Sunshine and picnics and goofy shit like that, I see that kind of thing from afar and it all seems very nice.

But that’s for other people. These days, I just observe. I haven’t participated ever since I lost my script. I never thought of looking for a new one. I found the role I was born for but someone else pipped me at the post at the audition. It was then I decided to take a bow and leave via stage-left. I took my seat in the stalls, watching the play from a distance.

It’s ok.

Truly.

I like it here.

Ok, I’m not that ecstatic but I never get that sad and that’s the deal I’ve cut. Pretty girls may come, but pretty girl always go. That’s as sure as shit in a baby’s pants.

I remember that morning clearly, almost twenty years ago now….

*

I woke up that morning and was full of the broken promises of spring. Dead weeds and rusted supermarket trolleys fill my yard.

That’s just how it is.

I was supposed to go into work but I couldn’t be fucked. Eva was my manager and she was on always on my case. She never liked me ever since I refused to do a dumb mains check one day. This entailed crawling under every desk amongst the dust and rat nests of cables, making sure the date-label on each plug matched that of the device it was attached to.

It was unnecessary bullshit and I pointed this out but no one wanted to listen. Some even hated me for it.

I guess some people just like the security of a steady ship, regardless of its direction be it north, south, east or west.

Or even downwards.

I worked there for a year before my final year at university where I studied computer science. Sorry, I didn’t say – I worked as a junior computer programmer for BT. knew the gig was a sick one from the moment I started. I remember that first day as clearly as that time I nearly drowned when I was seven. That first morning, around ten o’clock I think it was, the entire new intake sat around a table. I looked around.

I never saw such a sorry circle of wet bags in one gathering that didn’t have the banner ‘Baptist Youth for Christ’ outside the front door.  Short back and sides, glasses and blue shirts and good old Ulster standard-issue double-chins a plenty.

A manager, Mike Lee sat in the middle.

He reminded me of then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. He did have something of the night about him too.

He laughed at his own lame jokes. His eyes darted from side to side. He was one of the scariest people I had ever met. His head looked like a shark that pulled the skin of man’s head over itself.

I then noticed everyone’s suits.

All dark.

Well cut.

Identical.

Unlike mine.

I was bumming around home that summer and hadn’t two farts of a starved rat to rub together. After a hot and heavy June and July spent chasing my best friend’s sister, a letter arrived from BT’s Engineering Centre.

Dear Mr Paulson, your employment will commence on Monday August 2^nd. Please arrive at Royston House at 9am sharp.

I had no suit and I had no tie.

Dad lent me a few hundred quid and within days, I was back in Belfast, with a holdall and my Dad’s old grey suit.

The same old grey suit I now wore. It’s hard to say how I felt except I felt like a twenty-one year old man wearing an ill-fitting suit that belonged to a sixty year old man who was born in the 1930’s.

I stuck out like a poor thumb.

A series of senior computer programmers then came into the room to give very austere messages about the hundred and one ways I could be fired.

I listened intently for all the wrong reasons.

After a buffet lunch of finger food and stilted conversations, a series of managers came into the room to claim each of the new intakes for their own. One by one, I saw each of the mice being carried off in the talons of a grey suited hawk to some even greyer part of the building where they eagerly started a life of waiting for retirement and death

It’s the done thing.

It’s called aspiration.

Then Eva came in. She was one of the few women in the joint but to say she was a rose in a garden of thorns, well that would have been a lie. I used to nickname the office The Cactus, full of sap on the inside, full of pricks on the outside and my golly wasn’t she the sharpest prick of them all.

She never did take to me.

I was her second assignment. The first one under her charge was a born-again silver-spooner and the sun of Christ did shine from his perfect little arse. I was a rough cut and I didn’t fit into this beach of bland sand and smoothed down pebbles. She spent the rest of the year throwing acidic comments at how wonderful he was whenever I was in earshot. I guess she was trying to sprinkle my path with broken glass but she didn’t bank on my wearing Doctor Martens.

Sometimes, only sometimes, I felt something sharp but I never looked down. Pain goes away in the end, no matter how deep it is.

My first task was to write a price comparison program that compared the price of business and domestic phone calls between BT and Mercury Communications.

Nothing I did was ever good enough and holes were picked where there was no fucking fabric to pick a hole in. My year was spent pretty much in this vein of having my self-respect being slowly sucked into this vortex of soul destruction.

It was November when I met Sharon.

