopened the investigation into her death.
I did not kill her. It’s not as cut and dry as that. I had no part in her death. None at all. This is not another of those stories. My only fault was negligence.

TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2009: NO. 10.

2009-12-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

So I Figured I'd Do A Countdown, Cos Everyone Loves A List. It'll Be In A Particular Order I Reckon, As I Love To Discriminate, With Some Shock Choices But Some That You'll Think 'Yeah, Obviously, Dick'ed.' I Think A Lot Of End Of Year Lists Forget Months Like January, Cos They Were So Far Away, But Mine Is A Full On Retrospective. I Hope It'll Make Someone Go 'Oh Man I Haven't Heard That Since April, That Was The Balls In April Maaaan.'

Anyway, On To The First, At Number Ten.

Tiga - Ciao!

I Doubt This Will Appear On Many Lists At All. It's Probably Too Tongue In Cheek For Most People To Feature On A List With *Spoiler Alert* The Brilliant HEALTH Album, But It Is Fantastic For A Million Reasons.
With Songs Like 'Sex O'Clock', 'Love Don't Dance Here Any More', 'Shoes' And 'Mind Dimension', Tiga Pumps His Fist Whilst Threateningly Cackling In Your Face - A Bit Too Close To Your Face, Like Those Women You Meet Who Insist On Standing Against You Yet Whom You Well Don't Want To Kiss.
What Is Shocking About This Album Is That, For A Record Predominantly Produced By Soulwax, One Of The Most Widely Renowned Dance Act Of Our Time (Probably Second Only To Daft Punk), It Didn't Really Reach Much Further Than Full-On Gurning Electro Kids. And That's A Crying Shame, Because It Is, For Me, The Most Brilliant Album For Pre-Drinking To Since Justice's '†' In 2007. And Then The Majority Of Us HAD To Pre-Drink, Cos We Were Underage.
Tiga Seemed Sure Of Every Track On This Album. There Was Apparently A Hilarious Moment When He Appeared On Kissy Sell Out's Radio 1 Show. Sell Out (As This Would Be His Last Name) Told Him That He Had Seen Kids Going Wild In Clubs When The Main Lyric Of 'Mind Dimension' ('Every Time I Look Into Your Eyes I See The Future') Dropped, And Asked Tiga How He Had Come Up With Such An Inspiring Lyric.
Tiga's Response?
'I Wanted One Of Those Really Horrible Cheesy Lyrics That You Used To Hear All The Time In 90s House That Don't Really Mean Anything.'
Sell Out Took Quite Some Time To Reply...

With Songs Like 'Luxury' The Listener Has To Take A Step Outside Of The Music. Its Lyrical Content Can Be Summed Up In This Sentence: 'Basically I'm Rich And Bathe In Champagne And Rolex Means Fuck All To Me And Because Of This I Am Better Than You.'
Hoping He's Joking, I Enjoy The Overly Suggestive (I'm Amazed That's The First Time I've Said 'Overly Suggestive' In This Piece) 'OohWaahOoh's And The More Chilled Tempo.
Sometimes Tiga Hits The Boundary Of 'Come On You Show-Off Fuck' But You Never Hate Him For It. He Is Kind Of Brilliant.

'Sex O'Clock' Is An Obvious Favourite. Co-Produced By James Murphy (Fuck You If You Don't Know That Name) It Is More Of A Strut Than It Is A Song. It's Wondrous In Its Powers To Make You Think You're The Balls, And I'm Sure Such An Effect Is Tenfold For Tiga Himself.

Anyway, I've Said My Piece. There's Only One Way I Could Possibly Finish My Piece On 'Ciao!', And That Is With Tiga's Self-Produced Press Release TV Interview. If You Haven't Heard Him, Don't Listen Without Watching This Video First. It's A Miracle Committed To DV Tape. It Makes Me Think No-One Has The Right To Talk About Tiga Except Tiga. Which Means This Is All Irrelevant. I Apologise.

Part 1

Part 2

DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT...: PART ONE.

2009-12-06T10:55:00.001-08:00

Bruce Forsyth? Every time he says ‘nice to see you, to see you nice’ I get 20p. I had a dream about one of those guide dog charity boxes you see with the plastic dog on a handle, where I motioned to donate some of my hard-earned Brucie Bonuses to the guide dog training facility. But as I pushed the first of five 20 pence pieces into the slot on the dog’s scalp, it started barking, spurting blood and the handle was attached to an old woman with a white cane. I couldn’t stop forcing the coins into this pained dog’s skull, and the bloodstained nose of the queen shimmered in the daylight. Nobody stopped me: if anything they acted as though it happened all the time. When you see lost cat signs they’re far more hopeful than lost dog signs. Lost dogs are always dead, whereas cats fuck off all the time. Growing up during rationing my body has never developed enough testosterone, and so if I sleep on it awkwardly I wake up with a moustache side parting.
But before we touch upon the intimacies of these tenuously linked stories, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Harold Harman. I have never had an actual job, fate has just handed me everything I ever needed. The Brucie Bonuses, that’s true. I live for the Challenge channel repeating ‘The Price Is Right’ and ‘Play Your Cards Right’. Without those Brucie Bonuses I wouldn’t have two pennies to make fire with. I have lived what most who hear the following consider a rich life. Rich in events, yes, but rich in any other sense then, my friend, I would have to disagree. I live in stairwells and shop doorways, in a town the name of which I no longer remember. Nor do I care to. This town has burnt me to the ground like the remnants of a travelling carnival. Dirty marks on the floor, plastic cups and vomit washed away by rain and spit and simpleton feet. They don’t appreciate me here. They don’t know what I’ve done for the world they live in.
When I was 14 I left home. That was in about 1952. We were on the bus to Blackpool for a first post-war holiday, and I could see the sea before anyone else. In those days the game of ‘who can see the sea first’ came with the prize of a ha’penny. I needed that ha’penny, I hadn’t saved any pocket money for the seaside attractions, wasting it on cola cubes and comic books back home. When I saw the sea, I was overwhelmed. The bus stopped at the pinnacle of this hill, knowing that the children would be inconsolable if they couldn’t run about in the sheer ecstasy of their first seaview. I took my chance to run to the sea, with my mother having gone to the toilet at the little shop we had stopped by. The type run by an old married couple with signs of domestic violence.
As I ran down that hill, realising that the sea was much further than I had at first thought, I realised there was no going back. I would frolic in the sand dunes until my irrationally skinny torso could not take the wind any more. The police would come to find me, and I’d be huddled up behind a bush or something, you know, the classic makeshift shelter.
After about fifteen minutes I realised the error of my ways. The sea was just the sea, and a British sea at that. I had never been so disappointed by a new experience. Not at this point in my life anyway. I wandered slowly back to the pit stop shivering my mouth off, teeth chattering and damp from the ocean spray. They’d gone away, with no sign of a search party, just continued to a bed and breakfast with a name that now escaped me. The feeling of accidental liberation was incredible. I could do whatever I wanted now. So I walked down the hillside to the city lights like the wise men’s star, not knowing what I’d do when I got there but determined to avoid all busmates. That’s the first step towards how I came to be here. Beautifully alone among the wild hedgerows, the wind whipping at my side now and then, I knew I was not meant to live in factories or emergency services. They were basically the two jobs you could have back then. That or the army and I’d seen war take my father so that could sod off. That’s when I became myself. I don’t think I’ve changed since, at all. Fortunately I didn’t just die on that moor. These were the days before paedophilia, when every stranger was a friend you hadn’t met. Not like today where if I’m unconscious past about 6am in the doorway of a dead Woolworths, I’ll get kicked about by a menagerie of discontented men.

THE MERCI KILLINGS: FINALLY A FINALE.

2009-12-05T16:40:00.000-08:00

And finally, Oscar was alone, alone in charge of the world and all its merciless disasters. The forum ran dry, of course, as nobody alive was a member except Oscar. He’d given up on human contact, cleanliness and almost everything that makes a person distinguishable from animal. He hadn’t eaten in weeks, trying to decode chaos theory, having given up on the idea of ‘Oscar as messiah.’ Something you will not have read about in the papers is that upon his body’s discovery, Oscar weighed four stone and nine pounds. Had he lost three more of these units of life, he would have had no need for the razorblade. Four stone and seven pounds is the lowest weight a human can exist at without dying. Just. It is basically the number you find when you add up the weight of every bone, every organ, every tooth and particle of skin. No excess whatsoever - no muscle, for sure.
The ‘Oscar as messiah’ period was so short that it cannot be measured in months. For someone who had been so determined as to kill all those possibly blocking him from utopia, he had given up almost incomprehensibly quickly. The truth is that from a psychological point of view, I believe that Oscar cannot have coped with the guilt of serial murder as well as he wishes us to believe, and would have thus been preoccupied with the baggage of blood on his hands. His suicide note (which we will come to shortly) gives evidence as to why he gave up and turned his hand to chaos theory. This change came almost as a last attempt at redemption, with Oscar writing all manner of equations on everything he came into contact with: bedclothes, work surfaces, and eventually, his own skin.
Many papers have been published on the idea that chaos theory is entirely predictable. It is just that the human mind has not yet cracked the code of nature, which may, in its most extreme form, be able to tell you what will happen anywhere in the universe for all eternity. Perhaps if Oscar had discovered these ideas, however questionable they may be, he would never have resorted to murder, and instead become a brilliant mathematician capable of unlocking nature’s secrets. Sadly, we will never know what could have come of Oscar. I hope you have found this exercise in examination of misinterpretation and the human ego informative and void of sensationalism, and I am sure you will notice it is the only account that deals with Oscar’s tale without glorification of violence, pejorative treatment of mental illness or vilification of Oscar. Oscar was an extraordinary patient, yet one of whose type I hope not to meet again. What follows is the suicide note of Oscar Cornwell. Nothing emitted, nothing added. Purely the thoughts of an intelligent young man who had lost his faith in a world with no true rules. No reasoning as to why bad things happen to good people. And as hard as publishers may try to censor this: a world with no divine leader, no God or any number of Gods, just random acts of violence and fortune. Oscar was trying to find a balance in saturation.

August 12th 2008.

This is me. Everything I am is a miracle, and I would never now doubt that. I wanted to align the unjust placement of fault lines, to cure deadly illness, stop famine and war. But I have discovered, through mathematics and violence, that nothing is under any one person’s control. No individual can change the world. My only effect here is destruction; and though I feel irretrievably disgusted that I killed those people, their and their loved ones’ loss doesn’t affect the world. It keeps turning. Murder is tiny. Genocide is one further, but really, humanity is nothing. It has been said a thousand times and I’ll shall scream it a thousand times more, humans could die tomorrow and the world would not stop, but any other animal, vegetable or mineral and humanity would be fucked. And so, I am making a stand. To a world without humanity. To a world where we do not kill to ‘survive’ without having to. I sign this letter with the blood of my throat in the hope that somebody discovers me, knowing the lives I took and the choices I made and realising that truly, I made fuck all difference to this world, and nobody else will either. Be selfish or care for everything. I love everything from the soil beneath our feet to the black mass our universe expands into. I only wish I hadn’t wasted my single chance on irregular theories and kitchen utensil death. See you never again, because this is my end. Happily never after, Oscar.

THE MERCI KILLINGS: PART FOUR.

2009-10-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

September 19th 2007.

The online philosophy forum I partake in most evenings has arranged a real-life (whatever that means) think tank that I am to attend in a few weeks. I can’t believe quite how easy it was to meet people who, like myself, believe that they contributed to the world as we know it. Joe, 27, from Birmingham, believes he caused the Twin Towers to fall after swiping two wine bottles off of a table in a drunken rage. He feels terrible about it, as anybody would, and waited a fair few months before divulging this information with the other members. Linda, 53, from Weybridge, believes that she created Saddam Hussein whilst doodling on an exam paper back in the 1960s.
The think tank is to discuss how we should go about attaining complete control over our abilities. Joe and Linda are perfect examples of how easy it is for our type to mistakenly cause harm and evil to occur on Earth. Stephen, 42, from Aberdeen, is coming down to London especially for the meet. He says that he’s cracked the formula for paradise and needs to share it with us all before something else happens. Something we can’t recover from.
I feel superior to the entire group. I will not lie. They have each caused some disaster, and me? I do only good. I brought global warming into the public consciousness after Will, 31 from Camberley, made it happen during a particularly shitty summer back in the 90s. We don’t know how to halt it all together, but I have put it on the agenda for the discussion.
There are many theories as to how we came to be. The majority believe that in each generation one is chosen, which seems a fair explanation as our ages are all quite dispersed. This theory says that you do not have the abilities from birth, as they pass on once a former controller chooses to die. The other theory is that we are former controllers reincarnate. The ones that believe in this have many ideas as to who in history has been a controller – Martin Luther King, JFK, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan and Margaret Thatcher were, amongst the believers in this theory, most definitely controllers.
I believe the former theory. I do not disagree that some of the aforementioned people may well have been controllers, but it does not mean that we are these people reincarnated. They were simply those chosen from their generations.

The think tank Oscar refers to took place in a Starbucks in London Waterloo train station on a Saturday in late October. The group called the meet ‘The Real G8’, and according to various short extracts from Oscar’s diaries, the group did not get along as well as expected. There were very many disagreements among members, but it seems the most controversial statements came from Stephen. Believing himself to have cracked a formula for paradise, he had expected the group to take his words as gospel. But as seriously as this group took the subject, they found many continuity errors in Stephen’s ideas. He theorised that if they worked together, trying to take on one world issue at a time as one consciousness, they could succeed far more brilliantly than as individuals. Oscar seemingly kept quiet throughout the meeting, taking in the words of the others. It was the beginning of the end for Oscar. These other members even seemed crazy to Oscar, and didn’t understand their purpose as wonderfully as Oscar felt he did. In the next extract, Oscar’s intentions become clear, though it is still many months before he will carry them out.

November 20th 2007.

Since The Real G8 Summit in London, the forum has taken a turn for the worse. The members bar me are delusional, and fighting over what they have done for the world, like children in a game of Cops And Robbers shouting ‘you’re dead, I shot you, you’re dead.’ They do not dispute my claims, as I can back them up with the methods and actions I took to fix the issue. They want fame from this. We should be looking to make the world better.
The truth is that I am beginning to doubt their abilities. I feel like the only one who speaks modestly enough to actually have the powers. I believe I may have conjured these personalities to exist as company for myself, and they have now grown out of control. They exist to betray me, conjured subconsciously to give me an enemy amongst all this. A challenge.
The challenge will be over in a matter of months now. I intend to erase these characters so that I may continue with my true mission – that is, to make the world paradise for my creations and myself. I first intend to erase Stephen in Aberdeen. His self-assuredness is dangerous; I do not claim to have all the answers, but the paradise mission will take much discussion, and Stephen is not open to suggestion. Also, as Stephen is the furthest from me, it will be virtually impossible for any detective to connect me to the murder.

I do not wish to dwell on the murders one by one. Although my description of this murder will exceed the detail of the others, it is not due to any prominence. Every killing was carried out in the same scrupulous manner. I have of course decided not to feature a photo section a la ‘Helter Skelter’, because the police photographs are too graphic, and Oscar’s photographs are too disturbing. Until this point in Oscar’s case you may not have thought a picture as sinister as Sharon Tate’s body with her unborn baby torn from her womb could exist. This is not a competition between The Manson Family and Oscar in terms of sheer insanity or depravity, and for that reason I have chosen to leave out the photographs.
Oscar caught the train to Aberdeen from King’s Cross station on the morning of January 31st 2008. You may have seen the CCTV footage of him stood on the platform in the multitude of prime-time documentaries made in the wake of Oscar’s discovery. He travelled alone, unarmed. More unnerving extracts from the diaries (omitted at the request of Oscar’s mother) detailed how he planned to kill with household objects, so as to avoid carrying a deadly weapon.
The murder appeared to police to be swift and without too much struggle. Oscar caught the train back early on February 1st, having murdered Stephen in the early hours of the same morning. He had managed to arrange with Stephen, away from the other forum members, a visit, where the two ‘superior’ forum members would discuss issues amongst themselves. Under this veil of friendship, Oscar attacked Stephen with a bread knife, eventually detaching Stephen’s head from the spine.
Some reports said that Oscar beheaded his victims, but this is not true. The head remained attached in all cases, but Oscar attacked so brutally that he managed to sever the brain’s connection to the spine. He believed that this would disconnect them from their ‘controller’ duties, so that each victim would be the end of their ‘controller spirit’ line, leaving him alone to decide the fate of the world. Terrifying diagrams exist of Oscar’s research into how this might work to rid the world of ‘controller spirits’. Oscar then took pictures of the victim’s spines for later reference, pictures of their naked bodies (for a power trip and proof of their vulnerability) and pictures of the word ‘merci’ spelt out in salt on the victim’s mattress – for quite some time the police missed this vital piece of evidence in linking the murders. The word ‘merci’ was picked as a play on the word ‘mercy’, as Oscar felt he was being ‘merciful’ to humanity by killing these individuals, and it is also an anagram of the word ‘crime’, which in his undeveloped brain was a ‘cool’ calling card. All photos are contained within Oscar’s diaries, and after Stephen’s death Oscar stopped writing any words at all, replacing entries with dated photographs. Between January’s scarce diary entries and his August suicide note, Oscar did not touch pen to paper.
In the final part of this book, I will detail Oscar’s suicide. The other murders all occurred within the months of February and March, but now, for the first time, I will explain to you the reader why Oscar waited so long to die.

THE MERCI KILLINGS: PART THREE.

2009-10-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

Society cannot of course blame Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon for what Oscar did. His crimes do not reference their music at all, and I of course do not believe in the backmasking idea that suggests music can have subliminal influences on a person. What is far more likely however is that his knowledge of The Beatles came from his father.
On the 18th March 2004, Oscar’s father, Ranulph Cornwell, died of a heart attack aged 49. Oscar was 16, and from what I gather, not at all close to his father. From what I learnt from Oscar, his father was a drinking womaniser. I wish not to offend the family members that survived Mr. Cornwell, I am just recalling Oscar’s words.
He reacted very oddly to his father’s death. He dropped the protection of ‘women as objects’ and became almost an entirely new person. He was who I had always suspected him to be – a sensitive and neurotic boy. When asked how he felt about his father’s death, he said that he felt guilty. Guilty for feeling relieved. Guilty for having not seen him enough. Guilty for not revealing who he truly was whilst the man was still breathing.
He recalled times when he would go to his father’s for the weekend. His dad would tease him about his virginity, and watch primetime television shows just to ogle the youthful presenters and contestants. Oscar regretted laughing along, pointing out presenters his dad might not have seen. It was never that Oscar didn’t enjoy the female form, it was just that he felt he had to prove his masculinity.
Some of his family members say that Oscar’s murders were the final proving of his masculinity to his father.

March 21st 2004.

So dad died three days ago now. I still feel weird about it. I can’t watch TV, but that’s all I can’t do. It’s all we ever did together. It would be harder to cope with if we had done more than just that, but I kind of feel like its already sorted out in my mind. It’s not like every action I carry out has a ‘dad used to love doing this’ feeling attached to it.
What’s weirder is the way that I can feel myself exiting my shell. At school I’ve been more open, kinder and I’ve even got a date lined up for next weekend. She’s called Elaine, and she’s really kind. She’s got eyes that look dense. That’s a fucked way of describing eyes, but I mean that there’s personality in them. The opposite of hollow. She carries herself as the ultimate 21st century female – skirt appropriately long, shocks of colours in her apparel. She dresses beautifully. She is in all meanings of the word, beautiful.
She’s fun to be with. We ate lunch together and when our hands touched, I took a leap and grabbed it. I loved that moment. She didn’t turn me away. She wanted my hand in hers. We looked at each other as if to make sure we both knew it was happening, it was really cute.
But it’ll probably end next Friday. Who really minds though? I used to think of things as set in stone, but now I don’t want that. I want the excitement of not knowing, of when the phone rings looking to see if it’s her and the heart palpitations that come with her presence. A friend of mine once said ‘never regret anything that made you smile.’ I don’t completely agree with it. But it’s a start.

I found it hard to read this. One paragraph on his deceased father and then three on how he had a date, and how Elaine was perfect and brilliant and gave him a new lease of life. It spoke volumes about his family life.
Contrary to what Oscar had believed next Friday was not the end of him and Elaine. They were together for a year and 5 months, and in that time Oscar was a delight to have in my office. I looked forward to his sessions. They had become entirely unnecessary of course – Oscar’s happiness violently peaked whilst he was with Elaine. I liked to hear his whimsical recollections of times he had had with her. It felt like my duty to calm him down on occasion, he seemed so besotted with her. As with all teenage love it was not built to last, and it ended rather suddenly when Oscar told me he was bored of her.
As an adult it is hard to take the love of teenagers seriously. Do they truly know what love is? My reply to that question is does anybody truly know what love is? Love is undefined and entirely different on each occasion. Sometimes it is ‘rip your heart out’ obsession, others it is ‘I would die 4 U’ devotion, and so on and so forth. The truth is that nobody experiences love in the same way. Not even the two lovers.
Oscar went into himself. He found nobody thrilling enough, and just thought of humanity as a whole. He was, in his mind, the only individual to have ever existed. He started to invest himself in bizarre philosophical theories, taking them as fact rather than a breeding ground for thought.

August 14th 2005.

Today on the internet I finally read the truth. A man theorises that everything outside of your visual field does not exist. Prove it wrong – I pondered it for hours until I finally had to admit that it was probably entirely correct. Everyone I know is a figment of my imagination, and that’s fine. It means the world is mine, entirely. Africa exists only because I allow it to; my brain has decided that the world must be bigger than the house I inhabit. I don’t know why, but maybe I’ll find out why one day. It’s very liberating to realise that you will everything to exist. I can do anything I wish, and involving myself with others is pointless because, in a way, they are all me. Elaine was probably my feminine side come to life. If I had created myself as a woman, I would most likely have been Elaine. Yet, I am not Elaine. I am Oscar Cornwell, and I’m only that because I want to be. All these years spent looking for a religion, a meaning, a purpose, and when I finally find the truth it means that I am the complete top of the food chain. All deaths are willed to happen by me, even one day my own. I want to meet others that live in my position, but is it possible? Could it be that more than one of my kind exists within the same reality? I have to find out.

I still have no clue as to what caused such consumption of Oscar by mental illness, and serious mental illness at that. More than a God complex, Oscar believed he controlled all that he could see. We had a few sessions after this revelation; a revelation I of course had no idea about until I was permitted to read the diaries. I told him to stop coming, because he smugly spoke gibberish at me. I now of course realise that Oscar thought I was under his control and so used his sessions with me to ‘test his powers’.
After this we stopped seeing each other. The rest of this account will consist of annotated diary entries and an afterthought of mine, explaining in depth the murders and the possible psychology of Oscar Cornwell. I merely speculate, as I had no contact with him after 2005. I do not wish to be seen as writing this book so as to be regarded as a specialist on Oscar’s case, I write this only from a personal need to vent my feelings and have the truth out in the open once and for all.

THE MERCI KILLINGS: PART TWO.

2009-10-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

He was a man built around obsessions. Subjects that would undoubtedly crop up in all of our sessions (after the initial trust exercises) included spiders, his physical wellbeing and a woman called Ava. When he first mentioned Ava I made sure to not fuss over it. Dropping it in flippantly in a later session was the best way to go.
He described her as having long brunette hair, beautiful eyes and ‘the best set of blowjob lips’ he had ever seen. He recounted a time when his mother had walked in on them having sex, and he had pulled the duvet over them both, so it appeared like he was levitating, but most importantly, alone in his room. He laughed at this memory, and a serene smile came across his face when he told me that his mother had never confronted him on it. It was only after around ten more sessions that Oscar told me Ava was a blow up doll.
This revelation wrote off all of my thoughts on his relationship with Ava, and I unprofessionally became rather angry about the wasted time. I had of course been paid for these sessions, but I wanted to help him, without trickery or lies such as this. The only good that came of it was the unexpected reveal that Oscar also spoke to his friends of Ava as a real-life girlfriend. This showed progress in our relationship, with him telling me the truth whilst lying to his friends. I counselled him on how he thought of women, and made him draw his ideal woman. This was mostly to distract him from the weight of the next activity, which would also include drawing.
The female form was of course a love of his. He drew his perfect woman in such detail – shading under the breasts, discreet make-up and realistic hair. The woman was obviously what my father would call ‘a real dollybird’; hourglass body, heaving bosoms and Oscar’s favourite ‘blowjob lips.’ In his diary this occasion is well documented.

August 24th 2003.

Today my counsellor made me draw my perfect woman. As per usual, I struggled to show what feelings I actually had towards love and sex et al and instead opted to draw the man’s man’s ideal. One of those Playboy chicks, who would fuck you if you had enough money in the bank or even just in your wallet. Truth is I hate those women. They’re stuck in the 50s with the whole ‘cook your man a meal’ mentality. When a girl says they’re dressed up for themselves it is bullshit. All women want sexual attention all the time. Even the taken ones. I think that’s why I’m so awful with girls – the majority of them, I completely despise. There’s no humanity, just cheap thrills.
Not that I am actually better than that. I crave attention in all areas, forever. I sometimes think that this counselling lark is only necessary because nobody wants to interview me. I want love on major scales to the point of hysteria. Beatlemania.
I don’t think I’m asexual, because I’ve never had sex, but I think I easily could be. I think I fear sex. I know how judgmental and shallow people can be, and so losing your virginity must be putting that all out on a plate for the world to see via the receiver. That’s not true for women though, unless they’re with a massive cunt of a man who describes every millimetre of her vagina to their friends. Women are mostly expected to lie back and take it. Most times I don’t think the man even sees her genitalia.
The counsellor gave me this homework assignment – I have to draw my own personal paradise. Why all the drawing? I hate my drawing. I try to draw realistic humans but the end result is slightly wonky, so that the picture looks like my intention after weeks and weeks of crystal meth addiction.

That personal paradise he mentions was the next assignment I previously mentioned. I could speak of that picture forever, analysing it to shreds. It was the complexity of it that first struck me. It was like a great film that every time you watched you saw something new.
The undertones of sexual frustration were there once again. Coconut trees, monkeys, nude sunbathers - all flooded the A4 snapshot of his psyche. Yet the most interesting part was the waterfall. It is not unusual for a waterfall to be included in a ‘paradise.’ It represents an individual’s goals and desires, and can symbolise beauty and grace. Behind Oscar’s waterfall was a cave. This was not unusual, but he had drawn things invisible to the human eye inside that cave. I asked him to draw in detail what was in the cave.
In Oscar’s usual way, he tried to take away the gravity of the situation by making it vulgar, drawing the cave as a vagina-shaped crevice in the wall behind the waterfall. When he saw that I was disappointed and bored of his childishness, he set about drawing the contents of the cave. Within that cave, he drew himself.
From what I have learnt in many years of psychology training, this could have meant one of two things. The first is that Oscar felt detached from paradise, that the waterfall separated him from his idea of perfection. The other is that his goal is to discover himself, and who he is.
Not wishing to bullshit the patient in the middle of a breakthrough, I asked Oscar which idea felt nearer to the truth. He spoke quietly, cautiously and honestly when he told me that both seemed quite true. He felt however that they went hand in hand. He said, quite bluntly, that because he did not know of his purpose or place in the world, he could not reach that paradise.
I spoke to him about myself for a short while, hoping to relax him with a story he could relate to. The truth is that I had had no idea what I wanted to do until I was 18. At that age you have to take a jump into university or straight into a job, and I felt that no day-to-day job would suit me. I lucked out when taking psychology at university, which at the time I was unsure of, and loved it.
I said he need not think so submissively about the future. It’s what you make of it, I told him. There’s no instinctive gene that says what your life’s purpose is, and philosophers have been mulling over the meaning of life in general since basically the dawn of time. He seemed to acknowledge what I had said, but the diary entry that day was perhaps a sign of an internal dispute of Oscar’s.

