Sin (2 page)

Am I making light of it? Yes.
Got to. You've gotta laugh! So
they
say.

Afterwards, after the statements
and the press and the ambulances, I found it hard to sleep. I've
never seen anything like that up close. On the TV, sure. In movies
and the news and the papers, there's much worse. But it's removed.
It's distant. It's not there, full in your face. You're not in the
middle of it, with breaking glass and screeching tyres and screams.
You don't hear the screams. Should that make a difference? I
suppose not, but it does. But it was only the beginning, wasn't it?
Yes, Mr. Hindsight, I know.

I know.

Four days. I'd almost forgotten
about it in four days. That was all it took. Like a day a death. It
was like a fuzz. A blur in my head, smudging out what I'd seen.
What I'd caused, though I didn't know it. Did I? No. I don't think
so, not then. On the fourth day, God made Hell. So to speak.

I'd gone to work; an oil
refinery. I was in the control room, a concrete and steel bunker
built to withstand the blast of the refinery going pop. And wadya
know. It works.

I was waiting for a permit to go
on site. It's a pain and it can often take longer to get the permit
than to actually do the job, but such is the will and the way.
Necessary evil, that's what it's called. I wasn't even thinking
when I took the coin out of my pocket. I wasn't even aware it was
in there. Thing is, it should have been mixed in with the rest of
my change. What are the chances of me picking that specific coin
out of a pocket full of them? I guess pretty good, considering
that's exactly what I did. It was already in the air when I
realised what I was doing. I also, quite suddenly, remembered the
crash. Even the jolt from the unexpected flood of images wasn't
enough to prevent my hand from appearing underneath the smooth arc
of the two pence piece as it lazily curved through the air. It was,
you know. Lazily curving. Could almost have been a slo-mo replay of
Beckham knocking one into the back of the net. Lazy. Carefree. All
the time in the world, thank you very much.

Then my fingers closed around
it. There was a dull thud, and the alarm boards all over the
control room were ablaze in flashes of red. Screeching alarms made
the air a solid wall of noise that had to be fought through. It was
like wading through treacle. People were scrambling
desperately.

That was inside, where it was
safe.

Outside…

The death toll was two hundred
and fifty one. The 'one' was my best friend, Dave. At least another
eighty were badly injured, and that was without the damage to the
environment. The Community Alarm went off, warning the surrounding
villages, but it wasn't really needed. They heard the blast. They
felt
the blast. They saw the smoke. Cars five miles away
jumped, startled. Windows eight miles away shattered, the glass
falling like the tears of the bereaved.

Sounds quite poetic that,
dontcha fink?

I've seen photos of Tunguska, in
Siberia, where the meteor (or UFO if you believe Mulder and Scully)
hit. It was like that, in a way. A real blast. Party on down to
Hell's kitchen folks. Today's special, anything you can still
recognise. Hurry, it's going fast!

The coin was warm. I could feel
it in my pocket, where I'd apparently put it, although I wouldn't
swear to that. The warmth was, I suppose, comforting, even though I
barely noticed it in the midst of the melee.
At
least it wasn't the whole refinery. At least it was only a 'little'
bang.

I'd be surprised if you thought
I should have had an idea then. I should, you might think, maybe
have had an inkling about what was happening. Nope. I was only
tossing a coin – even though it was something I hardly ever did.
That I'd been in two tragedies in less than a week was...
unfortunate. It was devastating for those involved, yes. I'm not
heartless. I do see that. But this isn't about them.

Well, it is. But it's about
stopping it. It's about THEM, the 'them' that includes you, my dear
Dr. Connors, not the 'them' of those already dead. I was the Big
Bad Wolf come to blow their lives apart. But I didn't know it, not
until Mr. Hindsight came along and shook me by the hand, and that
wasn't for a while yet.

I don't know
how long it took me to forget that one. Oh, I couldn't entirely
wipe it from my memory - I had to work there, eventually, when they
had made it safe again. But to forget the horror, to forget the
impact? It wasn't long. Soon enough I was wandering around as if
nothing had happened. Simple as that. Easy as sweet caramel and
apple pie with
lashings
of vanilla ice cream, just like me old ma never
used to even think about making. But I'm not heartless. It was the
coin. The coin seemed to be making me immune. It seemed to deaden
something in me, some essence of actually caring. Of course, me
hearties, I didn't know. I carried on regardless, just like good
ol’ Sid James.

