Sin (3 page)

My friend, my chum, my pain in
the bum was back to say a great big fat “Hello.” Right on top of
the ten pence piece, to make sure I couldn’t miss it, was the two
pence piece. Howdy, pardner.

Flip.

Catch.

You know how it goes.

Across town, apparently, a
seventeen-year-old kid was fed up. He was bored with his life and
himself. His dad was in a shooting club. The gun was locked away in
a secure box hidden in the attic, in line with all the police
requests. The boy knew where his dad kept the key. He got the key,
then the gun. His name was John, which makes it every bit worse. I
know his name. He’s not anonymous. I know his name, I know
him
. He left a copy of Terminator in his DVD player to make
it look like he was influenced by action films where every gun held
a million bullets. He wanted them to think that, even though he
knew it was crap. People, he thought, did what they did because
they wanted to. A film was a film, that’s what he thought. Sure,
Arnie might waste a few bad guys, but that didn’t make
him
want to do it. No, John did it because he wanted to. He was
bored.

Besides. His dad’s .22 pistol
only made a little hole.

He would have taken the 9X bus
to town, I guess. At least the number 5 doesn’t go that way. The
shopping centre was, naturally, packed. It was a Saturday, so it
would be. John chose the Starbucks coffee bar to start his little
performance. He didn’t think it should cost nearly three quid for a
coffee, even if it was a Mocca-Chocca-Locca-Shocka-Artery-Blocka.
It was as good a place as any. It wasn’t what he expected. There
were the bangs. There were the screams. There were the crumpled
bodies and the pools of blood, but it wasn’t what he expected. He
expected to
feel
and he didn’t. He just didn’t.

So he used his last bullet on
himself. He yawned as he pulled the trigger.

How do I know so much about John
and his thoughts? Ask me another.

I didn’t feel so much from him,
as he didn’t feel much himself, but I felt the terror and pain of
those around him. Oh, an old woman of seventy three, with two
children and five grandchildren, was trampled in the stampede as
Starbucks and the shops around it emptied in seconds, the people
scattering like birds off a telegraph pole. The window of Clintons
Cards was shattered and the grandmother was showered in a rain of
glass slivers. She didn’t feel anything either. Her heart had given
up the ghost, so to speak.

I was sitting third from the
front on the 3C, on my way to the war zone. I was staring out of
the window watching the world go by, wondering if the bus was
staying still and the Earth was moving. I remember seeing a young
boy jumping on the bonnet of a Mondeo. I smiled to myself, knowing
if it was my kid or my car, I’d go mad. By the time the bus pulled
into the station near the precinct, only a few minutes away from
Starbucks, I was shivering. I wondered if perhaps I’d cried out, as
a few passengers were looking at me strangely. Or did they know? I
didn’t want to go in anymore. I knew what I’d find. People were
running about. Some were crying, others were standing there, dazed.
One or two acted as if nothing had happened. Which one did I fall
into? I don’t know. I don’t think I was crying. I didn’t run. I
couldn’t stand still. I think I acted as if nothing had happened. I
didn’t want to go in, but that’s what I did.

It was just as I’d thought. Just
as I’d
felt
.

I walked past the bodies and
pushed through the crowds. I bought some cookies from Millies – the
assistant behind the counter looking at me as if I was crazy buying
cookies at a time like this, but not willing to miss a sale. Maybe
I was crazy, but I was also suddenly starving. All thoughts of why
I’d actually gone to town in the first place were forgotten. I
turned in the direction of Starbucks and said goodbye to my very
good friend John, a young lad whom I’d never met. I dropped the
half eaten white chocolate cookie into a waste bin and walked
home.

I slept well that night. Like a
log. I had a dream. At first I thought I was in the middle of the
Never-ending Story, you know where Fantasia has been consumed by
the Nothing? Well. The world had broken into thousands of pieces
and each was floating about in space like lifeboats after the
Titanic. I watched as families smiled and waved to me as their
little pieces of Earth crashed into their neighbours’ and they spun
off into space. I awoke knowing, finally, that it was all me. I was
responsible. Me and that damned coin.