I was down visiting my folks in my hometown that weekend and it was the Sunday night bus back to the big city. My Dad dropped me off and sped on. I wanted to be there early to be first in the queue and to smoke a few Marlboro lights and have a good think. Most of my thoughts were about leaving but I was the first in the family to go to University and leaving would have broken my mother’s heart. Poor mother. She thought I was a little Bamber Gascoigne or a Stephen Fry, dressed in tweeds having erudite conversations with high minded people in the ante-rooms of libraries. Little did she know I was heading for a first class honours degree in alcoholism, debt and playing Russian-roulette with VD.

I had smoked a few cigarettes while sitting under the plastic hood of the bus shelter when I realised that it was only five minutes to departure. No one else was in the queue. It didn’t seem right. By now, the place would have been heaving with students and strange looking men with grey drawn faces who looked like they had cut out their trouser pockets and liked to sit beside young men.

But I was alone until Sharon arrived.

It was freezing cold. I was wearing a shirt, a jumper and a thick grey coat but the cold, like ill-will, always finds a way inside. The first thing I noticed about Sharon was how ill-dressed she was for the weather. She looked like a pretty icicle. She wore a skimpy white blouse that looked more like a christening gown and a thin PVC bum-freezer. I never saw a girl look more innocent in my entire life.

Looking back, I think I just wanted to meet an angel.

I asked her if she’d like a coffee and she said ok. The town was still a stranger to Sunday opening so the only place that was open was the Royal Arms Hotel, right in the middle of Main Street.

Inside the lobby, I remember how reassuringly brown the whole place was. The carpets, the walls, the furnishings. No-one objects to brown. It’s the colour no one loves. Funny how lowest common denominators are never really that common at all. It’s what’s left when what everyone really wants is taken away.

We talked about the music we liked. She liked Blur. I liked Depeche Mode. She didn’t like them because they wore leather jackets. I let it go. God knows what leather jackets reminded her off. I was old enough to realise that foibles are never chosen. We talked about the friends we had and what we did and what we wanted to do when we grew up. I was twenty-two and she was nineteen. To be frank, nearly twenty years later, I’m still waiting to grow up.

I checked my watch. Time had slipped quickly like a drunken bum in an ice-rink. It was nearly time for the bus. We hot-footed it to the station and boarded just in the nick of time. It was packed out and there were no double seats left so we had to sit on different parts of the bus for that ninety minute journey.

I have to tell ya that those ninety minutes felt like a thousand years. I kept looking behind me to where she was sitting to see her face. She must have been staring at me the whole time for every time I looked over my shoulder, there she was, looking right back at me.

When the bus pulled in, I made my way out onto street and waited for her. Down the steps she came. I asked her if she was cold. She said she wasn’t but I know a shiver when I see one.

So I took off my grey overcoat and draped it over her shoulders. She looked up me from under her eyes, smiling a thank you to me.

You’re welcome, angel I smiled back. Sometimes words break the spell. There was little magic in my life and I was damned if I wasn’t going to bottle that dust-devil of a feeling.

This was the early nineties and mobile phones were still the stuff of the TV show Tomorrow’s World. I lived in shitty shared house in the student quarter but at least it had a landline. We swapped numbers but she told me she lived in Bangor, twenty miles away. Neither of us owned a car but there was a decent enough train service so we agreed to meet the next day. I walked her to Botanic train station and we waited only fifteen minutes until her train pulled in. We embraced and kissed before I had to let her go.

Man that sucked.

It was a Sunday and I realised that I hadn’t booked the next day off but I hadn’t taken any sick days so I thought fuck it and spent that evening in my room smoking weed and listening to Radio One, counting the seconds until I fell asleep so I could time travel to Monday double quick.

Around midnight, after Bob Harris whispered good night, I crashed out.

The next day, I phoned in sick, using the best dreary woe-is-me-phone-in-sick voice I could muster. No-one talks like that when they really are sick. I hammed it up so much I nearly tasted bacon. Eva said see you tomorrow in a downbeat I-know-you’re-bullshitting-but-I-don’t-care kinda voice.

I ran down the Stranmillis Road, through Botanic Gardens and all the way down to the train station. I was forty minutes early for the train but I couldn’t wait. I chain smoked like a chimney on fire.

The train pulled in and I hopped on. It was 10:40am. There weren’t too many people on the carriage apart from myself. A well dressed elderly man in green corduroy trousers, checked dark twill shirt and matching tie and brown tweed jacket was reading the Newsletter. In the seat to my left across the aisle was a fat dude in a tracksuit, deafening himself with that rave racket that passed for music. No harm to him but he looked like he would do himself a favour by losing the map to Mickey D’s now and then.

