PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller (2 page)

It was a morning without promise,
where individual details seemed limp and insignificant.  Through the shade of
night not even the streetlamps were enough to bother a sleeping eye.  Before I
left the quiet of the bedroom I turned to look at him as he laid there, mouth
wide and spit-caked.  There was something crusting over his eyelids too, but I
was used to his physical misfortunes and paid them little attention today. 
Under normal conditions Gregory is beautiful.  But like a werewolf he suffers
from a cruel affliction of nature, transforming into something much less
appealing during the night. 

I moved through the house over which
night still hung like a shroud, the day ashamed to show its face.  I arrived in
the kitchen to find Ishiko already there.  She too is beautiful, her features
so delicate and symmetrical it is as if she was crafted by hand, sculpted from the
finest porcelain.  Her face lends itself to thoughts of her as a Geisha, and I
often imagine her face as white as the softest powder snow of early winter, her
red lips the only thing to spoil it like a bloody gash against otherwise
perfect skin.  Other times the image I see of the Geisha merges into something
else.  Once I came home to find Gregory sitting on a dining chair, casually
pulled out from underneath the table as if he had by chance decided to sit
down.  She was dancing in front of him, her arms moving around in circular
motion, her palms displayed as if inviting him to look, occasionally sweeping
past her face in the great art of slow motion seduction.  On that day I stood
in the doorway picking at my head wound watching for a while, but they didn’t
see me.  Instead he continued to sip his tea, a smile inching on and off his
face, until I left them there.  This time her face appeared white like a corpse
as if the life had slipped away from her.  She wasn’t dancing in this image. 
She wasn’t even breathing.

Ishiko is our housemaid. 
Her name means little
stone.  I looked it up on the internet during a lucid moment after she
arrived.  I discovered that there were many beautiful names that her parents
could have chosen from the list of Japanese names I found.  Hatsu meant first
born.  I thought how beautiful it might be to be a Hatsu.  Somebody’s first. 
Every day, and every moment that somebody spoke to you and said your name aloud
would remind you of how precious you are.  The first of everything.  The first
baby, the first nappy, the first feed, the first sleepless night, the first
cry, the first labour, the first and most important love any person would ever
feel.  Another, Sakae, meant prosperous.  Just by having that name I imagined
my life could be easier.  Tama, jewel.  Setsu, fidelity.  All wonderful names
as rich in their sound as their meaning.  A name like these offers promise.  It
means that when you were born your parents made promises to you.  They knew
things about your future, and that it would be good.  Ishiko.  Little stone.  I
find her name quite sad.

I hear him coming down the stairs
whilst I am drinking my tea in the kitchen and I feel my skin tighten as if a
spirit has passed through me.  He avoids me and it is a temporary relief.  He
goes straight to the conservatory.  He tries to get there before me every
morning, and on a morning like today he will have woken up to find that I am
not lying in bed reading as I normally do when I wake early and he will have
rushed his way downstairs to try and beat me to the small wicker table.  On the
odd occasion that I arrive ahead of him he appears ashamed and deflated, like I
have scuppered his plan, his purpose.  I don’t know why, but he always stands
up to greet me, like I am a stranger and we haven’t lived together for over two
years.  I don’t know why he does this.  So I wait and sip my tea which she has
made to perfection, whilst I wait for him to take his position.  When I arrive
in the conservatory his greeting is as expected.  It looks and feels so formal,
like I am a guest in my own home.  He stands up to greet me, but lately his
eyes no longer meet mine. 

“Good morning,” he says as he lifts
his buttocks out of his cushioned chair.  I have prepared my face with a smile
which he doesn’t notice. The way he says good morning is so uninspiring.  It’s
the opposite of a passionate kiss, or a nasty fight.  It’s a kiss for an
unloved grandmother, with no feeling behind it.  He is nothing more than the
image of a husband, a catalogue pose with one foot up on the rocks and looking
out to the ocean ahead.  He is the page ninety nine in formal menswear of
husbands.  Most days I feel like I might die from suffocation in this place,
but dying isn’t that easy, and I am not so lucky.