I had three weeks then. Three
weeks of uninterrupted mundane brain drain. Normality was the norm,
just as it should be. There were no nagging thoughts eating away at
the back of my mind, like locusts feasting on a vast field of corn.
I didn't look at myself in the mirror and see evil shadows running
across my face, dancing gleefully at the carnage I was creating.
Nope. Nothing like that. Everything was hunky-doodle-dory. Nice and
normal.

Flip.

Catch.

The trains collided just outside
of town. All on board dead. I was waiting in my car, impatient that
they always closed the barriers about ten minutes before the
train's going to arrive and about two seconds before I turn up. How
was the coin in my jeans? Ask me another. How did it get into my
hand? Ditto.

All on board dead. And the Post
Office. And the refinery. They all screamed out to me.

Dead.

Say it enough times and it
becomes just a word. Dead. Dead. Dead. Four letters thrown together
to mean something that was so much more and so much less. Dead. An
absence of life. An absence of anything. For the few days that it
took my mind to wash away the spectacle of the train crash, I said
that word to myself over and over. I didn’t feel responsible for
the accidents, for that was surely what they were, but I didn’t
feel quite… right. But, like I say, eventually it becomes simply a
word. Meaningless. Emotionless. Dead.

Flip.

Catch.

An earthquake. Turkey I think.
Somewhere over that side of the world, anyway. Rivers flooded their
banks. Landscapes changed their features, as if they had suddenly
frowned, angry at the little humans skittering over them. They
don’t know how many died that time. I do though. I know. Four
hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and ninety two. Seems
a lot written out longhand like that. Seems more than 417,892.
Numbers are just numbers. Written out, it’s more real, more
horrific, more sorrowful. More like a kick in the teeth, to be
honest. They estimated about 350,000.

They were wrong.

How do I know? How do you know
the sun will rise tomorrow? How do you know that Sunday will follow
Saturday? You just do, dontcha? You just do. Same here.

I just do.

I think it was around then that
I started to wonder. I think I began to suspect something. I’m not
sure. I mean, it’s only a bloody coin! How can I, or it, influence
world disasters? Besides,
Turkey?
I’ve eaten it, but I’ve
never been there! I threw the coin anyway. Dropped it into the
River Freshney on the way home. Here little fishies! It’s a bit
tough, but tuck in. Keep you going for weeks that will!

Flip.

Catch.

I didn’t notice. I have all
sorts of coinage passing through my pockets during the week.
Newspapers, coffee machines, petrol, Mars bars all play their part
in the ebb and flow of the Royal Bank of Pocket. How one particular
two pence piece could manage to remain in there was a mystery. Why
it hadn’t been passed to a shop assistant in return for a bottle of
Coke (diet) or a packet of chewing gum, I couldn’t guess. How it
came to be back in my possession at all after taking a swim in the
river…?

WHY does the sun always rise?
HOW does Saturday always follow Sunday? You know they will, but
why?
I don’t know either. I don’t want to know. It just
does.

It was four days. The earthquake
still dominated the news both on screen and in print. In my head,
though, it was already fading. It was going the same dulled way as
the rest. The feelings of being responsible were dissolving too,
like sugar in water, diluted until, no matter how hard you looked,
there was just a foggy liquid that tasted just a little too sweet.
I didn’t notice the coin in my pocket. I don’t remember taking it
out. I don’t remember flicking it up. I just remember the arc of it
through the air and the warmth as my hand closed around it.

A child. Perhaps four years old.
Typical TV advert stuff to slow your speed. The ball bounces into
the street. The boy runs after it. Laughing, naturally laughing. He
doesn’t see the car. The car doesn’t see him. The driver feels,
rather than hears, the thud.

The child bounces into the
street.

It happened in front of me
again, not thousands of miles away. Mere metres from where I stood.
Hah! The ball even rolled to my feet! How’s that? I turned and
walked away. I could hear the young woman waiting for half a dozen
first class stamps. I could see the drivers of the trains. I could
feel the heat from the flames on the refinery. I could taste the
water from the flooded, surging river as it swept away all that
stood in its path. I could hear the laughter of the boy.

I just walked away. I think I
maybe even whistled a happy tune.

