PSYCHOPHILIA
Michelle Muckley
Copyright © 2014 Michelle Muckley
British English Edition
First Edition
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual people, places, or events is in every respect coincidental.
This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment, but may be lent and copied without prior permission. These permissions extend to your personal use only, and do not intend to cover the copying of the material for distribution to the general public.
For extra copies, and further information about the author, please visit:
www.michellemuckley.com
All rights reserved.
For print copies:
ISBN: 1497578116
ISBN-13: 978-1497578111
Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for taking the time to purchase and read Psychophilia. First and foremost, I hope that you enjoy this book. I was inspired to write this story following a period of illness and a stay in ITU. The sense of claustrophobia that I experienced during the recovery was at times worse than the illness itself. Whilst this is a work of fiction, the story is born from that time.
If you enjoy this book, I would love you to sign up to my mailing list. You can do that HERE, and I will let you know about offers and future work.
In the meantime, I leave you with Charlotte.....
For Stasinos, for making the impossible possible
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
The monster was the best friend I ever had.
Boris Karloff (1887-1969)
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty one
Chapter twenty two
Chapter twenty three
Chapter twenty four
Chapter twenty five
Chapter twenty six
Chapter twenty seven
Chapter twenty eight
Chapter twenty nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty one
Chapter one
Everybody around me celebrated. Everybody except me. They said it was the point in time when the balance tipped, when I finally agreed to let them help me. They told me on that day I woke up with red eyes, red as the Devil’s, Gregory said, like fire might burst through them, my pupils the craters of two angry volcanoes. Their description of me sounded like something rabid, wild, as if I had been set loose. For a time afterwards I imagined myself as a snarling dog, lips foaming and teeth on show. I imagined them holding me down to stop me biting those who were unlucky enough to get close. If I had been an animal I would have been euthanized or shot, put down out of my misery. But human misery is tolerated. It is allowed. It is necessary. Humans have a mandate to suffer their pain and work through it. We cannot be killed like dogs.
They used to discuss this moment with a reminiscent smile, sort of like, oh how it was back then. They would talk whilst I sat, inanimate like a discarded slipper tossed to the floor. They would discuss me idly, like they might deliberate a good wine or movie, the chatter chirruping around my head like birds in a spring sky. They would recall how willing I was back then when life was simple and good, before anybody had tried to die. Now their heads stay dipped, heavy with sadness at how far we have really fallen. At how far I have sunk. Now they see how pointless it all was.
I do not remember this moment in time. There was no light bulb moment or eureka as I came to understand the solution to the problem. To their problem. But I can imagine it. I can imagine what it must have been like. The words leaving my mouth at a rate so fast, that I would forget the meaning of the sentence before I had finished saying it. My heart beating me in the chest like a jackhammer, a rhythmical reminder that life was a punishment. I know my hair felt electrified and my skin crawled with bugs that felt like a million static shocks. Even the wind against my skin must have felt like an enemy, there only to break me into submission, to push me backwards. I know because I am starting to feel this same energy again. I believe that in my proximity to death, I had never felt so alive.
When there are things that I can’t remember they tell me what they want me to believe and they omit what they want me to forget. You see, the past is rather blurry now and I don’t remember clearly. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me anymore. Now it just feels like déjà vu, something there but not tangible in the real world. Most of what I will tell you about the past is based on other people’s experiences, their memories. I have learnt the recent past through their eyes, which is ultimately how they wanted me to see the world all along. Their own view of it has been forced upon me because there is no viable alternative. Like the Nazi party of pre-war Germany. It worked for a while. But now their version of the truth doesn’t always feel like it agrees with what I feel inside. Their truth is like a square shape that they bang repeatedly at a round hole in a child’s toy. Somehow it just doesn’t fit. It never will, no matter how many times you push it.
But the cruel trick of my amnesia is that I remember a lot about the distant past. I even remember my first day of school. I remember the blue plastic mattress that I sat on to listen to stories about princesses, and I remember the blond girl who sat next to me and seemed innately more perfect than I was, or could ever hope to be. I was chubby, and mousy, and even with only four years of life experience I was aware of my inadequacies, evident in my hand-me-down clothes and frizzy hair. The blond girl came to my birthday party that year and my father announced that she would be a heartbreaker when she was older. By way of omission, I assumed that I would not be.
I have spent the last few months trying to piece things back together. Gregory was trying to help at first, and so was Dr. Abrams. The women who live in my quiet street, the type of street that doesn’t deal with these sorts of problems, would prefer that I was normal and so they have helped me too. It is in their best interests. In their lives, I am the square building block and their life is the round hole. But I am used to not really fitting in, and they perhaps do not understand this.