August 31st 2003.

The counsellor told me that there’s no master plan for human beings. This implies atheism on his part, and I think that might have been a dangerous thing of him to say. I am currently uninterested in the idea that nothing has any meaning, because that means I am disposable. And some people might say that makes them feel free, but that makes me fucking terrified. Sure it’s probably nice to think that once you’re doing something – it allows you to change jobs and stuff – but I don’t do anything yet.
I ordered a Qu’ran, a Bible and the Tibetan Book of The Dead today. I need something to believe in. Humanity is nothing to believe in. Love still has a chance to be the unifying religion, but so far there are no signs of its existence to me. I don’t believe in a God, but I do believe in an afterlife, just as meaningful as the present life supposedly can be. I just want to find some more perspectives. Buried under all the homophobia, sexism and squalor in those books there must be some hope.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the third reference to The Beatles so far. John Lennon read the book during the recording of Revolver, and Tomorrow Never Knows is based on some of its contents. Along with Mark Chapman and the idea of ‘Beatlemania’ this forms Oscar’s subtle influence from The Beatles. Charles Manson was infamous for having believed The White Album was a message for him to start a race war. This bears negligible relevance. It’s just a fact that interested me.

THE MERCI KILLINGS: AN INTRODUCTION.

2009-09-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

June 14th 2007.

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. I’m 19, and everything is already coming to an end. My teens are coming to an end. My education is probably coming to an end. My sexual peak is coming to an end. My belief in love is coming to an end.
That ‘sexual peak’ line, that’s a scientific fact. The moment a boy hits 19 he is slowly becoming less virile, less fertile and on the whole less able in bed. A woman hits her sexual peak at 30. I can’t tell which is worse – hitting your peak as your sexual career (as it were) is just starting to expand, or getting to enjoy something when you’re settling down?
But yeah, the whole death thing. I get so bored for weeks and weeks at a time that I contemplate suicide. I’m not sure if I fully believe in reincarnation, but I feel that if I were to take my own life, it’d just be like changing character in a video game. Sort of a ‘no this one’s no good, I’ll try another one’ situation. Religion sort of fights this idea. Is Heaven the equivalent of the final cut-scene? I don’t really know. I lost track of this metaphor a while back. Plus, what if Heaven isn’t the final plateau? It could easily be that there are several higher levels. I mean, Earth can’t possibly be that close to the top. People die from dirty water, AIDS exists, nuclear war comes closer with every second of every day, and yet I don’t feel bad worrying about my hair, if I’m sweating too much, if I’m blinking too often, et cetera.
I think this is the basis of depression, though. I’m entirely aware of those awful things, and how I am a speck of dust on a mirror in comparison to those giant issues. It doesn’t change how I feel. I’m still alone and ugly, regardless of how many donkeys die in the desert.
I want to be the man to turn the doomsday clock’s hands to midnight. I think I could make this place beautiful if I had a clean slate. I don’t want everyone in the world to die, I’m not a Jim Jones, or even a Mark Chapman. I just feel like some families are doomed to inherit pain and evil. Homophobia is the latest travesty to still be acceptable behind closed doors, and it all comes from fathers. If your father brought you up to think that gay sex was disgusting, calling men ‘shirtlifters’ and ‘poofs’, if your family is really close, then you will probably inherit the same beliefs.
I think divorce is good for the world. If your parents hate each other, or cheat on each other, you’ll inherit trust issues and anger issues and all sorts of deep-set emotional problems. You’ll never be able to love properly without some form of counselling. Nobody’s ever managed to just shake those feelings off.
Then again, maybe divorce doesn’t stop this from happening. My parents divorced when I was still discovering what vegetables, animals and minerals were, and I’m pretty ruined. I heard arguments that involved words nine year-olds probably do say but shouldn’t hear come from the mouths of family members.
I don’t see myself marrying any time soon. And nowadays that’s cool, and fine, I mean some chick had twin babies at 70. Not that I’ll wait that long, that’s really mean to the children. Who’s going to tell two 10 year olds that their mum died of old age? They’ll be more fucked than those of us lucky enough to hear and witness sounds and sights that television saves for after the watershed. It worries me to think of what I’ve repressed. I’ll be one of those people you hear about who remembers something in a doctor’s office and starts slashing people to shit, unless I work this all out.

That’s as good a way as any to start this story. The above is taken from Oscar Cornwell’s diary, approximately a year before the crimes he is now so renowned for. It took me some time to gather the courage to write this. I was fearful of seeming to be milking a cash cow, what with the press coverage Oscar garnered. Please understand that I only write this for people to learn from. As you can see, there are no signs that Oscar would evolve into what we now know he was at the time he died, except for maybe the ‘doomsday clock’ wish and mention of Jim Jones and Mark Chapman, both notorious for very different types of murders.
I first started to counsel Oscar when he was 15 years old. I remember the first time he came into my office, he struck me as your typical depressive teenager from a broken home. He wore the baggy black jeans and the face of anger and sadness. I figured that he’d be out in a couple of sessions – it’s a teenage phase; I like to call it ‘lack of interviewing.’ At that age people think they’re the first person to have thought something, felt something, done something. They feel overly individual, particularly in cases of divorce, I have found. Some psychologists theorise that the so-called ‘victim’ of a broken home is glad of the discourse, although I would never go as far as to say that.
The first few sessions, we just talked about the divorce, life at home and his relationship with his mother (whom he lived with) and his father (who had moved out at the time of the divorce). His answers to questions on these topics were classic teen angst wrapped in pop culture references. He was obsessed with all that is sexual which of course is not unusual for a teenage boy, but would come to an unexpected conclusion in the crimes you will have read so much about.
In this book I hope to further explain Oscar’s state of mind. The family have given me their blessing and access to many of Oscar’s belongings, including the diary that the previous extract is from. I will progress through Oscar and I’s relationship using these artefacts and my own notes from our sessions together.
His actions came as a great shock to both his friends and family, the former of which I hope I may be so bold as to lump myself in with. In no way do I excuse Oscar’s actions, but I will never condemn him for them.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF REGINALD D. THROWBACK, PART FOUR.

2009-09-09T16:20:00.001-07:00

My first kiss. My first kiss, in that seedy apartment, with a woman my father had defiled.
She was 24, 7 years older than me. She right off the bat told me that we could probably never have vaginal intercourse. The doctors said that penetration could cause the wounds to re-open, and that without the labia and clitoris it would be extremely hard for Holly to get aroused enough for sex to not hurt. I, a 17 year-old virgin, found this hard to take in. I didn’t want to make love to her then and there, I just wanted to know that it would eventually be a possibility.
We talked for hours. She was in the Open University, learning how to be a teacher. I told her I was planning on taking my A levels once I’d fully come to terms with my father’s activities. We kissed some more, and I walked home.
I rang her straight after work the next day. She’d had some ideas as to how we could make love. I was worried about it. She was still an ex-prostitute, who had the previous day explained the worst and funniest things that happened to her. She could have any number of diseases, and I assumed that we wouldn’t be doing that which is usually done, because of the injuries. It was a bizarre place to be, with a woman who was now handicapped because of my own father.
We arranged to meet at hers that night. I went to the shop, for condoms, flowers and chocolates. I was terrified on the walk to Holly’s. My first time with a woman was to be with a woman who had been with more men than I could possibly imagine.
As I walked through those smoky halls my pulse was racing. What if I wasn’t good enough for her? What if I couldn’t perform? What if the whole experience was just a job to her, like when she was a prostitute? I wanted this to mean something. I instinctually knew that sex should never be without feelings. I’d heard horror stories about people who just entirely regretted their first few sexual encounters. I really didn’t want to be one of those people.
As I knocked on that door, I started shake. I was more than intimidated by Holly’s sexual experience. I felt like a child. To be more specific, I felt the way I did when my father would prove his superior strength on me at any point I made a noise, throughout my childhood. She opened the door half-naked, blues playing in the background in candlelight. She walked me in by the hand, sat me down in the armchair and handed me a glass of champagne. It was so perfect.
She started to crawl towards me, as my eyelids started to droop. The last thing I remember hearing, before the unconsciousness, was, in that raspy Cockney accent, ‘like father like son you fucking idiot.’
When I woke up, the blues still played, but the candles had all burnt out. Holly was nowhere to be seen. I figured maybe she was sleeping.
I had no clothes on, and my lap was wet. I walked to the bedroom, smiling, wishing to see my love. Through the door, I saw an empty bed and a full-length mirror. In the mirror I saw that the wetness was dark, thick and sticky.
Shit, I thought. Maybe Holly had been too enthusiastic, used her vagina and bled all over me. She might have rushed to hospital, but then I realised something, as I was wiping the blood away from my legs.
I touched a charred stub. A stub where my penis should have been.
I hadn’t had sex. I’d been castrated, then cauterised. And on the door, a Post-It note read ‘FUCK YOU’, and I sat there and cried until I knew I had to start walking home.
I never did get those A levels. The world is based on love, both physical and mental, and half of mine is nowhere to be found. Furthering yourself is only to broaden your spectrum of love, and me, I’m off of that radar for good.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF REGINALD D. THROWBACK, PART THREE.

2009-09-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

If you plot the points at which Jack The Ripper’s victims were found on a map of Whitechapel, connecting them forms the crude shape of a vagina. In my research into prostitutes (aided by the death of my father and the allowance of technology in the house) I discovered many facts such as this. The word ‘whore’ comes from the Old English ‘höra’, which meant ‘desire.’ The fact that ‘whore’ is now an insult shows just how much language can change over a short period of time. Saying ‘you’re my whore’ now implies that you are a pimp, or just very derogatory to women, whereas it would’ve previously meant ‘you are my desire.’ Which is beautiful in a way.
One in 300 women in London is a prostitute. That is a terrifying fact, when you think about the size of universities. It is 0.3% of all women, but to me that is still too much.
My research was mostly to discover the dangers of dealing with prostitutes. I knew I didn’t want to deal with ‘pimps’ or ‘johns’, in fact I wanted it to be Holly and I discussing my father’s tendencies over coffee. But things are never that simple.
I walked down to the infamous estate that my father had taken his women from. The details were easy to find; they’d been spread all over the front pages for weeks after the discovery of my father’s depraved work.
The Kateston Estate. It was infamous enough for violent crime, drug abuse and poverty, but with prostitution added to the mix my plan felt like a death wish. Walking towards the estate down one of the largest inclines in the area felt symbolic. Descending to the same level as the lowlife that inhabited the pit, a knot grew in my throat. I wanted this to be a flying visit, straight in and straight back out. Yet, as Holly had never sold her story to a newspaper or magazine, I had no idea what she looked like. All I had to go on was my father’s diary notes, which stated she was a tall blonde with breasts too big for her spindly frame.
A small group of women were at the bottom of the hill, stood on the pavement pigeon-toed. I of course don’t know how it is to have a vagina, but I am sure that that stance is derived from having to fuck for money. I’ve seen women who are just slutty have to walk like that, so these women must’ve been toughened, as it were.
I walked up to the nearest woman, amongst all the bizarre sexual mimes aimed at me by the group. I asked if she knew Holly Sloane, and if she was nearby.
This woman wanted £10 for any information, so I gave her that but swore to myself that was all she was getting from me. In my research I’d discovered average rates for prostitutes. For £7, most prostitutes will give you a hand job, and allow you to finish on them. It’s terrifying to think about. I don’t even get out of bed for £7. My job at the time paid £9 an hour.
She told me Ms. Sloane used to hook with her, but since the media attention had quit and gone straight. She gave me her address, and proceeded to try and talk me into sleeping with her. £35 for half an hour, £50 for the full hour. Averages. Prostitution isn’t empowering, in my mind. It is admitting you are a product, selling yourself. Some feminists say it empowers women, making men admit they are willing to pay for your socket genitalia. I think a world where that is empowerment is a world gone to hell.
I walked by the remaining hookers and approached Holly’s road. It was on the same estate: a shitty little flat, where the staircases stink of piss and the lifts never work. The corridors were full of smoke that just hung in the air. It felt like one of those dreams that teeters on the edge of being a nightmare, so you can’t let your guard down ever. Shouts and the cries of babies echoed through these halls, and I struggled to place the origin of any noise I heard. When I finally got to Holly’s flat, I put my ear to the door. I wanted this to be a one-on-one situation. I didn’t want any trouble. I just wanted to help, and apologise for my father’s actions.
I knocked on the door, and almost immediately there she was. Her voice wasn’t how I imagined it would be, silky and soft. It was a dirty murmur of a voice, with a powerful Cockney accent.
‘What do you fuckin’ want? Who sent you here?’
I explained myself. She invited me in, taken aback by my appearance. At first she ranted and screamed at me in that terrifying voice. Not only did her voice not match her obscenely proportioned body, her language was like nothing I’d ever heard spout from a woman before. My mother was entirely intolerant of bad language, and the kids at school who used it were just unable to express themselves in a civilised way, I’d thought until then. I think because I’d built Holly up as a victim, I had expected her to be a damsel in distress type of woman. In a bizarre way, I was quite disappointed that my father’s attempts to end her life hadn’t left her a withered wreck.
I apologised until she calmed down. She then offered me a drink. The choice was tea, water or vodka. Water was safest. We sat around the work surface that divided her tiny kitchen from her tiny front room, and I proceeded to ask what had happened with my father. She sighed for the longest time imaginable, and then the events cascaded from her in that cutting voice.
‘I was down on the estate, stood with the other girls, smoking and shivering as per fucking usual. Then up drives some guy in a Bentley, who I now know is your fucking dad. We all go silent, push our tits out and mime blowjobs through the tinted windows. Your dad winds down the window and points to me. I was fucking well relieved, some nights I used to stand out there and get nothing at all. With a rich cunt like your dad you can sometimes squeeze a thousand over a night. He asked me how much for the whole night. It’s £1000 without extras, and by extras I mean oral, anal, facials and that. He tells me he wants the girlfriend experience, and hands me a grand. I immediately play along, holding the hand he isn’t driving with, doing all that romantic shit. The girlfriend experience is my least favourite job, but for a grand I can never turn it down. It creeps me out that someone would be so deluded that they would want to play out a scenario in which they and a complete stranger are in love.
Anyway, we got to your dad’s, and he gave me this weird fucking dress to wear. It’s not unusual for johns to want you to dress a certain way, so I obviously put it on. It had this fucking ridiculous corset stomach on it, made me fucking dizzy as shit. I walked out in this dress and he was sat by a log fire with two glasses of wine. ‘Well alright!’ I thought to myself. It looked like this would be a well easy job, apart from the bit where I had to sleep with the fucking beast. Your dad was one of the ugliest guys we’ve ever had round here, and we get all the fucking ugly virgins coming round to blow their stuff up us.
Anyway, he made some small talk, talking about the royal family. I thought he was gonna blow his load right then he was so excited talking about the fucking queen. After a bottle or two of the wine he asked me to undress. I did it, and started to touch myself on his command. He sat there, with a grin on his face. It felt like he was just making me do this shit to prove his superiority over me. It fucked me off.
I started to crawl towards him, and I pulled his flies down and got his dick out. He started to panic, for no fucking reason I could see. I reassured him that it was all alright, and that’s when I saw what had made him panic. Me coming close like that put my pussy out of view, and the knife in his hand, which reflected the fire next to my eyes, was now fucking useless. He couldn’t do whatever the fuck he had planned to then. I backed off, and put his money down by the fire. I didn’t want a grand if I’d never get to spend it.
He lunged at me, and your dad, being a fat fuck, overpowered me and had me pinned to the floor. I remember trying to scream, and him turning me over with my face buried in the carpet. Nobody could hear me through that, he knew it and I knew it. He sat on my back with one hand on my neck, pushing my face into the floor, while his other hand reached across the floor. The next thing I knew I was bound on the floor with him turning me over. He pulled the knife down across my tits, scoring my nipples.’
She’s crying now.
‘He then moved down my body, scoring my abdomen as he went.’
She lifts her shirt slowly to show the scarring.
We’re both crying now.
‘He cut my vagina to shreds. I saw my own flesh lying limp on the carpet, and was given a second wind. My legs weren’t bound as tightly as the rest of me, and I managed to wiggle a little more space whilst he was distracted with my dissection. I kicked and kicked and kicked, and he fell back on to the floor from his crouching position. I jumped to my feet and ran as fast as I could to the door, with him chasing me the whole way, screaming at me to stop. I got out on to the driveway, still gagged with my hands behind my back, bloody face from using it to push doors. He stopped chasing once I got through to open air. I walked home, naked as the day I was born, at three in the fucking morning, crying my eyes out. Not only had he mutilated me, but he’d mutilated my livelihood.’
I held her close. A relation of mine had ruined her. As I looked into her eyes, I saw lost purity. I saw a girl my age, afraid of letting men fuck her for fear of emotional harm. I wanted to know her. I wanted to help her. I wanted to love her.
And at that moment, with us looking into each other’s eyes, she kissed me.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF REGINALD D. THROWBACK, PART TWO.

2009-09-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. His obsession with Henry VIII, which the remainder of my family had thought was an in-joke, had flooded into reality, and the headlines for that matter. ‘Survived’ was of course my mother. The other five were not wives of his, but that is where the dissimilarities ended. Apparently my mother had been well aware of what he did in his annex, but ‘protected’ me from the truth of it, deciding she would tell me when I was old enough. The news came out shortly after my 15th birthday, and on the day it hit the presses she refused to let me go to school. ‘The children may have known, having seen it on local breakfast time news, and kids can be cruel.’ When she broke it to me – both that my father had committed suicide and been the reason three women died – I didn’t really know what to do, or think.
Please understand. There was no love lost between my father and I. If I was doing well academically then the rest didn’t matter to him. It often felt like I could’ve had cancer and as long as I did my homework he’d cope with it like water off of a duck’s back. There was no such thing as mental wellbeing. I think he thought of me as an extension of his own intelligence. If Freud were to apply his ideas of the id, ego and superego to the family dynamic, my father would most certainly have been the id. He lived an even more decadent life than my mother and I had known. It all came out in the murder-suicide aftermath. A diary was found, written in ink with a quill. My father had noted down every act of his insanity as if taking stock in a supermarket.
The first death had been of a woman named Dolly Beauchamp – almost certainly not her real name, but one the police found on a business card in her purse upon inspection. That business was, as you no doubt have predicted, the oldest job in the world. My father had hired prostitutes for a large sum of money to play out ‘the girlfriend experience’ exactly as he wanted it. He dressed them in regal Tudor-style outfits. Dolly Beauchamp had been the first to be fully involved in the scenario, and when my father had started to shout at her for cheating or forgetting to cook for him et cetera, she had played along, saying how ‘bad’ she was. The poor slut had thought it was foreplay for a rough sex act.
With this in mind, Dolly had placed herself in the jaws of a guillotine, most probably assuming there was no blade. I have since learnt that stocks are often used in bondage. She probably thought this was the same. She probably expected my father to penetrate her every hole, ‘punishing’ her for being ‘bad.’ She probably expected he’d let her out after her ‘punishment.’
She probably didn’t expect that while she shouted dirty words, spurring my father on to fuck her in the throat, he would drop the blade that had been hidden in the darkness of the ceiling and remove her head from the rest of her hollow being.
The second murder was a different kind. In keeping with the poem, victim number two, or ‘Died’ as we shall refer to her from now on, had not been murdered. I have always disagreed with this police verdict. They had categorised it as ‘manslaughter’, but the way that my father so gleefully remembered it in prose suggests otherwise. Died hadn’t been in any state to be recognised. Nobody came forward to say she was missing. She was a Jane Doe in the eyes of the police. My father never noted a name in his diary for any of his victims.
As far as I could tell, the death of Died had started as accidental. The diary stated that they had been making love on the bed, and my father had grown confused and frustrated by the emotions he was feeling towards her and started to play rough. She had enjoyed this at first, but he started to push further and further through her. ‘Twas as though I was trying to penetrate her heart’, he had written in the diary. She started to bleed from the top of her cervix. At least, I assume this is what happened. My father had very little knowledge of anatomy and just noticed blood. The sight of blood had both scared and excited him, and so he continued, with gusto. She must’ve been screaming by now, because my father wrote that he had to use the ruff she was wearing as a gag to cushion the sounds that were no doubt audible from the family side of the house. She had died from internal bleeding a few hours later. Hours after my father had finished with her. He then stashed her with Ms. Beauchamp’s body in a cupboard under the stairs of his illustrious abode. When both bodies would not easily fit, my father had had to break the bones of Died. He’d smashed her jaws with the butt of an axe, leaving no dental records. Then were the legs, which he did in two parts, making Died’s thighbones fall in two, and then the same with her calves.
Things only became interesting as I read the diary entries that my father remembered the ‘divorced’ in. The two of them, although listed as divorced in my father’s journal, had actually just been able to escape the fate he had had in store for them.
The first’s name was Phyllis. She was not a prostitute, the only one in my father’s grand scheme who hadn’t been. I’d actually met her several times. She was a middle-aged woman who worked as a maid in my father’s quarters. She had always been very shy around my mother and I, preferring to leave the moment she had cleaned up my father’s half of the house. For a woman her age she had an unusual amount of deeply set wrinkles in her face. The face of someone who was living day by day, living to survive rather than enjoy herself. In the diary my father remembered her fondly. He remembered her fondly as a nymphomaniac. Her looks had always emitted a feeling of guilt to me, and when I read this passage it clicked into place. Tears streamed down my face, I remember to this day. Whether the tears were out of sadness for my mother, or for the loss of a man who I’d never known to have any grasp of romance, let alone love, I do not know. The diary continued to speak of how my father would try to get the house as tidy as he could for when she would visit, to have more time to spend enjoying her company with red wine and warm embraces.
She had committed suicide after three years of their affair. She had written my father a letter, which he had tucked into the pages of his diary. Tearstained, the letter said: ‘My darling, I cannot apologise enough for what I will have done by the time you read this. My life has become a constant cycle of guilt over the last few months. I enjoy nothing but being with you, and when I leave your side I am reminded that our love is condemned. We exist only in the rooms of your home, and every exit is a divorce, a heartbreak, a reminder that your house is a stage upon which we act as lovers, only to leave the auditorium with a little less of our souls. I will always love you. I just no longer love the world or, more importantly, myself.’
It was a horrible feeling I took from this letter. This woman had felt about my father, who I was entirely disconnected from, how I wished I would one day make a woman feel about me.
I pushed myself to read further. I had to consciously remind myself that my father had been a murderer to stop myself relating to him. He had treated me like a process. Get through school, get a job, get married, have my grandchildren. And yet, I found myself excusing all of this because he held a glimmer of romance.
I felt that to rid myself of the innate love of my father, I would have to meet one of my father’s victims. To be precise, the second ‘divorcee.’ Her name was Holly Sloane. She was a surviving divorcee, a prostitute from the same streets as the beheaded. At 16, when I should have been pursuing higher education, I got a full-time job at a bakery, and began the search for Holly.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF REGINALD D. THROWBACK, PART ONE.

2009-08-29T06:07:00.001-07:00

Of course this isn’t my real name - a pen name to hide embarrassment that will no doubt follow this intimate communication. I am now in my 30s, and have escaped the binds that will emerge in the coming passages. I’ve never recovered from what went on in that house – 44 Penwick Avenue, the one with the illustrious gates and regal gardens. The kind of house that a young child’s nightmares take place in, revealing their existentialist fear of being too small for the world that encroaches upon them. My childhood was based upon a regiment of fear.
The house was split into two sides. One side was my father’s personal haven – filled with his bizarre antiques and modelled on the castles of the 15th and 16th century. It had the four-centred arches instead of regular doorways, and no electricity to ensure its authenticity. My mother and I weren’t to touch anything in that haunting establishment, and in fact were very rarely allowed inside its walls. Once a week we would all eat Sunday lunch in there at the criminally overextended dining table. I describe it as such because for as long as I lived in that house, never once did my father have any guests. Nothing necessitated that table, and the three of us sat around it was the family dynamic manifest. Both my mother and I sat far away from my father at the head of the table, on opposite sides. Until I was about 12 years old, hitting puberty and the first glimpse of independence at secondary school, I thought that all families lived this way.
It all started to make sense then. It would take years to fully scare my upbringing out of me, to bring me to an acceptable level of normality. I was in quite an advanced phase of spiritual growth by then. It was like being a feral child – if you haven’t learnt to speak in a human language by 14, you never will grasp the lip and tongue movements necessary. My issue was not language, but it was communication.
My first day of secondary school was not one of adventure and release, but one of realisation and fear. I greeted my teacher as my father had taught me to greet all of my elders, with a bow, and reminded myself to end every communication with him with ‘sir’. My classmates laughed, and laughed. They were the types who cared not for respect or authority. They smoked at the back of classes, taking pictures on their camera phones of pre-pubescent genitalia whilst I and a few other institutionalised nerds would bury our heads in textbooks and literature.
School was the only place I had access to modern culture. My father banned any literature written after 1603. This meant I had read Shakespeare’s entire works, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Bible countless times. I personally wasn’t religious at all, but if my father had known that he would’ve disowned me, even thrown me on the street. He was a devout C of E follower – church every Sunday, cross around his neck, all that bullshit. He made my mother and I go to church with him, although neither of us ever feigned interest or excitement.
At school I was opened up to Roald Dahl, ‘The Lord of The Flies’, and eventually Oscar Wilde by my English tutor. I loved Roald Dahl’s comic tendencies. You have to remember that whilst most people read these before they were ten years old, I had been totally cut off from these nurturing experiences, and so I had to start from the bottom in terms of literature I could relate to. One of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – The Wife of Bath’s Tale – tells a story of a man who rapes a woman, and so is sent off to find ‘what women want more than anything else.’ He finds a hideous witch, who promises to give him the answer if he promises he’ll do her one thing. She tells him the answer, and so she makes him marry her. She is wildly ugly, remember, and so he protests but does it anyway. The day after they are wed, he says that he finds it impossible to sleep with her because she is so ugly. She gives him the choice of her being ugly and faithful, or fair and unfaithful. He responds by allowing her to make the choice. She, having said that the one thing women want is sovereignty over their husband, decides he has learnt his lesson and becomes both beautiful and faithful.
That’s the kind of thing I was forced to read in my youth. Rapists being rewarded. I can see no other message in that story, truly. It’s just horrific and dark and a sign that people back then were no better than the pigs they put on spits and gorged themselves on. My father, in his unstoppable sexism, loved that story.
So school for many years was a literary adventure. I scored high grades, expanded my knowledge of the modern world by any means necessary and keeping my head out of trouble, spending breaks indoors to read and never straying into the backbenchers’ (as I called them) way. They weren’t too much to worry about anyway. It was mostly my father I feared. He did terrible things that my mother would turn a blind eye to. ‘Speak through a flower’, she always said. Pretend things aren’t awful at home and keep up appearances. My mother and I formed the resistance against my father.
Born to parents who both worked during the 2nd World War, he was a child of the blitz and was evacuated to the country. He lived in three or four different homes, with various retirees set in their ways. He refuses to say he had a bad time, but it was these experiences that most definitely shaped him. They had most likely been born in the Victorian era, a brutal time for mental health and justice. No wonder he though his actions were usual. He thought there was no such thing as mental illness.
And now comes the time for me to explain what was going on. My father, just after I was born – his one and only child, a boy – developed what is known as a narcissistic personality disorder. ‘God complex’, they often call it. In the DSM manual, it is described as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy." With my father’s obsession with the Tudor era came a slow descent into the unspoken belief that he was Henry VIII.
It sounds stupid, I know. Like a Hans Christian Andersen tale. But please believe me when I say that that is just how it appeared to be. It was never voiced by him, and it was just a comic way of my mother and I dealing with it. However, as you will discover, the comedy soon faded from such ideas. The moment I had integrated with society a substantial amount I noticed the anomalies in his behaviour. The eating of rich foods, his chosen ignorance of modern appliances, they started as endearing and eccentric but turned dark with almost no warning.
To this day I still refuse to go into his side of the house. I was conditioned to expect pain and misery to ensue in that cavernous pit my father called home. And anyway, by now the smell must be unbearable.