“Good morning, darling,” I reply. 
Page thirty six, the good wife clutching her husband’s arm, formal gilet and
cargo pants.  Perfect for sailing.  I feel like we anchored in the middle of a
squall but are pretending that we are still moored somewhere beautiful, like a
lagoon of aquamarine which swallows you up as you dive into it.  We are the
couple that set forth on a Caribbean cruise, but blindly ventured into Cape
Horn and are now treading water hoping that somebody will save us.  We are not
sailing, though.  We don’t have a boat anymore. 

“What menu do you think we should
offer tonight?” I ask.  “I was thinking about the venison, but I’m not sure if
it’s the right choice.  Perhaps if we have her prepare the pheasant, but there
is always the possibility of the guests finding a shot.  Do you remember last
time?  She didn’t find them all and poor Mr. Wexley broke a tooth.”  I smiled
throughout this little monologue, giggling occasionally, which I think made me
appear friendly and caring.  The reality is that I care no more about whether
we serve the venison or pheasant than I did when Mr. Wexley broke his tooth
because I believed he deserved it.  I hate the pretentious bastard.

“I was thinking fish,” says Gregory. 
“We could begin with oysters, and then sushi.  Ishiko prepares it very well.” 
This is his answer, proffered whilst he splits a croissant and heaps it with
jam.  The jam oozes out of the sides as he turns it around on his plate for
inspection and it reminds me of obscene things.  Especially the way his fingers
are poking at it.  Regarding the fish, I’m not sure if he is joking, if he
wants to wind me up, or if he is just stupid.  I believe it may be a
combination of all of these things. 

“I’m not sure that raw fish is a good
menu choice.  I would prefer venison.”  He bites his croissant and the jam
oozes into the corners of his mouth and I get the same sick thought about my
own body.  I have become obsessed by such thoughts of late and I am reminded
that I am a woman by the simplest of things.  Today is a croissant filled with
jam.  Yesterday was the neighbour’s cat who lounged on my front lawn licking at
herself.  I am disgusted by these thoughts and wonder if they will pass in due
course.  I hope so.  I have begun to offend myself.

“Quite right,” he offers me.  Nothing
more.  I guess we will be eating venison this evening.

I saw a documentary once about a man
who weighed so much that he could no longer leave his house.  He was bed bound
essentially, although he was able to move between shower and settee.  He was fat
like a walrus, disgustingly so without shape or proportion to his form so that
you could no longer make out where his body ended or where his limbs began.  As
he showered he was mandated to pay particular attention to each fold and flap
of skin because the obscenity that was his body was under constant threat of
fungal infection.  Afterwards I vowed to diet, and for a while I watched the
crevices which encircled my less than average body diminish and I was
satisfied, but recently they have returned.  My body is a little plumper than
it was before, and so my cheeks and facial dimples are also more noticeable and
defined.

As repulsed as I was at his size, the
fat man from the television had a wife who adored him.  She cooked food for him
each day.  It required an inhuman effort to feed a man of that size to the
point of contentedness, swollen like a milk-drunk baby.  She smiled at the
cameras, her pride evident in the grin that bore several rotten teeth and it
was clear that all her attention was directed at him.  She had created him.  It
was her doing.  Every kilo was a kilo of love and attention.  She slathered him
with cream, washed him, tended to his innumerable sores, and even wiped the
shit covered arse that he couldn’t reach.  I found it an abhorrent sight, but I
also knew that I would give in to that sort of attention.  I would get that fat
for somebody who cared for my every need, who nursed me until I became
something loveable.  I imagine I would thrive in such symbiosis.  Gregory did
try this once but he didn’t have the stamina.  Maybe if he had persevered I
would have become addicted to being loved so much. 

After breakfast ended and I finished dressing
I walked down the stairs to find them both stood in the hallway.  They look
like two people who were deep in conversation only moments ago, his face
thoughtful and tight like a punch-ready fist, but they are aware of my presence
and they have stopped talking.  At the top of the stairs I could hear hushed
voices but nothing distinguishable that I might have understood the topic of
conversation.   When he sees me he straightens his shoulders and lifts his
chin, a cue for Ishiko to complete her duties.  I ridicule myself by wondering
if they were planning something nice for later which I was not supposed to hear
about.  Some sort of surprise, perhaps.  But I doubt it.  She places the scarf
around his neck.  She crosses one end over the other in quite simple fashion. 
It is basically a knot, but she makes it seem intricate and delicate.  She
creates Zen in his scarf, a fact I find both impressive and heartbreaking.  We
are very lucky to have her, I am assured.  He begins to talk to me whilst
checking his appearance in the mirror.

