by Peter Marks
‘Possibly, but think of your waist, think of your thighs, I do. Two night’s of passion with the Mattress King and you’ll feel like a new woman.’
Same suggestive remarks, same infantile humour. Wright wondered why his mind worked so mysteriously. Last night he was ready to die, couldn’t even talk to himself yet here he was a few hours later on the phone, talking as if nothing had happened. Verbal habits were amazingly resilient.
‘One night with you, and I certainly will feel like a new woman. One night with you and I’d undoubtedly turn lesbian.’
Christ, maybe she was serious. His confidence all but evaporated, Nathan was easily frightened and readily, almost ravenously accepted any indication he was as repulsive as he knew he was.
‘Probably,’ he sighed, knowing it was probably true.
‘Jesus Nathan, don’t quit. Fight you bastard, stop feeling sorry for yourself. You were doing well for a few minutes, I thought you may have recovered a little.’
‘From what?’
‘Nathan, I know it hurts, but you can’t spend the rest of your life like this.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ll personally see to it that you smile again ...even if it takes plastic surgery or an expensive orthodontist to renovate your sad, grim face.’
‘Sure.’
‘Sure? Is that the best you can do. My spastic cousin has a vocabulary more expansive than yours.’
‘Your spastic cousin also dances better,’ Nathan said, almost smiling.
Nikkie had known him long enough to know that the one thing Wright couldn’t resist was handicap humour. Her poor twisted cousin had been quite a hit with Nathan ever since she’d told him the sad story.
________________
Wright rifled through the book shelf (shelf pity...).
‘Yes sir, you’re in the shit with no spade,’ he sniffled, leafing through Slaughterhouse 5. The whole sorry mess reinforced his opinion that love really was the ultimate parasitic growth, a threat, a disease, a mocking farce. Love was THE curse, the penultimate tragedy when it went ashtray, and his had gone further than ashtray - his had gone far enough as to disappear.
Gazing from the window he noticed a small, sheltering sparrow nestled amongst the leaves of one of the trees of the small park outside his anguish. He had the sudden urge blow the little buggar to pieces. Fortunately for the sparrow, Wright had no gun and no real mean streak but moaning anyway that this was yet another indication of how sad things had gotten, that he couldn’t even kill to ease his grief, he dragged himself downstairs to the lounge.
Tossing himself on the couch, he noticed it had been raining as if agreeing with Wright’s black mood. Scanning the deserted street, slithering black and glistening outside, he inhaled slowly on a freshly lit fag, fuming - bitter in the knowledge that just beyond, over moist roof-tops just a few suburbs away, lay the cure (which he hoped wasn’t being laid but suspected was).
Just a few miles away, Kelly lived content without him. The thought stabbed him. Still it was probably raining there too and Graham’s probably got genital herpes he reminded himself, but this did little to cheer him. Out there, under a brooding grey sky was some-one, some-one special who could, were she so disposed, dispel his gloom.
Sadly, somewhere out there was some-one who refused to intervene on Wright’s behalf. To make him whole again.
Throwing none too pleasant smelling shoes off, he curled into the cushions of the couch hatching dark thoughts now almost totally detached from reality. From behind a cushion he extracted a half full bottle of Whisky and drank hungrily.
________________
Nathan rarely saw the real light of day. Mainly, he basked in the Edison ghost glow, the sunless rays invented by man’s mind. He was pale, his nose was perpetually red, and his hopes stuffed firmly in the trash can.
The only time he sought clouds and climate was when he went for booze. He’d stopped eating weeks ago. His only sustenance was his memories, and the brain withering contents of the brightly labelled bottles he purchased to ease his hurt.
His expeditions into the world were not without incidence. Dogs attacked him, people stared at Rudolph the Red Nosed Pisshead. He didn’t care, nothing mattered.
Aside from the bottle.