Joy convinced me. That nice Mr.
Postman only brought me one letter that morning. He was early for a
change. It was a white envelope with my address elegantly printed
in blue ink. Joy only ever used a blue pen. She thought black was
rude. She didn’t write to me very often. I can remember only a few
times in our lives that I’d received so much as a postcard off my
sister. My heart drilled its way through my chest like John Hurt’s
Alien as I sat at my kitchen table. Hey, it could have simply been
a ‘Hello’. I hadn’t seen her in a month or three. She could have
merely been dropping me a line saying she was fine, sunshine. But I
knew she wasn’t.

Joy was a joy to be around.
Everyone liked her and she made everyone happy. As I held the
letter in my trembling hands with my coffee going cold and my
Weetabix going soggy, I thought about that. It had never occurred
to me before, but Joy was joy, and I, Sin, was basically sin. Good
and evil, light and dark. Two sides of everyone’s favourite two
pence coin. Oh, I needed to get a life! I was talking crap! Yeah,
everyone liked my sister – she was a nice person! Why wouldn’t
they?

But, sitting there, forgetting
to breathe, I knew I was right, at least almost. Maybe I was a
little wide of the wotsit, but I was close. You know how I knew.
That’s right. I just did. I opened the envelope, pulled out the
neatly folded sheets of paper and started to read. Joy’s
handwriting was smooth and flowed like water running across the
page. Everything about my sister was…
silken
. Her skin, her
walk, her voice. Perhaps that was why she was always so
popular.

Ah.

Perhaps not.

I read the letter three times,
then calmly laid it on the kitchen table. I stared out of the
window. A sparrow was flitting about on the window ledge. Something
busied the bushes at the bottom of the garden. It wasn’t just me. I
wasn’t alone.

Joy, it seemed, had found a coin
one day. It was years ago when we were children. A two pence coin.
I’d never seen it, nor had I seen her toss it. She had, though. But
whereas I ruined lives, Joy… Joy
made
lives. “I make people
happy,” she said. And it messed her up. She caused couples
desperate to have children to become parents. She rendered poor
people rich. She stopped accidents from happening and natural
disasters from occurring. It was as if I was looking into the dead
eyes of my mirror.

You see, Dr. Connors, Joy killed
herself. I’m sure that’s in my notes, or you’ve found it out, but
rather than simply being words on paper (even as these are), I want
it to mean something to you. Joy, my sister, committed suicide. She
even told me exactly what she was going to do, something I won’t go
into, as I’m sure you already know. My first instinct was to ring
her, to try to stop her before she’d had chance to jump but I knew
there was no point. It was too late. Joy was dead. I wanted to feel
sad, but I didn’t. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I
still
want to feel something. I
still
want to cry. But I
can’t.

“I make people happy,” she
wrote, “and it’s killing me.”

I found my coin a mere few
months ago. Joy had been found by hers years before that. She’d
know almost straight away what was happening. I had only known, for
certain, that morning – that morning when Mr. Postman kindly
brought me the letter. At first it made her content. She was
bringing happiness and good fortune to almost everyone around her.
That was at first. Being contented I mean. Then it stopped being a
pleasure and became a frustration. The frustration turned to hate.
Joy was alone in her world. While everyone else was enjoying life,
my sister was drowning in the responsibility of keeping it up. She
felt stripped. One more good turn was one more piece of her torn
away. Every smile was another knife twisting in her heart.

She had tried, early on, to rid
herself of the coin. She couldn’t. No, really? It kept coming back
like the not-so-proverbial bad penny. That’s almost funny, dontcha
fink, Doctor? No, me neither. So she decided, if she couldn’t get
rid of the coin, she would get rid of herself.

Joy had noticed something. At
first, she said, the incidents were erratic. Flip, catch. A man
would not take the step into the road as the car burned around the
corner. Flip, catch. The bully would see the error of his ways and
would apologise to his victims. Flip, catch. The baby would smile
at her father. Flip, catch. The mother of seven would win the
lottery. Some were big, others were small. One would change the
lives of a country, another would make a man feel good for a
second.

