Death & the City Book Two (27 page)

I make my way back down the side corridor into the rear car-park, and stick my head around the side of the building - just in time to see Alice emerge from the front doors. Phone in hand, super-sized designer look-alike handbag over her shoulder, a giant brown pashmina-cum-scarf tousled around her, so that she resembles a Walnut Whip, atop stripy leggings and outsized Snugg boots. She puts on some dark glasses against the cloudy overcast daylight, and flicks back a curly henna strand of her unwashed hair, escaped from its plastic 'banana' clip.

She thinks she's a celebrity, I muse, as I follow at a safe distance. The irony of being her stalker today not lost on me, under the circumstances. One of a billion blogging internet micro-sensations. Street style copied directly from Gwyneth or Kate, trying to sidle down Oxford Street unnoticed. She struts with equal 'Don't look at me, I'm nobody' aloofness, except when her head is down to spell-check her auto-texting.

It's not long before I get an update from her blog, and so that I don't have to stop and read it, I dial up voicemail instead and select audio texts, so I can keep my eyes on her and follow while I listen. My Manga voicemail digitiser reads the blog update to me, like the voiceover from
Akira
,
the original movie.

And so it is, the dagger emerges from behind the cloak. No more am I merely the pawn in the game. Now rather, promoted to Knight. To act on information, not just collect it. I realise now that my previous work was mere training for the real tasks ahead. To gain the confidence of those around me, of my abilities, of my trustworthiness. And yet still I pity them, how little they know of me.

Ouch. Internet ego ahoy. She sounds like the show-off version of me. I switch from voicemail to call head office.

"How many followers on her blog and Twaddle?" I ask.

"Including you?" they say. "Fifteen. In comparison, she follows about forty to fifty others. Mostly minor to mid-range celebrities, Porn Stars or academics, scalping their style and content for her own, half the time."

I laugh and hang up. Yeah. In a flooded market, it can't be good if even your friends and family don't consider you enough of an internet sensation to read your anonymous postings. I don't think she'd be considered much of a risk of confidentiality with those ratings. Maybe a risk of plagiarism, to other self-effacing publicity-shy hardworking moral people. I'm being sarcastic, of course.

The part of me I feel that differs, from what James and Ash were just discussing (in terms of attention-seeking demons, robotic replacements, alcoholism, cult rescuers or exorcisms, or the taking away of an individual's responsibility - for actions, behaviour and personality traits or disorders) is that I decided to take full responsibility for my inner monsters, and full responsibility for their thoughts and actions also, no matter how evil or out-of-character. And it was a decision that finalized my ability to live as a sane person, make independent judgements that were sound, and deal with everyday life normally, without undue stress. In a society that endorses diminished responsibility and mitigating circumstances, and external influences such as the Media, the focus is placed less and less on individual responsibility. I chose to take that responsibility, whether I could be trusted with it or not, and see how things turned out. A dozen or so years ago, I was still having unexplained psychotic episodes. Nowadays, I
am
a good psychotic episode, for anybody noticing out of the corner of their eye what I'm up to when not in full view.

Luckily for me nobody picks up on the reality, but for my First Aid skills at work, and lack of squeamishness, I have been accused of vampiric tendencies. It goes with the territory. There is something a bit strange about ordinary people wanting to believe in the extraordinary. Whether it's bloodsucking romantic fiction, or tabloid rampages about alien abductions. Something is missing from the human psyche that requires a fantasy life with the possibility of a parallel reality. And I mean, for normal people - not clinical psychotics. It's as if real magic used to exist for humans, but was taken away at some unrecorded point in history as a punishment for something, and we're always on a quest to regain it. Someone who has experienced falling in love might be able to describe it, that feeling of searching for something magical, meaningful, and yet mysterious. I don't know. It's beyond my qualifications for that sort of thing.

