crush him: reduce him to nothing but a fat, heaving curl beneath the covers in a pitch-black bedroom. There is no light in the world at those moments, and yet somehow he sees himself all too clearly.
When the relationship is over, it feels much the same, only bleaker. He can walk the streets and go to work, and for lengthy periods of time he is able to forget what he has done. The woman is no longer in his life, of course, but that absence is only the vaguest of pressures at the back of his mind. Perhaps there is an odd quality to the sunlight and the air, as though the world has subtly shifted on some emotional level, but he functions.
Until he remembers.
Who he is. What he is.
Then every minute aches, and it seems impossible to imagine that he can bear an hour. He does, of course, and days somehow pass. What he experiences is not simply depression and self-hatred, but despair. True despair, he knows, is not so much an emotion as a vacuum. It is the feeling of God turning His back on you. Running through it is the knowledge that the things you have done can never be undone or made right. If a glass rolls across a table, you can catch it and roll it back along its path to where it started, but if it tips over the edge and smashes, that can’t ever be reversed. The glass will forever be broken, and you will always be the man who broke it.
Even worse than the knowledge are the memories. He can still see everything that happened very clearly, and in his mind, the images play over and over, the most awful parts vivid and present. How could he have done that to them? The hate he felt for them makes no sense any more. It’s the memory of an emotion, and the memory doesn’t fit.
He lies in his bed, sometimes for days at a time, trying to stop himself from feeling anything at all. He calls in sick to work. And he is sick. Sometimes he wonders if people can sense it from the street – if the house stinks from the disease of him. He wakes up and imagines the women standing there in the corner of the bedroom. What’s left of them.
It always happens like this. After a while, it simply gets too much.
Of course, this time it’s different.
This time, he’s killed her.
He saw the flyer while he was working at the university.
The contract was only for a week. He brought sandwiches in with him, and took to spending his lunch hours in the Union bar. The building was old; you walked in through the run-down entrance, and then down a set of stairs, and the bar was built into a large wooden booth at the centre. He would buy a couple of pints and sit, drinking slowly, losing himself in the chatter around him and trying not to think.
He could feel the students’ eyes on him, because he was conspicuous in his overalls and obviously didn’t belong here. He was too big not to notice, and with his bedraggled hair and unshaven face, he looked as if he had walked out of a wilderness. Whereas they were all so young and small, with their supple bodies and smooth faces. The pupal stage of an entirely different species: none of them would grow up to be like him. He tried not to look back at them. When he did, the person staring tended to turn away very quickly indeed.
The notice boards outside the bar were peppered with flyers and posters. Many were professionally done, advertising club nights. His gaze tracked across the images of young men and women in various states of undress, disco balls glinting, clusters of multicoloured bottles arranged like skittles. An alien world to him. There were also printed and hand-scrawled advertisements: rooms to rent; rooms wanted; lifts offered; musical instruments for sale. Notices for sports clubs. It was a cacophony of the small details of other people’s lives. Like the students themselves, there was an air of naïve, puppyish hope to it all. Nobody would want most of these things, but they’d put them up anyway.
And then the flyer for the helpline caught his eye.
It was on the third and
When the relationship is over, it feels much the same, only bleaker. He can walk the streets and go to work, and for lengthy periods of time he is able to forget what he has done. The woman is no longer in his life, of course, but that absence is only the vaguest of pressures at the back of his mind. Perhaps there is an odd quality to the sunlight and the air, as though the world has subtly shifted on some emotional level, but he functions.
Until he remembers.
Who he is. What he is.
Then every minute aches, and it seems impossible to imagine that he can bear an hour. He does, of course, and days somehow pass. What he experiences is not simply depression and self-hatred, but despair. True despair, he knows, is not so much an emotion as a vacuum. It is the feeling of God turning His back on you. Running through it is the knowledge that the things you have done can never be undone or made right. If a glass rolls across a table, you can catch it and roll it back along its path to where it started, but if it tips over the edge and smashes, that can’t ever be reversed. The glass will forever be broken, and you will always be the man who broke it.
Even worse than the knowledge are the memories. He can still see everything that happened very clearly, and in his mind, the images play over and over, the most awful parts vivid and present. How could he have done that to them? The hate he felt for them makes no sense any more. It’s the memory of an emotion, and the memory doesn’t fit.
He lies in his bed, sometimes for days at a time, trying to stop himself from feeling anything at all. He calls in sick to work. And he is sick. Sometimes he wonders if people can sense it from the street – if the house stinks from the disease of him. He wakes up and imagines the women standing there in the corner of the bedroom. What’s left of them.
It always happens like this. After a while, it simply gets too much.
Of course, this time it’s different.
This time, he’s killed her.
He saw the flyer while he was working at the university.
The contract was only for a week. He brought sandwiches in with him, and took to spending his lunch hours in the Union bar. The building was old; you walked in through the run-down entrance, and then down a set of stairs, and the bar was built into a large wooden booth at the centre. He would buy a couple of pints and sit, drinking slowly, losing himself in the chatter around him and trying not to think.
He could feel the students’ eyes on him, because he was conspicuous in his overalls and obviously didn’t belong here. He was too big not to notice, and with his bedraggled hair and unshaven face, he looked as if he had walked out of a wilderness. Whereas they were all so young and small, with their supple bodies and smooth faces. The pupal stage of an entirely different species: none of them would grow up to be like him. He tried not to look back at them. When he did, the person staring tended to turn away very quickly indeed.
The notice boards outside the bar were peppered with flyers and posters. Many were professionally done, advertising club nights. His gaze tracked across the images of young men and women in various states of undress, disco balls glinting, clusters of multicoloured bottles arranged like skittles. An alien world to him. There were also printed and hand-scrawled advertisements: rooms to rent; rooms wanted; lifts offered; musical instruments for sale. Notices for sports clubs. It was a cacophony of the small details of other people’s lives. Like the students themselves, there was an air of naïve, puppyish hope to it all. Nobody would want most of these things, but they’d put them up anyway.
And then the flyer for the helpline caught his eye.
It was on the third and
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