The sound of thump-thump leaked from his ninety-nine pence headphones like an aural oil-spill and it was rapidly drowning the cormorants of my good humour.

I cast him a glare.

He returned a smile.

He then started nodding his head in time to the music and closed his eyes and sank into chav-reverie.

I sighed and resigned myself to the train-travellers hazard of Other Passengers and looked out the window as the train cut through the city like a voyeur’s knife, passing by endless rows of unkempt backyards and curtainless windows.

Half an hour later, the train pulled into Bangor train station. I glanced over at the raver dude. He was reading a book. It looked quite thick. I was impressed. I got up and I noticed the edges were coloured gold.  He looked up and smiled again.

Fuck me; this dude wants to be my friend. He lifted the book and showed to me while removing his headphones.

“The Bible” he lisped.

“Uh huh”

“I’m a friend of Jesus”

“Uh huh”

I grabbed my bag and scurried off like a mouse in front of a dozy cat. Strange country.

Her you can find Jesus in the strangest of places. They should twin this hellhole with Alabama and be done with it.

I found a cluster of BT and Mercury payphones inside the terminal building so I went to one of the Mercury ones on principle. I lifted the handset and rummaged in my pocket for a clatter of silver and shoved a bunch of ten and twenty pence pieces through the slot. I then reached inside my jacket pocket and took out her number that was written on a folded white envelope.

I memorised it and dialled.

“Hello” answered an old lady.

Sharon boarded with an old lady.

I said hello and introduced myself and asked to speak to the girl.

“I’m sorry but she moved out last night”

I explained that I only met her the day before in my hometown and that we arranged to meet.

“I’m sorry young man but she’s moved in with her friend Chris on Dufferin Avenue. I can give you her address if you can wait a moment”

My mouth dried up. I think all its moisture went to the palms of my hands. I felt sick.

“She never mentioned this”

“She never mentioned it to me neither. She told me this morning after breakfast. She packed her case and called a cab and off she went. I have to admit, I was a little surprised. She is usually quite a sensible girl for her age. She came downstairs, had her toast and cup of tea like she always does. Then she told me. I didn’t know she had a friend Chris. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t”

“Oh, well, I hope he’s good to her but I do worry. Well, she left a forwarding address. Let me go to my address book”

I thanked her and waited.

Dufferin Avenue.

Nicknamed Sufferin’ Avenue. Twinned with Skidsville. A lost soul of a street full of the lost souls who wash up on its rocks from their shipwrecked lives. A half-way house between here and hell. Runaways, dropouts, on the runs, ex-children’s home kids who make the mistake of turning eighteen and have stopped being cute.

And my angel face.

What the hell was going on I wondered. I repeated this question to myself like a neurotic mantra.

The old lady returned to the phone and gave me a house number.

21c

Dufferin Avenue. To this day it’s the kind of place where every address ended in a letter.

I thanked the old lady and slammed down the phone. I didn’t bother retrieving the change. I heard the coins fall into the tray like a win on a fruit machine but I sure didn’t feel like a winner.

Anything but.

I couldn’t waste a second.

I ran out of the terminal building and saw a taxi rank to the right. I jumped into the cab at the head of the queue and gave the driver the address.

Minutes later I was in Dufferin Avenue. I had never seen it before but its notoriety preceded it.

Now it was in front of me.

Jesus Christ. The Devil has a colony.

It didn’t me long to find 21c. The front door had seen better days. It was once painted blue but now long chipped and weather worn. Two of the six glass panels were broken and replaced with cardboard. One of them had the Kellogg’s Frosties logo facing outwards. I couldn’t help thinking of the policeman’s elbow that punched the glass in to enter the building on the way to find a body.

It has been known.

Bangor, a glamorous ex-beauty-queen of a sea-side town who no-one has had the nerve to tell that the pageant ended years ago. It sits on the Ards coast like an aging divorcee in a party-dress with a moth-ball still stuck to its hem.

The grand old townhouses had long since been degentrified. The wealthy had moved up the road to Cultra and Helen’s Bay and the vacuum was filled by property developers with a hard-on for multi-occupancy and Housing Benefit cheques. Each building was divvied up into a rat’s nest of bedsits and studios. A plastic sub-city of blue and black council bins sat outside each building on the street like an out-door mausoleum of punk-rock penguins.

Litter would have looked better.

I looked for the buzzer for 21c.Beside the lock was a plastic mount with each of the flat numbers written on a small piece of light green cardboard.