Just one of the problems I have with an individual's life being fractal, I consider, hovering back while Alice waits to cross at the traffic lights opposite Lighthouse Mall, opting to jaywalk the road in order to keep alongside her at a distance. A taxi driver speeds up in order to abuse his car horn privileges at me, which I ignore. No matter how good Connor's intentions are towards me, the only pattern-matching I have to play by, is a history of manipulation and ulterior motive. The closer it seems to be that we're in a relationship, the more distant I feel from it emotionally, out of lack of recognition, or bearing on past experiences. I simply don't identify with myself being in that situation. Only the parts I recognise as being potentially part of some hidden agenda. To change the outcome on my part, potentially it means changing my own value of
Z
_n
.
In a nutshell, switching personality to a new one. Not one I would formerly have recognised, in an earlier incarnation. Such as consistently failing to live out some fairytale, being discussed in the Women's Institute by Miss Haversham and friends. Or smashed off my face on Tequila Sunrise fishbowl cocktails and JD/Baileys shots, conceiving Darth Malaga's deadly Zombie-killer pink knitted balaclava-wearing offspring.

For people who re-invent themselves in the public eye, it's a matter of course to change image, identity, alliances and commitments. For those not in the public eye, you'd consider them fair-weather, fickle, or fashion victim. But to re-invent yourself internally, not so that anyone would notice a surface re-evaluation, and to do so consciously rather than out of an escapist self-defence mechanism, takes into account premeditation of a certain kind. Particularly when done so hoping to influence future outcomes or events. Again, my judgement of the idea is based on experience of current patterns. Like, patterns of events leading to appointments with death dealers. Not going out on romantic dates yet.

I'd like to know which genius of psychology came up with the theory of pattern matching, now that I can prove it with fractals mathematics, and whether they're due for a good kicking. Because until I come up with an entirely new
'
Z
_n
'
both the psychology world and I are stuck with the current program I'm running. Which although it suits head office and the smooth running of society (as the famous saying goes, like a swan - society being calm and serene on the surface compared to the unseen frantic paddling beneath), it doesn't suit my human needs in other psychology mumbo-jumbo jargon. Like having a healthy and active upbringing, and a romantic history fulfilling my 'emotional love states' so that I can interact fully, and make meaningful contributions at every stage of my life. Whatever those are. If romance begins with a game of
Kiss Chase
, so far I've been the runaway winner of every round except against Connor. Hell, I could win matrimonial
Hide-And-Seek
as top Hider for the last twenty years.

It is weird. There just doesn't seem to be a romantic analogy in my brain. Whenever I try to conceptualize it in my head, I get the repeat patterns of stalking, and obsession, and hidden agenda merrily repeating themselves to infinity. And when I try to introduce ideas for alternative outcomes, my self-monitoring is a step ahead of it, with awareness of stuff like 'premeditated' and 'strategy' which are not natural concepts in romantic situations - only manipulative ones.

It doesn't help, I guess, having a friend like Elaine, who believes romance is engineered precisely with opportunity, home baking, and finely-tuned with glorious Technicolor-focused personal attention; or like Martha, who rescues or picks up any old thing nobody else wants, and casts a spell on it, turning it from Lazy Toad to Indebted-To-Her Toad, who has to show some act of gratitude once in a while in order to keep the roof over his head. Which to me sounds more like a case of the Devil you know, being better than the weather you don't. I have known people in the past under voluntary obligation to various Devils in their lives, and romance isn't part of the deal. Unless you mistakenly interpret everyday emotional blackmail and extortion as romance.

Hmmm. I follow Alice into the mall, which is annoying, as I want to stop and look at shoes in the Bootleg outlet, which does affordable catwalk trend skyscraper heels, but she doesn't pause there. I tell myself I have plenty of shoes, not to mention that every time I go near there on my own, head office ring up and ask me to try on anything in black PVC stiletto heel thigh boots, and send them a photo. I always tell them they can't afford me. I swear there are some bigger shoe fetishists working up there than I am.