SHINING CHARACTER REFERENCES (AN OPEN DOCUMENT)

2009-08-29T05:13:00.000-07:00

Always too out of ur league ben iv always thought that. And my opinion of you did very much change the two nights i stayed over and you couldnt handle the fact ____ wasnt sleeping in your bed. TWO NIGHTS BEN!!! wtf??? you reli do have some issues... Read more!!

I reli dont like the way you're speaking to ____ i thinks its very sad, low, pathetic and childish!! But iv always thought that! Im glad ____ is out of the emotional trap she was in, it did her no good!!! And ur mate is a complete prick as well... shes sooooo much better without you both in my eyes!

I LIKE TO THINK LITTLE GIRLS COULD JUMP ROPE TO THIS.

2009-08-28T18:02:00.000-07:00

Drunken Little Ditty.

Nuisance, nuisance
Give me your two cents
Three cents, four cents
Please talk more sense
Five cents, six cents
Spinning on a sixpence
Useless waste of fucking breath.

LOVESICK, PART TWO.

2009-08-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

I woke Pearl up. Obviously my first rational thought was that it was her period. But when I had wiped the blood away with various napkins and tissues, the skin of that area was broken and weeping. I asked her if she had anything similar, and she of course said no. I booked an emergency doctor’s appointment. I put plasters on the worst areas, and got dressed. Pearl didn’t say much. I had never known anything like this. I didn’t say goodbye to Pearl as I jumped in a taxi to the surgery. I was terrified.
When I got to the doctor’s she asked what the problem was. I told her I had an STD that I didn’t recognise. It was easier that way, I figured. I stripped down, and in the female doctor’s eyes I saw graveyards and walls covered in blood. She composed herself, and said it looked ‘painful’. She had no clue.
She said that it looked like a mixture of necrotizing fasciitis (which can be fatal) and gonorrhoea. I asked what made her add gonorrhoea, knowing that necrotizing fasciitis on its own was plenty to kill me. She pointed to the end of my penis and I blacked out.
From the waist down I looked like poorly applied wallpaper. Blood slowly crawled down me, and I started to go insane. The thing with disease is that you can’t escape your own body.
I built the courage to ask how you caught it. But she only said that it might be that, and if it was then you only catch it through deep and infected bruising. Gonorrhoea obviously was an STD, but I convinced myself that Pearl had probably just masturbated without washing her hands and got it. The chance was slim as anything, but I had to believe in her.
She told me I’d have to go to A&E, so I rang Pearl and told her. I told her not to worry, and that I was sorry for appearing to blame her for it. She still seemed apprehensive and cut off from me, from the world, really.
When I got there the doctors rushed me into a little room and examined me. They had no idea what it was, gave me some steroid cream for the scars and sent me on my way.
When I got back to mine Pearl was waiting there crying. I limply ran to comfort her, careful of my injuries. She explained it all. She knew what it was yet no doctor did.
She’d cheated on me in America. His name was Doug, and he was 25. It had been the night she’d called me for phone sex. She said that she wasn’t taking the piss out of me. She just missed me. My touch, my kisses.
I wasn’t ready for her to become sentimental all of a sudden. All those months of cold and calculated relationship and it took her cheating on me to realise what she would lose?
I had no time for this right now anyway. I needed to extract from her what it was I had.
In America they had called it Goldstein Syndrome, after this infamous Doug. He was the only known sufferer of it. Five days after she had fucked him, he died. The doctors said that it seemed to form its base in the male Y chromosome, explaining why Pearl hadn’t died. She was just a carrier, he said.
I started to weep. Her cheating on me was the cause of my death. I couldn’t believe she would have unprotected sex with another. It made me sick to think of her in the throws of love with anybody else. The first time we had had sex I never wanted to have it with anyone else. The act felt like we’d invented it. I’d had sex before, but it was never so beautiful as it was with her.
She told me how the doctors had told her that she would never be able to have unprotected sex again, because there was a 60% chance of the disease being passed on to the partner. She said that it tore her up inside, because she knew I would suspect something was amiss if she asked me to wear a condom.
‘Black widow spider.’
It was all I could say. Then I giggled to myself. She had been willing to risk my life for the sake of keeping her infidelity a secret. Pride is a sickening thing.
I wanted to do her harm. I wanted to really hurt her. But I sobered from such rage after deciding that the knowledge that she killed the one she loved and would continue to if trying to reproduce or actually feel a man inside her was punishment enough.
I verbally attacked her for about an hour. She finally had no reply. I was entirely in the right this time, unlike so many other arguments we had had. She cried and cried, and I was glad of her tears. I wanted her damaged, to know how it felt for the one you love to hand you a death sentence. I eventually came to terms with it. I didn’t know when Doug had developed it, so I didn’t know how long I would live for. Maybe a day, maybe a year. All I was certain of was that my remaining time on Earth would consist of celibacy and agonising pain, both mental and physical.
Did you know there are no defined symptoms for a nervous breakdown? It’s not a technical term for anything. Doctors just throw it about when you’re on the brink of insanity, but gripping reality just tight enough. I had one when I learnt I was going to die, it was a very odd feeling. Insomnia, non-stop crying, delusional paranoia. It was a dark week or so before I shook myself out of it. I had this sort of scroll that I made out of taping 8 sheets of A4 paper together, that I would just bleed, weep and stream-of-consciousness on to. Choice lines included:
‘Ugly fucking heartless cunt’
‘Beauty is wasted on those so meaningless’
‘Apathetic fucks are in the majority’
And so on and so forth. I’m not proud of any of those lines, but I think it’s important you see them to understand my mental state. They say a huge step to getting over anyone you love is to tell them that they broke your heart. I didn’t believe in this. Pearl would probably get some sort of sick thrill out of the knowledge that she had had such an effect on me. I mean, we are talking about a woman who chose to kill me rather than face the embarrassment of asking me to put a condom on.
But when I came out the other side of the morbid breakdown, I felt a new lease of life. I had been coasting along with Pearl, and the idea of death had, as cliché as it is, made me want to make everything count.
The next and final piece documents my last few weeks. I skip through much of it, because there were many things that would seem insignificant to you, but meant the world to me. I will only write about the parts that I think will interest you. I died on the 18th June 2004, at 02:24am.

LOVESICK, PART ONE.

2009-08-09T09:20:00.001-07:00

‘Love is a many splendoured thing.’
‘Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.’
‘Love is the only gold.’
‘We that are true lovers run into strange capers.’

Many things have been said of love. I think trying to explain love is like trying to explain what happens when you die – that is, it’s a personal feeling. Just as everyone is individual, so is an individual’s love. Love is completely indescribable. It is painful and it’s paranoid and worth every second of every drawback that it comes with.
Let me explain myself.
My name is Frank Blue. At least, it is here. I don’t live any more, dead for five years. This is the first time I’ve felt it possible to talk about my death and the surrounding events. I have finally overcome the rage that I died with to be able to write what I believe is a fair account of what happened to cause me to die.
What was great about dying so young (I was 22 at the time) is that I am now forever cast in the image of me at 22. My shoulder length black hair will never fall out, nor will it grow. My twisted up and feminine frame will stay the same shape eternally. Even the clothes I wore at the moment of passing are exactly the same and unchangeable. The only irony in this is that the bracelet I wear is a constant reminder of her. Pearl, the 21st century personified: over-analysis mixed with an untouchable heart.
I apologise. There are, of course, still remnants of my hatred for her. Yet, we were most definitely in love. The kind of love that is so intense that at the time you don’t appreciate it, and so you piss it up the wall. I don’t think I can be entirely to blame for what happened between us, but I slowly saw her becoming more and more introverted and I could no longer read her feelings, which in turn made me a paranoid fuck. Of all the things I learnt with Pearl, the most important is that love has no safety net. Every day is another day that the love of your life could change their mind, and every day is just as important as the last. The first clause of that sentence may seem paranoid and awful, but it is not meant as such. It is a positive – a motivational tool, like scales in the bathroom.
We met when I was 20, in my second year of university. She was an exchange student from America, here in London for a year. We were studying English Literature. When we were finished I had no idea why she had picked the course. She couldn’t connect to the characters we discussed – all romance and suffering. She floated along in a bubble of academia and naivety. It felt like she was only good at it because she’d studied intensely what she should be saying at every interval.
This isn’t an insult. She was very good, regardless of whether she meant it. She was also very beautiful. Blonde hair, green eyes and this smile that, when revealed to me, made me feel alone in the world with her. Everything faded to white and didn’t matter because she was smiling. We forged a bond over Oscar Wilde and how pretentious everyone else was. We were a gang of two for a few weeks before I finally kissed her.
We were out drinking, and I was intoxicated enough to be honest. I could feel a burgeoning love for her inside me, and I couldn’t hold it in. Bleeding hearts over spirits and mixers, it was so fitting. She said she felt the same but wanted to keep it quiet for a while. I was so hurt. She used the phrase ‘not public but exclusive’, which to me still means she was embarrassed of me. I left her at that table and went to mix with other people. I can’t explain how much that hurt, and it was most definitely the root of the paranoia I experienced later in the relationship.
After that things weren’t quite the same for a while. We were nervous around each other. The fact that she was telling everyone on our course that we were together but to keep it a secret rattled me – I wasn’t sure that we had agreed to be together, because of the implied embarrassment. I mean this in no boastful way, but I am sure there are plenty of women in the world who would not be embarrassed to be seen holding my hand, kissing me and the like. I don’t know what it was about me that made her see me as a dirty little secret, and I hope I never do. That was one of the most painful experiences of my life.
We had to build it again from the floor up. I remember one time, in an act of attempted reconciliation, we went out for dinner. Or rather, we got down the road, and the way in which she berated me made me wonder if I was willing to open my heart to her. We never made it to the restaurant, and instead went back to mine and I cried myself to sleep in silence and pitch black.
I can’t remember what finally got us back together. I think she might’ve just given in, actually. I distinctly remember making jokes about how I ‘eroded her’ into being with me. She never laughed, but I think that that’s probably because we both saw a bit of truth in it.
I will skip the few months over which our love grew, because they matter not. They serve only as reminiscence, and history is for the aged and unhappy. There were no bumps for a long time after we overcame her embarrassment of me, it was a classical love; the type that wartime poets thought up in the trenches, idealising their previously mediocre marriages.
And for a long time everything was perfect. We said ‘I love you’s every day, and made love so often that I was sometimes in pain. When she wasn’t around I thought of her constantly, spending the majority of my student loan on things that made me think of her to give as gifts. At the pinnacle of this period I started to have doubts. There is a lyric that says ‘I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love is to like the other slightly less than you get in return – I keep feeling like I’m being undercut’, and that entirely sums up what I was experiencing. I think trying to be ‘cool’ in love is a lot like being flippant when diagnosed with cancer. It makes you look inhuman. Love is designed to be a completely overpowering sensation. You shouldn’t try to hide that. But also, you shouldn’t flaunt love in front of those less fortunate. It makes you look false. There are a thousand holes anyone outside of a relationship can pick in any relationship, and publicly overstating your love for someone makes it look like a lie.
I was absolutely infatuated by Pearl. In my eyes, she was it. We would discuss our future halfway up high streets sheltering from the rain, speaking of children and marriage and surnames. It was very full on, but I loved every second of it. I wouldn’t take back a word I said, except for probably a week’s worth of mouthfuls at the very end. Drunkenness and loneliness make Frank completely fucking insane.
As it petered out, we hit the end of term. She went back to America and I was not to see her for the duration of summer. We would talk on the phone all the time, but she’d call me when she was drunk which I didn’t like. She used to complain about me calling her when I was on drugs, and she didn’t take drugs so she drank a lot. I remember one time in particular, just before the end, where she rang me from a pub. I could hear all her friends sitting around giggling, and she was trying to initiate phone sex. It really felt like she was taking the piss out of me. I loved her so much and she was laughing at me down a phone with her American friends. It was only two weeks until we would see each other, and to instil a fear like that in me was so paining.
I don’t paint Pearl as a very pretty picture, do I? But truly, I was madly in love with her. I couldn’t wait to get back to university to see her again, and then it was only a year until we could spend our lives together, exploring ourselves and learning the world together.
When I saw her again I was struck by the whitewash effect her smile had on me. Nothing else existed once again. It was like nothing had ever happened, and at that point I guess I didn’t think it had. We spent the whole day in each other’s arms, whispering sweet nothings and kissing passionately.
That evening we made love to a playlist we had compiled drunkenly the first night we’d been together in such a way. It was glorious. My love for her was such that I no longer noticed anyone else in a sexual way. I thought everything was disgusting compared to her.
But then the morning came, and upon awakening I could feel something wasn’t right. Blood was running down my thighs and I began to feel faint at the sight. I was always very squeamish in life. Now that I’m dead I don’t think anything makes me feel those earth-shattering butterflies felt when you’re on the precipice of unconsciousness.

A LIFE IN BROKEN GLASS, PART THREE.

2009-08-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

Upon penetrating the window, the odour that smashed my face in was unrecognisable. I had no idea what the smell was coming from, but it seemed to be everywhere. I got my mobile phone out to use as a torch, and discovered that the smell was a mixture of paint and semen. It smelt fresh as paint does, but also thick. I was horrified. Why was Jennifer’s room in this state? This couldn’t have been done before her death could it?
I moved my light over the paint and discovered it was prose. The paint was yellow – an odd colour for slogans fuelled by hate, red is the stereotype. I will now let you in on a secret. After my discovery of the prose, my proto-love of Jennifer vanished into a hatred and rage. If what was written was true, she wasn’t like Gwen at all. She had fooled me, and in death no less.
‘Here lies not
Jennifer Frederick
Beloved town bicycle
1993 – 2009
Her heartless ways live on’
It couldn’t be true. My Jennifer, she couldn’t have been a whore. She couldn’t have slept with anyone – she was the angel of my dreams who died a virgin before she could ever know me. This almost definitely certified the ex-boyfriend as the murderer, but that was the last thing I could think of at that point. I felt betrayed. Here I was trying to do her a good deed in light of her departure, and she’d not even cared about herself. I wanted revenge on this dead slut I had craved; who had temporarily restored my faith in love.
She only looked happy in those photos because she was fucking everyone in them. Sex is primal, it releases certain endorphins that combat emotion of any kind except happiness. Another time that endorphins are released is upon death, to get you to the other side without you going insane. I laughed to myself in the hope that Jennifer had wasted all of the endorphins saved for her death on the cocks of pubescent emotionless boys, making her passing unbearable both mentally and physically.
I sat on her bed and collected my thoughts. I needed to calm myself, but found it impossible upon realising all of the tawdry games that had been played out on the bed I currently rested on. The classic signs of a whore’s bed were there – decorative pillow numbers into the teens, candles on bedside tables - fuck it, you’ve seen a whore’s bedroom.
I needed to demonstrate the effect she had had on me. I turned the main light on – I didn’t care if her parents came in, I never intended to leave this room anyway.
I rifled through drawers and cupboards and under the bed, and found all sorts of sex paraphernalia that made me physically sick. This girl, who looked so peaceful and innocent under the weight of that television, was a nymphomaniac. Hardly any of the merchandise I found was for two people, unless a male might have used it on her. This girl was polluting my thoughts with savagely sexual images. Blood, screaming and stringy white paste everywhere.
I went through her underwear to find that all of it was as slutty as you could imagine. I could spit venom, I was ragingly angry and had no idea what to do.
I found some pills under her bed (probably Viagra but who gives a fuck at this point, they weren’t blue and I wanted to die) and took the whole bag of them: about eight. My heartbeat became horrifically rapid, and I thought of those cartoon ‘lovers’ where the male’s eyes turn to hearts and his heart beats out of his chest. I started laughing, and took another look at the underwear.
It was kind of funny, really. Her mother probably washed these, which meant that she had to condone the wearing of such sexuality, and in turn meant that she was okay with her daughter being a huge fucking slut.
I didn’t want to be in this house any more. The world was a better place without the existence of the people who inhabited it – me included.
But before my finale, I committed one last act of hilarious sin. Whoever had written the eulogy on the wall in paint and semen had had the right idea.
I grabbed a pair of Jennifer’s most whorish underwear, and proceeded to masturbate into them. They were soft from the undisputable acidity of this slut’s vagina having worn away the undercarriage. I’ve never been one to masturbate. At the time of my being in her room with her underwear, I hadn’t ejaculated for about two months. Sure, Helen and I had had sex just the other day, but I didn’t ejaculate. It was a problem I had. Any woman I didn’t completely trust, I couldn’t ejaculate into. It was a reason Helen and I had never had sex, because she thought it was ‘impotency’, yet impotency is the inability to achieve an erection. My thing was not physical, it was all in my head. I didn’t trust her with my cum, and the vulnerability of the moment of orgasm is not a side of me I would like any woman to see. If she knows you’re capable of weakness, she’ll slowly kill you through erosion.
Before, when I said that Helen had been the only woman I’d slept with. I apologise to you, the reader, but I hadn’t committed to suicide at that point and did not want Helen to know of my infidelity. But now that I am soon dead, it doesn’t matter at all. She’ll know all of this – my obsession with Jennifer, the way I had never truly loved her, how I masturbated into a 16 year-old girl’s underwear.
The other woman’s name was Sarah. She was 17, and I had been 29. I met her at a work do at a nightclub. We’d exchanged names and, intoxicated, headed for the bathroom. I will not express what went on in there, because if you are reading this I assume certain things about you, and one of those things is an ability to piece together certain facts.
Oh fuck it. I came right up her, and I loved it.
And now, having ejaculated on to Jennifer’s pillow, I have climbed on to the windowsill and am preparing my swan dive. Pray for my quick death readers. This is my suicide note and you’ve been a wonderful audience. I bow to your unrelenting interest. I don’t know what you could possibly take from my story, but I hope it teaches you something. Pull any meaning you wish. You’re probably right.

The End.

A LIFE IN BROKEN GLASS, PART TWO.

2009-08-02T05:17:00.000-07:00

I decided that I wouldn’t tell Helen about this. It would be my own private project. We didn’t have a printer in the house, which would mean that I would have to do most of my research at work. This would probably be favourable, as sometimes I could be a little bit obsessive with my projects. I once became so enamoured by the story of Lord Lucan that I researched day and night to discover where he was (Australia). I didn’t want to alert Helen to my latest project, and so keeping it at work, and perhaps the library every now and then, would aid its secrecy.
I worked as an IT consultant. I had a base office that I would be called out from every now and then to fix a broken server or some such boredom, but generally it was a matter of taking calls and walking people through the fix. I got paid a regular wage, so it was tolerable. Plus I had a lot of free time in the office.
The first thing I did in terms of research was to log on to the popular social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc.). Apparently religious extremists get most of their information from these types of websites. She would definitely be on one of them, and Jennifer Frederick doesn’t seem like too popular a name. Also, I still had the image of her cold, lifeless face in my mind, and was sure I could identify her from memory alone.
I hit Facebook and immediately got a result. There she was, staring at me through the screen, looking just as Gwen had. I clicked through to her pictures to assure she was the right one. Over a thousand pictures, and in the majority of them she was surrounded by the same set of friends. They looked like they were always having a great time. Nothing seedy or underhanded about them. No pictures of them smoking or drinking. No signs of anything but clean happiness.
I checked her profile for possible suspects. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend it seemed, and so naturally he was the prime suspect in my mind. Looking at pictures of him filled me with a rage I have seldom felt before. I took my lunch break to calm down.
On lunch I couldn’t get rid of his smug grin. She’d been 16 with a 20 year-old boyfriend. This was the only hint of tarnishing to an otherwise perfect teenage girl. I bet he’d taken her virginity whilst cheating on her. Bragging to his mates about how many virgins he’d had, and here I sat with a coffee from a faceless corporation having only slept with one woman.
After Gwen had died, I had no sex drive at all. In fact, I lost my virginity on my wedding night. Even then it was out of necessity – apparently a marriage without fornication isn’t marriage. I hated every second of it – her slutting up and talking dirty, wearing crotchless panties – I wanted to vomit. The moment we got to our hotel room it was obvious that she had fucked tens if not hundreds of men, and there I sat on the bed with an unused skin in my trousers. I barely masturbated at all after Gwen was gone. Nothing was attractive any more.
When I went back I wrote down the details of the ex-boyfriend. ‘Patrick Jefferson.’ Even his name induced vomiting. He lived in the same area that I did, and so, as I learnt from crime novels in my youth, I decided that he was likely to return to the scene of the crime quite often. When I found him I didn’t know what I would do, but I swore that I would keep it together. I don’t want blood on my hands because someone murdered a girl that was the spitting image of my one true love. It didn’t make her my love. I was projecting on to her. I was sure to not drive myself crazy with this investigation.
After I got the details I clicked back to Jennifer’s profile to browse her photos. She’d lived such a happy life. She was a beautiful example of womankind. That night at home I treated Helen better than ever. Jennifer was rekindling my belief in love and the goodness of womankind. We made love later that night for the first time in over a year, and it was wonderful. When we finished she still spoke of other men, but I had my thoughts of Jennifer to block out any jealousy. I’m not afraid to say that at the moment of orgasm I had envisioned Jennifer in my favourite picture of her – she wore a beautiful red dress and had only subtle make-up on. She just looked so happy that I wanted to take her in my arms.
The next day I went to work a new man. My posthumous love was wrong. I just had to find qualities in Helen that I liked. I decided that I would give the marriage another go. I’m a firm believer in the idea that marriage is for life, which is rare in this time of divorce and pre-nuptial agreements.
I next researched local newspaper reports. They rarely had much to contribute other than straight up facts, but it was worth a try. Full name – got it. School name – got it (Appletree Secondary School). However, there was her road name in there. Madison Close – two roads away from me. I would visit tonight. The roads in my area were never too long, and considering Madison Close was a cul-de-sac, it would be easy enough to identify where she had lived.
The day dragged on at work, fixing plugs and deleting viruses. I knew I couldn’t get away with visiting her residence whilst Helen was conscious. I would go once she was sound asleep. The slightly misshapen woman I had now decided to make a point of loving was a very deep sleeper.
I slipped Helen some sleeping pills to be on the safe side, mixed into a cup of tea that I had made her to rekindle any remaining emotions we had for each other. She soon felt tired and went to bed. I of course joined her, holding her in my arms as she drifted off; careful not to get an arm caught under her heaving torso.
I left the house quietly, with the dog in tow as an alibi if anyone saw me, or Helen woke up and wondered where I went – ‘took the dog for a piss.’ It was around 1am, and so I figured the few roads I had to occupy on the way to Jennifer’s would be empty. Fortunately I was correct.
I first checked the perimeter of Jennifer’s house. It was a beautiful house – one of those middle class cream detached homes, with a garage and driveway capable of holding numerous cars. It was the kind of house you could live a full and rich life in.
I found nothing to suggest the presence of another person outside, so I decided to try and check Jennifer’s room. I had spotted what I was sure was her room on my check of the outside. It was the front top left room, and there was a well-placed drainpipe that I could probably shimmy up. I had let myself go, I’ll admit that, weighing 15 stone; six of which I was sure was just my gut. However I had all the time in the world, and with the drop meaning death I was sure my instincts would enable me to hold on during any necessary breaks. I tied the dog to the bottom of the drainpipe and climbed up.
After several short breaks to keep a look out for anyone approaching and to catch my breath, I was level with the window. These old houses often have wooden window frames that are all too easily broken – it is the price you pay for finding the pretentious ‘rustic’ look necessary. The window was slightly ajar. These houses hadn’t been built with perfect measurements, and so often the windows were impossible to close entirely.
Having filled my head with these trivial thoughts of design, I was wholly unprepared for what came next. The room was a horror movie set. This couldn’t possibly be real.

A LIFE IN BROKEN GLASS, PART ONE.

2009-07-31T15:38:00.000-07:00

40 years old and still pining for my first love. Don’t misconstrue this information; I was married alright, but not to a woman who I had ever loved.
25 years ago I had met the love that haunts me to this day. Her name was Gwen. She had this fantastic way of darting her eyes at me that I swooned for, intoxicating me with her very presence.
We met at school. She came to my school just as we were heading into the year of our GCEs. She told me one time that she’d had to come here for the last year of enforced education because her parents had run out of money to put her in private education. She never gave off any sign of being some posh young thing. She fit in perfectly with the classes. I knew at once that we would soon be together.
We began dating just after Christmas. It took me three months to get up the courage to ask her out, but in the end it was very much worth it. We dated until the summer, at which point a terrible thing happened.
I've never written a poem for anybody else, and I don't think I will. Reading it at her funeral was the lowest point of my life. Minus her various celebrity obsessions, she was and lives on in my mind absolutely perfect.
Her name will forever strike the chord inside me that feels like a stomach funny bone. It's fucked up and entirely childish, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I am the dog with the permanent wound in its stomach to make Chinese shampoo. I am a spectator sport, and one of those ones that only generates ratings when nothing else is on.
She’d had leukemia. There were no signs as far as I could see. She always looked very healthy and full of life. Maybe it was the knowledge of her expiry date that made her such a fulfilled person. I remember this one date we had where we went to dinner, and walking home she spotted a way down to a river. We broke through this fence and walked along the river for a while, hand in hand. We got to this bridge that got the train over the river, and Gwen ran up the incline to the top of the bridge and stood on what tiny ledge there was above the river. She looked the epitome of happiness, I remember just wanting to kiss her for all time.
That’s definitely in my top five memories. Nothing since has really compared. Losing someone you love that isn’t a family member at that age is the toughest thing, because you’re only then discovering what love is. To have it taken from you before you can explore the full extent is shattering.
My current wife (my only wife) was called Helen, and I despised everything she touched, including myself. I think after Gwen I gave up on love and just settled for a woman who would take me. I couldn’t risk losing another, and even though it was only one case, I felt a bit like a black widow spider. I blamed myself for Gwen’s death, for no reason at all.
We’d met at university and been married for 16 years. We rarely argued, but we also rarely exchanged ‘I love you’s. On the fateful evening I will now tell you about, I had taken our dog out for a walk after a particularly seething argument. She hadn’t stopped talking about this guy from work called Kevin all evening. She worked in telesales; one of those jobs you would never wish upon anyone. She did this every so often though - speak of other men, holding them in such high regard like I don't exist, or am even on the same platform. She acted like she dreamed of being single. As if she was the only regretful party in this marriage.
I screamed this at her after she said ‘Kevin’ did the funniest thing at work, which was to push her up against a filing cabinet and tell her he wanted her there and then. I could feel the bile rising in my throat. It’s not that I was jealous; it was just that if I couldn’t have an affair then neither could she. We were both locked into this marriage. For better or worse.
And so after the argument I had slammed the door with the dog in tow. We went to the park. I always find it bizarre how many people are walking their dog at any one time. This time there were about five people walking their dogs around the vast expanse of greenery. I didn’t like to see other people walk their dogs, as they often treated them terribly. So I took an alternative route that was a bit creepier. Nobody walked dogs down there for fear of rape or mugging. We lived in the most middle-class suburb I’ve ever known and yet there was still a fear of crime.
And yet, there was an awful lot of litter down this track. It was a narrow corridor of dirt path, and it had a genuinely quite disturbing air to it. Nobody littered around here for fear of prosecution by the neighbourhood watch. This was obviously a well-known fly-tipping area, because there was an old television in the tight ditch between the path and the walling. But as the dog and I approached the TV set, it became all too obvious that something was amiss. An arm protruded from underneath, and I slowly approached to lift the television that obscured the vision that is now etched on to my memory.
A young girl of about 16 lay there, with a bloodied face and pale white skin. Paler than anything I have seen ever before. She looked empty of blood, hollow and terrifying. She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse, so I called the police immediately, and waited for them to arrive, entranced by this discovery.
It was then that I noticed the similarities between the girl who lay before me and Gwen. They had the same nose, the same bluey-green eyes and brown hair. The shape of her face was identical to Gwen’s, and I froze with the realisation. I checked her body for any form of identification, and all I could find was her school library card. A picture of her smiling beautifully graced the laminate, along with her name. ‘Jennifer Frederick’, a name I won’t too soon forget. It sounds ridiculous, but I could have sworn it would at least be a relative of Gwen’s, if not Gwen herself.
The police arrived and questioned me for hours about the state that I had found Jennifer in, and if I had touched anything. I said just the library card and the television that had rested on her face, and they shook their heads as if I had massive contaminated the scene. The likelihood is that the killer wouldn’t have even known this girl was enrolled in a library, let alone would they have touched the library card.
I was allowed to go but given the tacky line ‘don’t leave town.’ Of course I wasn’t going to leave town, all the clues to solve Jennifer’s death were right here.
This sounds stupid, but I genuinely believed that if I solved this case, I would be rid of the guilt that hung over me regarding Gwen’s death. She had died by accident, but Jennifer hadn’t. I would discover what had happened. It gave me something to do in between my nine to five and unconsciousness that wasn’t resenting Helen.

