by Lee Isserow
It's been a while since I last wrote.
But you know what, it's been more than a while since you last responded, so I'm only following your example.
“I learned it from you, Dad, I learned it from watching you!”
Are you keeping up with the local news?
Our local news is probably different to your local news, wherever the hell you are these days...
How about looking at a calender? Or maybe you've spent the last thirty years crossing off the days in your mind like I have. Somehow I doubt it..
He was released yesterday.
Did you know that?
If you did know, do you even care?
God, I don't even know why I bother writing to you, it pisses me off just to spit these words out, and I've already got so much damn anger bubbling away at the complete and utter impotence I have at that bastard being out.
That's the point, maybe.
The same realisation I get during each and every one of these emails, that I have so much hate, so much anger that I don't let out. Repress and repress and repress. That's what you said, that's what the therapists said.
Everyone wants me to bury the rage.
Aren't I entitled to feel some damn rage?
“Feel, but don't act.” that's what they all said, like they had all been reading from the same script.
Oh God, you didn't coach them, did you?
Jesus, now I'm questioning everything about my reality.
How can you screw my life up more by not being a part of it than you did while you were here...
Dammit, that's not fair. I'm as angry at myself as I am at you.
More at myself than I am at you.
Because I had a chance to make it right, and I failed.
Don't ask, it's not something I can talk about over email.
Sure you'll respond to these messages at some point, huh?
Quite the backlog to get through, and knowing you, you'll start at the beginning and work your way to the present so you can do an empirical analysis of the narrative.
Hope you're ok.
B.
10
Ben sent the email during the lunch break, to an address that appeared to still be accepting mail, even though he hadn't had a response in well over five years. A part of him wondered if his father was dead. A smaller part hoped he was dead. But for the most part, Ben wanted his father to be alive and healthy, even though he was well aware that each and every one of his stream of consciousness rants read like a mental patient going back and forth, to and fro over whether they loved or hated the recipient.
He didn't love his father. He didn't love anything or anyone. That part of him dried up and died long ago. He tolerated, that was the closest he got to love, and Ben was all too aware that toleration was very far removed from the concept of love.
A long, troubled sigh forced its way out through his lips, and Ben glanced out the window. The children were running around, playing, laughing. There was a soft pulse in the lower middle of his skull as vague memories made themselves known. The pressure wormed around that section of his brain, sending out waves of foreign emotions from times long gone by. Times when he was free of weight of the world. When he was still innocent. He longed to be able to return to those days more than anything, even though he knew it wasn't even remotely possible.
His eyeline shifted. There was movement in the window. His focus was too slow to adjust, as the blur of a car on the street on the far side of the playground suddenly burst to life and skittered away.
The knots in his gut wrenched themselves tighter than ever before, and a shiver ran down his spine. He knew he was paranoid. Knew it was borderline delusional to buy into what his mind was telling him. Even though he knew that, it felt clear as day. He was being watched.
11
As the days went on, they started to blur together. The routine had a habit of doing that for Ben. Tuesday became Thursday became the following Monday, then it was suddenly Wednesday, then Friday of the week after next. However, the routine was good, it was starting to feel as if the actions all those weeks previous were just fragments of an awful dream – and Ben knew awful dreams all too well.
Although time sped by, his paranoia didn't dissipate. Every time he was walking or driving anywhere, it felt like there were eyes on him. Every window Ben stood in front of gave him a twinge of worry that he was in the crosshairs of some unseen assassin. It was never the same car he saw out of the corner of his eye, never the same people on the street, and yet knowing that didn't alleviate the dread that was growing under his skin.
Somehow, half term crept up on Ben, and before he knew it, he was being invited by his colleagues for celebratory drinks at the local pub.
“No more of those little bastards for a full week!” Mary declared, raising a glass. Mary was the deputy head, and had four primary-age children of her own. The drink already consumed that evening seemed to have washed away the realisation that she was going to be trapped with them for a week, and according to the tales she told, all of them were loud and obnoxious little trolls. None of the others decided to point that out to her, and clinked glasses.
Ben didn't have much to offer in terms of conversation, but was enjoying being in their company. The constant chatter from them, and the other patrons of the bar, was providing a calming white noise. His thoughts and worries were drifting away into the sea of amorphous voices. He realised there was a smile on his face, a genuine smile, and couldn't remember the last time one of those has come to him. It had been a stressful month. A stressful year. A stressful three decades. But it finally felt like things were slotting back into place. His smile grew wider as he started thinking about where his new outlook might lead him next. He might be able to make actual friends. From there maybe he could get to the point were he was able to date. If that worked out, then there was the chance, somewhere far down the road, that he could possibly fall in love.
He smiled wider at the prospect, all too aware that it was based on a fantasy. There were a lot of hurdles to overcome before he got to that point.
“You coming?” asked Andrew, towering over Ben at his full height on those freakishly long, thin flamingo legs.
“What?” asked Ben, he had drifted far, far beyond the conversation happening around him.