I buzzed and waited.

Seconds later, I heard a door opening from inside the building followed with a shamble of voices, followed by the sounds of feet thudding down a thin-carpeted stairwell. The shape of a person fell upon the opaque glass panels on the front door.

The door opened.

It was angel face.

She looked at me as if I was February the thirtieth.

“What, I mean, how did you find me?”

“Your landlady told me”

She pursed her lips and looked uncomfortable.

“She told you about Chris then”

“Uh huh. News to us both”

She looked so sheepish she could’ve grown wool.

“Chris, he’s upstairs. Do you want to come in?”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No” she whimpered, looking down at her feet.

Disappointment has morphed into curiousity. I wanted to meet this Chris character and see what he had to offer that I didn’t.

She led me upstairs, and I remember more than anything else..

The Smell.

It was a dog’s cocktail of old takeaways, rancid booze and damp. A bomb would have been an act of mercy. The staircase was as I imagined, 1970’s remaindered carpet and peeling wallpaper. We turned a corner and she led me into her flat.

And that’s where I met Chris. A fine figure of a man if you are thinking of the number 8, font size thirty.

Comic Sans Serif

He sat on the sofa in a tee-shirt and boxer shorts eating noodles from a paper plat. The TV was on at a low volume. The cheerful sunny English voices of the presenters provided much needed dissonance to the situation.

“Jack, this is Chris”

“Hi Chris”. Those words dragged their feet from my throat like hungry soldiers returning to a losing war.

He still didn’t speak. He just stared at me and then looked at the TV. I looked at angel-face.

“What’s going on?”

She didn’t say a word but the silence said it all.

I nodded a silent goodbye and saw myself out.

*

Later that day I returned to the city and sat down by myself on a park bench in Botanic Gardens. I opened my bag and took out the picnic I made for two. I spent the afternoon people watching, thinking and smoking.

I noticed the flower beds. They were pretty but flowers are only beautiful when you’re happy.

The daffodils seemed peculiarly vulnerable; their bright yellow heads sitting on long tall stalks like the refined heads of refined women on refined necks that begged for hungry, hungry kisses.

I was starting to get hungry and I looked at the food I had prepared but it didn’t seem right to eat it.  I didn’t prepare it for me.

It was for me and her.

I left the lunchbox on the bench, looking around to make sure no one saw me. I didn’t want some well-meaning stranger chase after me shouting ‘hey, your lunch box’. I didn’t want the lunchbox. I filled it with hope and now its contents had gone bad.

Disappointment.

That’s one smell I never did learn to wash away completely.

It hangs around like the smell of a lonely guest with nowhere else to go but your spare room.

I went home and flopped out on my bed and fell asleep.

*

The next day, I returned to work, back to what I know.

Back to a land of benweed and nettles.

At least I know they’re real.

I never did see Sharon again. She’d be in her late thirties now.

I hope.

the author writes:

“This story was inspired by a wake I went to where the deceased was being subjected to more criticism than fond reminiscence by those present. I didn’t sit well with me and then I thought about what fun he would have had if his ghost could have moved around and listened in.

Perhaps he did”

Tanya the Teenage Queen of Parties and Bad Magazines went to sleep under a thicket of blue red eye shadow that remoulded itself above her eyelids. She moaned a bit and writhed a bit before finally giving up the ghost on her friend’s sofa.

She was such a terribly young candle to have had her flame peter out so soon.

Tanya’s mom and sister cried a lot.

“Whole life ahead of her”

“What a waste”

And various other tributes were uttered dutifully. That’s not to say they weren’t meant but the older amongst them had heard such utterances before, usually at the funerals of other young tragics who had passed on at the wheel of fast cars or drugs. It didn’t make it less sad, only less imaginative.

Tanya, despite being dead, found herself able to attend her own funeral. At first she was tentative as she turned the corner of St. Martin’s Avenue to where the church was. She stopped for a moment, seeing the black cars parked outside the doors. There were lots of stony faced men in ill-fitting black suits, perfunctory badly ironed white shirts and poorly knotted black ties.

Funerals, weddings and court appearances.

She saw her brother Darren. He was in the same black tie he wore to fancy dress parties dressed as Mr Black from Reservoir Dogs. The women where cloaked in veils, like shy dervishes, moving slowly on high heels, clip-clopping up the steps and into the church like little horses in dark dressage.

But on hind legs.

This being her first funeral since her own parting and first public appearance, she was worried that someone would see her but the voices told her not to be so silly. She took a deep breath and walked towards the mourners and with a steely burst, mingled amongst them.