________________
Three days later, while the sun had managed to circumnavigate the planet a few times, the moon had flown through a night sky with its usual diligence, Wright hadn’t shifted from his point of return. Seemingly stuck to the cushions of the couch, the pissed Gnat was still hugging a half spent bottle, his eyes past red, almost orange black, but fixed firmly to the television. Not yet quite completely in fairyland, he was full as a vat, filled with disbelief at his sorry plight.
His moods were leading him a merry dance.
He swung like a bedevilled Tarzan on a crippled vine, helplessly swinging from one mood to another with dizzying dexterity. He was up one minute, plummeting the next. His spirits, THE spirits of rum, vodka and whisky, sent him reeling with frightening irrationality, tossing him about like a ping pong ball on a writhing sea. From maniacal laughter to sad tears, he was out of control. Crying, laughing, crying. Off he’d fly into the heavens of hate, yelling and screaming her name riding the jetstream of rage, looping the loopy and screaming vengeance. Then the down draft caught him. And he was in love again. He felt like some pathetic piston.
Up, down, up, down with no middle ground in which to rest. There was no region which soothed or gave refuge to the fevered emotions which swept in, then out of his too weary mind.
Wright was delirious.
First he’d despise her, then he loved her, then ambivalence would set cement solid and he wouldn’t care. Then he would. The mood swings were becoming increasingly violent. One minute he loved her, the next minute he hated her but he most longed for her warm lingering touch.
Lying there, alone in the dark with a himself he hardly recognised, he decided he’d rather her dead rather than gone. Then decided she’d not be of much use six foot underground with tits so cold not even his hands could warm the prized protruberences. So he ignored the urge.
________________
Deep and irrevocable the cut was made. The blade found flesh. Totally detached, he stared at it, watched the bleeding river, warm and fluid, run down his slashed wrist, washing over his outstretched palm before flooding through his fingers to drip in waxen puddles on the tiled floor.
Slumping to his knees, he waited for the end. For the blood to leave him, for life to retreat. There was no going back, no damming the flow which turned the tiles red, and flesh white.
From the door, God appeared and told him he was an idiot. Wright told God he was dying, telling God to leave him in peace.
Not likely God said and healed him.
________________
The image was all too vivid when he woke. Cautious of the damage, and wondering where God had gotten to, Wright slowly extracted his wrist from the cushions searching it for the cleaved flesh. Wright sighed somewhat disappointed when he discovered his veins weren’t drying, therefore he wasn’t dying in a body with no blood.
Such a demise was too messy to contemplate but some days were like that. Some were a heady flight from reality, while others were just an all too familiar feeling of being taken for a ride.
Wright decided to reform. He made up what was left of his mind to concentrate on the unglamorous and the ugly knowing the beautiful weren’t too be trusted. Pick an ugly instead and marry them, at least they’ll be grateful he thought. The beautiful? Well, they’d just be some-one else’s he guessed.
Wright was convinced he was right, but how would he know, he’d never chosen personality over looks in his entire life and even now, even suicidal, he wasn’t about to start altering his standards. Buggar it, the half brain of the very pissed Nathan slurred, who wants to date a woman who’s beauty is anything more than skin deep? Who wants to wed some-one who’s looks would remind hi
m of how cruel genetics can be? Some incredibly ugly woman he’d have to lie to (or worse still lie with). Some-one he’d have to tell she was beautiful when he’d know better, know better than date her in the first place Nathan sneered and rolled off the couch, still clutching the bottle.
Thump. Heady stuff. Thank God for booze he snorted, patting the black label of the fast diminishing brew that had been conscripted into sharing Wright’s woes, and Nathan’s veins. (So that Gnat could share the effects with their brain and the extinguished neurones with posterity).
Getting to his knees, he poured himself a glass, 20% Vodka, 80% on the floor, attempting to be a little more civilised.
Kelly where are you? What did I do to deserve this? He wailed, gulping the grog. The drunker he got, the angrier he became, becoming less and less stable with each sliding sip (structurally as well as mentally). Nathan began to totter about the lounge mind and body unbalanced, waving like a willow in the breeze that was blowing in from the darkness outside from an open door. Two potted palms joined Wright in swaying.
