by Ruth Dugdall
‘As Keats said,’ I conclude, projecting to the camera, ‘now more than ever seems rich to die. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. A perfect death is a way to cheat the dulling, dumbing effect of time. To die at the height of love is the only way to preserve its purity.’
My voice is louder as I say this, cracked with emotion. I look sideways, wondering if Cate has noticed this.
On the screen there is a moment’s stillness before the students move and chatter, gathering their belongings as they leave the hall. A few of them slow up, milling around the lectern as if to ask me something but I ignore them, intent on collecting my papers, and eventually they drift away. The show is over.
I stand and switch the tape off, turn the lights on.
Cate remains in her seat, “That was quite something.”
As we are making our way out we both realise that we are not alone. There is the sound of snoring and we see a slumped figure a few rows behind us. “Alex?” I say loudly. He must have been here the whole time.
His head lolls up, revealing the whites of his eyes, red marks on his cheeks from where his knuckles have pressed. He’s not just asleep, he’s intoxicated.
“God knows how he’s made it into the second year.” I mutter, glancing at Cate, who is studying him closely.
His eyes are dilated and his lips cracked.
“Alex is always like this,” I tell her, “apart from when he’s hyped and then he won’t shut up. I gather from the polarisation in his moods that he varies his drug of choice.”
“Can’t he get help? Don’t you have drug counsellors at the college?” Alex is in a bad way, trying to focus and swaying in his seat.
“Help is available if he wants it, but he doesn’t. He’ll never pass this year; he’ll drop out. No degree ceremony for him. Come on, we can’t do anything.” I’m already walking towards the exit when I hear him say, “Bitch!” Cate stops, no doubt expecting me to rebuke him. “Let’s go.” I say, turning to leave, but she is slow and before we have exited the hall he cries out, “You murdering bitch.” In the corridor I walk ahead, Cate catching up behind me.
“Do you often get jeered like that? Why didn’t you challenge him?”
I don’t turn, just quicken my pace. “Come on, Miss Austin. I only have half an hour to spare before I must get on with marking essays.”
My office is a good size, flanked by pristine white shelves, rows of books placed together aesthetically. Orange penguins, shelves of dark older novels, paperbacks in reds and pinks and blues. Green books are fewer, a fact you wouldn’t know if you catalogued your collection by author or subject, but my collection is not conventionally arranged. It is a piece of art.
Cate stares, a viewer in a gallery. “How do you find the one you’re looking for?”
“I close my eyes, I picture the cover.”
Cate sits in the plastic chair used by students before my ridiculous suspension. Her suit is buttoned and it pulls tight across her chest. “I know nothing about Keats, but does his work really mean all that, or is that what you feel? Is that what you think about time? That it has a dulling, dumbing effect on love?”
My own chair is brown leather, an angled back. It leans with me, away from her. “I think it’s a matter of fact that time is the murderer of love and beauty. A perfect death, especially a young death, is like a fly trapped in amber. It is beyond time, beyond decay. Like the revellers depicted on Keats’ Grecian Urn, the deceased will never age. Only death, or art, can cheat time.”
“But what about love that lasts forever, couples who are devoted to each other in their eighties, nineties? Isn’t that a way of cheating time, too?”
The heating is on high and she looks hot, but doesn’t remove her jacket. I pour two glasses of water from the jug and hand one over. “Maybe. But time still ravages beauty. And it is rather a risk to think love can be sustained. In my experience it doesn’t last.”
She doesn’t disagree. She looks beyond this room, out of the large window, to where students will be walking briskly across the cold square. I don’t look, I know what’s there and it bores me. I pull her attention back. “All of this means nothing to those students. They’re still young enough to feel immortal – they know nothing of death.”
“That’s a bit patronising, just because they’re young doesn’t mean they haven’t experienced grief.”
“Even if death has taken someone close to them it will seem remote. Pleasure and sin are the narcotics of the young. They’re too busy enjoying life to fear its loss. They can’t wait to leave the lecture hall and head to the union bar. That’s the main reason they came to university.”
“Surely that can’t be right, there must be many students who are here because they want to study.” Her tone is sharp.
“Miss Austin, I long for pupils with genuine aptitude, who wish to learn for learning’s sake. Sometimes I despise my students. I see them texting on their mobiles in my class, I’m forced to read work plagiarised from the internet. And not one of them would choose to sit in their room studying when they could be out partying. They think that English Literature is dead and gone, irrelevant to their modern lives of rap and horror films, gadgets and gizmos. They don’t realise that nothing they experience is new.”
“But on the video the students were totally rapt by your lecture. Not one of them looked distracted.”
