I groaned as I pulled myself to my feet and limped my way towards the front door. I reached for the door handle and then froze.
I heard her sobbing on the other side of the door. Alice never cried for anyone or anything as long as I had known her. I didn’t even know that she could to be honest.
What could have happened?
Reluctantly, I opened the door and she fell straight into my arms. She buried her face into my chest and cried. Her whole tiny body shook and convulsed as she sobbed hysterically.
I held her against me, ignoring the shooting pain coursing through my body.
After a minute, I rested my hands on her and pulled her wet, sobbing face away.
“Alice, what’s wrong? What happened?”
Her face was buried into her hands, and her sleek blonde hair covered her face. I brushed the hair back and held her face up to meet mine.
“Alice?”
She looked at me through tear-filled eyes. Her lips quivered until finally they pursed open, and she said the words:
“Marcus is dead.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“What? How?”
“He took his life last night,” she managed. “Jonathan said he left a note.”
She finally stopped crying, shaking as she held her head up to regard me.
“Jesus, Pete, what happened last night?”
I let my hands fall from her face and tried to cover my swollen lips and black eye.
“Things got a little out of hand . . .”
“Marcus wrote about what had happened. Said he couldn't live with himself for what he had become, what we've all become . . .”
Alice tilted her head to gaze at my injuries.
“Fuck, Jason sure done a number on you.”
She tried to rub her hand against my face, but I softly brushed it away.
“Are we monsters, Pete?”
“I don't know.”
“I know Jason and Tony are for what they did—”
I let my head hang in defeat.
“—and I hope those fucking scumbags get what they deserve.”
Alice spat the words as they left a bitter taste in her mouth. Anger had devoured her sadness. The delusion of liking oneself, let alone anything or anyone had been shed. Dissolved like the countless pills she swallowed and crunched each day to numb it all out.
At that moment, I couldn't feel anger anymore. I had drained my reservoir and it was bone dry. Sorrow and guilt were the only things that remained underneath all that rage-filled sludge.
“The things Marcus wrote about made me sick . . . I'm so glad you tried to stop them.” She managed a ghost of a smile. “I used to think you were a monster, too.”
“Some days I still feel like one. I'm the one that caused all of this.”
“It was those two that caused all this! They could have killed her and . . . Marcus . . .”
Alice fought down the urge to cry again. Her eyes swelled. Her lips began to tremble.
“It's my fault,” I managed. “I should have done something sooner. I should have seen what they were becoming.”
She burrowed her head back into my chest and we mourned the loss of a friend.
That was the night we had our first overdose.
CHAPTER 23
We drank heavily into the early hours of the night in memory of Marcus and our former selves. We needed to feel numb for a little while. If this was how normal people felt, then I could hardly blame them for wanting to drown themselves in booze on a weekly basis.
Alice snorted lines of coke from every surface she could find. Her handbag was full of every narcotic you could imagine. A walking pharmacy of diet pills, anxiety pills, depression pills, iron supplements, youth rejuvenation creams, and, of course, cocaine. Somehow she always managed to have a small bag concealed somewhere inside the lining of each bag she owned.
An old habit from an old life. Things were simpler in the past things, back when we were simple people with simple problems.
The next morning, I woke up with a splitting pain in my head. I could not tell if it was from the beating the night before or all the booze. My brain leapt against the confinements of my skull like a nut in a loony bin. I needed an aspirin before I killed someone. As I raised my hands to massage my temples, the coldness of my room overtook me and made me shiver slightly. It was then that I suddenly noticed that I was naked in my bed.
Clothes were scattered around the room with casual disdain and disinterest. Like the aftermath of some kind of erotic tornado.
The noise of the bed sheets moving beside me indicated what I thought.
Flashbacks of the night began to replay in my mind. Little flashes and snippets like a film playing out of focus. Like the cinematographer trying to play back the reel of my memory was still too drunk or stoned to do his job right. As hard as I tried to replay them, my head simply throbbed far too bad to remember much.
Alice was asleep beside me. Her soft, blonde hair splayed over the bed like a shining halo. One hand was tucked beneath her pillow, the other disappeared beneath the white sheets. I stopped to admire her for one long minute. I'd never realised before what a beautiful, young, innocent woman she was until that very moment. I always knew her from one of two emotions: either frowning or smirking to some inside joke only she knew. At that very moment she looked peaceful and happy.
As if sensing me staring at her, a low smirk formed on her lips.
“I can understand why you’re so angry all the time.”
I raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“And why's that?”
“Because this place is a fucking dump.”
Alice laughed to herself and I joined in.
“I don't think I've ever seen you laugh,” I commented. Her eyes flicked open and shot me a sidelong grin.
“You probably think I'm just one of those stuck up selfish bitches, huh?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Hey, be nice!” She playfully nudged me and I winced in pain. A low seductive smirk formed upon her thin red lips.