Anyway, there's nothing in the window that distracts me from what I just thought. About emotional blackmail. What is Romance, as portrayed in the Media and fiction? Rarely serendipity and mutual good feelings. For the purposes of drama and excitement, it would seem all romance is about manipulation and power. Soap operas are driven by petty emotional control freaks and their victims, making marriage and parenthood as an idea quite perverse and repulsive. In fact, long-term relationships in fictional settings seem to be unnecessarily livened up, with infidelities, tragedies, terminal illnesses and addictions, to excuse the lack of 'romance' and presence instead of shapeless cardigans, Wellington boots and lack of dialogue. As a former blackmailer by profession, I'm probably alone in thinking that emotional abuse of that ilk is about as far from actual 'romance' as any human being is likely to experience.

But then I'm probably not alone in recognising that emotional manipulation itself is a Media tool to sell fiction, either on screen or on the page. Whether it's soap opera or dramatized biography. You don't see endless scenes of elderly couples happily eating chocolate
Hob-Nobs
in bed together, watching porn or reading
Lady Chatterley's Lover
aloud with all the comedy voices put on. You don't read chapter after chapter about housewives whose only tears of unhappiness are when the first daisies of summer are cut by the lawnmower, and who get excited about the new Mills & Boons in the supermarket every month. There has to be dysfunction, and misguided loyalty, and shadows catching up from the past. Unnatural quirks and bigotry and self-loathing by the bucket-load. Otherwise it's not drama - or at the very least, realist. As the critics would tell us.

Maybe I'm just a romantic surrealist, I think to myself, reversing the meanings into something I can grasp as a concept - not difficult when your psychosis used to do so with every concept. I expect romance, whenever it comes along, to be different to what I know and experience from day to day. Other people who don't experience the same things as me, might surprise me by how they interpret it, and what their emotional responses are - like Elaine going all gooey whenever I mention speaking to a guy, she imagines that historical romance book cover again. They don't see my internal filters keeping my head clear of that kind of thing. That I pigeonhole my life experiences and social contact into factual events - not subtext that could be translated into meaning anything else.

If Elaine was living my life, she'd be wearing that black leather Pussy Galore outfit every day, I think to myself. Making the most of it. I catch sight of my reflection in my own leathers passing the entertainment superstore. Like a blonde post-Apocalypse
Mad Max
character, all graffiti and studs. But all I see is the fancy dress outfit. Not a personality attached to the image. The mall is full of people of every variety, from ethnic to Goth to chav to touring bikers in their weatherproofs - I don't even stand out that much, except perhaps by being one of the solitary shoppers among the groups and couples. Even knowing I'm dressed this way for a good reason doesn't make me feel any more justified, knowing that my reflection is still telling me I'm a dressing-up box killer. With no personality. Not even a personality qualified by the costume. The clothes might as well be empty, barely haunted by anything - just animated and commandeered to carry out orders. Costume golems.

That would really be the ultimate in denial of responsibility, believing that your clothes ruled your actions and behaviour. Like the Mädchen Amick movie -
The Red Dress
or whatever it was called. More than just a uniform - a qualification. A life of their own. Like the Hollywood hit-man. He doesn't need to advertise. The image does it for him. From bar to broom cupboard.

I've heard sex workers interviewed, who said their clothes gave them confidence. But the same could be said of any make-over show, also. I don't consider that putting certain clothes on suddenly puts me into killing mode. Especially if the most I've had time to put on is a towel, or been rudely awakened by head office demanding my services in my pyjamas. The minimum efficiency and confidence is obviously part of who I am within my own skin - not put on like a Catwoman outfit. If I dressed up for the job I would be a caricature of a contract killer, the kind I think of as egotistical and lacking in substance. The briefcase full of false moustaches and Michael Caine NHS glasses, and Cold War spy equipment. Because I know I don't need it to switch personality into work mode, I'd feel obvious and pretentious using it. I carry my alternative selves around in my head, not in my wardrobe.