That time the memory didn’t
fade. The horror stayed with me during the dark nights and darker
days. As time went by, my oh my, my mood darkened too. I knew. I
knew
it was me. I
knew
it was the coin. I
knew
I was responsible. I went to the pier at Cleethorpes. It stuck out
like a literal sore thumb, reaching away from the beach into the
lovely waters of the River Humber, or is it the North Sea? Either
way, it’s muddy and murky. I certainly wouldn’t want to swim in it
– paddling when I was a kid was bad enough. Well, the two pence
coin was going to find out if it could sink or swim. I knew which
one I was betting on.

I held it in my hand for a
second, then simply let it drop. It spun away to splash into the
water. There was a brief flash of reflected sunlight just before it
hit and it was gone. Good riddance.

I noticed that, as it spun, it
almost looked like it would had it been flipped. I shook my head.
Nonsense. Get a grip. Get a life. Get an ice cream. Yeah, I really
fancied an ice cream at that point. A whipped 99, a chocolate and
vanilla mix with a flake, juice and hundreds’n’thousands. I checked
the change – the
safe
change – left in my pocket. Wouldn’t
you know it, I was two pence short! Typical. Oh well, that’s the
way the double-choc-chip cookie crumbles.

Ooh, I just had a brief Homer
moment: Ahhh, cookiessss.

I felt a few spots of rain. Good
job I didn’t get the ice cream, really. My car was only a short
distance away. By the time I’d reached it, the heavens had opened
and it was heaving it down. Cats and dogs? Elephants and rhinos
more like! By the time I was half way home, thunder was grumbling
towards me with sheets of lightning to brighten its merry way.
Remember that, Dr. Connors, me fella-me-laddio? Remember that?
Rained for a solid seven days. Solid non-stop. Solid as Niagara
Falls on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Except we forgot what that nice
smiling sunshine looked like for a while there, didn’t we? Too busy
wishing our cars were like James Bond’s so we could flick a switch
and the wheels would turn in and we’d skim along like a boat. Too
busy wondering if the insurance would pay to replace the carpets
and suite and TV. Too busy eating your tea with ducks swimming
around your ankles. Too busy watching your kitchen table float away
like a raft with legs. It was as if the whole island, good ol’
Great Britain herself, had been submerged under two feet of water.
Someone had pulled up a zipper from Land’s End to John O’Groats and
the sea had come together from either side. It didn’t matter that
there was no electricity – the constant lightning lit up everything
like a giant camera flash.

Remember Dr. Connors? Because I
certainly do.

I don’t think anyone died then,
amazingly. Maybe there were one or two casualties, but considering
what happened, it was a lucky escape. Did someone get struck by
lightning? Can’t remember. Maybe. Still, considering… Of course so
many thought that their lives had ended, or wished they had. Houses
were flooded, belongings were ruined. Most of the country had waded
to a standstill. It took a mighty effort to get moving again. It
took a mightier effort to shake the drowning feeling I was overcome
by when the cries of my other victims echoed in my ears.

Anyway. I don’t know why I ask
if you remember it, Doc. I know you do. Everyone does. I just
wanted you to think about it for a moment. Just hold in your mind’s
tiny grasp (or should that be ‘tiny mind’s grasp’?) for a second or
three. OK? And on we go.

When things got going again and
life returned to its quirky little ways, I bought a bus ticket. My
car, the same as just about everyone else’s, was knackered. It
didn’t want to play. Well, who can blame it, eh? How would you feel
if you’d spent the best part of a week and a bit with your arse end
submerged in water? It probably wouldn’t do your plumbing any good
either, now would it? I bought the bus ticket to town. I used to
take the number 5, at one time. Never no more, oh no. 3C or 3F,
they’re the ones for me. No other number will do, thank you very
much. The 3F costs 20p more each way and goes all around the houses
(which all buses do, I know, but this one goes ALL around them) to
get to the same place, so the ride lasts a good fifteen minutes
longer, but it’s not the number 5. The 3C costs about the same and
only takes about five to ten minutes more, but it’s not the number
5. What is it, every half hour for the 3F and every twenty minutes
for the 3C? Something like that. The number 5 was every ten
minutes. Of course, it still goes on its happy travels, round and
round the same route it goes, where it stops everyone knows – all
the bus stops and the Post Office. No, it doesn’t. That Post Office
stop was a little one off special, just for sweet little ol’ me.
Ain’t it nice. Why, thank you ma’am. Thank you oh, so very much,
indeedy. Still. Anyhow and anyway, the number 5’s not for me, no
way!