“We're moving on to the Prince's Head.”
Ben looked around, and saw the rest of the teachers that had been sitting down at the table were grabbing their coats and bags and were assembling at the door. “Oh, no...” Ben stammered. “I'm going to head home.”
Andrew rolled his eyes. “Booooring,” he shouted, as he walked over to the others. His disproportioned body was wavering with every step, as if his upper body had no musculature of its own, wobbling over to the left as his right leg moved forwards, left leg shimmying ahead to send his body back towards the right to stop him toppling over.
The others waved at Ben, and he gave them a small wave back, before staring down into what was left of his drink. He hadn't picked it, Andrew insisted he try some kind of craft ale, and it was leaving a bitter aftertaste on his tongue that didn't seem to be budging. Ben pushed the glass away and tried to return to the blissful state of mindlessness that came with immersing himself in the white noise. It wasn't working. Someone had started playing a quiz machine behind him, and the questions were being shouted all too loudly by the machine, and even louder by the participants repeating them to one another.
He got up from the table, grabbed his coat and left the pub. Over the last few hours he had been able to steal a few moments of peace, and was happy with that, even if it was only temporary. Next time, he hoped, it would be longer. Longer still the time after that. And then, perhaps, the rest of his dreams for normalcy could begin to be made flesh.
Strong hands grabbed the collar of his jacket as he passed the alley round the side of the pub, pulling him in and throwing him up against the wall. He saw a glint, but didn't register it as a knife at first. Fighting his attacker's gra
sp with all his strength was a mistake, as he tried to push forward, free himself of the hand holding him in place, he slid his abdomen on to the blade in the process.
Ben gasped as his flesh was pierced, felt his skin tearing open. The breeze from the cool night's air wafted up through the slim hole made in his shirt. He could feel the blood dripping, picturing the knife gliding in through his intestines.
“Stupid bastard!” his attacked shouted. He recognised the voice, but couldn't place it. “Only meant to rough you up, scare ye' and teach y'a bloody lesson...”
The knife angled up, tip puncturing a lung, the breath instantly became weak in Ben's chest. He looked down. There was so much blood, and he felt so cold.
The knife was wrenched out, tearing upwards at the thin slit in his gut, making it four times as tall as it was upon entry. Ben couldn't feel his legs, and fell to the floor. The alley melted away, consumed by darkness, and he welcomed unconsciousness. He knew that in its embrace the pain would stop. But soon, all he could hear was screaming.
12
The nightmare came to him almost instantly, but it was transposed from his childhood home to the alley. His killer was playing the role of his mother, but whereas she fought with a gallant silence, he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Just as Ben had witnessed time and time again, jaws of jagged dark brown teeth formed themselves from the body of the glutinous crimson beast. They rose high in the air, then came rushing down, tearing through the soft flesh of his neck. The jaws clamped over his head, barely any blood spurting to the ground. Slurping sounds emanated from the creature's head, as it began to suck the attacker dry.
The screams became gurgles, the man's mouth trapped in the creature's liquid body, drowning him in his own fluids as they were siphoned by the hideous fiend, its body engorging as the six litres of the attacker's blood were ingested, one by one.
The gurgled screams became more laboured, becoming softer, quieter. Then the screams stopped altogether.
Once again, Ben was adrift in the blissful emptiness of white noise. Surrounded by darkness.
13
The darkness held, until pierced by sirens that were distant at first, but drew closer all too quickly. As the noise came near, so too did flashes of light, tinting the dark void with their cyan glimmers.
Ben was jerked into waking by thick, sturdy hands pulling him from the ground. He expected his legs to still be weak, but they seemed to have little trouble supporting him, even if it did feel like they were carrying a heavier load than normal. Cuffs clinked on his wrists, and as they shoved him into the back of the police car, he became aware that the officer was reading him his rights, but Ben could barely make sense of the words. His focus was at the scene over his shoulder. The far side of the alley cordoned off with blue and white striped police tape, large lights on stands illuminating the grisly scene. At the centre of the alley, a body lay, motionless. There were large gashes around the neck, just as there would have been from the monstrosity in his dream, and there was remarkably little blood for such a gruesome murder. Speckles of it seemed to wet the pavement beneath the corpse. The majority of the fluids were over the victim's face and hair. His scraggly blonde locks slick and matted with a deep, dark red.
Ben knew what this looked like. What the police would assume. A few weeks ago, it's how he would have wanted James to die. But now suddenly faced with the reality, with the body, and the police slamming the door on him, preparing to drive him away from the scene as a murder suspect, he wished more than anything that this was still part of that transposed nightmare.
14
Ben was made to wait in an interrogation room. It was smaller than he expected from his binge watching of police procedurals. The walls were a cold, dull grey, a single florescent tube sat in a socket built into the ceiling that could fit two, vignetting the corners of the room with shadows. He was sat on the far side of the room, opposite a two way mirror. Two empty chairs were laid out on the other side of the table, waiting for detectives to sit in them. He stared at himself in the mirror, that feeling of being watched rearing its ugly head again.