It didn’t stay that way though.
The results of her coin levelled out, then began to increase in
both momentum and… Joy left the word out. She couldn’t find it. I
knew what she meant. Each time, it would be
more
. She saw
herself being eaten away. She saw herself living only for the world
and not for herself. So she planned to leave. She planned to
jump.

She had realised something. She
didn’t know if I would believe any of what she had written, but she
had to tell me. She realised it wasn’t the coin. The two pence
piece was simply the catalyst. It was the trigger.

It was her. She was the cause.
Joy
was
joy. She said that, when she understood, she could
throw away the coin. When she understood, it was as if a floodgate
inside her had been opened and a torrent of happiness was
unleashed. That was how she put it. If she didn’t end it, she would
drown.

I took the coin out of my
pocket, where I knew it would be, and placed it on top of the
letter.

The coin was the trigger. It was
her. It was Joy.

It was me.

I felt something inside me
twitch at that point. It was as if I shook without shaking. For the
first time, I noticed the radio was playing. I didn’t realise I’d
turned it on. I looked at the clock. It was almost half past ten.
Time for the news.

Here’s the headlines at ten
thirty. Seven hundred die as freak tornado hits sleepy Essex
village.

The coin was resting on Joy’s
letter. It regarded me lazily. It knew. Flip. Catch. I had flipped.
I had caught. Not the coin, oh no. Me, myself and Ay-caramba!

It felt like someone was poking
me in the chest from the inside. It would happen anywhere and at
any time. Relaxing in the pub. Flip. Poke. Catch. A motorway
pileup. Watching the TV. Flip. Poke. Catch. Etna erupts. Sitting on
the crapper. Flipety-pokety-catch. Earthquake in Northern
Scotland.

Doctor, doctor, doctor. You can
check on each and every one, as I’m sure you already have. You want
dates? Times even? I’ve got the lot. Even the earthquake in
Scotland. Doesn’t happen very often that, does it? Two in one week
is just the gravy on the Yorkshire Pudding, dontcha fink? Yes, Doc.
Check it out. Three days, four hours, twenty two minutes after the
first, a seismic hiccup way on down in Loch Ness was strong enough
to capsize a survey boat on the surface. Now, Loch Ness is very
deep and very wide. An educated man such as yersen, Doc, would know
that it’d take a good ol’ bounce to even ripple the surface.
Course, the survey crew reckon it was dear Nessie herself, and
they’re going to be wasting a whole heap of money and time on
searching her out. I reckon if Nessie was swimming about down there
she’d have gone a-running with her kilt hiked right up to her
hips.

So I had to make a decision. I
had to choose. For Joy it was easy. Well, maybe not so easy, but
she was always the one who
could
. Me? I guess I could have
tossed a coin… John did it with a gun. I couldn’t do that. No-Guts
was my middle name, and I wanted to keep them exactly where they
were. I couldn’t jump off a bridge, although the Humber was just
murky enough to be inviting. Driving my car into a wall was an
option, but my right foot decided to have a mind of its own and not
want to push that pedal-to-the-medal. A train mashing me to mush
was another idea, but it would probably hurt.

In the end I did decide. I
couldn’t kill myself, but I figured I could take myself out of the
loop. I could disappear. I could forget myself – become a John
Doe-zee-do-your-pardners. Yee
HAH!
That’s when I came
knocking at your door, Dr. Connors. That’s when I rang your
bell.

It wasn’t difficult. Not that
you’re not good at your job, Doc. I don’t mean to imply anything
like that. I have enormous respect for your abilities. I bet that
surprised you. Honestly, I do. Granted, you are so totally off base
with my case that you’re not even in the same time zone, but that’s
just me. I’m a special case, so to speak. A real vintage.

But it was fairly simple to get
my own room-without-a-view. Act nuts. A little doolilly, a little
doolally. A little ‘I’m-a-little-teapot’ thrown in for good
measure. You practically welcomed me with open arms, didn’t you?
Thanks for that. Really. I mean it most sincerely folks. Yeah,
there were no ‘12 good men and true,’ were there? Just that nice,
bespectacled, slightly balding (yes, Doctor, everyone knows) man in
the suit creased so sharply it could cut butter.

Thank you. You took me in and
doped me up. Helped me pack up all my troubles. What a guy.

Unfortunately…