They didn’t see her.

Tanya sat at the back wearing a dark blue frock coat and a pair of black doc martens. She was invisible to everyone because she was a spirit. The powers that be let the spirits back on ‘funeral leave’ to see and hear what everyone thought about them.

Tanya itched to tell her sister that she had fucked Jimi Hendrix and Rimbaud the previous night. 

What a party that was Tanya thought.

She blushed to think of the things she let John Donne do to her body and he was from the middle ages too! It was the ‘Getting to You Know You’ party held once a week for the newly dead. The next day held no hangover and she shared a spliff with a ploughman called Huw who came from 11^th century Devon. Huw didn’t say much but his breath stank and he kept leering at her bosoms. Women’s bosoms weren’t as shapely back then but it was heaven after all. God let the souls do what they pleased.

And it pleased them

After the service, all Tanya’s friends and family piled into their black limousines and ceremoniously drove home in convoy back to Aunt Chrissie’s house.

Tanya hopped a ride on the roof of her mother’s limo and after 20 minutes, all the cars were parked and everyone went inside. The door closed on Tanya’s face but she glided through the wood and glass and into the living room.

The crying stopped. Tanya’s dad put on a Chas and Dave CD and before you know it, the mourners were lifting up their trouser legs and hitching up their skirts to dance to ‘Gertcha’ and ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’.

Mum came down with a family album, stuffed to the gills with badly taken family snaps. With a flourish, she held the album over her head and tipped the photos on the ground.

“Come on, let’s all dance on Tanya”

Everyone danced on Tanya’s old photographs. Uncle Pete had taken a framed picture of Tanya from the sideboard, broke the glass, took out the picture and stuffed it in a sausage roll before eating it. His youngsters stood around him egging him on.

“Oh, you’ve been waiting a long time to eat young Tanya, haven’t ya darlin’ croaked his fat wife. Everyone rolled around laughing.

Tanya was horrified. Nobody seemed one bit in the least sad. Everyone was having a good old time. Everyone seemed glad that she was dead. Even her friends were taking part.

She walked around the room, short of breath, eyes red with the sting of tears still fresh on her cheeks. She saw her sister Agatha drawing a moustache on a school photo of Tanya. The felt-tip pen had run out and Tanya’s mother pulled out a fresh one from her handbag and gave it to Agatha to continue the defacement.

“Hold up love, she aint’ ugly enough, lemme have a go”

“Alright mum, go for it”

Tanya’s mother produced a blue pen and drew large pieces of acne on Tanya’s face on the photo.

“Look everyone, look at the spotty dead girl”

Everyone laughed. Tanya was beside herself. Someone had remarked that it was an improvement.

Tanya went up to her mother and started to throttle her from behind but her hands went through her neck like it was thin air. Tanya fell forward with the force and her head landed inside the brickwork. It was odd seeing her old house from the inside this, Tanya thought. No-one has much of an opportunity to put their head inside something impregnable like a brick and have a good look without their skull being bashed in.

One of the advantages of being dead was that no-one could physically harm you anymore but psychologically, she was as sensitive as ever.

Tanya thought that this might be how it should be. After all, the mind is the seat of the soul, if the soul lives on, so might the personality. But the sound of a really loud Jam record interrupted her erudite train of thought and thoughts of revenge came back. She got up and dusted herself down and went into the kitchen and picked up a knife but the knife couldn’t be lifted. Tanya felt like a toddler who couldn’t express what she felt. She screamed again

“Why the hell are you doing this to me? What have I done? Does no-one I ever loved miss me at all ?”

She crumpled up like a crushed doll and cried bitterly. She felt she would cry for ever. After a minute, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She froze. This was the first time she felt touch since she died. Tanya looked up and saw her beloved grandmother looking down at her. Grandma Wilkes had passed on only five years earlier  but she looked more alive than ever. Her face, although wrinkled seemed luminescent, her eyes were deep like a mountain lake and her hair was more silver than grey.

“Come on Tanya love, stand up now”. Tanya clasped her Grandmother’s hand and helped herself to her feet.

“Grandma, why are they doing this to me? What’s going on”

Grandma smiled beatifically at Tanya and gently caressed her cheek.

“Oh love, you must understand, you’re seeing them as they really are. This helps you to move on and leave them all behind. Flipping heck, I’m starving, look and learn love, here’s a little trick”

Grandma turned to the crowd and shouted “Woooo, looks who’s here”

The crowd turned around and began to throw sausage rolls and pickled onions at Grandma. She kept her mouth open and scoffed the lot. After she swallowed, the crowd went back to their original stances and chattered merrily amongst themselves.