“Well, I work hard to keep them entertained. That’s why it’s so wrong that I’m not allowed to teach. This week I was scheduled to give a lecture on St Agnes Eve. The poem is not a romantic love story but a sensual exploration of a rape. That would have got their attention. It’s not politically correct and I was looking forward to the pseudo-feminists’ reaction. But don’t be fooled, Miss Austin. The students that appeared so engrossed on that tape, would shortly afterwards be drinking vodka and snorting cocaine in the union bar. You saw evidence of that yourself.”
Cate is silent for a while, “Who was he?”
“No-one who matters. Alex won’t last long. I failed his last essay and he can’t progress into the final year if he fails another. Which he will.” I drain my glass and push it aside.
“Doesn’t it bother you? It’s such a waste. His future… he’s only, what, eighteen?”
“And not my problem. I didn’t force the drugs into his veins.”
Eleven
We all have choices. You know that, don’t you, as well as I? To exist, to breathe; to nullify life with narcotics. It’s all a choice. Choices, of course, don’t happen randomly. They come to us at a certain time, in a special way. But still, we choose. Smith made his choice: to submit is also to act. There is always a schema behind actions, behind deeds. You just have to look hard enough. That’s how I analyse the dead poets, looking for a pattern behind the words, searching for the themes and messages under the surface. It’s how I live, looking for the meaning, the leitmotif of life. So I don’t think it was an accident that long before I met Smith I came across the story of Armin Meiwes, who even then was old news and only commanded one column of print, not even on the front page. It wasn’t my newspaper, I rarely buy one, but had been left in the staff common room, on a chair, waiting for me. It was unusual to find the staff room empty. Normally several lecturers would be jostling for position by the open window, cigarette in hand, or would be chatting by the coffee machine. But it was approaching the end of term and a warm day. My colleagues would be seated on the grass with their stacks of essays for marking, or in their rooms preparing for the imminent exodus. I was alone in the staff room. And the paper was next to me, already folded at the page, as if to draw my attention: ARMIN MEIWES NOT A MURDERER.
The headline was an announcement, a quote from the defence, and I pulled the paper on to my lap to read the rest of the article.
Armin Meiwes killed and partially ate a man he met via the internet in March 2001. He was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for eight and a half years. Last year, an appeal court ordered a re-trial to establish whether Meiw
es was guilty of murder. The 44-year-old denies the charge and says he simply carried out a willing victim’s instructions. He admitted killing the German-based computer specialist Bend-Juergen Brundes at Meiwes’ home in the town of Rotenburg.
Meiwes’ legal team argued the defendant was ‘killing on request’, a form of illegal euthanasia that carries a maximum five year sentence. They argue that two consensual adults should be able to act in any way they see fit and there is no evidence that Brundes was not of sound mind when he opted to be killed and eaten. Indeed, he had even joked with Meiwes that ‘smoked meat lasts longer,’ after hearing they were both smokers. The case continues.
Replacing the paper on the chair at my side, I examined my feelings, took the pulse of my reaction. It was racing, but I found no shock there. Instead my excitement was the sweet taste of recognition, of a thought reflected back in an unexpected setting. Killing on request. The idea, then, had already occurred to me. This newspaper article didn’t plant the seed. If the idea hadn’t already existed I’d have glanced at the article, dismissed it as a sick perversion. But instead it tapped into something inside me, something already alive, a root planted deep began to reach up. The idea began to grow.
So it was possible then, to find someone like Bend-Juergen Brundes. To find a man, a lover, with the same desire. But how would such an advert be worded? Could I computer screen, a flare in the sky, a signal across distant waters? A man might answer, it could be the man standing next to me in the supermarket queue. It could be a man from across the oceans. The web could span these distances, make it possible to send a thread, find a fixing point. To weave a home, for a mate to rest in before extinction. The idea excited me. The German case showed me what was possible.
But the time wasn’t right. It was years, a whole six years later, that I started to stalk the web, reading messages, waiting. Lee had gone, posted to Germany, and I was bored. Looking for something. I didn’t know what I sought until I saw the ad:
Man seeks beautiful woman for the journey of a lifetime: I will lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help. Will you help me to die?
Smith placed the advert in January last year, and I replied. He first came to me in the February. He never even told me his real name. He wanted to protect me. That was our agreement. I confess to being with him when he died. I watched him take the overdose, I watched him cut his own skin. Smith wanted to die. It was his free choice. His death was suicide. I was just helping him; he didn’t want to be on his own when the end came. Who wants to die alone?
Cate Austin doesn’t see this. She can’t. She’s part of a system that believes in retribution and justice, whatever that means. And she speaks of prison.
Today a psychiatrist is coming. He will also have a hand in deciding my fate. I’ve made a decision. I’ll be the author of my own destiny. I will not submit to the judgment of others; the time has come to act.
I’d not thought about prison before Cate Austin said it. The word is too romantic, a beautiful lie. ‘Prise’, a word for open. Said quickly prison could be present – birthdays and Christmas.
How can such a word mean something so ugly, so absolute, as incarceration? I shall say jail. The word is more honest, in it you can hear the clink of keys in locks. I like to be honest with words: jail terrifies me. There. It’s said.