These plants guarded the door to the sundeck and acted as Wright’s camouflage when he was maiming ants by focusing the sun’s rays through torch eye glasses.
Nathan was drunk as a skunk. Stumbling about the room, he collided with the furniture, bumping about like Blind Alley and apologising to Mr. Chair and Mr. Plant as he sent them reeling. Anxiously, he searched for something to do with himself, something which would divert him, anything that could distract him from the turmoil within.
Anything to take his mind off romance. (He should have tried smoking pot. It would have been Romancing The Stoned).
________________
‘Whhraat?’ He slurred.
‘Nathan, you’re pissed!’
‘Ann yourr ugly butt at lest I’ll be sober in the mworrning...’
‘Thank you Winston.’
‘Sawright Nik. How the hewll r you?’
‘I are fine thank you, how are you?’ She asked concerned.
‘I are fwine thank yew.’ Nathan parroted.
‘God Nathan, when you go to pieces you sure make a jigsaw of yourself. How are we going to get you back together?’
‘Glue’
‘I suspect you’ve already been sniffing it anyway.’
‘Sexx?’
‘I think you’d better stick with glue Nathan. It’s bound to be cheaper than paying some-one to do sex with the pissed against some lampost.’ Nicola advised.
‘Are you working these days?’ Nicola asked, shoving a PR Release in the fax machine certain that the journalist who received would be about as competent (i.e. as pissed) as Wright was.
‘What day is it?’ Nathan asked, sobering slightly.
‘Monday.’ The question didn’t surprise her, Nathan was always asking what day it was even when he wasn’t drunk.
‘It was Monday yesterday.’ Wright claimed.
‘Nathan, I hardly think you’re in any state to know what year it is, none the less what day it was.’
‘It’s 1923 and I’m to young to work...’
Nicola hung up. Nathan was obviously not fit for the work she had for him. Or coherent speech apparently.
________________
Monday eh? Oh well, the grog I guess. I could have sworn it was Tuesday. Leaving the phone he drifted back out to the balcony to retrieve the bottle. If only he could stop himself from thinking about her. And HIM. What to do? Kill Graham? Too obvious. Kill Kelly? Too tempting.
God he was sick of feeling lousy.
He could stop the grief if he could start doing something. But what? Masturbate? (Too exhausting) Self Immolate ? (No exhaust, there was no chimney).
Suddenly, the answer came to him, or rather he went to it. He sat unsteadily on the edge of a chair at the dining room table. Head in palm to rest the ache, he started reading the paper to see how the world had coped in his absence.
It had coped better than he had.
Drunk and unsteady, he was unable to focus, and unable to concentrate. The print was too small for his trembling pupils so he gave up. Looked up to survey a room which seemed to be shifting. Seeing five of everything, pissed, with eyesight of a house fly, he had nothing better to do with his anger so he turned child and began tearing the newspaper into precise shapes.
Now sprawled on the floor, cross legged, shoulder resting on the stable coffee table, he busily began making paper dolls with black print frocks from the fashion pages of the evening news. Rip, tear, rip, cry for a few minutes. Once they were perfect, he stabbed them with a dull bread knife. It was Haitian Voodoo, vodka version.
‘Hait’em all women,’ he slurred. Then began chanting hate’em, hate’em while hovering over the shredded dollies.
Mumbling in fluent Pissed Latin, he ranted and incantated above his handiwork before skewering the dollies with an earnest ease. Engrossed in this ritual dissection, he became more and more zombified, getting drunker and drunker with each death defying swig from another fast emptying bottle. The drunker he got, the crazier he became.
And began a new game.
Separating one of the torn bodies from its Siamese embrace, at arms length from his volatile breath, he held the orphan in front of him. Then laid it on the table, pressuring it flat with an outstretched palm so that the various features: arms, legs, head and torso, became obvious. Lurching forward, Nathan bent dry lips to the cut paper and christened the shape Kelly. Gently, sweetly, lovingly he kissed her. Again and again.