EGGSHELLS.

2009-07-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

These eggshells you speak of
I can’t see -
But I am blind to
The loss of our love

I can’t communicate
This mixture of hate and love -
It swells within me, a battle
Any fool can guess what wins

The eggshells beneath
Aren’t rejection or disdain
They’re remnants of us
And what you definitely felt

The photos remain
Of our bodies entwined
Hands never alone
And lips never unwanted

The eggshells under foot
Aren’t triviality or incoherence
They’re giving and holding
Those things you forgot

And you’re off having
The time of your life
I can’t say it doesn’t hurt
To see you ‘glad’

The eggshells you step on
Aren’t fear or embarrassment
They’re remnants of us
And the memory goes on.

THE PORTRAIT OF A PAINTER, PART THREE.

2009-07-27T18:48:00.001-07:00

As I have mentioned before, everything you read in these pages is true. My own mother wanted me to conduct my own abortion. She said that she had done it several times in her teens, which terrified me beyond belief.
‘It was the done thing back then.’ Such atrocious lines spewed from my mother’s lips sending shivers down my spine. I couldn’t believe it. Reading this I know it must be hard to believe, but if you feel even slightly disgusted then you must know how I felt, standing in that room with my mother instructing me to D.I.Y such a mistake away.
It was the way she delivered her words so calmly and passively. She wasn’t that worried about the pregnancy because it was ‘so easy’ to fix. She told me that she would get me what I needed when she went to the supermarket later.
As you can imagine my mind conjured all kinds of horrific imagery. What did they sell at a supermarket that you could do such a procedure with? I imagined sharp vacuum cleaners. Acidic washes. Tongs. Even keyhole surgery, I mean you must understand what I was going through, with no clue what I would have to do to myself.
When she got back from the supermarket, she handed me a bottle wrapped in a plastic bag and told me that I should probably drink it whilst stood in the bath.
Gin? I’d drunk gin before.
‘Not just gin – ‘Mother’s Peril’.’
It didn’t say that on the label, like it was a make or anything, but she continued to explain having seen the confused look on my face. Apparently in the late 1800s when prostitutes often found it necessary to have illegal backstreet abortions, which were carried out by a probing of the cervix, they discovered that drinking large quantities of gin made what existed inside of them fall out as they used the bathroom or similar activities. Gin was far cheaper than these probes, and safer too.
‘I advise you to drink that in the bathroom darling. I would come and help you, but this is an experience a woman must have by herself. There will be blood, but I want you to be strong. If ever it gets to be too much for you, you shout me and I’ll come straight up. Everything will go fine, I promise you my love.’
I walked up the stairs in a daze. I couldn’t believe what I was about to do. I undressed and sat in the bath, drinking away. I’d never liked gin. It had always tasted too clinical – now I knew why. This was a clinical procedure. Drinking until the chemical reaction that was going on inside of me came out. I am pro-choice forever. Bringing an unwanted child into the world is worse than murder, because it is condemned from the start. There is no arguing with Christians on such matters, and it is one of the main components in my hatred of religion.
About a quarter of the bottle down I started to laugh. I wondered what Tristan would make of all this – me sat in a bath, naked, drinking gin. It would look funny without the background information. I had to admit that much. I quickly hated myself for thinking of that cunt. I had a special act of revenge saved for him, but for now it could wait.
750ml of gin in my system and I felt a shake. It was a rumbling from just in front of my stomach, and then a weight dropping down. I was so terrified to look into the water. When I opened my eyes, the blood was flowing towards the plughole. I’ve never seen so much blood. But then, it wasn’t the blood that frightened me any more. It was the ball of pale, thin skin that lay between my thighs. I fainted at the sight and woke up when it was dark.
I picked the thing up with a piece of tissue and put it on the side of the bath while I rinsed the blood out. I had a shower to get the blood off of myself, and also to just make sure I was alright down there. The thing was so small that I’d hardly felt it come out. It made me even angrier with pro-life believers – that thing had never been alive. It was a tumour - it had no human features at all.
I dried off and got dressed. My mum shouted up to see if I was okay. I replied that I was and walked to my room with the lump of flesh in tow.
This is your warning to stop reading, because here is the revenge.
I put the thing in the centre of a piece of A4 paper, and just looked at it for a while. I then slashed my palm with a razorblade, and let the blood drip on and around the piece of flesh. Then came the cup of tears, which I poured on to create a marbling effect. At the end of it all it looked quite psychedelic.
I wrapped the work in red paper and pushed in some mothballs for freshness. I then inserted this ‘present’ into a Jiffy bag, which I then mailed to Tristan.
What? Maybe he would’ve liked to see it. You can’t deny that it was an attention grabber. He called me as soon as he’d received it, followed by a call from the police. Both phone calls were full of gagging sounds and genuine fear. I’d done what I thought was right. He had disposed of me with no further thought, and so I had voided my body of all memory of him. It’s just a shame that I’m in prison now, on the mental ward.
I would’ve liked to see Tristan one last time.

The End.

THE PORTRAIT OF A PAINTER, PART TWO.

2009-07-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

Once he had left, riding high on the drug that is love I decided to paint him. I refuse to hold back how much I felt for him – I wanted him beside me both night and day. To immortalise him in a painting was the next best thing.
I liked to do portraits from memory. It put across a personality that seldom existed in pictures from photos. I think my brain lumps the memory of the personality and physical appearance into one. I definitely think in pictures rather than words.
I had a shower to wipe off the residue of last night and got to work. I hated straight up re-enactments of people. If every portrait is really of the artist as Oscar Wilde says, those people were lifeless and shallow. I used unnatural colours that could convey a feeling.
I started by painting his tight-lipped mouth. I would use my newly discovered avant-garde ‘brushes’. A mouth is just a vagina on its side anyway.
I used white paint for the lips, dabbing only a tiny amount on to my genitalia. In my mind his words had been honest and pure. The white showed up well on the black background I’d decided on, showing a dark past that was implicit in his mannerisms.
The eyes were red with passion – for these I painted just my clitoris, which I printed on and for the eyelids I used a kiss.
The rest of the face was blue. I didn’t know why I’d chosen that colour but it seemed right in my head. And there it was. I was so proud of that painting. Somehow it had come out looking exactly as I remembered Tristan.
He called me later that evening. We spoke for about two hours, of sweet nothings and dream visits. I bought us two tickets to see The Cure in Paris in two months’ time that I would surprise him with. We agreed to take it in turns to visit one another, and we would do this every weekend.
Of course, as is typical, I never saw him again.
He carried on texting me at least once a day for about a week, but then even that stopped. I blamed it on various things like family problems or lack of money. I didn’t worry at this point. I had a feeling that everything would be fine, because that night had been unforgettable – for both of us, I thought. I decided to distract myself with creation. He’d call soon enough, apologising, I thought.
When the call didn’t come, I didn’t know whom to turn to. Alice was still besotted with Tristan’s friend, and so would assume that I was in the wrong, which was most definitely not the case. If I spoke to my mum or sister about it, they would know that we had made love in my sister’s house, which was a truth I didn’t want to come out. He’d changed my whole outlook on life for the worse – I would’ve told my mother in a heartbeat usually, with any problem, big or small.
So I wrote him a letter. It wasn’t angry, or even passive aggressive; it just asked what was going on and said how I was feeling. I decided to include a little photo of me with the picture of him, to see if that might have impressed him.
I sent it the minute I’d finished composing the small parcel. I was sure it was the right thing to do. At the very least it was a guilt trip.
Weeks went by with no reply. Three weeks to be precise. Three weeks since I’d slept with him and no period. I wrote it off as stress. I’m an intelligent girl, I’m sure we used a condom. We had to have used a condom, didn’t we?
Push it to the back of your mind, I told myself. It had been a stressful time recently – words cannot express just how overpowered by him I had been. I’d been thinking of marriage, how my name would look with his surname – everything that little girls do when they’re playing in the garden. I felt a fool.
I decided to take a positive from all of this sadness, and painted another picture. It screamed rage, and when it was done I threw a cup of tears (collected over several days) at it. I wanted to destroy every feeling I’d ever had for him.
I didn’t wash, eat or sleep for about a week. My mum said nothing in particular. I don’t know why – looking back I was a loathsome wreck. Every time I cried I would catch what I could in a cup that I placed in the fridge for fear of it evaporating. All great art comes from anguish, I’m sure. You can see that in any truly moving work.
I still hadn’t had my period. By this time it was four weeks late, and I had to talk to somebody about it. I told Alice, and she said that it was stress and not eating, but that we’d get a test in town, and she’d help me do it. I was so grateful for Alice in that moment. She was going out of her way to help. That sign of care was enough to make me eat again. I’m no longer sure, looking back, if it was Tristan that I missed or just the feeling of being loved.
We wandered into town and had some lunch before getting the necessary item. She spoke of Tristan’s friend, and how they hadn’t spoken in some time either. She was so strong about it though, that it really got to me. Why did I feel this way when it had been only one night? Alice had been with the other guy loosely speaking for about three months. He’d been her first too. My conclusion was that I was weak.
Having had an ill-gotten glass of wine with our lunch we started to loosen up. We were making jokes about how I’d have to think about waterfalls and all that shit – stupid jokes you make to numb the tension. I was fucking terrified. I was 15, which made Tristan technically a paedophile, and I could never look after a child. If it came through positive it was definitely an abortion. In the pharmacy there were about ten to choose from, so naturally we got the most expensive one. My mum was unbelievably rich, having inherited a lot from her mother when she died, and so in turn I was rich.
The test, called ‘GreenLight’, was said to be 99% effective from two days after copulation onwards. We went to the public toilets and locked ourselves in the disabled cubicle. We’d need room to jump around when it came through negative.
I pissed on it and waited the necessary five minutes.
So yeah, my life was fucking over. Some teenage cunt from London had come down and impregnated me with his fucking useless seed. I cried so hard. I’d heard about the process of abortion and it sounded absolutely terrifying. I didn’t want to see something solid come out of that part of me for at least ten years.
I got home and told my mum what had been going on. I got her completely up to date – Tristan, sister’s house, Alice’s birthday party, the disabled toilet incident. Absolutely everything. She cried, but she wasn’t angry. She was caring. She felt how scared I was. She comforted me and got me a glass of wine to calm me down.
After the drink I felt better, but not for long. My mum had this insane idea that doctors in abortion clinics frown upon the pregnant youth and that the word always got out. She said she couldn’t bear to live with people knowing that I had had to have an abortion. I couldn’t believe my own mother was saying this. ‘Keeping up appearances’ didn’t come into this – I was sure they frowned upon teenage mothers far more than they did teenagers who received abortions.
And then she said the words I’d been dreading in reply to the question I asked in a scream – ‘what do you want me to do about it then?’

Forced miscarriage.

THE PORTRAIT OF A PAINTER, PART ONE.

2009-07-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

http://open.spotify.com/user/benme/playlist/6HfnnQMniR51mKr5eszHgN - Spotify 'Soundtrack' Playlist URL

Before we begin, there are things you should know about me. I am 17 and have never met my father. He left before they were certain I was conscious, and has never had any contact with us since.
By ‘us’ I mean my mother and I. As a result of my non-existent dad, we are very close. I have told her everything that you will read in these pages. I am not embarrassed of any of it, so react in whatever way feels most appropriate to you. Some will laugh, some will gasp, but take into account that everything that follows is fact.
There have been many moments in my life that I can say affected me as a person. The above is of course one such moment, if a moment may be allowed to last so long. Others include the first death in the family (my mum’s mum) and the time I lost my virginity. This is that story, and the aftermath.
I was 15 and went to my best friend Alice’s birthday party. She was turning 16. She had some boys coming down from near London, one of whom was sort of her boyfriend. They were in that state in a relationship that happens at either the beginning or the very end, where one likes the other more than it is reciprocated. She was completely enamoured by him, and he didn’t know how to break it off. It was clear to anyone, and I felt sorry for the two of them. They would both end up hurt.
They were a year or so older than us, these boys. I refuse to call them men, because you aren’t a man or a woman until you’ve settled into yourself. I know I haven’t, and they definitely hadn’t. They turned up far more drunk than anyone else at the party except for Alice and I. It was awkward, especially as Alice’s parents were chaperoning. We must have looked like such losers. Or maybe not.
I got talking to one of them. His name was Tristan, and he had this Human League haircut dyed jet black. We talked about Morrissey and The Cure, all these 80s bands that I had basically no knowledge of, but he seemed to take comfort in the idea that somebody there was like him. He had awful self-esteem, even for a drunk.
So it got to about half ten, and he and I had been talking for about two hours, with various short breaks for us to get more drinks, go to the bathroom or ask our friends for advice on how to pluck up the courage to kiss.
I won’t lie because I said I wouldn’t. For me, for some bizarre reason, it was love at first sight. I was telling him things I’d barely told Alice, and he hadn’t run off. He’d listened attentively, asking all the right questions. We were talking about love and heartbreak, and the pain in his eyes begged me to kiss him.
That kiss is one I will never forget. Intoxicated romance – in the film adaptation the camera will spin around us and zoom out to see people cheering us, and when we’ve stopped people will cheer. It was a stimulus for every single one of my senses, and I never wanted it to end. When we stopped we both smiled at each other and carried on talking, but this time holding hands. I think holding hands is the most beautiful and delicate way of putting across affection – you can never look like a slut when somebody is holding your hand. It’s a guarantee of back up: the mark of a gang of two.
He was introducing me to the boys he’d come with wearing a huge smile on his face. We were proud to be with each other. For a short time I questioned the idea I next put forward, but I’ve always felt that you should do whatever your heart says.
The group of boys had nowhere to stay that night. Alice’s parents had no idea they needed somewhere to stay, and so were being awkward about it. I told Tristan that my sister lived just down the road and would be fine with them all sleeping in her front room. He thanked me seemingly endlessly – I think he knew I had hidden intentions.
My intentions weren’t so much hidden as unexpected. I don’t think I really thought of sex as anything more than a possibility at that point. I was fearful to appear a slut in front of him. I’d just never felt such an immediate bond with anyone before, I was overwhelmed, and so I blame what followed on intoxicants and spontaneity.
Walking back to mine swigging from a bottle of sambuca him and I had left over, I couldn’t help but further hint at what was to come. He kept falling in the road, and I kept pulling him towards me and we would kiss against lampposts and walls. We were Sid and Nancy had they been raised by Stephen Fry, in my mind. All bullshit.
When we arrived at my sister’s house, I showed them the bathroom and where they could sleep. Continuing the idea of truth in this account, I will admit that I was disheartened when Tristan didn’t force me to sleep with him. Not in a rape way. Just to ask.
I got up the stairs and rang him telling him to come up. He said he would in a minute as long as I was sure my sister wouldn’t mind. I was. She was probably passed out somewhere anyway – she was like that. We got along well, ‘thick as thieves’ as they say, but she was definitely a drunk.
He came up the stairs slowly, and I decided to take him by surprise. As he opened the door, I stood there entirely naked. He looked shocked and simultaneously insanely happy. It was cute. I will spare you the gory details.
In the morning he was still fast asleep holding me in his arms. I felt so close to him, even sober. I was so happy that it was finally not just the alcohol that had attracted us to each other. He woke up soon after, and we kissed. I then showed him my art.
Note to audience: this is where it all started to go wrong. I just couldn’t see it yet.
My art was mostly abstract work. I liked to feel the paint. It’s strange how a colour can mean so much to you. I showed him the pieces I was most proud of – these canvases covered in a cornucopia of colour – and as he showed his approval, I showed him my more experimental work.
I had been testing out some new things. I had always worked with my hands more than brushes, slathering the paint on in swipes. However, since becoming fully developed, about three months previously, I had discovered a new and more sexual technique.
These ones were in the style of potato prints – the art you do at pre-school. I thought it was edgy to combine the childish with the sexual. The first few pictures I showed him were just prints of my behind. He laughed, shocked, but still said he liked them. Once he’d settled into them, I showed him some I’d done with my breasts. I liked to make these ones quite daunting, so there was a whole series of paintings that were uncomfortable to look at designed entirely from prints of my breasts. He said it was ‘pretty rad’, so I decided I would tell him about the other ones, but not show him them.
I told him these were the easiest ones to do.

‘You just paint your vagina, and then push the paper against it.’

He started to laugh. He’d missed the point, I think. He said I was crazy, and that one day when I knew him better I should show him some because it sounded ‘interesting.’ It hurt when he called me crazy.
Because I wasn’t.
Back then, I wasn’t crazy.

SHE IS APATHY.

2009-07-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

Blasé around art
Everything means fuck all
Better not wait for emotions to start
She is apathy

She is apathy
Indifference becomes her,
You’ll see her floating by
Touched by nothing

She can’t reminisce
She remembers only bad,
She is lost in a world
Championing fads

She is apathy
No cares for you
She dissects life
Until there’s nothing to do

Apathy is catching
Spreading like wildfire,
Throughout your homes
The flames rise higher

And you won’t care
Because it’s got you,
Death grip of passiveness,
You’re apathy too.

DOWN THE BARREL, PART FOUR.

2009-07-26T15:38:00.000-07:00

Like I said, you won’t like the plan I had. It involved cutting my series short. I had plenty of ideas, but none that really compared to the initial shock of episodes one and two. I didn’t want to be immortalised in a show that petered out. I wanted bang bang bang. Three episodes were all I needed, and after me, the flood.
The next episode would purely be me committing suicide by Ling Chi. Ling Chi is an old form of torture and execution. Translated into English the phrase means ‘death by one thousand cuts.’ It would be excruciatingly painful, but the process carried out correctly only lasts 15-20 minutes. If I could hold out for a little longer through self-hypnosis, bookend it with a couple of ad breaks and hey presto, you’ve got a fucking commercial television broadcast.
For this I would need the crew, but only to upload the footage to the internet. I personally would upload the first two episodes before filming the finale, and then hypnotise one crew member into uploading this footage on to the website whilst in a trance and unaware of the consequences of his actions.
He would then comment on the appropriate articles on the BBC website, and comment with a link to the videos. After this, he would e-mail the footage of the third episode to everyone in my e-mail address book. The address book still had all of the addresses of old directors, the people in charge of commissioning shows. If after their years of work in television they hadn’t been entirely desensitized to human emotion, this would make them think twice before being so cut-throat in the future.
This would make history, like the anchorwoman who shot herself live on American television. We would never be forgotten by those who ruined us. The videos went up on to the website www.intothemirror.co.uk as I arranged the camera angle, the knife and a bucket for whatever pieces of myself fell off in the process. I placed the crew member who was in a zombified state with his back to me. He would know when to do what was necessary. He didn’t know, but it was planted in his head.
I hit record and walked around to the chair with the knife.
‘My name is Henry Staire and you remember me, vaguely. Was I on ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’? No. I had my own television show that a lot of you watched four years ago. I pretended to hang myself. Critics called it tacky. Tell me, oh wondrous tabloid press, is it tacky to commit suicide on tape?
And you may think nobody will ever see this, but they will. Just like the Ken Bigley beheading, it was there if you looked for it. The internet is the future of the media – it makes perfect sense to think that all television channels will eventually just have players on websites, and the television will be a thing of the past. I say it’s empowering.’
As every sentence ends, I am slashing my body.
‘I am leading the way with this very website, ‘intothemirror.co.uk’. I never wanted to be known as a pioneer – I still don’t, fuck, I’m not a pioneer – but I wanted respect. I didn’t want to be spat at in the street for trying to entertain. I didn’t want to be laughed at and cancelled when the format wasn’t run dry. You’re all too happy to do infinite series of Big Brother, but my show, which teaches the basics of psychology – oh no. Not after the furore about the faked hanging.’
A wrist, a finger, a palm.
‘I’ve got nothing having been dragged through your machine. Look at a banknote, it’s a promise, not actual physical matter. Money is nothing, yet everything. And so you, in your middle class house with your wireless and your organic food and your speculation on those in the public eye – you’re the problem. By paying attention to junk culture, you’re becoming junk.
All mainstream music is regurgitated punk played on keyboards and sung by a chick with decent tits, and I don’t know how it gets away with it. We’re all just sitting around waiting for copyrights to run out on works of genius. We’ve already got Oscar Wilde and Dostoevsky’s entire bibliographies, so read up and repeat.
I’m no better, sure. But I realise it. I’m not trying to impress people by being the first to tell them of Michael Jackson’s death. I’m not trying to make people better. I’m trying to burn myself on to the side of your brain. I will be the bitter taste in your mouth and the hole in your heart that you can’t fill. You can’t fill something with emptiness, and that’s what we’ve come to.

Emptiness.’

And with that, I bled out.

The End.

DOWN THE BARREL, PART THREE.

2009-07-26T11:01:00.001-07:00

The day after the shoot I felt revitalised. Watching the footage back I was spurred on to do more and more and quicker and slicker and as soon as possible. Reading the headlines was the best bit.
‘STAMPEDE’
’12 KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT’
Only twelve was disappointing, but I took solace in the fact that there would be more opportunities. More deaths. More horrific and affecting in their scope. That was the pilot, and on the back of that I was happy to fully commission my series of six episodes. Next I would film my homage to Alfred Hitchcock in the form of ‘Strangers On A Train.’
I guess you could say that the newspaper reports were a form of guerilla advertising. An article regarding the ‘disaster’ was on the front page of the BBC news website. I decided that that would be the place to start posting the episodes when I was done, just as comments linking to my website. But that was for a later date. This was far from over.
During my years of drug abuse I had of course stumbled upon various people who could supply the machinery necessary for ‘Strangers On A Train.’ I specifically wanted an AK47, as it’s particularly associated with terrorism. I wanted ‘Strangers On A Train’ to be more than just a moment in time, I wanted people to be fearful every time they got on a train. If this series were to have legacy, this episode would be the very core of it.
The plan was that I would rig a train carriage with secret cameras, voiding the necessity of a crew. After their reaction to my last endeavour, I didn’t feel that they could take this one. Also, I didn’t want to have useful people caught up in what was to occur – if one of them got caught in the firing line, they would have to be replaced and as far as I was concerned, there were too many people in on it already.
If you haven’t figured out the plan, here it comes in layman’s terms.
I would plant various subconscious queues with the AK47 in the bathroom of the train. The queues - positive reinforcers of ‘going postal’, if you will – were just as subtle as previously. Lots of reds and phallic symbolism - you cannot tell me that a gun isn’t a penis enlargement. The cameras would be placed directly beside the usual CCTV cameras, so as to give the audience the feeling that it was the official tapes they were watching. I also placed one in the bathroom. Illegal, yes, but I felt that it might be a nice touch to see my victim’s thought process, and it wasn’t like I was going to use any excess footage to watch people urinate.
I didn’t have fetishes like that. Not extremely, anyway. I am not asexual, and I do definitely enjoy having sex, but I can go a long time without it. To me it’s like dessert. You don’t need it, but it’s a nice thing to have every once in a while. The last time I had sex was about a year ago, with a woman called Barbara. She was of an older generation, and was possibly slightly older than my deceased mother. A kind lady, I had met Barbara as we both ate alone in an up-market restaurant in northern London. She’d recognized me from television and told me how she liked my stuff.
She had a purple rinse, and wore glasses around her neck on one of those strings that only the socially unacceptable ever utilise. I found her humble ways endearing, and invited her to eat at my table. She obliged, and as we ate in virtual silence until she had consumed such an amount of alcohol that she actually propositioned me rather than the other way around.
After a short fumble between my young, tight body and her dry and scratchy frame we skipped into a cubicle and stripped each other. She was a doddery old thing. She blew me for about ten minutes, then after about five minutes of regular missionary sex against the cubicle wall I pulled out, pushed her to her knees and ejaculated into her hair. That is my fetish. I’ve never understood it, I think it probably has its roots in the idea of defacing something after it has shown you such love – like stabbing a dog or something. I think shooting your semen into someone’s hair is much different from say, the mouth – the mouth for instance, had never interested me, because when a woman swallows, it shows a sort of physical wish to have you inside them, as a part of them, whereas my preference was just because it was hard to cleanse secretively. Old Barbara would be walking around with the residue in her hair until she could shower, labeling her a whore to anyone who noticed.
Anyway. It came to the day of the shoot. I had the cameras wirelessly connected to my laptop, which in turn recorded the images to the hard drive. The AK47 was in one of those unnecessarily huge sports bags you see footballers with, along with the queues and of course, my laptop.
I would stay hidden away from the carriage that the gunner would populate, as soon as I had planted the final, crucial components into the bathroom. I expected that it would not be long between my planting of the weapon and the commencing of the action.
Never has an expectation been more perfectly met. I had barely made it to the other carriage when I heard the ricochet of bullets on metal and bone; the screams of businessmen - none of which wanted to be a hero; the wailing of emergency brake alarms and finally, silence. Silence for two minutes before one more pull of the trigger.
With an AK47, it takes a man with the gun training of an assassin to get just one bullet out. Bullets shoot out in twos, fours, tens – never ones. It’s a shame the unknowing gunman hadn’t known this, or else his teeth might still be in a condition for him to be identified by. He had, I assume, after waking from the trance, realised what he had done, and decided that he could not live with the guilt. His head was in pieces all over the carriage’s window, every colour in the spectrum of red. I really felt that it was for the best. Had he lived, he would only have spent a lifetime in prison. Death is far more desirable than that.
I collected my cameras, queues and sports bag and got off at the next stop. Police were already at the station and wanted to talk to me, but I said I had only heard gunshots, and had no other information as I had been in the toilet. That short conversation was the longest moment of my life. What if the cop had checked the bag? Seen the bizarre pictures and my cameras? I would’ve been ruined – my fifth series over before it had seen the light of day.
From now on I would be more careful. Mass projects were too much to take, for both the crew and myself. I had to target important individuals. Individuals who had scorned me, who cancelled my show. The individuals who lowered me into this world of shit. I had moments of happiness, but only when my plans came to fruition. The next one had to mean something, it had to be a real front pager. You won’t like it, but I had just the plan.

DOWN THE BARREL, PART TWO.