“Are you certain about the menu
tonight?” he says.  I stand on the bottom step, my hand gripping the rosewood
banister.  His attention is on his gloves, good quality leather and for which
he paid a small fortune.  Quality, I am told, does not always come cheap. 
“Venison?  Really?  Sushi is much nicer.”

“I am not allowed to eat Sushi at the
moment.  It’s dangerous.”  He nods, his lips pursed shut and I have my second
disgusting thought of the day.  Why do such simple things all remind me of my
own body?  My opinion regarding the food and lack of compliance with his
envisioned evening of entertainment seems to have hindered the perfect
alignment of his cuffs.  He is fiddling with them but his gloves limit his
dexterity.  He grunts a little as he tugs, first holding his arms straight, and
then bent as he tries to regiment them in place.  I am his inconvenience, a
destroyer of plans.

“Ishiko, please, would you?”  He
holds out his arms and she expertly tugs at the starched sleeves, and as if she
has cast a magical spell his appearance comes together.  He looks back to the
mirror and after a brief and indistinguishable adjustment to his scarf he is
ready.  “Then pheasant it is.”  He walks towards the door before stopping,
turning, and walking back towards me to complete a task that he has forgotten,
as if only now he realises that he does not have his keys.  There is a hint of
a smile but still no eye contact.  I know I saw it, and for just a second I
thought he was going to grin, show me his teeth and reach up to kiss me with
Ishiko standing behind him looking on.  I am on the bottom step and so we are
roughly the same height.  But the hint of a smile was exactly that.  It was
gone as quickly as it came.  He does kiss me, though.  On the cheek.  I'm what
he had forgotten.  “Happy birthday,” he says, the tail end of the words leaving
his lips as he turned to walk away. 

“Thank you,” I reply, a little too
gratefully.  But I am grateful.  I cannot hide it.  Any type of love is good. 
It doesn’t matter if in reality it is hard, or damaging to the soul.  It can
push you to the edge of sanity but it is still better than its absence. 

By the time he left the house and got
in his car I had put on my coat and arranged my own scarf.  Ishiko has lingered
next to me, perhaps waiting for me to chastise her for a menial failure on her
part.  This is what she expects from me.  I decided not to in the hope that
some of her calmness would soak into my pores, and my body would save it up so
that later, when I am with Gregory again, I will emit the same radiance and he
will love me.  All I have wanted is for him to love me, I think.  I see his car
leave the driveway, and I pick up my keys and turn to follow.  As I step out of
the door I hear Ishiko speak.  I am so used to not hearing her say anything to
me that it is as if my ears have tuned her out, gone on hiatus, not expecting
to have any role to fulfil.  When I realise that she spoke I turn and ask her
what she said.

“I wished you a happy birthday.”  I
say nothing and shut the door.

I am thirty two today.  I was born at
10:15 AM in the morning, my mother a child herself, my father convinced he was
adult enough to handle it.  They held me in their arms and cried, their tears
falling onto me leaving tracks in the birth slime on my face.  She told me that
I cried for three days solid.  It was as if I knew that I was a mistake, that I
knew I should not have been.  Generally my birthday does not cause much
excitement for me, but this year, this year especially I did expect a bit of
fuss.  How sad that the most enthusiastic person about my birthday is my
housemaid.  Her wishes were those you would offer to a stranger, should you learn
that on your day of meeting it was the anniversary of their birth.  Perhaps
that’s what I really am in this place.  A stranger.  I thought that my being
pregnant may elicit some form of excitement from my husband.  I had hoped it
might offer us a life raft back to shore, back to my lagoon where the waters
run warm and ripple around my shoulders as I float in them, spread out like a
starfish with the sun warming my skin.  But it hasn’t.