There was light. And she said (for this is a truthful tale, rather than those bollocks ones you find in three thousand year old books that have been translated and inferred, transferred and interred, like so much re-chewed food, until the original story is lost for all time beneath the steaming sack of shit we call humankind)…

“It is good.”

And that was enough for me.

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“Do you think they can hear us?”

“Don’t be silly. They’re all the way on the other side of town, with their heads down, focused on their studies. There’s no way they have any idea where we are, or what we’re doing.”

“Where are we, and what are we doing?”

“We’re here, together, alone. And we’re doing … well …” He shrugs his fear-curved shoulders, and looks at her hopefully, his hands not straying an inch from where they lay dead in his lap.

“Here, let me help you understand what it is we’re doing here.”

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There is blood. Lots of it. Pouring from open wounds, pooling in my palms, slipping through my fingers, dripping from my fingertips, darkening the already threadbare carpet beneath my feet. I am in the room with them. This is their blood. She stands by the bed, hands on her face, toxic shock beginning to run through her body…

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I would be the lunatic throwing his own faeces at the wall, to drip down and be drawn in, scratching his own face until his hands are taped over to protect himself. That would be me, flipped out and forever flipping over, down, deep down to the very base of myself, where the real demons of dreams waited to take me home, even further inside, until there is no escape, and I suffocate on all the shit that I have swallowed and ignored all of these years.

For therein lies true madness, true hell; to drown in one’s own bullshit.

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I can hear the siren screech, footsteps thundering up the stairs, paramedics rushing in to take her over, their gaze flitting over dead meat on the bed, before bending to their task. My job is done here, I want to leave, to cry, to curl up in an ice cold bath. To scrub myself clean, then scald the wounds with hot water, that’s all I want now, but instead I stand stock still, quivering in the corner, and watch them rush and move, wrapping her up, then removing the blade, the blood spraying across them not even causing a flinch, as I watch her life slip away, inch by inch. I slap myself in the face, wanting to stop the rerun rhyme, but all I can think is how she has finally run out of time.

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Is this all it takes to be free of the guilt? To air one’s dirty laundry in public, at court, for the judge and jury to see? Wow! If I had known it would be this easy, I would have turned myself in much earlier. For what? For anything. For everything. For breathing, eating, sleeping, fucking, not fucking, fighting, not fighting, drinking, not drinking. Just for being. For cleansing.

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I had seen enough beatings to know that some hard bastards are made out of stone, and even if the screws’ sticks and fists and boots crack and broke bloody arms and noses, smashing fingers and knees and elbows, cracking ribs and battering skulls, still these same hard bastards would get up and throw another punch or kick, or if down to their last ounce and unable to grapple, would bite and tear with their teeth, earning themselves a good kick or two in the face. None of them were pretty. But none of that mattered when they came for you.

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“I’m dying from life – for from our first day, we are given this deadly poison called our breath, our lungs, our heart, all pulsing and pushing and beating, marching to different drummers but along the same road – to death. We are all going to die.” And he started giggling again, so hard and so infectious that I found myself giggling along – but in my case there was no mistaking the giggle – the squashed face and squinted eyes, the half-bent, hand-on-stomach crouch, tears of pure unadulterated joy running down my face.

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Right then, mid-swing in conversation, she shivers into a sneeze that curls her top lip and wrinkles her nose. I can hear Walt Disney sit up in his grave and say, “Now that’s what I call cute!” and I know what I have to do; get her warm, safe and sound, and then help her find her friend.

Her laughter tickled my belly, and her eyes stroked my length. Crude, maybe, but true. There was something so seductive in the way she looked at me that I could not help myself, I got half-hard in a nanosecond. And for anyone who has been at the lip of insomnia, pumped full of nicotine, caffeine, and can’t sleep stress, the thought of getting hard, let alone the reality of it, is beyond comprehension.

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She looks at the screen just as the heroine strips off what remains of her bikini, and straddles the pool man, the camera panning across her perfect bouncing breasts and lascivious smile, before catching his lips in a big ‘o.’

By the time the screen zeroes in on his waxed butt cheeks pushing into the hidden space between her legs, my lost bird has turned to me with a twisted grin and said, “Kind of hardcore for a first date, don’t you think?”

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