2009-07-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

After several drafts and redrafts, I settled on the six episodes that made the grade. Having turned to alcoholism, several of the ideas I had had needed to be cut for their stupidity. One involved hypnotising a huge amount of people to shoot themselves in the head, but with a £2,000,000 budget and only one of me with which to hypnotise the victims, the buying of illegal weaponry and keeping the event hushed was not feasible.
My crew was sycophantic, which improved my presenting manner unbelievably. With people believing in your abilities and approving of your every word and movement, it is impossible not to be a somewhat grandiose version of yourself. My pieces to camera were in the vein of the classic ringleader, introducing elephants and other such antiquated attractions. I wore a tailcoat and a fitted suit, every garment presented in black. I had decided that to add an extra facet of dementedness to the show I would not shave for two months before shooting, which gave me a thick, dark brown beard – not dissimilar to the one Charles Manson cultivated during the height of his infamy.
This was not all that Mr. Manson and me had in common. It is clear to anyone that our powers of persuasion are second to none. Prior to this final series his style of persuasion had been very different; making people do terrible things to say the least of his actions, but during the formulation of this series I had discovered many more common traits between various cult leaders and myself other than just using mental suggestion for bad.
For example, both Jim Jones (creator of Jonestown and responsible for the biggest non-natural disaster before 9/11) and myself had had a public struggle with our sexuality. The tabloids had labeled me gay, the broadsheets had labeled me bisexual and all the while I labeled myself straight. However, I felt that the ambiguous nature of my sexuality only added to my mysticism, and so never denied or confirmed any such rumour. It didn’t bother me at all, sexuality has always appeared to me as a spectrum, and I have never ruled out homosexuality because one could find love absolutely anywhere. I did not pursue men as I did pursue women, but if a male had jumped out at me as the love of my life I would of course have gone for it.
Yet again, I don’t think I truly understood the idea of love. Being a hypnotist and illusionist I of course had quite a lot of understanding of the human brain, and knew that the chemical effects of love were the same as OCD. Nobody would search for the duration of life for OCD, so why search for love?
I was searching for revenge more than anything. Revenge gave me the feeling of love without the remorse or anxiety. Revenge has no downsides. Revenge is pure elation; a chemical satisfaction better than that of any drug I’d ever found.
I decided that the first episode – a pilot for my own experiment in audio-visual history – would be the idea I had titled ‘Stampede.’ I needed a heavily populated incline, preferably in a town centre. I decided upon Guildford town centre: full of the type of fickle middle-class bastards who had believed the media hype surrounding my faked hanging. The high street was on a cobbled hill, which would also complement my Victorian style.
When we got there and I’d done a few pieces to camera in nearby castle grounds, we set up at both the top and the bottom of the hill. I directed the crew at the lower end of the slope to shoot straight up the road, but from the safety of a wall or some such higher ground. The guys at the top were to shoot my interaction with the crowds and their reaction to the ensuing events.
A few days prior to the day, I had left many subliminal messages suggesting a time (3.00pm, the height of shopping centre business hours) and an urge to sleep at that time. Pictures of sleeping triplets with watches on supposedly advertising G-Shock, trios of beds mocked up to look like an advert for Tempur mattresses – you get the idea.
I was horrifically nervous. Group hypnosis was very much less likely to take effect, but I assured myself that the full-time workers would most definitely have been affected, which gave me roughly 90 people under my control. When 90 people charged out of all the shops upon my screaming of ‘avalanche’, it would prove the theory of ‘people as sheep’ and would cause an absolute riot.
Very rarely in television do you get only one chance at a scene. This was not a stunt that could be reset without a huge passage of time. At 2:59pm, I readied myself and waited at the pinnacle of the hill with the crew. I had told them it would be a harmless ‘flashmob’-type thing, with everyone in the street falling asleep and waking up exactly one minute later. They were not ready for what followed.
Avalanche.
Like clockwork, staff shot out of chain store upon chain store, and the pedestrians, being caught up in the moment, ran along with them. Children’s hands were let go of in the riot, screaming and not understanding the commotion. I should say now that the younger a child is, the less susceptible he or she is to my methods, having not been socially conditioned into conformity yet. The children were not the ones I wanted to punish; so it was lucky that their parents dropped them relatively early in the ensuing chaos.
The incline was probably 25 degrees, and tens of people tripped and fell to the bottom of the hill. The quickest to fall down there were the most unfortunate – trampled by those trying to escape who believed in the disgusting ideas of survival of the fittest and every man for himself.
Watching this unfold filled me with a childish glee, and I couldn’t wait to review the footage my crew had got. I wanted to see the fear in every one of these idiot’s eyes. I hadn’t even thought about the press coverage such a disaster would cause – and with no idea what had triggered such mass hysteria.
My crew looked on in horror, but it was okay. They were kind people. I had plans for them, so that they would not be accessories to this uncategorisable crime. We packed up pretty soon after the event, sticking around to get some reaction shots of those critically injured (read as ‘dead’) and explore the extent of damage to the town.
After this I drove the crew back to my house. They were still reeling from the shock of assisting me in mass murder. After a silent drive, I directed them all to sit in the lobby, and one by one join me in my office. Here I wiped their memories of any death or pain that happened on the trip, and so that they wouldn’t be reminded of the actual events I pushed them through to the rest of my house, not to see the others until I had treated them as well.
On the other side of my office everyone seemed to be really happy with how the day had gone. I cooked us all dinner and then sent them on their way, so that I could watch the footage back. I decided I would edit it myself, so as to keep the truth to myself. I trusted nobody but myself, which would prove to be vital over the next few weeks of shooting.

DOWN THE BARREL, PART ONE.

2009-07-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

http://open.spotify.com/user/benme/playlist/6BuZTQJeMfs8buWLqBLowU - Spotify 'Soundtrack' Playlist URL

These past four years had been hell. Life was rushing by me like a sped up silent movie. All these people giggling and rushing around, and I'd missed every punch line. I'd sit in cafés and watch them all, with their dreams of invitations for them and some unnecessary other. Ampersands meant more to these people than real connections, they forged families from snakebite and number ones, and I'd had enough of it. Somebody needed to shake these people out of this misery that they were so oblivious to. Nobody was real; they were a memory of a former humanity that died while no one was watching.
My name is Henry Staire, and you used to know me. I had a primetime Friday slot on the terrestrial television channel IBC. I was the first famous hypnotist in over 80 years, riding on the back of a wave of Victorian-era nostalgia. Of course, nobody who watched my show had been alive in Victorian times, just as nobody who was actually alive in the 1980s dresses in an 80s style.
Yet another individual the media machine chewed up and spat out when they’d squeezed him for all he was worth, my show lasted for four series and then was cancelled without warning and replaced by a reality TV show about interactions between humans and animals. I even did a few tours of my material, involving audience members. This was my favourite thing to do, because those watching couldn’t deny what I was doing to the participants as they so easily could on the television. My favourite trick was to show the audience that I was no different from them, by way of ‘bringing out’ an audience member’s dormant psychic abilities. It was easy enough to do, although I’m afraid I cannot tell you how due to the rules and regulations of The Magic Circle. It shocked and amazed the crowds, who mostly consisted of middle class couples and their goth-tinged children.
The television show was a huge success, with rave reviews from the press from start to finish. Towards the end the ratings did start to dip, but I would never blame the content of my show. Everything I put into that programme was analysed down to the ground by myself, and focus groups countrywide responded excellently to every piece. But then I pushed my luck, and hanged myself on live television. I was fine, bar a nasty friction burn on my neck, but people thought it was tacky and the fact that I broadcast it live on the 40th anniversary of the last British hangings seemed to cause far more controversy than an actual hanging would have.
It was after this trick that my television career was over. I became a punchline for use by those who struggled with controversy and ingenuity, who would make jokes about how faking killing myself had been career suicide. They got a big laugh from the great unwashed. It’s amazing how quickly love turns to hate.
And so shortly after I’d eroded the majority of the money I had made, drinking and hallucinating my way through public mockery, I hatched a plan.
The general public is fickle scum, giving you great reviews one minute and crucifying you the next. They spit on you in the street, point, laugh and whisper behind their hands. All I was to them was a quick entertainment fix, and then on to the next show, and that was just the problem. I had to be remembered. Fame or infamy, so be it - either equated to column inches. Having failed half way up the respectable ladder, it was time to double my efforts to the bottom.
Oh, there’d be a fifth series.
I decided to first employ a camera crew. This was almost too easy: I found those who had any previous experience of camera work who had been converted into followers by my onstage antics. This also meant that they were susceptible to hypnosis – a quality that would come in handy later on. I then set about compiling various ideas to cause death and rioting that would leave no trace of my presence, minus the video footage that I would have to post on various websites across the internet just before my suicide.
I make no bones about it. This series was the end. After playing out my plague of confusion, I would cancel myself once and for all.

STRIP CLUB WAITRESS BLUES.

2009-07-23T16:42:00.000-07:00

She's out tonight
At an open audition.
'It's derogatory to women' she says
Unconvincingly.
And it's something to do with
Being deemed good enough -
Good enough to work
In the smell of semen.
Women subconsciously wish to be judged
In the way they believe men judge them.
It's the lad's mag eruption,
Tarnishing all men's reputations
With a sweaty undercarriage.

SWANS MATE FOR LIFE, PART FOUR.

2009-07-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

My first reaction was to vomit. All I had in my system was coffee, so the vomit was thick and brown. This made the girl cry even more for some reason. I was no longer raping her, but vomit made her cry.
I cannot convey the feeling I had in that moment. I had ruined this girl’s life, causing her deep and dark emotional pain, and in the process cheated on Rose. Maybe I didn’t have to tell Rose. Or maybe she’d understand. Or maybe, and more likely, I would never see Rose again, because I was now a criminal, and paedophiles don’t sleep in prison. They get beaten up at all hours and spat at and quite rightly – paedophiles are subhuman. And now I was one, so I didn’t deserve Rose’s love.
I opened my front door and let Frances leave, apologising profusely, giving her money and clothing. We were both crying, but me for far more selfish reasons. Her life was ruined; it was fair that she would cry. I was only crying for my own loss.
I knew that I had to see Rose at once, to explain myself. I ran to the shop and bought 5 packs of the sleeping pills. I knew that it would take a long time to explain myself to Rose and so would need to be unconscious for far more than the usual 14 hours. I’d get probably 48 hours of sleep with that amount of medication, which would hopefully be enough time to explain myself, re-establish our love and maybe even arrange some wedding things. I hope she could forgive me. I had a feeling she would.
As I walked home I began to take the tablets. I’d bought a bottle of Evian with the pills so that the journey wasn’t just wasted time. I needed to see Rose as soon as possible. Frances’ blood had made my genitals stick to my underwear, which was really painful, but I needed to get home as quick as possible so jogged lightly, limping to compensate the pain.
I was getting quite tired by the third packet, and my body had started to reject any further tablets. I was a jogging, vomiting, paedophilic sham of a human. I hated myself, and I hope that by now you do too.
I crossed the road to my house in a stupor, and unaware of my surroundings caused a car to screech to a halt and beep its horn at me. I waved him off, slurring an apology. When I put my keys into the door, I fell through the opening and crawled up the stairs to my bedroom.
As I got into bed, Rose was there waiting for me. She told me that everything was going to be okay, and that we could now be together forever. I started to weep in her arms. I shut my eyes for a second, and when I next opened them she was still there.
I think I always knew Rose was a figment of my imagination. Now that I’m sure she is, it doesn’t change how I feel about her. She is the love of my life, and now, the love of my death. Now I would never have to wake up from her. We would be together always, living in a paradise of my own creation. And maybe you’re thinking I don’t deserve this - I don’t deserve to be happy after what I did to Frances. And you’re right. But you and I, we live in different worlds now. You can live in the knowledge that somewhere in your reality, I am lying in a bed decomposing whilst nobody cares. In your world I was a plague; a parasite, but here I am free of mistakes, free of imperfections, and I can’t ruin anyone else’s life because ultimately, I live on in my own head.

The End.

SWANS MATE FOR LIFE, PART THREE.

2009-07-23T15:45:00.001-07:00

I ran to her, ditching the newlyweds who stood open-mouthed watching my every move. They would no doubt complain to my manager, but that didn’t matter. Could it really be her? Would she remember me? Was I awake or was I asleep? I had to be awake – in my dreams Starlight was always shut.
I tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around I saw it was definitely her. She looked shocked to see me there, which made me laugh. I hugged her, and kissed her neck up and down. I couldn’t believe she existed in ‘real’ life, and now I could be permanently happy, both in dreams and consciousness.
She screamed, and ran out of the shop. I had to know what was wrong with my Rose: why had she reacted in such a way?
Rose grabbed a male pedestrian who was probably a little bit younger than me. Mid-thirties, full head of hair and casually dressed. Could it be she, just like Stella, had found a replacement for me?
He turned and saw me running towards them. I punched him straight in the face. The saving grace of my life had traded me in yet again, and this time she wouldn’t get away under such amicable terms. I grabbed her by the arm and ran home with her. She screamed, asking me what I was doing. Well, I only lived a ten-minute walk away, and she’d see what I was doing then.
I took off my Starlight-issued tie and gagged her with it, so as not to attract any more attention. When we get to the house you can scream, I told her. It was almost too easy to drag her to my house, almost like she wanted to come. I think a part of her still loved me, even if she had said she’d marry me and then gone off with another man. She might’ve wanted to explain herself, but I had no time to hear her pointless defences.
We got to my house and I threw her into my bedroom. I locked the door behind the two of us, and proceeded to undress. I kept screaming at her, asking why she did it and what gave her the right to break my heart. She looked confused and scared. You’re fucking right you should be scared, I said. I stopped screaming at her, realising it was scaring her more when I seemed calm and putting across these threats.
I laughed, realising the comedy of the moment. I, a naked 41 year-old man, was screaming at a young girl I had been in love with while she remained fully clothed. I ripped her clothes off, humiliating her and meaning that if she escaped, she would have to do so naked.
I ranted at her, telling her how she was no different to any of the other women in the world – all cheaters and liars and stuck up wastes of space. She’d tricked me into thinking she was different – better than the others.
She made me think about the human race, and how if you cut everyone down to the core, they’re run exactly like their ancestors. All sex and violence and food and sleep. Well, now she would see that I too have that core. I’m no different from any other man, and no other man is any different from me. The difference is that I no longer cared if I lived or died – a very inspiring feeling.
First I decided I would degrade her. I cut all of her hair off, and then burnt the roots with a lighter and a can of deodorant until she was entirely bald. She was crying profusely by now, but I had to power through any emotion. My life was no longer anything to care for. I would’ve died for Rose, and now she would die for me. Slowly and painfully.
I then decided that I would have sex with her one last time. She would forever know that I was the last person to be inside her, if there is an afterlife that is. Maybe the afterlife and the dream world are one and the same, and once dead she would be mine again, and we would both have forgotten her terrible visit to my conscious world. I stuck myself inside her roughly, as she had liked it before. She seemed tighter than I remembered, and understandably had no natural lubrication. I pulled out and ran to the toilet to get some lotion to sort this problem out. But upon re-entry, I noticed something. Rose had bled vaginally, which was weird because Rose didn’t get her period. She was on the pill, and never took a break to let nature take its course.
And then I realised.
I had broken this girl’s hymen.
If this were Rose, she wouldn’t have one, due to the simple fact that we had made love countless times. I looked into the girl’s eyes, where I could see nothing but fear.
A wave of coldness ran over me as I realised I had the wrong girl. I took her gag off and began crying myself. Apologising profusely for having mistaken this virginal girl for my fiancée. I could not believe my actions. Of course it wasn’t Rose. Rose loved me, and would never leave me for another. I felt awful for this girl but also for doubting Rose’s faithfulness. I asked her for her name.
Her name was Frances Thwaite.
She was thirteen.
And I was now a paedophile and a rapist.

SWANS MATE FOR LIFE, PART TWO.

2009-07-23T15:02:00.001-07:00

The thing is that after a week of dream dates with this girl, going to bed at about 6pm and waking up just in time for work, it became harder and harder for me to sleep. This of course meant that I went a few days without seeing her, and when I next saw her I had to apologise to her and regain her love. I took her to expensive restaurants in London, seemingly having infinite money. I bought her clothes in extortionate boutiques in Paris, which she protested, but I would have done anything for her. I promised myself that I would take sleeping pills from now on, to ensure I would never miss a night with her.
It also meant that I no longer had to wear myself out at work. I treated the customers with flippancy, and had no qualms about not showering for days at a time. If I’d given the tiniest of fucks about the ‘real’ world, the comments of colleagues would have been hurtful, but customers sort of expect IT nerds to stink. It makes them feel less self-conscious and sorry for the worker, thus more likely to buy a television, I argued. I no longer did the bare minimum amount of work, I just made sure not to get caught doing nothing. I started smoking so that I had a constant connection to my unconscious self. I wore sunglasses every second that I spent outside of Starlight. I’m sure people thought that I screamed ‘midlife crisis’, but it wasn’t like that. It was all part of the rebirth that comes with genuine love.
The next few dates with ‘Rose’ (she’d never told me her name, but it seemed to fit her) were slow, and had lost the magic of the previous week. We’d run out of things to talk about, and I know that we were both conscious of the elephant in the room that was taking our relationship to the next level. On the Wednesday night, I got us both drunk to see if she would become open enough to talk about sex. I wanted so much to hold her in my arms as I fell awake, to see her beautiful self in the nude. She started touching my genitals through my jeans under the table in the bar, winking and being very forward. I loved it. I hadn’t had any of this spontaneity with my ex-wife Stella, and Rose was everything I wanted in a woman. She was sexual in a respectable way - never slutty. We got a taxi back to mine, and started necking on the backseat. We wanted each other so much that I could’ve penetrated her then and there.
The moment we got back, having tipped the taxi driver more than generously, we both ran upstairs, ripping our clothes off. She shared all of my deepest sexual fantasies – things that made Stella become squeamish whenever I mentioned them. Rose never made me wear a condom, even when I went from her back entrance to her mouth she didn’t complain; if anything, she delighted in it. My climax went on for about 45 seconds, and she lapped up every last drop, relishing the depravity of it. As we lay side by side, kissing and holding each other as tight as possible, I said goodbye. I said that I would meet her at the park the next day. We exchanged ‘I love you’s and I fell awake.
When I awoke, I was still lying in the spooning position I had formed around Rose’s beautifully simple anatomy. I smiled to myself, having had such a brilliant night with her. I decided that I would soon propose.
The thing is that by now, I had quite an addiction to the sleeping pills. It was of course both physical and mental, because mentally I needed to take them to see Rose, but physically I needed more and more each day to fall asleep. I had started to take them throughout the day at work, so that it wasn’t necessary for me to swallow 10 tablets in quick succession. For Rose, I could not pass out quick enough.
Taking them at work soon became an issue. One day after work, the staff that felt comfortable enough with me to confront me on such a matter held an intervention. My boss had found a box of my pills in the bin, and arranged for a drugs counsellor to come in and talk to me. I was reeling in agony - I would once again be late for Rose, I’d have to rush through my morning routine, and if these vultures - who preyed on my problems to reassure themselves that they were doing fine – confiscated my pills, I’d have to add an extra half hour while I bought more. The counsellor asked me why I was on them. I refused to tell them about Rose. They wouldn’t understand. I just said that I’d been on them since my divorce and my tolerance was such that I needed a lot to get to sleep now, and didn’t like taking them all in a row so spread it throughout the day. She said that it was probably ruining my liver, and after showing me a few pictures of ruined livers of other addicts, took my pills from me and sent me on my way.
I walked to the shop hurriedly, checking my watch every few seconds. I was meant to meet Rose at half past six at the park, and it was quarter to six now. I got the pills and ran all the way home. I took the entire pack and ran to bed. I was asleep in seconds. When I woke up in the dream, it was twenty past six. That gave me ten minutes. I rang a taxi and got dressed after running my hair under the tap; it could dry on the way.
I ran out of the taxi to meet Rose. I’d had no time to buy an engagement ring – I wouldn’t have even if I had been on time. I arrived at quarter to seven, and she looked really upset. I explained what had happened, and she said she understood. She was just the absolute perfect girl, with so few complaints and such a beautiful body. She told me that I should come off of the sleeping pills if they were damaging me – she wanted to have children one day and said that she didn’t want to raise them alone with me having died of liver failure. I kissed her passionately. I may not have had a ring, but I had the passion. I got down on one knee, and she immediately started to weep, gasping profusely. She looked so happy. She said yes, and we made love under a tree in the middle of the park. I asked if she wanted to stay at mine, but she said she wanted to go home to tell her parents. I told her that I couldn’t be sure what time I’d be there tomorrow, but I’d give her a call when I was back. We kissed a long and sensual kiss, and she went home.
I woke up. This wasn’t going to plan, I hadn’t got back to my bed, and the illusion of the passage between worlds was no more. It was half nine, when I was supposed to be at work at nine. Shit.
I turned up looking haggard and tired. They knew immediately that I’d gotten right back on the sleeping pills, and told me to use a few of my sick days to get better. I said I would, and that I had decided to quit the sleeping pills forever this time. They looked worried and hopeful. It is odd how people give a shit when it makes them feel bigger than you.
At my house, I had no idea what to do with my waking hours. I went for a walk, and visited the local places that I had been to with Rose. They didn’t seem quite the same. I sat on the bench where I had proposed to her for a while, which had a better energy but was still nothing on being there with Rose. I returned to the house with a growing sense of despair. I wondered if I would ever sleep again without the aid of the pills.
I lay in bed all day, trying to drift off. I eventually found my way to sleep at about 4 in the morning, but the sleep was so light that I never really felt like I was with her. It felt so weak and distant that I burst into tears in front of Rose at lunch. She said that she didn’t mind if we only met for a short while a day, because it was better that we would see each other a little bit forever rather than for a long time in the short time with the aid of my pills. I agreed. I could only muster a peck on the cheek, but she understood.
The next day I went to work feeling physically a lot better. Mentally I was breaking down. Without the sweet release of Rose I had nothing to look forward to. I hoped that it would only be a few days before my sleeping patterns returned to normal, but then a funny thing happened. I was serving a pair of newlyweds, and a young woman perusing the mp3 players caught my eye. It was her. It was 100% undoubtedly Rose.

SWANS MATE FOR LIFE, PART ONE.

2009-07-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

http://open.spotify.com/user/benme/playlist/6CNY5zJjjqWV7fCXZN2yyv - Spotify 'Soundtrack' URL

Dreams convey a truth that the viewer has not consciously realised. In ancient Greece a type of divination based on dreams was called oneiromancy, and they believed they predicted the future. I don’t believe they predict the future, but I do think they hold a strange relevance to your conscious life.
For example, after my wife Stella divorced me in 2005, I had a recurring dream of her stabbing me in the gut. Interpretations of being stabbed include that you feel inadequate, betrayed and may indicate a power struggle.
All applied.
Seeing your own blood can mean that you are suffering from exhaustion or feeling emotionally drained. Again, both ideas were true.
I’d always had an interest in the symbolism of material things. But recently my dreams were becoming far more literal, and anything I could pick out as strange meant nothing to me once interpreted. My dreams were becoming more real than anything else. Sometimes I’d dream I was walking home from my job. Nothing happened on the walk - it was too real.
My job. Fucking hell. One of those jobs that nobody remembers you have, and nobody remembers anyone does. I worked in the TV section at a chain electronics store called Starlight. The customers came in three categories – newlyweds, techie old men and nerds. Newlyweds were my least favourite. Believing in marriage is one of the worst traits known to man. No scratch that – believing in love is the worst trait known to man. Love died with the discovery of the wheel; when people realised adultery was a possibility – a sick, horrific possibility. I’ve never been able to decide if being cheated on is worse than just being straight up left. Both are terrible ends to a love, and both basically imply that you’re not good enough for your partner.
Stella, she’d run off with some guy for her job in an IT department. The events were so classically ‘21st century’; ‘IT department’ and ‘adultery’ are still relatively new concepts. His name was Ian, although I never met him. I imagined he was a slimy little wisp of a man. To steal someone’s wife, who one loves dearly, is not the behaviour of an attractive Mr. Darcy-type character. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I’m probably better looking than him, but it isn’t hard to be more attractive than me.
My name is Howard Brown. I am 41 years old and balding. In my dreams I have a full head of hair, and I don’t wear glasses. Nor do I repulse women, or have an undefined beer gut. But awake, alas, this is who I am.
Techie old men are the best of a bad bunch. They know exactly what they want, having looked it up on the internet, so I just get them the one they want and the commission is all mine. At 41, single and with very little chance of that changing, it’s the little victories like a £20 bonus that make all the difference. And so I’m sure you’ll understand why when I say I became addicted to sleep.
I would rush home at 5pm everyday, having made sure to tire myself out at work, lugging TVs around, speed walking constantly and jogging on my lunch break. I had no friends at Starlight, and so didn’t much mind if they thought I was disturbed. The moment I got home, I would shut all the curtains and fall into my private parallel universe.
Once I had fully accepted that I preferred unconsciousness to being alive, the dreams all started in the same way. I would wake up in my bed, with nothing to alert me to the fact that it was a dream other than the sensation of weightlessness and anaesthesia. I remember the first one as clearly as my own aged body.
I went about my usual morning routine, which was fine. Then I walked out of my house, and, upon arrival at Starlight, discovered it was shut for the day due to staff illness. I decided not to come straight home, but instead went to the park. I strolled gently down the road, lighting a cigarette. In real life I don’t smoke at all, but I guess my idealised me is confident enough to not look a fool when smoking.
Upon arrival at the park, I sat on a bench and was surrounded by kids playing around, and a group of men played cricket to my right. I watched the cricket for quite some time. It was a beautiful day. Attractive people gave me friendly nods, as if to acknowledge I was one of their own. But then, there she was. The true reason I was in love with unconsciousness.
She had shoulder length brunette hair, and was wearing a strappy top with three-quarter length jeans. Her figure was wondrous, like a Greek goddess. She smiled at me, and I invited her to sit down with me. We spoke for hours, about what I cannot remember – it might have all been nonsense – but I know that we were in complete agreement. She was touching her hair and straightening her shirt a lot. In my desperation after Stella I had read a book on body language, and these were the biggest indicators that a person is attracted to you.
She had to go, but before she did we kissed. It was absolutely thrilling, and the anaesthesia of the dream world faded to allow me to experience the butterflies and palpitations of true love’s first kiss. I sat for a while after she left, just taking in the most glorious day of my life. The walk home was one of swelling, overpowering elation, and when I got in, I masturbated over the memory of her and fell right to sleep.
And the next thing I knew, I was awake. I know now that you must understand my wishes for unconsciousness. It was the only place I could see my love.

SMOKING IN HINDSIGHT.

2009-07-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

The cigarette waltz
And your tone of voice
As if disappointed
I’m not someone else

Not someone better,
Just anyone different;
A change of pace and
Genitalia

Terracotta smile
That exudes total numbness,
In absence of emotions
You apply more make-up

‘Love’ is just a word
‘Sex’ is just exercise
And nothing ever done
Is anything more than practice.

#14983, PART FIVE.