“I like it though. You really ought to laugh and smile more.”
Her eyes fell towards the bed as if reality suddenly came crashing back.
“Pete, about last night . . .”
“I know.”
She rested her arm on the pillow and smiled up at me.
“I like you, Pete. I really do it's just . . .”
“Just what?”
“There are some things you don't know about me.”
“Like you and Jonathan, right?” I asked.
“Please, Jonathan's a fucking obsessed psychopath.”
She had a face unused to such rage, and lacking the folds and hooks to accommodate it. Old habits from an old life of Botox and heavy layers of makeup. Those same heavy layers of makeup and mascara were now cracked and smudged on her downcast face.
“How so?”
“He's just . . . he's obsessed! He leaves me messages, calls every day, he even threatened to kill himself if I didn't say I loved him. He's torturing me, Pete. That self-hating, narcotic artist—but it's not just about him . . .
“Then what?”
“Pete . . . I . . . I can't trust guys . . . I can't . . .”
“Alice, it’s okay—”
“When I was younger I was—”
Her face looked so blank and lifeless at that very moment. For once, there was no smirk, no frown. Just emptiness. She looked so weak and vulnerable.
“Men are pigs. That’s what I learnt from a young age. The basis of my childhood education. So, yeah, if I seem a little bitchy at times, well, there you have it.”
I wrapped my bruised arms back around her. She gently slid back to my side and rested her tired head against my chest.
“Usually I just fuck and chuck guys.”
“I'm sorry, 'fuck and chuck?'”
“Please. Don't play so naïve, Pete. I know I can get any man I want, so I fuck them, get what I want from them,
and then chuck them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“To hurt them I suppose. It's the only way I really can. Hurt their dicks, hurt their ego.” She turned onto her side and pulled the blanket up over her exposed breasts. “Plus I didn’t get this far into my career by being a nice girl.”
She let out a tired sigh.
“I think you’re the only guy I can trust in this entire world and that thought scares the life out of me.”
I said nothing, but let the thought hang in the air.
“We can't just sit around while those rapists are out there. You know we have to do something.”
“Like what?”
“We have to kill them.”
FROM THE DIARY OF PETER CLAYTON
I once asked Jason what he thought about the Bali terror attacks of 2002. Back before all of this, we used to talk a lot about humanity’s desire for monsters to be real. This infamous act was when a car bomb detonated near a club full of Australian tourists.
He stared deeply at the picture I held in my hand.
“Look at that picture,” I told him. “Think about the victims inside. They were just dancing and laughing and having a good time when Muslim fundamentalists decided the best way to get the world behind their cause was to make those innocent, joyful tourists die horribly in flames.”
His face visibly twitched as the toxic words found his ears.
“Think about the culprits watching it burn, listening to the screams, smugly confident this act would somehow get them into heaven.”
I held the picture mere inches from his face. His face turned as red as the flames.
“How does that make you feel? What does that make you want to do?”
He grabbed the picture from my hands and tore it into ribbons before throwing it back into my face, writhing with barely-controlled rage.
“Okay, now, how does it make you feel when I tell you that picture was not of the Bali bombings, but rather a completely accidental nightclub fire that happened a year later in Rhode Island, in which a hundred people died due to a pyrotechnics malfunction?”
“I . . . shit, man. What are you doing getting me all fired up like that for?”
“It barely registers, doesn't it?”
Jason nodded as if he was beginning to understand.
“It's because of rage. Because we've been trained to act in a certain way—not to danger, but to monsters.”
“But anger alone isn't enough, right?” Jason chimed in. “It needs to be going somewhere?”
I nodded approvingly.
“It's right there, right in front of us. In all our movies, in all the biggest speeches, a war against unspeakable, inhuman evil is the only thing that makes us unite and put our differences aside. If it weren't for rage, we’d never have become a civilised society.”
See why we must do these Playdates? You see why they are so important?
CHAPTER 24
“Do you think God is angry?”
I had begun looking for other outlets to talk about my anger. I couldn't face the thought of seeing Sarah again so soon, and the old place just made me think of her, made me think of Marcus.
It all felt so forced, so plastic being in a church again. I was never a religious person, but something about confessional booths unsettled me—a certain dull, gleam of complacent claustrophobia. Like being locked in a wooden coffin with only your sins to keep you company and to keep you warm. The more sins you have, the warmer you’ll be, right?
The feeling of being buried alive wasn’t anything new to me. Try spending seven years in my apartment and then see how you feel.
“I mean, all throughout the Bible he's preached as a loving father yet look at all he done: he caused the floods, which killed thousands, spread diseases. Just take a look at the Black Plague that killed off three quarters of the world’s population. And yet, despite all that anger and vengeance and sending his children, which he apparently loves, to burn in horrible agony for eternity; he is still known as the almighty? Almighty asshole is more like it,” I said.