“Heaven might be full of your rock stars and gold and makeup but I tell you, there’s not enough food to go around. You have to come down to Earth and get your grub. Funerals and wedding are best, lots of people and lots of nice party food and you never put on any weight! Look at my ass. I used to have a big fat one. I don’t any more”

“Gran!, don’t talk like that, it’s embarrassing”

She looked at the room once again. Family members and friends were getting progressively pissed and telling tall tales about Tanya. Tanya was overcome with a wave of altruism and felt sorry for them. She walked up to her mother and looked at her face. For some reason, Tanya noticed her mother’s eyes focussing on her own.

“Tanya?, is that you ?”

“Yes, mum, it is”

“You’ve seen and heard all this then, haven’t you?”

“Yes mum, why?”

“Well if you can’t make fun of the dead, who can you make fun off?

“But I’m your daughter. It’s not right. You should be crying”

“Oh you want your dear old mum to cry do you ? You always were a selfish little girl. Now, I’m getting me another glass of wine, oh I forgot, does God exist?”

Tanya smiled.

“No, he doesn’t. There’s a heaven alright but no God. It’s just one big giant party. A bit like this one.”

Her mum stood there, staring into her glass of warm Tesco’s merlot.

Tanya smiled and faded slowly away.

She never returned again.

The End

Image entitled ‘Streets of Madness’ by Evelina Kremsdorf http://fineartamerica.com/featured/streets-of-madness-evelina-kremsdorf.html

Hello.

It’s been fourteen years since I was relieved of my liberty.  In a way, it’s cosy here.  No taxes, free accommodation, meals, laundry, education, heating.  I’ve never felt more free.

Are you one of The Nice People who wouldn’t dream of hitting someone who fucked you off in case you lose your job and your home? Do you shudder at the thought of spending time inside or meeting someone like me? A jail-bird, an ex-con.

I’m not the kind of man you’d like your daughter to bring home. That’s ok. I don’t particularly like your daughter much either. Well if you’ve come this far then I think you like me or perhaps I intrigue you. Don’t worry about getting too close. I’m at a safe distance. My grasping outstretched arms and overgrown finger nails will get nowhere near your wincing body. It’s ok. I’m behind bars.

But right now I’m also behind your eyes.

I am logically minded but in a round the houses way.  I could circumnavigate the globe to end up in a village that was only a few miles away from the point of departure.  My mind takes odd diversions. You may have gathered this by now. I jump from idea to idea, a flea in a world of dead dogs.

I am not one to take the easy way.  Even as a child, my teachers said I would take twenty steps at something when only four would do. Everything seemed so complicated. I had no mind for mechanical things or remembering details. In fact, I always found the world overly complex, more so than needs be. I smashed up a radio once to see what it was like inside. It was all wires and things and blood. I did smash it over my brother’s head because I wasn’t allowed near my father’s toolbox so I couldn’t find anything to unscrew it with.

They told me I shouldn’t have done that. My brother died three days later and my parents divorced two years after that. I lived with my father. I think he lost the toss of the coin with my mother. He kept telling me that his real son was dead and that I was just his act of Christian charity.

The court ruled misadventure. I was only seven.

He was nice like that. He even bought me a Kylie Minogue tee shirt and cassette tape for my seventeenth birthday. She had split from Jason and become a pop singer.

I liked her. I wrote lots of letters but she never replied until one of her friends replied on her behalf asking me to stop writing to her. I wrote back asking why but I never got an answer. I carried out asking why and one day a policeman came to our house to tell me why in person. My father was livid and he asked me to leave the house. He didn’t leave me high and dry though. He gave me three hundred pounds and arranged for me to live in a lodgings house with Muriel who happened to be the aunt of a lady he knew from work. He worked as a teller in the Allied Irish bank.

So I moved out and into a bedroom that smelled of mothballs and old ladies. I spent most of my time in the room looking at pictures of girls in magazines. Muriel caught me one day and ran downstairs and made a phone call. It must have been to my father because he arrived at the house a little over twenty minutes later and hit me and called me an unhealthy little runt and that I needed to get outside into the world and meet and work with real people who would knock me into shape.

Whatever that meant I still don’t know.

So he got me a job as a junior clerk in another branch of the Allied Irish bank but in the same city. The staff knew my father though and they gave me funny looks and kept themselves to themselves. They seemed very shy like that but not with each other I noticed.