2009-07-20T13:59:00.001-07:00

I feel a bit like a disciple writing this. I spread other people’s stories. None of this really happened to me, did it? I was learning from the others’ mistakes. I had no great tragedy. My great tragedy was a conscience running overtime. That was all. I just thought too much. I had never filled my days with a job or a hobby. I sat around in my room, contemplating how the others dealt with their issues. I could barely handle knowing the stories – that’s how I’ve come to be here – and they had to live with them. They must be such strong individuals to not have just ended it all already.
Anyway, after settling in to the day to day of life on the ward, I started to find patterns in the suicides. Over three years, the suicides went off like a bomb, and I was in the eye of it all at ground zero. The two next door to me were the first to go, then the two next door to them, and on and on in such a manner over a period of about two years until the ward was almost entirely made up of people who weren’t there upon my arrival.
Carl was the last that I had known to go. These suicides were very odd. There was always a lot of blood, but the first two had died at almost exactly the same time. We weren’t allowed razorblades or anything sharp at all, so how these bodies were coated in supposedly self-inflicted lacerations is anybody’s guess.
When I first saw Carl’s body lying there, I felt nothing. He’d stayed in the room furthest from mine, and so was the last in a pattern that five or six deaths ago I had come to terms with. There was no note in his room, and there had been no sign of him growing suicidal. The irony was that the scars he had so hated during life were overwritten by new wounds; wounds created by something I cannot imagine.
For quite some time the suspicion lay on my head. As I was the only original cast member, the other pantomime freaks were on edge around me. I must admit that I took a certain amount of joy from this – if I wanted to watch TV, you better believe I was going to watch TV. Lose at poker? I doubt it. I had more cigarettes than I could smoke by the time rumours started to make the rounds. I didn’t mind winding these people up, even perhaps ruining their waking lives with the fear of my attack. They’d all come here virtually sane, but within months they’d given in to self-fulfilling prophecy and were quacking away, all trying to outdo each other in their insanity.
But then the pattern started again, and I couldn’t take the blame any more. There were investigations amongst the patients, but the doctors never suspected anything but suicide. No trace of a weapon capable to inflict these unimaginable slashes on flesh. This wave of so-called suicides had an extra touch – odd blisters that pissed out rancid pus for hours after the bleeding had stopped.
At that point I stopped taking my medicine. I was on a vast array of pills and suppositories by this point, with all the doctors saying I was becoming worse and prescribing more and more substances. My paranoia kicked in when I noticed that on every meal tray of every patient there was only one constant – a little orange powdery tablet. But if the doctors were poisoning us, that raised a million questions. What did they gain? What poison was this that could break the skin? And more importantly, how had I not died yet?
I’d been taking all of my pills for as long as I’d been here – by this point 4 years – yet I was somehow still alive. It didn’t add up; me, a scrawny young man standing 5’8” surviving poisoning while Carl, a heavy-set gentleman far taller than I, died. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to die.
Group became more and more taxing. All anybody could talk about was the deaths, and how it made them feel. The uniform answer was, basically, that they felt fucking scared – a universal feeling I’m sure; you don’t have to be insane to feel fear. If you don’t you’re probably insane sounds closer to the truth. At one point, while I was the accused, there had been the most terrifying moment, where I had spoken of how I was feeling awful about the loss of my one true friend, Carl. The nurse had even stared me down to look for any sign of sarcasm in my eyes. I couldn’t believe that the staff would want somebody to be thought of as a killer: it seemed very unprofessional to create a mutiny within your own stomping ground.
So eventually, I had to ask. I arranged a private session with my psychiatrist, and told him of my suspicions about the deaths. He buzzed in a man I had not seen before, dressed very smartly in a bespoke suit. He couldn’t have come far, as he was there in front of me in a matter of seconds.
He asked me what I thought was going on. I told him that I had noticed that this one orange, powdery tablet was taken by every patient each day. He asked me if I felt lucky.
How on earth could I feel lucky? My only friend here had died at the hands of someone else. I told him that I would much rather be dead myself than surrounded by death.
Oh no, you won’t be dying any time soon, he told me.
I was the control, you see.
My suspicions had been correct. The orange pill had been the cause. He continued to tell me that he was part of a government organization that had been commissioned to find a substance that could kill those that were an annoyance to world leaders. The tablet, which had the codename Antirex, had not been used in the field yet, as they needed to find the correct dosage to kill in a matter of hours. The hospital received an abundance of secret funding as an incentive to administer the drug to live-in patients, and in return the staff would up the dosage each time an entirely new wave of inmates arrived.
I was the fortunate one, I was told. Once they had found the exact right amount of Antirex, I was free to go. They said that although I had had problems in the outside world, living through this would have made me emotionally stronger than the most dehumanized of men. The psychiatrist nodded enthusiastically.
Naturally I asked how long it would take them. They had no idea. The dosage they currently used had a three day incubation period minimum, and they couldn’t push the dose up too high as if all the patients started dropping dead immediately, the suspicions could leak into the outside world and ruin the advance of Antirex.
My parents knew the story. That really got to me. They had not been looking out for my mental state, they’d been looking out for their bank balances. My GP was apparently one of very few attached to the Antirex campaign, and had approached my father about it one day. They were paid £2,000,000 each year I stayed here, and upon my release £500,000 a year.
I didn’t know what to do, what to think – anything. Bizarrely I understood why my parents had done it. I had been a leech. We never spoke; I was a lodger more than a son. To see me growing into a mentally ill bum, after everything I’d been given must have killed them. And if I wouldn’t make grandchildren, then they’d make a quick buck.
And so I am in here until the i’s and t’s of Antirex are dotted and crossed. With the suggestion that each wave of new patients was bringing me closer to freedom, it was impossible not to think dark, dark thoughts.
My bed was a simple iron affair, with a headboard made of an iron railing. I took out one of the rungs, and ran it along the walls until it formed a nasty spike. I didn’t wear too much away, as I had to be able to fit it back into the headboard after each expedition.
Killing my way to freedom is the perfect crime. Staff think they know that it is the pills, and each slash of a gut, an arm or a backside is an erosion at the wall of imprisonment. I entered thinking I was a madman. Now I leave knowing it.

The End.

#14983, PART FOUR.

2009-07-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

My earliest memory of the hospital is one that I try not to dwell on. I try to forget it because now I’ve settled in, moments such as the one I will recount now have drifted into the background and become the everyday.
Two men of titanic proportions, holding an arm of mine each, guided me into the hospital. I didn’t really have to move at all; they dragged me to my ward, then to my room, giving me a sort of flying tour of where I was to spend the next undecided amount of years.
The bizarre sights and smells of a mental ward will never leave you. In fact, I think there’s a sort of institutionalization about the place – if you weren’t insane before you came her, you would be in a matter of long, laborious months.
As I was carried through the door I noticed clumps of grey hair at varying intermissions on the floor. The living ends of these clumps were coated in white paint. To this day I don’t know why. The smell of iron hung in the air just below shoulder level, as if not quite warm enough to join the hot air in the ceiling, but not as cold as the icy flooring. I soon learnt where the smell came from. My ward had at least one suicide a week, and it was so clockwork that those more tolerant of life on my ward decided to place bets on who would be next. I laughed along, but I never put money on anyone’s life. Weeks later, the man next door to me, Carl, would tell me he’d lost 4 packs of cigarettes on me. They’d thought I was weak – too young to survive in a place like this, where TV was rationed, sleeping patterns were not of your own choosing, and clothes were uniforms.
My first night there I cried myself to sleep. I could hear all manner of strange sounds. Maniacal giggles, sobs and repeated questions added up to the midnight orchestra, and in the morning none of it was mentioned. The daylight made us strong.
At breakfast the next day, I tried to find anyone in the same position as me. Carl had been, at one time or another, but this place, it changed people, he told me. He said that nobody’s left outside of a body bag for the entirety of his stay – twelve years and counting.
Carl was a 38 year-old ex-stockbroker. Apparently he had millions in the bank, but that the conniving business he was in had driven him to madness. He admitted to me fairly early on that he had once needed somewhere like this. He hastened to tell me what was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I pulled it out of him a few days after.
We sat and watched daytime television together after breakfast, providing a sarcastic running commentary to a show on antique auctions. When our turn with the television was over, we played cards. He taught me ‘shithead’, which I found really funny – a man nearly twice my age laughing about calling me a ‘shithead’ every time I lost. Which was often.
After that we had group therapy. It was a lot like that film ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, except nobody was Jack Nicholson. Everyone was terrified to say how they felt, because they were either fine, or so ill that it was patronizing to ask how they felt. One guy, who they nicknamed Gorky, refused to talk at group, but would rip anything he could to pieces, in a calm and calculated way. He was much older than Carl. Watching him tear pillows and papers and bed sheets was chilling. Every so often he’d spot me observing him, and shout ‘did you like that one?’. I’d immediately look away each time, but I was fixated on his odd way of conveying his pain.
This pattern continued for a few days, with me and Carl growing closer and building a trust that I’d never known before. On the Thursday he told me how he had come to be here.
He’d been on Wall Street, just like any other day. After what occurred, he had been moved back to England from the American stock exchange because they couldn’t handle such intense needs as his. One Wednesday, he had started to lose a startling amount of money. We’re talking hundreds of thousands a minute, and he couldn’t get through on the phones to sell his shares. He broke down, envisioning his wife living in a wreck of a house and him not being able to feed her. He started to write trading numbers all over himself – his arms, his chest, his legs, until the point where there was no more bare flesh to write on.
Blood leaked from these aggressively written notes, leaving digital wounds all over his flesh. He’d begun to rant at nobody in particular about how money was nothing compared to the importance of his wife; and with all this they’d called him insane, and his citizenship had been revoked. According to Carl, although I’m not sure how much I believe this, they sent him in a plane none too dissimilar to the one in Con Air. A load of mentalists on a plane, of which one, according to US law, was Carl.
He still had the scars. Numbers on his shins, forearms and chest. Every part of Carl’s body was a memory of some business crashing, a bank robbery – the evil of money.
His wife was waiting on the outside for him, he told me. She never visited as far as I can remember, but the two communicated through letters and photographs. Carl had tried to communicate the fact that she should start a new life, but the nurses read through all the letters you sent for signs of any mental deterioration. He knew he’d never leave this ward. And soon enough, you’ll know why.
You’ll know why nobody was leaving.

#14983, PART THREE.

2009-07-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

I apologise for focusing on these seemingly unnecessary stories from my teenage years. It will fall into place, soon. I constantly remind myself of the good times I had outside, and then realize that they all ended in sadness. I guess without bad there could not exist any good, though. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction et cetera.
So now I’ve been in here for seven years. I don’t see that changing to be honest. Twenty-seven years old and being fed food that reminds you what day it is (today is pizza, meaning it’s Tuesday) on a tray that also has meds in little cups on it, it’s not dignified.
How I came here? It’s an odd story. One I don’t enjoy disclosing too often. But seeing as you’ll never meet me, and I’ll spend the rest of my life here, it’s okay. Just this once, I mean.
As you know, at 19 I was put on meds for major depressive disorder. They definitely worked, but they couldn’t beat the prejudices that people had. When most of my male friends found out they said I was just being a pussy, and when most girls found out they treated me as if I was genuinely insane. It made me so angry to see such naivety. Would you dislike someone who was on medicine for muscular dystrophy? Of course not, you’d feel sorry for them. I couldn’t believe that there was still such a stigma about mental illness. I’ve read facts that would make me shake with fear. Surveys say 54% of people think depression is a personal weakness, yet at some point in everyone’s life – this means you, and everyone you know – will experience a period of time where you are clinically depressed. Actually able to be diagnosed as a sufferer of depression. It’s not a personal weakness, it’s a sign of intelligence. If you think you could go through those two experiences I’ve mentioned before and still think the world was shiny and kind, then you are calling yourself an idiot.
I was depressed because nothing touched me. There was no glitter in anything any more. Nothing gave me butterflies. I realised that the meaning of life was just to continue the human race – nothing more. Women I’d met had no urge to question the world, to question religion, belief systems, fate and misfortune. Why do bad things happen to the good? I dunno, they’d say, and change the subject. I’d say I didn’t know too, but then I’d think about it. To them the question was a cliché, like ‘whatever will be will be’; some antiquated existentialist bullshit that they’d never cared for. If I asked when they last got pissed they could recount every detail of some Friday night word for word, and just how pissed they were, all that shit. I was depressed because nobody else was, perhaps.
Anyway, I’d been on the pills for a good year when I spiraled out of control. This girl I’d been on about three dates with (and before you ask, we didn’t, I write this as a 27 year-old virgin and counting) changed her mind about me being on the pills. She said she didn’t think she was really dating ‘me’, but some personality made up of film-coated chemicals. I broke down. What the fuck? I couldn’t believe this seemingly intelligent girl was now as bad as the rest. People have told me that I’m ‘the old me’ again with these pills. I’d felt so much better. I mean, do you really think I would’ve been on them had I not thought they were working? She basically said she just didn’t want to care about me. She was another of these Panorama watching fools that believed people just flip out on antidepressants. At that point, that wasn’t true. I honestly think I started that myth with the actions that came a few months after this charade. She also suggested she’d read something that said exercise helped depression. At that point I wanted so much to tell her to fuck off. As if I hadn’t tried all healthy alternatives before resorting to mind-altering drugs. I walked home, and began to drink.
Oh how I drank. I toasted oblivion. I only stopped to vomit, and those moments of being sick were commas rather than full stops in my bingeing. I would drink then sleep, then repeat. My parents didn’t notice. I’d always just stayed in my room. I stopped eating, and got my weight down to about 7 stone. For a boy of six foot two this was actually very bad, I’m told. I didn’t feel anything. I was fine as long as I had some form of alcohol in my system.
About a month later, I decided to go for a walk in the woods. I went to the woods, where the trio of forest kids had died. I went to the same spot where they’d been tied up and carved up, and felt awful. I lay down against a nearby tree and started to cry. The atmosphere of the place was too much – the air seemed thick, hard to breathe in. I started to imagine how Erin had done it, and could, based on the pictures in the newspapers, see my one-time acquaintances in their death throes. Erin was there, with her penknife, laughing as she sliced away, sometimes screaming affirmatives, but mostly silent as if she’d found the key to some eternal question.
I swigged and shook the image from my mind. I walked on further, and found a stream. I dipped my bottle in. I wanted to taste nature. Maybe Eddie had been right. Nature is beautiful. I wanted to live here, just for a while. Humans have lost the knowledge they once had; that the world doesn’t belong to them, it isn’t a belonging - it’s a privilege. We poison it, litter it and it still gives and gives. Clearly my thoughts were all over the place, but never on the good side. I walked home, having run out of gin.
And when I arrived, the doctors were there. I wondered if maybe something bad had happened to one (or both) of my parents, and what it would mean for me. Unfortunately it wasn’t anything so trivial. I was being sectioned. My parents had told the doctors I’d been becoming out of control with my drinking, and that I was writing and drawing terrible things on the walls. I saw photographs of what I’d supposedly put on these walls. Some were, of course, in my own blood, but most were in black marker pen. Pictures of the dead forest kids. Chicken scratch manifestos, life lessons for those just as terrified as me. I’d come to realise I wasn’t depressed because of the past, it was because of the future. Fear of the future and never fitting in anywhere. The messages in the pictures and writings weren’t for others. They were for me. The me of the future. I must’ve been doing them when I thought I was sleeping.
The doctors looked shocked at the sight of me. I hadn’t seen my reflection in days, maybe weeks, bar a silhouette in the stream in the woods. I noticed I had a patchy beard coming along, but that was through touch. When I saw my reflection, I couldn’t believe it.
I was ridiculously thin. The whites of my eyes were filled with blood, and my pupils were in a constant state of dilation. I had jowls purely because I had no fat in my cheeks to keep the skin tight on the bones. The only change I liked was the beard. I looked knowledgeable, like Freud or Karl Marx.
I got in the doctor’s car without fuss – I figured I needed a bit of rehabilitation, to get myself back. My mother stood on the doorway crying, but I saw my father mouth ‘it’s only what’s best for him, he needs this.’
And until a few years ago, I was in complete agreement with the bastard.

#14983, PART TWO.

2009-07-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

It was a lazy Sunday when I first met the forest kids. I’d gone for a walk, just to get out of the house. I hadn’t left the house in over a week. I was 17, college dropout and although the signs were there, hadn’t realized I was any different from anyone else. I don’t mean I was special, unless you use ‘special’ in the same way schoolteachers do. I wasn’t retarded. I just wasn’t usual. My house overlooked the woods, so it was a regular venue to my introspective strolls. This particular Sunday I was in a terrible mood, and was looking for any way to make my life interesting as it had once been.
I was looking to get lost, leaving the path and heading into the undergrowth. I found all forms of bizarre relics. A coin from the 1970s, children's coats – all the unimportant things that contribute to giving a place a sinister air. I walked for about an hour away from the track, just further and further into the trees, and I heard the crackling of fire. I couldn’t see the fire, but I followed the sound. As I got closer I heard ecstatic voices, the voices of happy youth making do with their surroundings.
I could see the fire now. I was entranced by it, falling over uncovered roots and small plants with the properties of elastic. I could see the people now, too. They were dressed in a 70s style. I was born in 1982, and they looked only slightly older than me – it was like I’d walked into the past.
I watched them for a while before I walked on. There were about six of them, two were kissing so passionately that the fire seemed to be living off of their energy rather than the other way around. Say what you will, but I swear the fire got bigger when they began to kiss. The other four sat smoking a joint on a big log. They were all in flares – not in a grunge way, but rather a Led Zeppelin/Woodstock way.
The boy who had just been passed the joint glanced over at me. I froze; actually a bit scared of them. Such hedonism. I hadn’t seen anything much like it before that wasn’t in films. He waved me over.
As I approached, he offered me the joint. I took a drag. These people were radical, I was no longer scared of them and realized that they were escaping the chokehold of home as I was, just in a different way. He invited me to sit next to him, and we began to talk. Names were exchanged, and they were never once patronizing just because I was younger than them. I’d met a lot of that before, especially in the homeless actually. Their only thing on you was their seniority, I guess.
We talked for hours about our worries, our fears, our hates and our loves. I had a lot in common with them, and they were fun. I found myself laughing – a sound I hadn’t made in probably three months at this point. I was pretty high, but my laughter wasn’t drug-induced. As the sun went down I helped collect more wood, and they said they were going to stay the night here, if I wanted to join them. I decided I would. There was nothing for me at home any more.
They broke out various bottles. Beers, spirits, wine. Anything intoxicating, they had. It got to about 1am, and they offered me some acid. I was pretty drunk, and felt good about it, but I said I would some other time. Today was the first day in seemingly forever that I hadn’t had some sort of vision involving death stuck in my head, but I didn’t want to risk going bad on these new friends of mine. They all took it so I decided to find my way home.
I’d forgotten how far I’d walked.
I got probably ten minutes into my journey when I thought ‘fuck it’, and turned round to stay the night with the forest kids. They seemed frightened when I first returned, but I explained why and they chilled out. This was going to be a strange night; just watching some acquaintances trip the fuck out.
After nearly an hour of silence they started to see things. I decided I’d take a step back from the group – they’d lent me a sleeping bag so I took it into a bush nearby so as not to disturb them. I could still watch them though, and it was interesting to see.
Dale and Amy, the couple, were making love against a tree. I didn’t feel perverse watching, and they didn’t think I was either - it was a beautiful moment. They started to paint each other with the charcoal from the fire, writing love messages on each other’s bodies.
John, the guy who had originally invited me to join them, was lying on the floor talking about different futures and the butterfly effect. Every so often he’d turn to nobody and say ‘right?’. The other three, who hadn’t properly introduced themselves, were nowhere to be seen. I later found out their names, but only when I had to identify their bodies, about a month later.
What had seemingly happened was that, Erin, one of the girls, had had a bad time. The other two, Emily and Will, had sparked up and taken a seat. Erin had thought they were trying to set her on fire. She hadn’t told them she’d seen them do this, but had quietly gone around the undergrowth and, with a penknife, collected many of the unearthed roots.
What ensued was not pleasant. To say the least - as I must. Emily and Will were found two weeks later, bound up with these roots, and slashed over a hundred times each. They’d been discovered by a man walking his dog in the area. He had vomited at the sight of his dog lapping at the now dry blood that covered the area, and then immediately run home to call the police.
Erin had written a note on the trees in their blood. One word per tree trunk, coming together to say ‘now you’ll burn.’ The bodies were in no real state for me to see. I remember that their faces were perfectly intact when I went to identify them. It was the rest of them that had been so hideously defiled. She’d done this with a penknife – it must’ve taken her hours. Hacking all sorts of bizarre polygon shapes into their flesh, as they lay there dying the slowest death.
The tatters of skin, I only heard about them. People in the area said that they hadn’t found all of the pieces that the two’s bodies were missing. Journalists came from all over to search for these jigsaw pieces of flesh. Only one had any ‘luck’, if you can call it that.
He found Erin hanging from a tree by one of the same roots she’d used to bind the other two. Her pockets stuffed with the remaining pieces of flesh. The sight was horrific. Pictures were published in scientific journals on LSD for years afterwards. Pictures with Erin’s face blacked out, but the bits of Emily and Will leaking out of her hanging pockets.
I didn’t see the three remaining forest kids for about a month. When I finally did, they were still shocked and terrified. Sure, they made jokes every couple of minutes, and complained about the usual things. But there was always the memory. The elephant in the room that was a double murder-suicide.
I’d gone home as soon as the sun had risen that night I spent with the forest kids. I wasn’t around to see the fallout of the missing trio.
It made me think. In the grand scheme of things, regardless of how friendly you are you’ll still get treated like shit. Eddie, who’d had a perfect life, now lived in alcoves and whisky bottles. The last I heard, Dale, Amy and Will were all working tills in various supermarkets. They were five years older than me, and had had such glitter in their eyes that nobody would’ve thought they’d turn out this way. There’s no formula in life. There’s no karma or yin and yang type situation. And it was soon after this that the change happened. Not so much of a change as a wind down, really. My room became a chrysalis for me to hide in until the world changed. Stupid 17 year-old thoughts. The world won’t change. I know that now. If you want anything to change, you have to rip it up and start again. And I just didn’t have the patience.
Wake up, take a pill, and drift off until unconscious again.
Try not to think, because thinking leads elsewhere.
I’ll now try to explain how, at 20, I came to sit in this very hospital. Try to keep up. It doesn’t make much sense. It contains lots of unnerving scenes of the mentally ill, and the not-so-mentally ill.
Reduced to ash everyone looks the same.
Remember this sentiment.

#14983, PART ONE.

2009-07-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

http://open.spotify.com/user/benme/playlist/2GQVNfrTeLeeWzCKnwfQn0 - Spotify 'Soundtrack' Playlist URL

From Now On, Humour No One.
If Someone's Boring, Let Them Know You Believe This.
Who Knows, Maybe It'll Change The World.
Make Everyone More Interesting.
Alert People To Their Downfalls, But Never In An Overly Insensitive Way.
Be Dangerously Honest, Admit You Don't Give A Fuck About Leaflets And Forms.
Right Now, This Is All Filler.
Waiting For The Headliner To Come On.
Drink Too Much.
Sleep Around.
Drive Too Fast.
Don't Sculpt Your Hair.

That’s the last thing I wrote before I was admitted. Admitted? That’s so much nicer a word than what it really entails. The truth is I was committed. To Broadmoor Hospital. I still completely believe everything written in the above stream-of-consciousness to be true. I will live and die by its rules. Unfortunately, in the hospital these things are frowned upon.
Being ‘dangerously honest’ is a sign of autism.
‘Not sculpting your hair’, or rather, not giving a shit about your appearance, is a sign of major depression.
Drinking too much – alcoholism.
Sleeping around – nymphomania.
And that was the problem. I’d been committed basically because my family couldn’t put up with my lifestyle. With only one of these traits you are a normal, well meaning citizen, free to walk the streets and meet others who no doubt also have one of these traits. When I was thrown in here, at 19, I definitely had a major depressive disorder, but the other things were just cultural staples. Drinking too much and sleeping around is of course society’s norm. People might see you as a meathead or devoid of conscience, but they still see you as a person.
Wikipedia says ‘current and former patients (of major depression) may be stigmatized.’ Replace ‘may’ with ‘are going to’. At 19 I was dealing with my illness with the tablets I’d been given and was actually making some progress. It was when people found out that I was ‘depressed’ that they treated me differently. I advise anybody reading this on any medicine for anything emotional to hide it from everyone. Even your fucking parents, if it’s possible. It rarely is, though. If you’ve been harming yourself – even just putting a couple of measly cigarettes out on your forearms – they can legally tell your parents that you’re a danger to yourself.
I think my problem was that I’d established my own independence at an early age. At about 16 (the age at which I, by the way, believe you are first the person you’re going to be for the rest of your life) I’d become sick of the world and living at ‘home.’ What is home? Someone said ‘wherever I lay my head is my home’. I’d been sleeping there since birth and it still felt wrong. It was clinical and white and sparse. I wanted clutter and personality, not attributes that appeal to the next buyer. Fuck that.
I used to run away from home every couple of days. I made some great friends on those trips – homeless people on bridges, teenagers drinking and doing drugs in the woods. There was this one homeless guy who had never left my thoughts for too long. He called himself Eddie, but wore various name badges he’d found from various retail outlets. If I ever found one I’d take it to him. He got a kick out of seeing what names were most popularly discarded. Needless to say, he drank a lot.
I remember one night with Eddie, we were sat on the bridge over the motorway, watching the cars go by and drinking scotch. I hated the taste of scotch – to this day I can’t drink it. I loved the looseness of being drunk with Eddie though. We talked about all sorts. The cars passing below, women walking by, that sort of thing. But when we were intoxicated we discussed far bigger things. I got up the courage to ask why he was homeless – a situation which he’d never explained to me.
He told me he used to be a singer. Yeah right, I thought. He used to sing with Rod Stewart he said, and reeled off a bunch of other names that I was too young to remember but he thought would impress me. He said that he was the next big thing in 1978, and that he was signed to some big record label. I acted impressed, and asked him what happened.
Apparently his album, which they’d given him a £4 million advance on, flopped, and so they repossessed all the stuff he’d bought with that money.
It angered me that Eddie thought he could feed me such bullshit.
‘Tell me what really happened Ed.’
He sighed, and became more human than I’d ever seen him. It was obvious that the singer story had been his shield. I felt bad, but he came out with the story nonetheless.
‘About twenty years ago, when I was 25, I met my wife. At the time I was working my way up through the civil service, and she was a reporter for one of the free papers. We met in a bar, and I knew she was it from the moment I saw her, I really did.
So anyway we courted and eventually became married. We were so in love, I can’t explain it to you mate. About five years into our perfect marriage, she went to the doctor’s for a cough and was diagnosed with throat cancer. She couldn’t bear to tell me. You see, we were recently pregnant, and overjoyed at the fact. Apparently by the time she was diagnosed with the cancer, it was too late for her. I had no idea she was ill at all, except for her increasingly skinny appearance – but a lot of women looked very skinny in the early 90s, and I thought she was maybe just on some crash diet. I told her I was worried about her weight, especially with the baby in there, and she broke down. She told me everything. She’d been predicted to have only six months left about five months ago. My love had had a miscarriage about two months ago, the baby was long gone. I couldn’t do anything. My present and future had died in this revelation. I decided to make the last month of her life the best we’d ever have. I decided to sell the house for the money to do all these things she wanted, and quit my job to be with her every day that she remained in my world.
We went sky-diving, bungee jumping, and we made love as the sunset on her final predicted day. We cried our eyes out that night, I wouldn’t let her go. She looked like a skeleton at this point, it was awful. I could see hints of my wife in there but it wasn’t her. Not really. She had a beautiful soul, but she was in pain constantly. Her hair fell out in clumps. That night of the sunset, she said that if she wasn’t dead by the morning, I was to kill her. She couldn’t stand living like this. She was insanely healthy for a woman predicted to die tomorrow, but not happily healthy. Most have gone into comas by this point.
So anyway, the sun came up and I couldn’t stop crying. She’d died as I held her. And seeing the sun rising from behind the world, and her peacefully dead face, I decided I wouldn’t ever go back to the world that we’d come from. I wanted to live among nature. For all its evils, there’s an opposite wonder. I had money left over from the sale of the house, and I’ve been living off of that ever since. It kills me every day to buy alcohol with the money that should’ve been spent on creating memories with my beautiful wife. Now the money flushed the bad memories out. The memories of every day without her.’
I sat across from Eddie, stunned. I didn’t know what to say. We were only casual friends, sharing a drink and a little chat now and then. I’d expected him to say his alcoholism was the cause of his homelessness, but that story, that blew me away. I shook his hand, lost for words, and walked back home. I’d been gone for three days, and my parents started shouting at me as I put my key in the door, but I didn’t give a fuck. This was all so petty in comparison to Eddie’s story. I drank heavily all that night, having stolen a bottle of vodka from my parents’ booze cabinet. I didn’t sleep for days, thinking about Eddie’s injustice. There was one thing I couldn’t get my head around at that point though. Eddie had thrown away an easy life with a straight running job, and for what? I didn’t see his love of nature. He seemed to always be on that bridge, when he could’ve been in the forest a mere ten-minute walk away. And besides, to have that love of nature was insane. Wasn’t it?
I didn’t see Eddie again, knowing that it could never be the laidback scenario it had been before. I looked for others on my other trips. The teenagers in the woods were my favourite. They didn’t give a fuck. They did what they wanted when they wanted. And I think, in no small way, their influence led me to be a patient/inmate at the hospital.
I’m patient 14983, and they don’t know what’s wrong with me. They only know that something isn’t right.