The top left side of my head still throbs from time to time, and when I touch it I can feel it is still swollen. The hair has grown back but the scar is raised like an itchy row of beans. For a while I did as they told me to and I left it alone. It was easy whilst the dressing was there and I was pharmaceutically mellow, but once they removed the bandages I was drawn to it like a magpie to silver. It started because I found an almost undetectable flap of skin at the edge of the wound. It was something that had surrendered and dried, preparing to sacrifice itself for the benefit of new growth. But it was still attached when I found it and as I picked at the edge it lifted in a sharp moment of pain, an electric shock of relief and fresh blood. Now, unless I see blood on my fingertips each day I convince myself that it will re-collect, manoeuvring like a stealth army sent to drive me back to hos
pital, subdued by their medication with a tube down my throat. This might be why it hasn’t healed as well as it should have. When I wake to find blood on my pillowcase which flowed freely during the night without any effort on my part, I know it will be a good day.
When I first got home the routine was easier. I couldn’t do much and I was weak. So I did as I was told. I rested. I ate. I slept when I was told it was time. I took my tablets when prompted. But the constant following me around and over-enthusiastic care felt as suffocating as a pillow shoved into my mouth. I was numb. After a while I returned to work, but I found that I would get to a certain place and have no recollection of how I had got there. I would have a conversation with Martin or Phillipa in the morning in the office, and then when they asked me about it later I wouldn’t remember it at all and the swelling on my head would beat like a drum. Thump, thump, thump. I became so indifferent that I was no longer part of life. Life was just happening to me. I was void, empty, and I started to believe that it had to be better to feel something as opposed to nothing. At the time I couldn’t remember what it was that I used to feel. I couldn't remember what the truth felt like. If I had, maybe I would have felt differently. Maybe I would have continued to put the tablets on my tongue, rather than hide them on a shelf by my bed.
From what he has told me I have reconstructed my last moments in my old life. I have pieced them together like clips of old cine film so that they run in staccato, jagged motion, those last crazy moments before I ended up in the water in a puddle of blood like shark bait. I might remember the odd face or two as they pulled me out of the water, but they too are distant memories that I can’t fully recall and I wonder if it just my mind’s projection of facts I have been told. He tells me that there were many people watching. Tourists, who came out to feed the ducks, take a boat ride, to push children in pushchairs covered in ice cream and raspberry sauce. They all stopped to watch, making up their own version of events. What had I done? How had I done it? Was it an accident?
I realise now that people enjoy watching the misery of others. It’s the voyeur in us. It’s the dark secret that you won’t speak of, but would love to hear from another person. How many of us laugh when somebody trips or has food in their teeth? How many of us rubberneck at the scene of an accident? You stop to help even though you have no idea about first aid. Really you just want to get a closer look, to smell the iron rich blood as it runs over the tarmac, away from the screams. It’s the books about murder that sit behind your classics. It’s the gambling you do that your wife doesn’t know about. It’s the man you slept with behind his back, or the porn sites you watch once she has gone to bed. We all like the things we shouldn’t. It’s how we are programmed. I like to pick at my scars, bodily and mental. I liked to die, once upon a time. Everybody has their own guilty pleasure. But where we are all united is in the joy of another person’s suffering so that we can at least be thankful that it’s not us. Not this time, at least.
You might sit on the side of your bath at night and replay the good things you have done or imagined, reminding yourself that you must be a good person. Good, and lucky. Some people might look to their God to try to find out why bad things happen. Give me the answers they might beg, as if they didn't already know them. You’ll look in the mirror and ask why him, why her, when the misery threatens close to home. But we allow the misery of the human because it reminds us of our own worth. We were given misery for balance. We enjoy the pain of others because it makes us appreciate the good in our own lives, and so we cannot tolerate those who try to escape it. They are letting the rest of us down. Human misery is necessary. We tell those in pain that they must fight sorrow, work through it. Feel your pain, understand it. This is what they said to me. They wouldn’t let me die. They wouldn’t let me escape. They forced me to remember, to wake up, and now they regret it.
Thank God it’s not me, we all say.
But then one day, it is.
Chapter two
It was a morning without promise, where individual details seemed limp and insignificant. Through the shade of night not even the streetlamps were enough to bother a sleeping eye. Before I left the quiet of the bedroom I turned to look at him as he laid there, mouth wide and spit-caked. There was something crusting over his eyelids too, but I was used to his physical misfortunes and paid them little attention today. Under normal conditions Gregory is beautiful. But like a werewolf he suffers from a cruel affliction of nature, transforming into something much less appealing during the night.