The thought suppressed itself as he studied his reflection. Ben stood up, inspected the tear in his shirt from where he distinctly remembered the knife penetrating his flesh. The hole was still torn in his shirt, but there was no blood on the material, not a single drop.
He pulled the shirt up. There was a five inch long gash straight up his belly, a line of wet blood lingering on the surface of the wound. He ran his finger along it. The wound stung, but no blood came away. He licked his finger and ran it along the injury again, pressing down on it with a little force. This time his finger sunk into the cut, and he slipped it down the full length of the slash in his abdomen. It made a squishing sound, and hurt like hell, bringing tears to his eyes. He pulled his digit from the hole. It sealed up. The line of wet blood was still lingering on the surface, but once again, no blood came away on his finger.
The door opened, and he dropped his shirt back down, a wash of guilt coming over him, like his grandparents had just walked in on him masturbating.
“Please take a seat, Mister Graham,” said the first detective, in a thick cockney accent. He was the older of the two, balding and stout, a thick, greying moustache sitting lazily on the top of his lip
Ben did as instructed, praying that the guilt he was feeling wasn't going to come across as guilt of the murder.
“I'm Detective Harris,” the elder detective continued. “This is Detective Levine.” He gestured to his younger colleague, who was small in stature, but had wide shoulders that supported a tiny head that seemed to be perpetually nodding along to a steady beat only he could hear.
“Quite a messy bit of business, down by the Queens.” Levine said, his tone sharp, words enunciated in a tight received pronunciation. He continued to nod to the beat. ”Messy, and yet, devoid of mess.”
“That is a curious thing, isn't it?” Harris added. The question appeared rhetorical, so Ben said nothing. “You wouldn't happen to be able to clear up a few details, would you Mister Graham?”
Ben didn't have any details to add, and shrugged.
“We are well aware of your connection to the victim,” Levine said, a small, proud smile coming to his lips. “But it's painfully obvious that the murder itself did not take place in the alley behind the Queens...”
“And your car is still in your driveway.” Harris added, pre-emptively, it seemed, as the statement caused Levine's smile to fade. ”Question is,” Harris continued, seemingly unaware of Levine's annoyance. “Where'dya kill him, and how'dya move him?”
“I didn't...” Ben stammered. This caused Harris to roll his eyes, and Levine to purse his lips.
“It's hard to believe that, given your history...” said Harris. “Given that he butchered your mother, and has spent thirty years at her majesty's pleasure for the crime.”
Ben took in a slow, deep breath at the use of the word butchered. He almost said something, about maybe believing James's story of innocence, but caught himself before the words came out.
Going down that path would only lead to questions about how he came to that conclusion, and that would lead to admitting that he assaulted the man who assaulted him in turn. The man whose murder he was now on the line for. He tried to quell the murmurs going on in his subconscious; that were telling him this was exactly what he wanted, and thus, this interrogation is the least of what he deserved.
“Let's start at the beginning. How did you come to be in that alley with Mister Carter?” Levine asked.
“He grabbed me,” Ben said. “Pulled me in, threatened me with a knife. Check his hands, you'll find fibres from my coat where he grabbed me.” he stopped himself from quoting further from the documentaries he had watched. Knowledge of basic police procedure was one thing, but to tell them how to do their job would make him appear cocky, and that never worked out well for anyone sitting on his side of the interrogation table.
“We a
re doing just that, Mister Graham,” Levine said, with a steely gaze. “We are also retrieving the CCTV footage from the pub, which I'm sure is going to tell quite a story.”
“It'll prove I didn't do it,” Ben said, coldly.
“Will it?” asked Harris.
“I blacked out after he stabbed me. Someone else must have intervened...”
“Ah yes, your 'stabbing',” Harris said with a scoff. “Curious how it didn't leave any blood on the knife, don'tcha think?”
“Nor on your shirt,” Levine added.
Ben lifted up his shirt to show them the gash up his abdomen. “Does this look like I'm making it up?”
“Barely looks like a scratch.” Harris said. “If it were deep enough to cause you any real damage, to make you pass out, you'd be in a hell of a lot of pain, mate. Not to mention your blood should've been everywhere. Don'tcha agree, Detective Levine?”
“I do, Detective Harris. EMTs said they tried to put pressure on your wound, and not a drop of blood came away.”
“Not to mention the Scene Of Crime blokes didn't find a trace of your blood on the scene... barely any of the victim's either.”
“So looks like the body was moved from the site of the murder, would've been quite the messy scene from what I gather, not a drop left in the poor sod from what I hear.”
“I don't know anything about that...” Ben said. Harris rolled his eyes and scoffed. Levine released a long and heavy sigh.
“We'll see if you're a little more talkative when we have a look at the CCTV.” Levine said. “Sure that'll make it a little clearer for all of us...” He rose to his feet and caught Harris's eye. The two of them walked to the door, took a final look back at Ben, and left him alone in the interrogation room to stew.