ZLFT.

2009-07-17T07:19:00.000-07:00

These pills, these pills accentuate
These pills, these pills accelerate
These pills, these pills adulterate
These pills, these pills I fucking hate

The stigma is that I’m not myself,
But if I’m not, then who the fuck else -
Am I to live on these supplements
Backed up by nightmare testaments?

Faux abortion
Chemical imbalance
Solving the problem
Of others’ belligerence

There is no cure,
It’s a heightened realisation
That ruins one in six
Through external abrasion

Your ignorance keeps it alive -
This parasite inside my mind –
And you can’t risk being entwined
Through caring for the one you find

The only cause is ‘nevermind’,
The only cause is apathy.
I am not the one
Who needs therapy.

SLUT EMPATHY, PART THREE.

2009-07-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

The dream I had that night was fucking terrifying. I was at a wedding – just attending. The proceedings were being conducted on this beautiful mountainside, with the altar overlooking the sea, representing the happy couple’s endless journey together. But, I was sat at the back. All in black. Heckling and vomiting and spitting at the romance of it all.
The bride turned round to see who was causing the unsightly scene, and I caught a glimpse of her face. The bride was me.
Six days afterwards was my first day of uni, so I jumped on the bus in kind of a sombre mood. I was pretty sure by then that the dream meant that the only way for me to have any form of meaningful relationship was to stop giving in to anything in a shirt with a cock. I was my own worst enemy, as I had so awfully demonstrated that previous Tuesday. The bus ride was so long and boring. I had my headphones on, playing a CD a boy who was sure he was in love with me had made me. I felt bad about taking his virginity. At that point I was a collector rather than a connoisseur, and he was one of those boys that blindly believed sex meant love. I didn’t know any of the bands on the CD, but I liked the songs. There was an undertone of melancholy to every one, regardless of how happy the music sounded. Some were sung by girls, some were sung by boys, but all seemed to be from a time before I was born.
I went to my lecture and kept my headphones in. Today wasn’t a good day for me to be listening to someone telling me how hard the future was going to be. I was struggling enough in the present, with my raging libido and self-loathing, who was this cunt in a suit to tell me it would only get worse?
I made no eye contact and ran to the bus the second the ‘lesson’ finished. I was the first on the bus that went my way, and so I watched the other freshmen get on, unsure of themselves and not seeming to trust anyone. Then this horrendously shy boy jumped on. He was staring at his shoes, until he looked up from behind his fringe and caught my glance. His eyes opened as if he was terrified, but he seemed to compose himself in a second and asked to sit next to me.
He had a strange kind of charm. He told me, in a very timid voice, that his name was Joe and that he had the cardigan I was wearing at home. I laughed with him. He asked my name, and where I came from, and I started to think he was just hitting on me again. The old me would almost definitely have slept with him, but I wasn’t so attracted to him physically as his way with words. He put really weird emphases on words that didn’t need it, and he had a bit of a speech impediment. I thought that maybe it was the sum of these imperfections that had made him so eloquent, to make up for it.
He asked what I was listening to, and when he knew all the bands and seemed impressed I nodded along. Cocktoe Twins and The Smiths and Jeff Backley, he said they were some of his favourite bands. He asked me how they made me feel, which seemed like such an odd question to ask someone you had just met, but I felt it necessary to respond. I said that I liked the way they could write a song that is happy when you’re happy and suicidal when you’re suicidal. As I said that he kissed me.
I was really shocked, and he apologised but then explained himself. He said that he had made a pact with himself that he wouldn’t let any moment of beauty escape without recognition, and that at that point, the feeling in my eyes was overpowering. I laughed, thinking he was maybe a bit insane, but then came his stop. He wrote his number on a piece of paper and asked me to call him later that night. I said I would.
She was as perfect as I’d predicted. She listened to the Cocteau Twins, Jeff Buckley, Daniel Johnston – this mix CD she had was the absolute best compilation I’d ever heard. As soon as she’d said why she liked it, I couldn’t resist kissing her. Someone with such fragility yet overpowering beauty couldn’t be allowed to continue in this world without knowing someone had overpowering feelings for them mere moments after hearing their voice. I hoped she’d call that entire day, making sure my phone worked and keeping it on me at all times, except for when I was pissing. I didn’t want this new found relationship to start with us each realising horrid biological needs were a part of us. I wanted to hold her, carry her through life without fear of anything at all. I wanted so much to cherish her. I couldn’t believe I was thinking these things having only met her that day.
A reason for my avoidance of class members – I feel I should explain my anti-social tendencies. According to the calendar, I was meant to come on about a week ago, but I still hadn’t. I’d known that my vagina should and could start pissing blood all over the man from Tuesday’s cock, but it didn’t. I was terrified, and had nobody I could relate to at this university, and that boy Joe had made me feel comfortable for the first time since my arrival. I would buy a test. But I knew the truth. I could feel the ‘truth’ growing inside of me. A woman knows. I was pregnant.

The End.

SLUT EMPATHY, PART TWO.

2009-07-15T07:21:00.000-07:00

‘I can’t believe I just gave that girl my number. I cannot decide if I’m Shaft or Liam Gallagher. Part of me thinks it was rad, but another part of me thinks I’m a massive tool. She was just a girl enjoying a band, and I either came off as a cocky fuck or just a creep. But imagine telling your grandchildren that you met the love of your life because you rang a number handwritten on the back of a ticket. I don’t even know if I want her to call. It would be so awkward, and she might even end up looking desperate in my eyes. I’m such a cunt – writing this on the train 20 minutes after I caught her gaze and left.
But hey. Carpe diem and all that jazz. Life is a sequence of missed opportunities and tonight I grabbed one before it got away, as they so often do. I fall in love 5 times a day and it’s rare that the feeling takes hold. The worst that can happen is this is all forgotten.
‘There’s a club if you’d like to go,
You could meet someone who really loves you.
So you go and you stand on your own,
And you leave, on your own,
And you go home,
And you cry and you want to die.’
I was tired of living up to Smiths lyrics. But, to be fair, even if she has a boyfriend, or even a husband, that gesture will have made her feel great for at least a minute. I wasn’t lecherous or perverse, I’d simply handed over an 11-digit number. And to feel a fool for an hour is worthy pain to let someone know that they are beautiful. I don’t feel like shit and I’ve probably made her day.’
My name is Joe and this was the latest of my rants on a failed love attempt. Having never had a real girlfriend, I was losing faith in romance and trying more and more avant-garde techniques to picking up women. Since I came to university I’d seen the teenage mentality of ‘hump and dump’ in heavy duty practice, and it made me feel ill. Early in my teens I had decided never to sleep with a girl on the first night I met her, to allow love to creep into all mental and physical orifices before I did. This had of course left me a virgin in the wake of women desperate to feel the jolt of a male orgasm going off inside them.
I understand that you get six loves in your life, and one of those is the person you are meant to be with, continually and forever. So every time you fall out of love, that’s a video-game-style life down. I’m guessing that some people have lost all their lives quite early in the game – I reckon by about 25 you can easily have loved 6 people. And what do these people do after that? Do they continue to look for new partners, trying to convince themselves that one of the times they were in love wasn’t real and was therefore replaceable? Or do they accept that those are the 6, and one of them is their soulmate, and try to win them back?
I was fortunate – 19 and new to love. I’d never been fully in love, so I could spread those 6 evenly over my life. That’s probably one every 8 years, seeing as I smoke and so far have no desire to live past 70, and that’s assuming that the first 5 are the duds and I only get to the right one at the last opportunity. Which would be fucking typical.
In my classes at university, there wasn’t anyone who showed enough creativity or wonder to be a potential lover. These women were mediocre to the very core – if you cut them open they’d bleed tap water, and their hearts would be constructed from Claire’s Accessories. I was yet to meet anyone desirable in a bar, let alone a nightclub. I refuse to go ‘clubbing’. I don’t want to spend three hours of my life trying to talk a shell of a woman into sleeping with me, nor do I want to just go in to drink and enjoy myself ironically. Sometimes the world is too full of irony and sarcasm, and although some things need it, I dreamt of a world without bitterness.
My ideal woman was not someone in a low cut top.
My ideal woman was not someone using a straw and winking at men.
My ideal woman was not at all outwardly sexual.
I wanted beauty and intelligence. I had no real sex drive, so sex was totally surplus. I would happily be a virgin my entire life if losing it meant sleeping with someone I didn’t love, or at least think I had the capacity to love.
But then I saw her on a bus. I was waiting at the bus stop, and as I jumped on and saw her in my line of vision, I was speechless. I muddled with the money, and eyed a seat that was far, far away from her. To grow a proper relationship, you had to start slowly as friends, and then get drunk and kiss one night. I am almost entirely sure that that is how every relationship that has ever gone the distance has started.
I took my headphones out and stared out the window all the way. If your eyes aren’t doing much, it heightens your other senses. I was trying to figure out what the girl was listening to. If it was The Smiths it was a definite sign. But I doubted it. Girls here had never heard of The Smiths, and thought The Killers were inventive. I mean, fuck.
Okay so I had no idea what she was listening to, so I tried to figure out how she was dressed. She wore a gold cardigan, with a red t-shirt and grey jeans. She looked immaculate, with dirty blonde hair that was messed up to perfection. I worried that she might be one of those girls who looked like that because it was ‘in’ or whatever, but I had a feeling she wasn’t. I have no idea why.
I went through all my lectures with the image of her on loop in my head. I couldn’t think of anything but her, it was so bizarre. I thought I was better than this – I’ve always been intelligent with my feelings, but I guess now it was important for me to just be instinctual. Everyone else at uni was – I swear one girl in my class still had cum in her hair from the night before in my first lecture – but my instincts were different. I hate to say they were better, but they just were. I didn’t want to fuck, I didn’t want to get sucked off, or any of those horribly named things. Say ‘sucked off’ out loud, it sounds awful.
After my lecture on something like videotapes, I got the bus back to my house. She was there again. I kind of hated that she was, because it was torturous to have to umm and ahh about talking to her for yet another bus ride.
Fuck it, I thought. This is another of those opportunities I should grab. I sat next to her. And so it began.

SLUT EMPATHY, PART ONE.

2009-07-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

http://open.spotify.com/user/benme/playlist/2C8A0Hh4Ec6X4lQcJjMSqm - Spotify Playlist 'Soundtrack' URL

Say I’m pretty. Anyone, I’m begging you, tell me I’m pretty. Physically showing it is no longer enough people, I need your words to approve of my dress sense and genetically unfortunate appearance.
I am made up of a lazy eye, acne and yo-yoing weight. Add to the mix tens of litres of inconsiderate semen, and you get me: Cassandra Shaw. ‘Cassie’ for short. I’m guessing my parents didn’t know the meaning of Cassandra when they named me – of Greek origin, Cassandra means ‘she who entangles men.’
I don’t entangle men. I am merely a service station, forever and always. I’m the girl your boyfriend drunkenly fucks when you break up with him. I put the ‘body’ in ‘body shots.’ I’m the reason you’ve got chlamydia. And I’m sick of it.
I’d tried to break the cycle when I came to university, but that lasted all of three days. The boys who view sex as a sport, they were my ‘type’. A type forced on me through my own lacking intelligence. The boys at the bar on a theme night – a theme that always somehow involved turned up polo shirt collars – they were my predators. Higher on the food chain because of their external genitalia.
That Tuesday night, where I broke my vow of celibacy until love, was preceded by the three worst days of my life. I couldn’t relate to my housemates at all. The two other girls, Anna and Chelsea, were just falling into the stage I was at when I was about 16 – the sex as passport idea, where if a boy had a CD you’d like to copy, or got a discount at a shop you saw something you liked in, you’d sleep with them. I was more into ‘sex as self-approval’ nowadays. If I felt down, or had a bad hair day, there was always somebody willing to be blown in a back alley.
The guys I lived with (Dave and Mike) were pretty average 18 year-old men, feigning nymphomania to fill in awkward silences. By the third night they’d already blurted out the number of people they’d fucked. I hate to use the word ‘fuck’ so often, but that’s what they do. They don’t ‘make love’, they don’t ‘sleep with’ people – they fuck them and then forget their names. I was obviously no better, but I was trying, at least.

After two and a half days of sitting around and waiting for one of them to give off any hint of human emotion, we decided to go out for the night. I was hoping I’d meet some new, more poetic types, to help me from falling back into the realm of easy lay. We played ‘I have never’, which I was actually up for, because I knew it would have a sexual undertone and I would be able to impress these worthless souls. Anyway, the highlight was being able to compile a chart of how many sexual partners each of us had had. Here it is:
Anna – 6.
Chelsea – 8.
Dave & Mike – 10.
Myself – 20+.
After 20 you start to lose count, I said. They had all thought they were slutty, but they were nothing on me. I excused myself and went to my bedroom, locking the door behind me. How could I not remember the exact number? I was a disgusting, horrid human being. The men I’d slept with, they were definitely the type to remember, even if it was purely so they could brag about it at a later date. I decided I wouldn’t leave my room until I could put an exact number on it. I’ll mention the past in detail once you’ve gotten to know me a little better, because currently, I’ve got a feeling you think I’m not only a hypocrite, but that if I really meant what I said about celibacy until I fell in love, I’d be able to stick to it. Well, old habits die hard. I counted 24, dried my eyes and returned to the front room.
We decided we’d go to Taupe, a nightclub only a short walk from our house. We were fortunately placed just outside of the busy town, so the noise was no problem and the distance was good for us. Since moving here I’d feared the worst about the rumours of weight gain. Over Summer I’d lost a stone, which gave me quite a shapely and tight body, and I couldn’t bear the thought of putting it back on.
We set off, me quite drunk from having to indicate I’d done almost everything they said they never had. I trailed a little behind the group – the boys at the front high-fiving and drinking beers, the girls whispering and giggling to each other and me taking in the scenery.
Please please please know that I was not out for attention. I was wearing a generic summer dress with a flowery pattern on it. Anna and Chelsea had slutted up, and I think the boys had already decided that they’d fuck them at some point, mostly out of convenience. I walked into that club wanting to meet some girls with the same interests as me – chart music, films and fashion.
But I fear I must give off a hormone or something. At the bar a sweaty ginger kid with a deep voice and blue Next shirt offered me a drink. I accepted, but I promised myself I would treat him as a friend, and nothing more. I sat down with him and his housemates, a few of which looked nice enough. I introduced myself and sat down with the girls. We talked for a while, but the experience was marred by the ginger boy’s need to sit close to me. I soon left, exchanging numbers with the girls but ignoring him. Orange haired sweatiness might get you pussy up north, but don’t assume I’m out to pull. That’s the worst thing. Dealing with people who are too obvious about trying to fuck you. Somehow they automatically think they’re in, because you’re a girl and have a miracle between your legs that is exactly the opposite shape of what hangs between theirs.
I had a few more drinks, bought by myself, and I was buying two at a time because the queue was so long. The girls from ginger’s house had come to find me, and asked me if I was up for a dance. I was drunk, and thought it’d be fun. ‘Bonkers’ came on and everyone went crazy, spilling drinks everywhere and shaking the walls so much it felt like the end of the world. We danced in a circle, laughing our heads off, and for a while had a great time. But then, three guys came up behind each of us, and I couldn’t help myself. I thought it was funny to let him carry on grinding against my back, shimmying up and down him and feeling his cock grow. He was attractive enough, for sure, but looking back this whole thing was the old me. I just got too fucking drunk. He took me into a dim corner and told me his name was Richard. He was in his first year, studying politics. He kept up the pretence of conversation whilst staring at my reasonably sized tits. Sober, I like to think I’d be offended. But with the music blaring and his kind, strong voice feigning interest in my personality, it was acceptable. He went to touch my hair, and I leaned in and kissed him. It was a really filthy kiss, the kind that demonstrates just how good you are at oral sex. He asked me back to his. I said I just needed to use the ladies, but I’d meet him outside. In the bathroom, I vomited all over the cistern, and then all over the seat. I cleaned my face up, applied some more concealer and went and met him. He had a cab waiting, and his eyes were on fire for my body.
I’m not proud of any of this. You need to know how awful I felt in the morning.
At his, he asked if he needed to use a condom. I said he did – I was on the pill but I saved bareback sex for guys who paid for at least two dates. He was in complete control – soberly reminiscing, I feel almost squeamish at the things that went on in that room. He treated me like a porn star, shouting instructions at me, that in my drunkenness I was all too happy to carry out. Looking back I think he was trying to impress his housemates, making sure they could hear. Fucking me from behind against the wall that separated his and another’s room. Making me beg for more. When he finally finished (the condom worthless by this point – he wasn’t in me, and he smeared his cum all over my neck) I pretended to sleep next to him for about an hour before getting a taxi home.
I cried all the way back, leaning on the passenger seat. The driver let me get on with it, thinking I was just a drunk – and I guess I was just a drunk to him. Just another of the drunk sluts he picked up at 5am.
I couldn’t keep that most sacred of promises - a promise to myself. He didn’t even have my number, and I didn’t want him to. He was another of the wrong type, and I’d fucked him and now felt even more alone than I had when walking with my housemates. I decided I’d stay in for the rest of fresher’s week. I’d watch television, and drink with the housemates before they went out, but I wouldn’t join them.
The only way to meet anyone you could potentially fall in love with was sober in broad daylight. The cover of night hides all blemishes and bruises, and I knew this all too well, having used it to my ‘advantage’ far too often. I’d wait to make friends until classes started. We’d definitely have things in common. And who knows, maybe I could meet a boy with good intentions, and make love for the first time in my life. I was still a virgin in the truest meaning of the word. I wanted whispered sweet nothings during sex, not shouted demands for a different hole.
I jumped into bed to the all too coincidental sounds of rain and thunder. Tomorrow, that was the new start. This time I swore I’d kill myself before pleasuring another husk of a man.

BROKEN, PART FIVE.

2009-07-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

It was Daniella. She was a brunette about 15 years older than me. She was technically my boss, although whenever she had to talk to me about anything whatsoever, she seemed terribly embarrassed to dominate. It was cute, really.
She asked if we could have a word, to discuss what had happened with the paralysed patient’s outburst. I’d decided I’d just push her insanity, momentary or otherwise I didn’t know.
Daniella giggled, and said that the funny thing was that there was semen all over her bandages. I laughed along, imitating that taken aback moment you see flirtatious people do at bars all the time. Daniella didn’t find the cum-soaked bandages disgusting, she found it funny. I guess it was kind of funny really. That sort of dark humour you see in David Lynch films.
She had this beautifully weathered face that I’d only just started to notice. She looked like she’d known pain, which in its own way was similar to a physical disability, I guess.
I know. I was making excuses as to why I suddenly found her attractive. Maybe it was the hint of depravity I sensed in her eyes.
She said that she’d take care of the changing of Millie’s bandages, for which I thanked her. In a moment of quick smoothness, I asked if I could repay her by buying her dinner. She stopped in the doorway, leaning on it in quite a suggestive manner. She of course accepted, and I said I’d pick her up at 8.
All day I was planning my outfit and thinking which restaurant would give off the right vibe. I wanted it to be cheap enough for her to know that I wasn’t in it for the long haul, but still expensive enough for her to let me do awful things to her afterwards.
At 6 I left the hospital and rushed through a shower and dressing. I wore a flowery pink shirt that screamed laid back, with my straight jeans and white espadrilles. I looked exactly like the sort of young person a woman of her advancing age would want to sleep with. I had an hour to kill before I’d leave, so I watched some Extreme Makeover and masturbated. I made sure not to climax though, as I wanted to save the fluid for the inevitable sex festival Daniella would be expecting.
It was about 10 to 8 when I left, and I had a fifteen minute drive. Classically fashionably late, I thought to myself. Her house was a beautiful modern three-storey detached number, and as I approached the door I began to regret my casual dress. When she opened the door however, I didn’t. She was dressed so reservedly. I can’t recall exactly, but I think a suit jacket was involved. Heinous.
We had a drink at hers before leaving for the independent Italian restaurant I’d selected out of the phone book. I drank a vodka and tonic and sat myself on her white leather sofa. She sat opposite me on a fashionable bar stool. I could nearly see up her dress, and I think she knew. The beauty of old age is that your body starts to deform on its own, and I imagined her sagging, lifeless vagina and the CPR I would apply later.
We jumped in the car and spoke of our interests. Fortunately hers ranged across a vast spectrum, so I didn’t have to speak of my own few hobbies – television, true crime novels and the anatomically incorrect. She listed jazz music, fine wines, classic literature and film. I felt encroached by her upper class mentality, yet she never implied that her interests were of a higher brow than mine.
I ordered a simple pasta dish and moved on to the wine. I let her pick, seeing as she knew wine so well. I just knew it got women like her very drunk very quickly, which was of course the aim.
After a few glasses and small talk, we pondered over relationships. She’d been married twice, and told me she was not prepared to go through with it again. In fact her last husband had been so abusive that she’d taken up a self-defence class, and was now a brown belt in karate. She hadn’t mentioned that before, and why was I so aroused by it? Maybe my own abuse committed to the weak and feeble had becoming boring to me and I fancied a challenge.
She continued to say she was content with just having fun until she met somebody she was sure was right for her. That was sweet. She had no idea how wrong I was for her.
We shared a dessert of a banana split, and in her intoxicated sluttiness she said she hoped it wasn’t the only banana we’d be sharing. I smiled like I wanted her, but I found her assumptions lecherous and banal. I would fuck her, that was a given, but she wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d make sure of that. Her dessicated vagina would be my plaything, like a child with a hamster, and if I was to treat it too roughly, well, that was the giver’s fault for not informing me of its delicate nature.
I was drunk, but there was no way I was walking back to hers. We paid the bill and I asked ‘your place or mine?’. My sexual career was cliché after cliché, I know, but whatever gets the cat in the bag. I was surprised to here her want to go back to mine, but it was fine by me. I just wanted inside of this strangely beautiful woman, whom I was no longer wanting to hurt.
Maybe it was the drink, but I’d found her personality to become more and more intriguing over the evening. She talked with passion about film, and was never condescending if I admitted I had no idea what she was talking about. She made plans for the future, saying we’d have to watch Citizen Kane and that she’d have to get some rare and old wine for us to drink, so I could see the difference.
As I parked up I kissed her with romance. I no longer wanted to sleep with her, I wanted to get to know her. She was glorious, and I was realising yet again that my attraction to her decrepit features was bullshit, as I had realised with Rebecca all those years before.
She had other plans for us, however. I wanted to fall asleep with her in my arms, and she wanted to tie those same arms that ached for her company to the bedposts. I complied, saying I’d never done it before but I was willing to try it. She pulled a single leather glove out of her purse, and as I was wondering what she was going to do with it she slapped my genitalia with it. Oh how it hurt me, physically and mentally, that this woman would see me as an object that was hers to treat as she wanted. I had wanted to smother her with gifts moments earlier, and now she pulled out a knife.
I could feel my pupils shrink to escape the vision of this maniacal woman standing over me with a knife. She softly slashed at my chest, still under the impression I was into it. She kissed the small wounds she made as she progressed lower and lower, until the knife was inches from my penis. By now I had definitely stopped giving her the idea I was into this, screaming for her to stop whatever it was she was going to do. She rubbed the knife up and down my cock, and when I couldn’t get an erection she slapped again with the glove.
And then I realised. I realised that this was how I’d been treating all the women before and after Rebecca. I’d been attracted to Daniella because she was a kindred spirit, into the same defacing fetishes that I was.
She made a small incision at the base of my foreskin, and I passed out from the vision of blood spurting out of my penis where nothing, not even semen, should’ve spurted out. When I woke up the foreskin was gone, and she’d taken my bloody cock into her mouth. She looked up at me with the most evil smile I’ve ever seen – I wanted to die. If this was foreplay, only God knew what she’d consider intercourse. During my unconsciousness she’d gagged me, so my screams of protest wouldn’t be heard.
She bit down hard on my penis, so hard that I vomited from the sight and the pain. She didn’t explain why she was doing this to me. Why would she want to hurt me, except for reasons of arousal? She didn’t know of my past – she couldn’t, I’d been so careful to keep it out of anyone’s spectrum of awareness.
More and more blood meant more and more vaginal lubrication in her book. She was dripping all over my stomach, on which she sat as she did things I couldn’t see, but knew I didn’t want to happen. She turned round, with one of my testicles in her hand.
She asked me if I wanted to know why she’d done this. I nodded, having lost so much blood I couldn’t muster any speech.
She was Rebecca’s aunt. She knew of our interactions through her sister, Rebecca’s mother. She said that she didn’t know exactly what I’d done, but she knew I had killed her. Rebecca and her had been close, and she’d told of my previous sexual exploits. She knew of every woman prior to Rebecca that I’d used my position as a doctor to abuse. She’d lured me in by laughing at what had happened to Millie the paralyzed girl, but she knew all along that she hadn’t been confused.
She spat these words at me as she slashed away at my body. I knew I would probably die here, on my bed in my more than spacious flat. I committed my last words to her memory. Words she would not forget for as long as she lived. She popped the remaining bollock out of my sac, biting through every tube of gristle that attached it to me.
‘I may have had odd ways of communicating my sexuality, but I’m what you’ll never be. I lived my sexual life exactly as I wanted to, and nothing I’ve done in the matters of love would I change for anything. You’re jealous. Jealous of my ambition, to fuck anything I wanted to, be it an armpit or an axe wound, and in committing this crime you’re going to carry on my legacy of fucking the hideous. That’s not piss on my chest, you’re soaking at the sight of my mashed genitalia, and you’re never going to shake this feeling. The feeling of superiority you cannot possibly shake – you’ll fuck any man with noticeable anomalies and love it. You look down on me now, but you wait. When you’re done with my body you’ll be thirsty for more – more terrible injuries, more genetic deformations. You can’t kill this need for smashed up bones, only inherit it. You’ll see.’
And with that, she stabbed me three times.
Perineum.
Chest.
Throat.

The End.

BROKEN, PART FOUR.