Then ripped the shit out of her.
She loves me, he slurred, removing a foot. She loves me not, he screamed convinced detaching arm from shoulder. She loves me. Off with the other foot. She loves me not. Off with her head. She loves me! He smiled suddenly as if the pronouncement could change or alter the present reality. Before the sad truth hit so he began afresh, tearing into what remained separating chest from mid-rift, tearing the section where paper D cups would have held pert breasts had the doll been person and not some sad sacrifice to Wright’s ever expanding lunacy.
________________
Suddenly it was two in the afternoon. Subtly, the light was waning due to some enormous dark clouds drifting in from the bay. The phone rang but Wright didn’t notice. He was busy.
He was still hunched over the table, hands hectic, whispering quietly as he took another chunk from Kelly now cannibalised. Almost imperceptibly, recited “She loves me not” in case God was listening and decided to agree. Rrriip. She loved him again (this time shouting in case God was listening and decided to help). The phone ceased ringing just as the last arm went west. He was down to the last paltry piece. It was time for the truth, the truth according to voodoo vivisection.
She loved him.
‘She loves me!’ He shouted, jubilant, lifting the last leg aloft and, holding it over his head as if it were the FA Cup, speeding around the room, doing five laps of honour in celebration of such a momentous victory. Around and around the lounge the pissed primate staggered, waving and bowing to a packed stadium of imagined onlookers. The crowd cheered, Nathan waved. The crowd chanted, Nathan bowed. The woman next door thumped on the wall, Nathan cowered.
‘She loves me you know,’ Wright said loudly to the wailing wall and began lapping the room again. On the fifth of three laps (he was too pissed to count) his energy evaporated and he came to a slow halt in front of the lounge mirror.
Looking at himself he saw quads.
Steadying himself, he blinked until four became one - one four headed monster. He faced the face peering from the glass and saw the horrible truth.
‘You’re ridiculous. Look at yourself, what sort of moron are you?’ He asked, himself already knowing what sort of moron he was but he was too tired to argue so he and himself went back to playing with the dollies. That lasted two minutes.
He was as restless as a poker chip.
________________
All Wright wanted was a little revenge (a lot would
make him feel even better). A little murder, mayhem or maiming would have satisfied him; some pure, simple, heady violence against the woman who’d caused him to feel this miserable, this lonely. This lost.
But he lacked the will. Nothing he could do, short of physical violence, would reach her. Not tears, not anger, not even suicide. She no longer wanted him, so she was beyond his influence. Beyond his machinations. The loss of power over her was a sudden, shattering surprise. Without love, hers for him, he was powerless. Love was power, he the pawn.
A pawn broken.
________________
‘Where the fuck are you?’
Wright breathed moistly into the receiver, his hopes dashed. The phone had rung and he’d leapt for it hoping beyond hope for a miracle. For his salvation. For his Kelly to be there but she wasn’t.
It wasn’t her, wasn’t the voice or tone he longed for.
It was the wrong sex, and the wrong person.
________________
Life lived in hope was a tiring test. Nathan was exhausted. He was just so weary from the long weeks of chronic anticipation. It was the telephone’s fault. Every time the damn thing rang, his whole body shook, his mind raced. Was it her?
There was the chance it was. Was her for him. A slim chance maybe, non-existent actually, but the sound still caused havoc; sending megalitres of adrenaline flooding through tube arteries in a swift dash from head to feet where it hit a dead end, and so come rushing back to his blurred brain.
Anticipation knotted his stomach and made his heart pump like a toads throat. It burnt his nerves to neon threads. The energy wasted was taking its toll.
The telephone was becoming life threatening.
Each time this wailing baby awoke Wright, like any good parent, leapt to warm the bottle. Between his lips usually. Whisky normally. Mothers milk to the frazzled Wright who drank ‘til he was calm.
Or comatose.
________________
‘Where the fuck are you?’ The voice repeated.