It was monotonous work but it paid the bills as they say.  One of the army of triangle packed sandwiches guzzlers. The padded cell of the coffee break, quarterly personal performance review, targets, goals, core competences, meetings, minutes, personal time off and  thinking about sexual encounters in the photocopying room..

That’s when I met Leopoldina.

Yeah, I thought the same myself.

Well, I didn’t really meet her. I just saw her every day from a distance, buying her scones and doughnuts from the sandwich man every morning at quarter past nine on the fifth floor. She was striking, but not in a conventional sense. I remember she had a  dark complexion, dreamy eyes and braided auburn hair with a wide parting in the middle.

She must have worked in an obscure part of the building because no-one seemed to know her. I never saw her in the canteen or at any of the social functions that punctuated Her Majesty’s Stationary calendar.  The coward within didn’t have the bottle to strike up a conversation.  It’s hard to raise the spirits of conversation with someone who has just walked past and momentarily brushed your shoulder without one helluva subterfuge.  I am pristinely logical but not quick of the tongue.

We danced this silent pirouette for quite a few weeks. I followed her without her knowing about it too. I saw her going out at lunchtime for walks with a man she held hands with and kissed a lot. I also saw her meet other girls for coffee. Sometimes she bought clothes in the women’s section of Dunne’s Stores.

Then a man was murdered.

Joseph Kerrigan, aged 54. He was stabbed by his son during a family row over them sharing a prostitute they both fell in love with. The IRA and the UVF had just stopped killing people that year and everyone was so pleased that Kerrigan was killed by someone who wasn’t in the IRA or the UVF.

An ordinary decent murder they called it.

But I remembered his name. Joseph Kerrigan. I didn’t have to ask him his name. The lady on the local news channel told me and I didn’t even have to ask her.

The next day I went upstairs to the fifth floor at ten past nine as I usually did and waited for the striking looking girl with braided auburn hair. I needed to know her. And like clockwork, she did.  She made her way to the sandwich man, counting the loose change held in her left hand and waited in the queue.

That’s when I took a deep breath and walked straight up to her and stuck a knife straight into her throat

Time seemed to stop yet speed up at the same time. I couldn’t really explain why. Her coins fell out her hand and she crumpled to the floor, gasping for air. People screamed. Men tried to help her. Some men threw me to the floor and kicked me. Some men threw them off me and sat on me making sure I didn’t move. I had no intention of moving and someone should have thought to ask me in the first place as it was all no unnecessary.

Later on, the police charged me with the murder of Alice Dawes of18 Wicker Lane.

She wasn’t called Leopoldina at all.

That’s just what I called her.

But at last, I found out who she was. Her name was Alice Dawes.

A nice policeman told me that.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see a man of a peaceful face stare back.

I wonder who he is.

Image entitled ‘Sadness 8’ courtesy of http://scarabuss.deviantart.com/

Time passed slowly like grit through clinched teeth.

I paced the aisles. I shouted for help. I kicked shelves, wrecked the counter and banged on walls. I checked my cell phone again but it was no use. I succumbed to sleep in the end, more out of the self-induced balm of narcolepsy that wholesome tiredness. I fell to the floor and curled up in a ball and slept deeply.

The next morning, I awoke. I rubbed my eyes and looked around me. I hadn’t moved. I was still there, still in the bookstore. I jumped to my feet and called for help. I looked at my cell phone. The battery was dead. Then I remembered my Zippo.

I’d burn my way out.

I reached inside my jacket and whipped out my lighter and rubbed metal on flint it. A long orange and yellow plume of flame shot out like an long ephemeral feather. I grabbed the first book that came to hand. I didn’t give a fuck what it was, as long as it had paper. I set the flame to a handful of pages and waited for them to take light.

But they didn’t.

In fact, the paper didn’t even singe. I flicked the flame off and felt the paper. Perhaps it was damp but no. The paper was as dry as the eyes of a rich widow. I threw the book down and tried to set another one alight. And then another and another until I gave up. Nothing look light.

Then the voice.

“We’ll let you off this once but if you damage one single page of any of us, you will never leave. Never leave”

I shouted things like ‘Fuck you’ and roared until my throat hurt but it was like shouting at some twisted God. It didn’t make me feel any better I have to admit but I had to let it out.

I walked around the aisles and that was when I found a ladder. There was nothing for it but to start at the back, top left shelf and begin reading the first book then the next.