2009-07-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

I went on my break. I needed to sit down and prepare my story for anyone who would confront me on what had just happened. I poured myself a coffee in the staff room and sat in the middle of the sofa.
Since I started working at this hospital, about a year and a half ago, I hadn’t met anyone bearing any likeness to a friend. Everyone was a colleague, nothing more. They all seemed so wet, the types who married by 25 and are perfectly happy to admit it. I couldn’t see the advantages of promising to be with one person your entire life. I was sure I’d become tired of their sex, and want something more.
I’ve always thought that by the time you’re 30, you’ve experienced enough pleasure to be able to figure out the exact sexual pastime required to get you off, and then you don’t experiment any more because you’re at the top of whatever it is you’re into. So I’ve never thought it possible to get married before 30, because, as much as you can experiment with one person, you’re more able to enter into more fetishes during the single life.
Between losing my virginity and now, I guess I would say I had had one relationship that I’d considered might go the distance. But, of course, as is always the case with love, it was fated to fail. Her name was Rebecca, and she’d been a waitress in the bar down the road from the hospital I trained at. We’d spoken a few times, and I’d often gazed at her going about her job whilst sat around drinking with the kids from my course. Well, it came to be the last time I’d be there, and intoxicated by the alcohol and dark lighting I asked Becky out. She had the most enticing lips. Or rather, I should say, lip. She suffered from a cleft lip and, as a Jehovah’s Witness, the surgery was deemed too risky to conduct, what with not being able to use a blood transfusion. I found all of this out on our first date, at a Jonny Ricketts 50s style burger bar.
The gaudy neon lights reflected beautifully off of my love’s revealed upper teeth. Watching her chew that burger up I could hardly contain myself. I wanted to know what it felt like to kiss the lip she was so self-conscious of.
After dinner I walked her back to her flat. She lived with two girls she’d known since secondary school, about fifteen minutes away from the restaurant. When we got to her door, I couldn’t wait to kiss her. What would the lip feel like? Would it be a tough, scabby flesh? Or would it mean she’d dribble all over me? I had to know.
I kissed her and it felt absolutely amazing. We went on a few more dates, following this method (if it wasn’t a restaurant it was a cinema, or some other cliché dating attraction) before I had a breakthrough.
The world stopped for the two of us. I was so happy to have met this wonderfully intelligent woman who was, in my eyes, tragically beautiful. It was then that I realized I wasn’t attracted to her genetically unlucky mouth. She was one of the most intriguing women I’d ever met, with a bizarre religious history and a dry sense of humour. I’d been focusing on the harelip because if I told myself I was purely in love with physics, I could never be hurt. Well I didn’t care if I got hurt this time, she was it! I played it cool while she walked into her house, but as soon as she had, I strutted all the way home. I started imagining what our children would look like, what her name would look like with my surname – I was on the phone to my father telling him he had to meet her, we weren’t even close, I just wanted to tell absolutely everyone I’d ever so much as made eye contact with that I’d met the love of my life and they would too. The world is such a beautiful place when you’re in love. My mind had no time for the sexual indecencies I’d been so obsessed with prior to Becky, all I thought of was making her happy, and how to propose to her. I’d decided on this beautiful ring, with the biggest diamond I could afford. She deserved it. She was my everything. I also knew exactly when to do it – a year and a half, to the exact minute, that I’d first laid eyes on her. Sure, it might seem a bit bizarre to still remember that exact moment, but when you’re in love you do. Clocks jump forth from the walls, and its as if the memory gets stored in a different, stronger file, separate from the monotonous.
I remember it was 3.38pm, on the 28th of September. It was a hot Sunday, so me and the other students had come for a few drinks to lap up the sun. The bar, The Queen’s Arms, was famous for its cheap prices and spacious beer garden. Well, I was sat on the side of the picnic table that faced the pub. All of a sudden Rebecca’s presence washed over me. I could hear nothing but her voice, her breath, see nothing but her casual outfit of a babydoll top and blue skinny jeans. I instinctively brushed my hair into its side-parting state with my fingers, and wiped any present sweat off of my face. She came to clear our table, my heart beating faster and faster with every step she took closer to me. She picked up the glasses and plates of those who’d eaten, and was gone again. I couldn’t shake her image from my vision – she was there when I closed my eyes, in fact she was even there when I didn’t. I was a stuttering mess that first time.
But the proposal was all figured out in my head. I’d asked her to meet me here at 20 past 3, which would give me time to get us both some drinks and pull my thoughts together into some romantic speech.
Well, she showed up at half past, but I didn’t care. Ten minutes is nothing when you have eternity to gaze into each other’s eyes. She looked serious, and wasn’t dressed to her usual standard. She was of course still beautiful. Her beauty wasn’t in outfits or make-up, it was in her words and her feelings.
‘We need to talk,’ was her opening line. That was surely a bad sign.
She’d come straight from his, which explained the clothes. He was someone she’d met at work in the bar, David she said. She’d told me she was going for drinks with some friends from work last night, and I’d thought nothing of it. Apparently the ‘friends’ were singular. She’d gotten too drunk, she said. She couldn’t drive home, and his flat was only a short walk from the bar they were at. He’d grabbed her hand on the walk home, and she hadn’t refused his advances.
When they got in, she fucked him.
I was in pure shock. I started crying uncontrollably, gasping for air and screaming hysterically. 3.38pm.
She told me how sorry she was. To be fair to the girl, she was crying too. This was no fracture, I was a broken man. Not a man, a boy. Rebecca had reduced me to a boy. I was so in love with her and she had broken not only the rules of monogamy, but the rules of her religion. No sex before marriage is what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. She told me she still loved me, and that she was only telling me this because she didn’t want to end what we had. Of course this was the end of what we had, I thought to myself. Now is time for a new beginning. The beginning of my domination. You’re going to regret this so hard you have no idea.
We got some more drinks and sat in silence. Neither of us knew what to say, so I broke it with a hushed ‘I love you, so much.’ I continued, ‘you’re all that means anything to me, and you’ve dirtied yourself. I know I can come to love you again, but it will take so much time.’
She breathed deep and said she understood. She said she couldn’t imagine not being with me, and that it was a momentary lapse of judgment. That’s a kind way to speak of your own evils, you cunt. I hate you hate you hate you.
I kept up the pretence of love for the afternoon, but this was the biggest mistake of her life. The plans I had for her tonight, oh, looking back they make me wince.
We kissed, and after a few more drinks each she invited me back to hers. We went on our way, holding hands and keeping up the image of happiness. When we got to her door, we started to undress each other with an urgency neither of us had had before. I spitefully wondered if she had a cleft vagina, the freak. She’d broken my heart and now I’d break her in.
Before we went any further I asked if she’d showered since ‘David’. She swore she had, so we got down to it. She started to fellate me, with that fucked mouth of hers. I rammed and rammed, smashing the back of her throat like a window. She coughed and coughed, but as long as I smiled lovingly at her she put up with it.
We then moved on to intercourse. I entered her having committed no foreplay on this second hand hole of hers. She gasped – not lubricated enough to accept me. I went on regardless. I wanted to hurt her like she’d hurt me. She gave me that look that says ‘it’s not quite ready yet’, which only spurred me on. The in and out hurt, in a way I can only compare to a friction burn you might get from a leather sofa. But this wasn’t for enjoyment, this was for revenge. I pulled out and turned her over, pushing myself with a deadly force into her behind. She screamed and then went silent, all the while with me dashing in and out like lightning. And deep, too. She protested, and so I pulled out and entered her vagina again. I could feel I was close, and so this was the time to do my worst.
I went to kiss her, like a romantic. I bit the left hand side of her upper cleft lip, and dug my teeth right through. She wailed and wailed, not knowing what I was doing, but I kept ripping at the loosened flesh, and when that side was fully detached and spat on to the nightstand, I started on the other side. I pulled out just as I was ejaculating, and sprayed it all over her blood soaked, lipless face.
She’d entered shock, so I had a while to just lie next to her; to hold her in the traditional post-coital position. The blood was spurting into her mouth, and she was gagging on a mixture of her own blood and my ejaculate. She could no longer scream, although her eyes were trying to put something across. But I was growing bored of just watching this whore bleed out and choke to death.
I ended it quickly with the bread knife I found in her kitchen, sawing at her neck like a loaf of crusty, fresh bread. Once this was done I collected up the pieces of her lips, any bloodied materials lying around and made the bedsheets into a sort of makeshift bin bag, which I poured her remains and the weapon into. I tied a knot in the top, waited until the sun set and made my way home.
And that was the reason for my interest in body deformities. With every one of my sleeping partners since Rebecca, I had projected their anomalies on to the previously correct body of her. I wanted her to continue to suffer beyond death. She had killed my instinct to love, and made me realise that the instinct of lust was far more prominent than the desire for loving company.
I would try to love again. I would try to get back on the horse. But I could make no promises. And as I sat there in the staff room, thinking about the night that I drove Rebecca’s sack of remains into the woods, there was a knock at the door.

BROKEN, PART THREE.

2009-07-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Work the next day was awful. My penis was so raw from the previous night that I winced with every stride as it hit the material of my underwear. It was also the busiest day I’d had in months. I had eight patients to tend to, all in for check ups and whom I had not previously treated. I always hated this situation – building rapport with people you wouldn’t have to see again, reassuring strangers that everything was going to be fine. The first of these injured newcomers was a woman who was suspected to have tuberculosis, back to get the results from the X-rays. Boring. TB had no visible symptoms, this bitch just coughed up blood now and then, which was disgusting. She had it, I wrote out a prescription for some antibiotics and sent her on her way.
The next was a boy with a terrifyingly tight foreskin. His frenulum (or ‘banjo string’, in slang terms) was insufficiently long for him to retract the foreskin in any noticeable way, which he said was causing him pain during masturbation. He was about 13, and probably the first patient I’d felt genuinely sorry for in months. I knew all too well the matter of genital pain; earlier while taking a piss I had noticed flecks of blood on the inside of my boxers – the skin was so raw it must have actually broken, due to the chafing occurring within my underwear. He said that he had feared he was impotent because he couldn't achieve orgasm, which is an all too common worry in teenage boys. Each man has a different way of reaching the point of ejaculation. I, for example, used a latex glove (the kind used during surgery) and would fantasize about someone I’d seen in hospital that day – women whose vaginal walls had caved in to make their anus and genitalia one hole during childbirth, teenage girls with uneven breasts. This kid seemed like he probably beat off to lesbian pornography on his parents’ computer, having so far failed to realize that there is no place for him in a lesbian ménage a deux. I hated telling him that to be able to masturbate like any other male, he would need a circumcision. Alternatives exist, like steroid creams, which could improve the pliability of his frenulum, but were unlikely to be as effective. I comforted him by saying that he’d be able to last longer with the ladies when circumcised. It’s true, to an extent, but the reason that circumcised individuals last longer is because they are almost entirely desensitized. This boy would never know the true beauty of jamming his penis between two lopsided breasts, and making sagging skin into a sexual orifice would bring him little to no pleasure.
That’s life though, I guess.
I sent him on his way, him all cheery thinking that he was going to be a legend amongst his friends for being able to go all night with the women he would be pressured into entering over the coming years.
The third patient, and the last before lunch, was a woman who was paralysed from the waist down. Another one for the hunt. She was in to have her….burns treated. It wouldn’t be her, Miranda or whatever her name was. But, I realized that there didn’t have to be more than one paralysed girl suffering from burns in my jurisdiction. I had no clue as to what I could do. I would have to treat her, and my only ridiculous idea was to wear one of those masks that were so popular on the underground in the wake of bird flu. Fuck it. It was worth a try. If asked why I was wearing the mask, I had no reply set up, but equally I had no chance of escaping a scene if she recognized me.
I walked in, grabbing some reading glasses from the reception desk on the way to further disguise myself. As I entered, our eyes met, and she eyed me with a glare that said she was on to me.
‘So…Mildred, what can I do for you today?’ I asked, putting on a deep voice. I had become a caricature to escape alerting my colleagues to my sexual preferences.
‘I’ve just come to get my bandages replaced, and for a doctor to look at how my legs are healing.’
‘Okay, that shouldn’t take too long. Let’s get these jeans off, if you don’t mind.’
At that point she breathed in the sharpest of air. Was it possible that she recognized me just from the way I took off her jeans?
No. No, it wasn’t. When I knelt down to remove her jeans, the glasses had slid so far down my nose that my eyes shone over the top in the way she remembered from our bar flirtations.
‘You! You who kissed my raw flesh before fucking me so hard in the arse that blood was in my underwear this morning when the carer came to change me!’
Could it be that the blood in my underwear was actually hers? That is a weight off of my mind, I thought. I can get straight back to masturbation if it doesn’t actually have to heal.
But whilst I was thinking these things, a crowd had gathered. Not around us; not even near us, really, but about ten feet away, patients and colleagues of mine had stopped in their tracks to hear what this paralyzed woman was accusing me of. My only option was to play the insanity card.
‘Could I have a little help in here please? The patient is confused and a danger to others and herself.’
A nurse quickly rushed in with a sedative, and I kept my composure as a surgeon would if the one on the table started bleeding out.
‘You’re fucking insane! Running from an immobile woman you’ve just defiled! These are the bandages you came on you fucking freak!’
I was still attracting looks of intrigue, which chilled me to the core. The beauty of my fetish was that I kept it behind closed doors, and I feared that if others looked down on me for it, it might inhibit my ability to continue in the field of deformity-as-stimuli. Would I have to tone myself down? I had been thinking of settling into a real relationship after the encounter with this woman, but I was so obsessed with the minutiae of damaged goods that I didn’t know if I could have an extended relationship with someone who wasn’t accompanied by artificial hollows that I could take enjoyment from, never mind the fact that such an obsession had taken over almost every aspect of my being to the point that I wasn’t sure I had a personality beyond it. Who could love a man so enamored with unsightliness that he lived and breathed for car crashes, failed suicides and birth defects?

BROKEN, PART TWO.

2009-07-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

Now I was 27 and lived alone. My flat was crammed with expensive appliances that were exclusively used by me. I had very few visitors, and I preferred it that way. I could separate my work at the hospital from my apartment. A couple of nights a week I would go to nightclubs alone, searching the seated areas for the crippled, the deformed; the friend that made a group feel better about their insecurities. I’d usually come home empty handed – recently my favourite spots were the refuge of the fat or publicly amorous.
After three months with nothing I decided the problem was that I was looking in the wrong places. I was treating this really cute number with gangrenous extremities at work and it hit me. I built up my usual rapport and asked if she had any hobbies. She liked dancing, music and all the very normal interests of a 19-year old girl. But then she gave me the lead I’d been looking for. Never making eye contact and tricking her into believing this was all small talk, I asked what she did in her spare time.
Bowling.
Of course.
These people don’t want to drag their imperfections out into the sexual arena of the dancefloor. They know they’d be in for disappointment while their friends left them to be filled by some stranger’s appendages. They go to youth clubs, recreation centres – places with no hidden intentions. No hidden intentions until my arrival.
After work I cooked a quick dinner, dressed casually (light blue shirt partially unbuttoned, straight cut jeans and Birkenstocks) and set out in my car to the alley.
On the way I listened to some shitty hit parade station to get in the mindset of a ‘fun lovin’’ young person. I usually only listened to the music of my youth – Huey Lewis & The News, U2, maybe some Pink Floyd, but I usually liked music to hang in the background. What was coming out of my radio was horrid and impossible to avoid, really confrontational music, even at low volumes. Modern pop is the aural equivalent of the ADHD kids I deal with so often at work; that ‘look at me’ mentality that all doctors are secretly enraged by. I turned the radio off. I wanted to turn up in a good mood, and not at the expense of my own intelligence. Lady Gaga is the death of art - although I am intrigued by the hermaphroditic legends. My training tells me it is probably clitoromegaly - an elongation of the clitoris - a few sufferers of which I have had the fortune to come into contact with over the years. Very rarely am I attracted to genital deformities, preferring to make the unsexual sexual, but that is a favourite of mine.
I parked up at the bowling alley at about half past seven. I figured that that was probably the peak time for the support group bowlers – not late, so that the alley hasn’t switched to the cheesy ‘glow in the dark bowling’ when drunk, anatomically correct students turn up to throw some balls around and make out, and not so early that the broken masses would be out to dinner at some restaurant offering an early bird discount. I walked in and glanced around. This was a utopia of outcasts.
The fat. The ugly. The slow and the unfashionable. And of course, the broken. Twentysomethings bowled from wheelchairs with the aid of a ramp, teenagers with missing fingers played with their good hand, the immortally scarred drank cokes and cheered them on.
I queued up to rent a lane and some shoes. Why had I not thought of the bowling alley before? Even the shoes are asymmetrical. I watched them bowl from the line with a childish wonderment. The boy behind the desk had to shake me from my trance, at which point I handed over the necessary money and grabbed my shoes.
A drink was in order - a drink to celebrate this miraculous find, and in honour of my ingenuity. Also, it would loosen me up. Unconscious patients were one thing, but chatting people up had never been a talent of mine. I changed my shoes, and glanced in the mirror behind the bar. I was looking good. My hair was sculpted to perfection, my face was that of a man five years younger than myself, and I was dressed as if ‘smart but casual’ was my life mantra. I took a long swig of my drink and headed to lane 9.
On one side of me, in lane 8, was a family who had given up any dreams of success, or even personal hygiene. They looked like shit, bowling strikes in silence. They treated everyone, including each other, with contempt, casting looks of disgust on the cleaner who had come to remove glasses from their area.
On the other side was Mecca. Lane 10, inhabited by a group who wore bowling shirts with ‘The Roller Bowlers’ embroidered on the back. They looked so content, cheering each other on regardless of the score – they created a nice atmosphere. I counted three women in wheelchairs and two men in wheelchairs, each with their own assistant.
I had my eyes on the youngest of the women. She looked about 23. She had this beautiful long blonde hair, right down to the seat of her chair. The only problem was that she had no visible deformations. Of course she was paralysed, but besides that she looked like a normal woman. I decided to observe for a while. One of them had to have something visible wrong, and so what if it was not the youngest? I’d experimented sexually with all ages. In fact, skin still tightly fitting to bones wasn’t nearly as exciting as sagging, browning skin.
But, a breakthrough came, in the form of a slowly creeping stain at the bottom of the blonde’s loosely fitting jeans. She tutted and called her assistant over, as I watched with increasing intrigue.
‘Ah don’t worry, it’s okay, I’ve got a lot of spare bandages in the day bag so we’ll get this fixed up in no time. It’s okay love, really, the doctor said we’d need to change the dressings every few hours.’
As the assistant lifted the jeans up, I was dragged back to childhood pantomimes and the excitement that came with the raising of the curtain. Here it was, my adult equivalent of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’
Pus. Pints of pus were descending slowly down this beauty’s leg. Analysing this as a practicing doctor, I would have to say it must’ve come from third degree burns. This occurs more often than you would think in individuals suffering from paralysis, for a multitude of reasons.
She was the one. I’d decided I was going to go home with her tonight. I had the perfect opening line. However, it relied entirely on her bowling abilities.
I continued to bowl, so as not to bring attention to myself. My own ability at this point was insignificant, so I threw the balls with reckless abandon, all the while keeping an eye on her score. She was hitting consistent 7s and 8s, and only had three goes left. I was getting wound up – once I decide on a tactic, I find it very hard to change it. As a doctor it is important to be decisive, as there are normally a number of ways to solve any one problem. The uncertainty in this tactic was killing me.
She got it. She got a strike. Now was the time.
‘Oh wow, a perfect ten,’ I said, with a smile and a small wink that only she saw. It was a bland and cheesy line, I know, but I knew that even the slightest attention I gave her would be paid back in full. She thanked me, and then rolled over to her assistant, talking behind her hand whilst looking at me.
I couldn’t wait to finish this game. I knew she was going to come over when she was done, and it would of course be opportune if I could be sat at the bar when she finished. I bowled my remaining sets as fast as humanly possible, changed my shoes and headed to the bar. Five minutes later she was at waist height next to me, pulling my shirt to get my attention.
Her name was Millie. We spoke of bowling, what we did for fun (besides bowling, which obviously I said I loved) and our jobs. She was a receptionist for an independent car insurance company. When she discovered I was a doctor, her eyes lit up. Did she think I was going to fix her fucked legs or something? She was getting ahead of herself, but I found her confidence alluring. I bought her a gin and tonic while she went to tell her carers that she wasn’t going with them, and said she’d get a taxi back later. When she got back I asked where she lived, et cetera. All the usual small talk was spouted, me trying to drag it out for as long as possible to get the optimum number of drinks down her. I had, in various ways, discovered that the perfect amount of alcohol for a woman you want to sleep with was four units. This was the stage where they were loose enough to take risks, but not yet feeling the tiredness that comes with drinking. I of course would attempt to stay as sober as possible. After two alcoholic beverages (including the pre-bowling vodka and coke) I switched to regular coke, meaning I had the upper hand on her. She would think I was just as drunk as she was.
So anyway, she thought we got along really well and started pouring her heart out to me. Apparently she’d been put into a bath about two weeks ago by her carer, and due to the paralysis in her legs not alerting her to the near boiling hot water, got terribly burnt. She started to weep and I comforted her in my doctor-patient style. She said I was one of the kindest people she’d ever met, and that she was shocked that I was interested in her, what with her being in a wheelchair. I smiled that slightly sad but reassuring smile that you see in romance dramas all too often. I then, being facetious, asked her what made her think I was interested in her. She laughed, and invited me back to hers ‘for a coffee.’ What a bland cliché of an invite. Of course, I accepted.
We got a taxi back to her place, which was a motel-style gated community, where they apparently had nurses on call 24/7 in case anything bad happened to any of those living there. Her house was on the second floor, so in the lift I upped the ante, kissing her neck and sliding my hand up her thigh. She smiled at me in kind of a filthy way, knocking me back a bit, but also sending such strong fantasies through my head that I was rigid before I’d even pushed her through her door. What I couldn’t do to this desensitised vagina, I thought.
She asked if I still wanted that coffee. Of course I didn’t. Neither did she, she said. I threw her on to the bed. I kissed her hard on the mouth, to keep up the pretence of spontaneous love. Ripping off those jeans I could barely contain myself. She grimaced, thinking her leaking and bandaged legs would make me run for the door. I smiled at her, and began kissing the raw flesh. I smiled up at her, but she looked horrified. I made it look like a joke – luckily she giggled – and told her I was only air kissing. Well, she couldn’t feel my lips on there anyway, so it was only half a lie.
She had such a filthy mouth. She was telling me I could do whatever I wanted to her. I didn’t know how far the paralysis went – would she able to feel me in either of these glorious holes? I asked, and she said that she couldn’t. Bingo. She went on to say that she could achieve orgasm just by knowing that someone found her beautiful enough to sleep with her. Needless to say, I crashed the back doors in. Regardless of how hard I went, she asked for more. I mean, what I was doing was kind of hurting me. We went like that for about 25 minutes, because with no lubrication and this clearly being her first time, I was feeling raw. I pulled out and finished all over her already soaked bandages. Oh that moment was rapturous, her face still pushed into the mattress with no idea what I was doing, still screaming for more. When I was done I quickly slipped into her front, and faked the noises of orgasm. I then rolled off of her, with her none the wiser to her now semen-soaked dressings. That’d be a surprise for her carer tomorrow, I laughed to myself.
I dressed and then made a dash for it, her wailing at me growing quieter with my every stride. It was only about 10pm, so I walked back to the alley and picked my car up. On that walk I felt like a God among men. These men I passed were so afraid of being seen as perverse that they’d never know the heights of my own carnal pleasures. So afraid to be themselves that they’d put up with vanilla sex acts with vanilla females all the way through their vanilla lives. In the car I put on U2’s Joshua Tree album and skipped to ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.’ Physically, that event was pleasing. But I was becoming sick of putting up with clichéd personalities just to achieve orgasm. None of these living absurdities had developed any individuality, because they’d always sat apart from the rest due to their physical appearance, and they thought that was enough to rise above. Far from it.

BROKEN, PART ONE.

2009-07-09T10:32:00.001-07:00

http://open.spotify.com/user/benme/playlist/3UsxiEkpppIppWDjaK14SA - Spotify Soundtrack URL

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broken don’t fix it, fuck it. I hate perfection.
Growing up I’d always been taught that it’s our differences that make us interesting and nice to look at. I’d just taken this theory to its logical conclusion.
Losing my virginity was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I was 22 and working towards my degree by doing volunteer work at the local doctor’s surgery in my spare time. It was mostly complete boredom, giving out antidepressants and telling people to drink Lemsip. However, every so often I would find a model example of a human in pure sexual form.
Funnel chests. Thalidomide. Colostomy bags. Sex aid, sex aid, sex aid. My victims thought I was this magical form of human being that didn’t see deformities; that focused on personality above all else. They couldn’t have been more wrong. I magnified their anomalies. I made examples of their broken bodies. But I gave them something in return: the physical love that they had rarely experienced.
The first was the hit that got me on this paraphilia. She was older than most women I’d feigned sexual interest in to keep up the pretence of normal function, in for a hip displacement. I forget her name.
I made her undress from the waist down, and immediately I could see the orifice created by old age. The gap between her leg and pelvis was small enough so that I could garner enjoyment from it, but not so small that I would cause her damage by entering it.
I told her I could fix it then and there. The elderly always trust a doctor. Even though probably all her friends had had this operation in a hospital weeks after diagnosis, she believed me.
Dosed to the eyeballs with general anaesthetic, I told her to count backwards from one hundred while I locked my office.
’96….95….94’, she muttered as I undid my fly.
Her sallow complexion faded from reality as I took her off of the gas and pulled her skirt down, careful not to rip it. Moving my hand across the hollow, I thought I might explode right there and then – the roughness of it, like bark, but the pliability enabled me to customise it entirely to myself. I held the two sides of her flesh together with my thumb over myself, and the deed was done in a matter of minutes.
And that’s what’s so beautiful about the act. Nobody gets hurt, and everyone feels human again. When she eventually woke up I span the old girl some yarn about ‘complications’ during surgery, which she said was understandable, and then I told her I’d call her with an appointment at the hospital, and went about the proper procedure.

The Diary Of Anne Spank.

2009-07-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

I really like you, because the others do
And I want to be a carbon copy too.
Indifferent really,
My interest is merely fleeting -
But I always get what I want
And now you're touching me up in the dark so your friends don't see,
It doesn't bother me,
It doesn't bother me -
You can always count on anecdotal evidence
I'm the resident
Good time girl.

Everything I do is for Monday morning
Conversation, the shock and awe.
Lust is a platform for statistics,
And secretly I'm keeping score.
Never expect better,
Try settling for less,
My face is clean but your parents' room's a mess.
Never expect better,
Try settling for less,
I'm the queen of abject loneliness.

Wonder if I'll ever settle down,
Leave town,
Try and leave this past of absolute numbness.
With more 'experience' than is meant for a person my age,
It's a curse, it's a gift, it's a privilege.

I Can't Enjoy LCD Soundsystem Stood Next To A Slut (Part 1)

2009-07-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

How many men were you with that night?
The night you got set on fire.
Find it hard to keep your clothes on?
Must be harder still to feel admired.
And I will both live and die
With mostly intact pride
It's not important to you but it's important to me
You only came for the ride.
Goodbye blue Mondays,
I'll be red for weeks and weeks.
Another twisted situation
Stuck on repeat.
And I know that you'll be just fine
If i give you a reason to hate me and a few weeks of my time.
You're better off living your life of art and censorship.
Keeping my distance.
Just keeping my distance.

O, Friend.

2009-07-04T12:25:00.000-07:00

Monochrome injuries with a searing pain,
Lethargy cancelled by desperation.
'The phone you have called is switched off'
Is a constant, like the fear of desertion.

He's got a dumb look
And you look cheated of your time with him, by me.
Those eyes have fire like his dick's for hire,
And I can't stomach it.

The electricity's gone dead,
I think it's his fault - it's his fault.
And white van men can try to take you away for all I care,
But I can't handle the inevitability of failure.

When I think of the ghosts of your past lives
And the men you had unzipping their flies
I fall into a void in my own head.

CASH AND SOMEONE ELSE'S CONSCIOUSNESS.

2009-07-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

If everything you felt was real,
Then why can you no longer feel?
I want you screaming in taxi cabs
About the biggest mistake of your life.
Walking alone with a cigarette
Through alleyways and discotheques
Nothing touches me oh no,
Nothing I can do but watch you go.

Tears behind shades
As the Summer fades,
Oh these don't count
For much.
Fears of your gaze,
Sun gone down on our plays,
I just hope you're
Fucked.

Wrong to assume fragility dies,
Remembering all the plans were lies -
Paris in the night, and I put up a fight
But this was all to no avail.
You want a clone of a kid's TV presenter
Bubblegum flavoured penthouse renter
He don't wear black, he don't know the sky
You want the abject dehumanised guy

[The riverside beckons
All love that is perished
And acoustic guitars
Can't substitute intelligence
But apparently that's all a boy needs -
Cash and someone else's consciousness]

In trying to help myself I've lost you
'Stay mute and passive and don't sniff glue
Wear earth tones, Topman it up
Spit that drink back in that cup'
I guess that doing things you hate
Is the price you pay
To avoid loneliness:
Nightclubbing, girl shopping,
No, no bar hopping
Just boring, toxic, stagnant mess.
Don't know what you're thinking, but I can guess.