Smith has been dead for seven months and never, in all that time, did I think jail was my fate.
You don’t believe me. Of course, I knew it was a possibility. Others, my solicitor, my barrister, pointed out it was there like rotten meat at the back of the fridge. How could it be forgotten? And it had happened to Meiwes in the end; the prosecution challenged the initial sentence and he was sentenced for murder. He was stupid though, searching for another victim and thereby inviting prosecution. A serial cannibal, he was a risk to society and his sentence bears no significance to my case.
Why should incarceration concern me as a serious option, when I’ve done nothing wrong? Nothing! Life, the air we breathe, is random. A happenchance that molecules and genes and chromosomes came together at random and we exist. That flesh and bone grow, that we’re allowed to flourish in the womb, that we are not, as a mere collection of cells, sucked away in a tube and discarded in some hospital rubbish bin. Survival is always an outside chance in the game of life, yet we exist. We are alive and, even more wonderful, with conscience and consciousness. Thoughts and actions and choices. Each breath we take is a choice.
Who are they, these people who think they can pass laws against suicide, as if breath can be protected by statute? Life is not a right. It’s a choice. Every breath, think of that, breathe it in. Make your choice again and again and know that you are alive, that life is what you choose. Now hold your breath. Do it. Hold, for a second, two. Do I have the right to tell you to breathe in again? Does anybody have that right? So, no, I don’t believe jail should be my punishment. If I can see beyond a law that would have me locked away, then surely you can too? Now, breathe again.
But Cate Austin says it may be so. That I can be locked away. I’m not naïve: I know what could happen to me in prison. Just look at me! Beautiful. Clever. An academic, for Christ’s sake. What chance would I have against addicts and thieves, prostitutes and thugs? My face would be shredded, I’d be an object of jealousy, vilified. I can defend myself against words, but not blows. Oh yes, I’m accomplished, but I’m still afraid of the flick knife, the hypodermic needle, the desperate woman with nothing to lose.
I won’t allow them to send me to jail. There’s always a choice and I choose to live, to breathe. I choose another way.
The psychiatrist, Dr Gregg, will be here soon. Cate said it was in his power to keep me from jail. He can ask for a hospital order, she said, and unlike a jail term there would be no fixed time that I must serve. Once judged sane, I’d be released. I could be free again in weeks. Days, even.
It makes me furious. How dare a man come here to judge me? So, this is the choice: I must be mad or evil. Sad or bad. It’s not possible, apparently, to be sane and to have helped Smith as I did. I’m sick of ignorant people misinterpreting my actions, choosing to label me as mentally unstable rather than facing their bigoted world of sanity. I’m angry, so angry that all I want to do is break glass. All I want to do is scream. No wonder I’ve felt so ill recently; the headaches, the dizziness.
The anger bubbles inside as I watch his car arrive, a family estate in conservative blue. Dr Gregg too wears blue, a dogtooth jacket and cords, half-moon glasses that glint as he looks up. I’m standing at the window, looking down as he waves up to me in greeting.
I’ve been waiting for my audience to arrive.
Twelve
“Miss Austin, it’s Charles Gregg speaking. You wanted me to contact you after my meeting with Alice. I saw her yesterday afternoon.”
Cate put down her sandwich and swallowed a mouthful of tuna mayonnaise. “Great. Thanks for calling so promptly. I saw her myself on Monday. We watched a tape of her giving a lecture on time and death. She was rather impressive.”
“I imagine she was,” he said dryly, “did you show her you were impressed?”
Cate thinks back, “Well, yes. I told her I thought her students were totally engrossed, as I was.”
“People like Alice need approval and praise. Tell me, Miss Austin, has it ever seemed to you that Alice considers herself to be unique? That she considers the majority of people beneath her?”
Cate didn’t need to think hard to answer the question, “Well, she’s quite scornful of how most people experience love. She thinks that her decision to help Smith die is misunderstood more than anything else. And she definitely doesn’t think it’s anybody else’s business – free choice and all that.”
“Exactly. The laws of the land don’t count for her.”
Cate felt at a disadvantage, as if Dr Gregg had already reached some conclusion he was now leading her to. “So, how did you find her?”
“Just as you have described. Only
more so.”
“How do you mean?”
She heard the rustle of paper, as if a file was being flicked through. “Have you ever heard of egomania?”
“Well, yes,” she replied cautiously, “but I didn’t think it was a medical term.”
“It isn’t. It’s the nineteenth century word for a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but I think it sums things up nicely. I think Alice is a classic case. There are nine key features to the disorder, and my initial assessment is that she scores high on most of them. She’s pre-occupied with power, arrogant and has a feeling of entitlement to act as she feels fit. Another feature is a lack of empathy. You’ve seen her more than me, have you seen any evidence of empathy?”