I cheated sometimes. I skimmed several dozen pages at a time but the books always seemed to know. I would hear a sign before the book would flick its pages back to the start, making me read it all over again. Days passed. There were no windows, no means of keeping track of day or night. My watch had stopped working and I had long since dispensed with it. I flung it in a fit of rage against the counter and it smashed to bits.

Beyond repair.

Irrational I know but I wasn’t in the mood for winning Nobel prizes in reasonable behavior at that time.

Strange things then happened. Well, it’s strange what becomes normal after a while but every day when I woke up, a loaf of bread and a jug of water was left by my feet. At the far corner, a chemical toilet and bidet. Whatever or whoever was doing this to me didn’t want me dead or leaving turds all over the joint. This was what I ate and drank. White bread and water, just like prisoners in bad cartoons.

I read one book a day at first until I found a book about speed-reading, which I thought was useful but I couldn’t quite master it. I practised it but it felt like skimming and looked where that led me. I progressed to reading two and sometimes three books a day.

I became militaristic about it.

I closed the world, my old world, out of my mind. Just man and books. I saw myself as just having landed on the Normandy beaches. Each book, a field beween here and Berlin. I had to fight my way through each and every single one. There was no shortcut, no chopper or freeway or jeep to suddenly take me to the end.

Months passed. I was resigned to having had lost my home and my job. Even if I was released how would I explain my absence? No-one would believe me. I’d have to start from scratch all over again somewhere else.

Time wore on. I felt I was Sysiphus, or a spirit trapped in a boulder in the middle of a stream, waiting for the stone to be sufficiently worn thin for me to escape. Someday it would happen but it wasn’t to be soon. I put such debilitating thoughts to the back of my head and just ploughed on. Every subject you could think off, every title too. Some I actually enjoyed reading, some were like wading through setting concrete with a hangover. Still, I had to keep going.

Eternities do pass in their own humdrum way and I was on the final shelf. I counted one hundred and twelve books. I got into a rhythm of reading three average sized books a day. I arranged the remaining books in order from longest to shortest. This would help me psychologically. The more I progressed down this shelf, the more books I’d be able to read due to their diminishing lengths, thus the quicker I’d get to the end.

**
I’ve just got to the final page of the final book. I’m scared now. What if I get to the end and nothing happens? What if I’ve missed a book? I don’t think I have. I was fastidious in making sure I didn’t jumble anything up. I was methodical, I chose each shelf in turn. I didn’t skip a book, why would I? The books were smart. They’d know if I ignored one of their gang. What if the books just didn’t give a shit about me and just let me languish here?

I got to the last paragraph and read each word aloud and slowly. The final sentence. The final word. Period. All done. I had completed my task. I jumped up.

“I’ve finished, I’m all done, I’ve finished. I’m through”

I waited for a response.

How I waited.

“Come down here, what is this?”

He put his right finger to his lips like a ham actor.

“Strictly speaking, I am no friend of yours, my….only joking. But you are the best possible friend I could ever have, or anyone of us here could have”

“What do you mean, ‘anyone of us’. There’s just you and me”

“Look around you” he said. “Your friends are all around you. The door itself is all around you ”

Then he vanished.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I jumped and turned around. He stood behind me.

“And the keys are all round you too. We just want attention, that’s all. The books. We the books. We all like attention, I bet you do too. How would it feel if every girl in every bar you ever walked into, just looked through like you didn’t exist? You stop at the bar and say hi but they don’t listen. They don’t even look at you never mind listen. How would you feel if this happens with every woman, in every bar, every night. Hmm? It either makes you want to stay at home, or….”

He paused and started to walk around me. I tried to turn around too to keep my eye on him.

“Get even” he rasped in my ear like old man with a tracheostomy.

“You can’t blame me for everyone ignoring you, it’s not my fault”

“Ah but you are the personification of the Reader. It is unfortunate though.We did sense a higher than usual degree of empathy from you. When you picked certain volumes off the shelves, we felt your pain. We decided that you would be the one”

“I be the ‘one’ what?”

“You will be the one who reads us all. One by one, you take us down, open us, caress us, blow the dust of us of all those dead forgotten years from out skin and read every single word of every single line. Then you put us lovingly back where you found us and take down the next one, and the next one and the next until there are nothing is next. Until every single book in here is read”

He vanished. I looked around me. He wasn’t to be seen. I ran around the shelves, looking in every direction but I was alone. Then I heard his voice. It was as though his voice was dipped in darkness and echo.

“Until every single one is read. Then you leave” said his voice. It seemed to come at me from all directions at once.

Silence fell.