“Anger is not always a sin. You ever hear of 'righteous indignation'?”
The voice asked, choosing to ignore my last remark. He had not risen to the bait as I expected he would.
“It's basically God-given energy. Anger is not always a sin. Two Greek words in the New Testament are translated as ‘anger’. It can be of defence of others or a principle.”
“Then God must really love me to make me so angry,” I answered.
“You're not an angry person, my son—just motivated. Tell me, you want to make the world a better place, don’t you?”
I could feel the shadow of the priest softly smiling back at me.
“You take a look outside of this church lately? This city has gone to shit.”
“Keep calm my son,” he said. “Anger is not an argument.”
“The world needs anger. If it wasn't angry, would it not be evil?”
The priest let out a sigh. That kind of sigh old people have reserved for when they’re just plain old tired. Tired of living and tired of listening to people half their age complaining about how hard and difficult they have it. Tired of the ignorance of youth and how each generation claims to ‘have it the worst.’
Here he was probably hoping it was a simple confession that a couple of hail Marys would fix, but fate would dictate that it was me he met on this cold autumn night. I could feel him getting slightly frustrated, but he kept it well sedated, like a slumbering beast behind his words.
A part of me wanted to see the beast he hid inside.
“Anger is a killing thing my son: It kills the man it angers, for each rage leaves him with less than he had before.”
The words and gathering silence made me feel rather uncomfortable. Out of reflex, I reached into my pocket to pull out a cigarette. Luckily for him, I was all out.
“Was there anything else?”
I paused for a moment. If it was a confession of my sins he wanted, then he’d better clear up the rest of his daily schedule.
“All year I prayed for a new car. I prayed for a job, a better apartment, a better life. Then once I realised God doesn’t work that way, I stole.”
The shadow of the priest visibly shifted in his seat through the mesh wiring.
“Stealing is a great sin, my son.”
“Nothing physical of course—I stole their sense of security, their pride, their arrogance and left them with something different. I left them with fear and anger.”
Now it was his turn to let the silence hang in the air.
“I tried praying a lot a few years ago. I prayed for people to improve. To show compassion for their fellow humans, to try to actually help others rather than feeling the intention is simply enough. I guess it’s one of the things that makes me angriest in life.”
“Holding onto anger is like holding onto a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burnt.”
“A Buddhist man, are you?” I smirked. Already another person had entered the other confessional booth and I began to wonder how long until this priest would simply grow tired and refer me to a psychiatrist to get the help I probably needed—or the cops most likely.
“There is wisdom in every man,” he answered rather sharply. “Now, are you going to tell me your sins?”
“That all depends,” I said. “Is it a sin to help kill a man?”
* * *
It was not much longer until he finally just referenced me towards sections of the Bible and sent me on my way. Straight away, another person entered the booth, and I could hear another tired sigh as the voice began his confession. Something told me that he would not sleep tonight after the things I had said. With a bit of luck, his world was probably a whole lot darker and he would lie awake late at night thinking, ‘yes, this generation is the worst.’
I read the sections he had told me to out of curiosity. I had little else to do while everyone else was at work, and my practice a
lways told me it was best to wait a while between each Playdate. It keeps your clients wanting more. ‘Keep them loyal and always under control’, is what they say to do—however terribly I had done at that.
They always say you can never trust a junkie. I couldn’t tell whom to trust anymore. Everything had a blood-red tint to it now. But still, I had my code of conduct to follow. At that moment, I wasn’t even sure if there would ever be another Playdate.
How wrong I had been.
* * *
All gods throughout history have been angry. Angry and jealous—we are just ashamed to admit it, but it is true. If truly we were created in God’s image, then surely rage must be a part of him too or else would it not have been omitted? If it wasn’t meant to be used, then why was it such a powerful (yet suppressed) driving force in the world?
Christians believe in God's anger at the sight of evil. This anger is not inconsistent with God's love, as demonstrated in the Gospel where the righteous indignation of Christ is shown in the Cleansing of the Temple. Christians believe that those who reject his revealed word, Jesus, condemn themselves, and are not condemned by the wrath of God. This of course stems back to Adam and Eve.
Was perpetual happiness so boring that eating the apple was justified? If not for God’s anger, would we still all be sitting in the garden with nothing to do? Why is it considered a sin for us to act upon our anger or harbour grudges when the basis of religion is built upon anger and rage?
Not all anger is sinful because to some degree, and on some occasions, it is inevitable.
Saint Basil viewed anger as a "reprehensible temporary madness”. Turns out the priest knew more about my problem than he cared to lead on.
I awkwardly sat on my leather couch, popped another painkiller, and took out my old yellow highlighter, drawing hard yellow slashes across an old copy of the Bible I owned. Or possibly, I had stolen from a hotel room. It was hard to recall.
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