I moved through the house over which night still hung like a shroud, the day ashamed to show its face. I arrived in the kitchen to find Ishiko already there. She too is beautiful, her features so delicate and symmetrical it is as if she was crafted by hand, sculpted from the finest porcelain. Her face lends itself to thoughts of her as a Geisha, and I often imagine her face as white as the softest powder snow of early winter, her red lips the only thing to spoil it like a bloody gash against otherwise perfect skin. Other times the image I see of the Geisha merges into something else. Once I came home to find Gregory sitting on a dining chair, casually pulled out from underneath the table as if he had by chance decided to sit down. She was dancing in front of him, her arms moving around in circular motion, her palms displayed as if inviting him to look, occasionally sweeping past her face in the great art of slow motion seduction. On that day I stood in the doorway picking at my head wound watching for a while, but they didn’t see me. Instead he continued to sip his tea, a smile inching on and off his face, until I left them there. This time her face appeared white like a corpse as if the life had slipped away from her. She wasn’t dancing in this image. She wasn’t even breathing.
Ishiko is our housemaid. Her name means little stone. I looked it up on the internet during a lucid moment after she arrived. I discovered that there were many beautiful names that her parents could have chosen from the list of Japanese names I found. Hatsu meant first born. I thought how beautiful it might be to be a Hatsu. Somebody’s first. Every day, and every moment that somebody spoke to you and said your name aloud would remind you of how precious you are. The first of everything. The first baby, the first nappy, the first feed, the first sleepless night, the first cry, the first labour, the first and most important love any person would ever feel. Another, Sakae, meant prosperous. Just by having that name I imagined my life could be easier. Tama, jewel. Setsu, fidelity. All wonderful names as rich in their sound as their meaning. A name like these offers promise. It means that when you were born your parents made promises to you. They knew things about your future, and that it would be good. Ishiko. Little stone. I find her name quite sad.
I hear him coming down the stairs whilst I am drinking my tea in the kitchen and I feel my skin tighten as if a spirit has passed through me. He avoids me and it is a temporary relief. He goes straight to the conservatory. He tries to get there before me every morning, and on a morning like today he will have woken up to find that I am not lying in bed reading as I normally do when I wake early and he will have rushed his way downstairs to try and beat me to the small wicker table. On the odd occasion that I arrive ahead of him he appears ashamed and deflated, like I have scuppered his plan, his purpose. I don’t know why, but he always stands up to greet me, like I am a stranger and we haven’t lived together for over two years. I don’t know why he does this. So I wait and sip my tea which she has made to perfection, whilst I wait for him to take his position. When I arrive in the conservatory his greeting is as expected. It looks and feels so formal, like I am a guest in my own home. He stands up to greet me, but lately his eyes no longer meet mine.
“Good morning,” he says as he lifts his buttocks out of his cushioned chair. I have prepared my face with a smile which he doesn’t notice. The way he says good morning is so uninspiring. It’s the opposite of a passionate kiss, or a nasty fight. It’s a kiss for an unloved grandmother, with no feeling behind it. He is nothing more than the image of a husband, a catalogue pose with one foot up
on the rocks and looking out to the ocean ahead. He is the page ninety nine in formal menswear of husbands. Most days I feel like I might die from suffocation in this place, but dying isn’t that easy, and I am not so lucky.
“Good morning, darling,” I reply. Page thirty six, the good wife clutching her husband’s arm, formal gilet and cargo pants. Perfect for sailing. I feel like we anchored in the middle of a squall but are pretending that we are still moored somewhere beautiful, like a lagoon of aquamarine which swallows you up as you dive into it. We are the couple that set forth on a Caribbean cruise, but blindly ventured into Cape Horn and are now treading water hoping that somebody will save us. We are not sailing, though. We don’t have a boat anymore.
“What menu do you think we should offer tonight?” I ask. “I was thinking about the venison, but I’m not sure if it’s the right choice. Perhaps if we have her prepare the pheasant, but there is always the possibility of the guests finding a shot. Do you remember last time? She didn’t find them all and poor Mr. Wexley broke a tooth.” I smiled throughout this little monologue, giggling occasionally, which I think made me appear friendly and caring. The reality is that I care no more about whether we serve the venison or pheasant than I did when Mr. Wexley broke his tooth because I believed he deserved it. I hate the pretentious bastard.
“I was thinking fish,” says Gregory. “We could begin with oysters, and then sushi. Ishiko prepares it very well.” This is his answer, proffered whilst he splits a croissant and heaps it with jam. The jam oozes out of the sides as he turns it around on his plate for inspection and it reminds me of obscene things. Especially the way his fingers are poking at it. Regarding the fish, I’m not sure if he is joking, if he wants to wind me up, or if he is just stupid. I believe it may be a combination of all of these things.
“I’m not sure that raw fish is a good menu choice. I would prefer venison.” He bites his croissant and the jam oozes into the corners of his mouth and I get the same sick thought about my own body. I have become obsessed by such thoughts of late and I am reminded that I am a woman by the simplest of things. Today is a croissant filled with jam. Yesterday was the neighbour’s cat who lounged on my front lawn licking at herself. I am disgusted by these thoughts and wonder if they will pass in due course. I hope so. I have begun to offend myself.
PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller Page 1
