Sin (6 page)

For some reason, this time, he'd
forgotten to top up my levels. Sometimes I felt the patients,
residents, grunts, whatever we were, were like cars. You had to
keep up our levels of oil and water and olanzapine to keep us
running smoothly. Otherwise we'd break down and need towing back to
the garage to be worked on. It was as unpleasant as it sounded.
Perhaps this time he'd met his monthly quota and had earned a nice
fat bonus into the bargain, because the strait jacket was all I
seemed to warrant. Strange how I could be happy to be wrapped up
and buckled down like some reject from escapology school.

Maybe I am crazy?

Or maybe Bender Benny was the
only sane one amongst us, and we were the manifestation, or
infestation, of his ramblings? What if we were all in his head and
this was simply a story what he wrote, guv'nor.

And maybe the moon really is
made of cheese and Wallace and Gromit's day out really was as grand
as it seemed.

The first thing I thought of -
the first question that came to me - was how my strait jacket had
managed to not be securely fastened around my torso and was,
instead, on the verge of floating away on a whim and a tide. And
how come it was so neatly folded, straps tucked in, arms carefully
creased across the top. OK, so that was two questions, but my first
instinct was not to ask why I wasn't a cloud of ash floating about
on the thermal updrafts of my favourite hydrogen-sulphide furnace.
Nor was it "Where the hell am I?"

That would have been a good one
for Houdini. How to escape a locked room whilst wearing the
prerequisite strait jacket, in less than one second, removing
yourself and the jacket with both arms tied behind your back, one
eye closed and whilst singing God Save the Queen. Granted I was
doing none of the latter, but it would still have been a good one
for Houdini.

I stared at the jacket for a
long moment. It bobbed on the waves, threatening to let itself be
washed away if I didn't quickly rescue it. I thought about picking
it up because it seemed part of me. It linked me to who I was. And
that's why I left it. It linked me to who I was. I nudged it with
my toe, helping it on its way. The breakers broke and the waves
took it. I watched its colour darken as the fabric soaked up the
water enough to weigh it down and drag it under. As it sank, the
arms drifted off the top, either waving to me or beseeching me to
save it. I waved back.

Bye.

I watched my cosy little strait
jacket, arms flailing, disappear beneath the surface. It struck me
that I could easily have used this watery grave for my own benefit.
Rather than turning myself into the Sunday roast, I could quite
happily have become shark bait - brunch for Moby Dick while he was
waiting for Roy Scheider to stick a gas cylinder down his throat.
The bottom of the deep blue sea was a definite alternative to a
smelly old furnace. If the weight of tonnes of briny water slapped
right on top of my head didn't kill me, the distinct lack of gills
surely would have.

Hello Hindsight, and
goodbye.

Finally my brain seemed to click
into gear and I realised I was actually still alive. I hadn't
drowned, nor had I been flame-grilled for that extra succulent
taste. No sesame seed bun wrapped me up and Flipper wasn't likely
to happen by and tell me Little Johnny had fallen down a cliff. I
was still a one and only, walking, talking, living freak. I wasn't
happy about that at all.

Turning, I looked around at the
beach. The sea was one thing - I had always loved to listen to its
whispering heartbeat as it danced its perpetual waltz with Sweet
Sister Moon. The beach was quite another kettle of haddock, chips,
scraps and lashings of salt and vinegar if you please. No, no mushy
peas thanks. The thing was with sand, it was sandy. It got into all
your nooks and crannies if you so much as sneezed at it in the
wrong way. When I was younger - young enough to not question wonder
and not to care about ordinary - I thought nothing of building
sandcastles, kicking footballs, rolling around and mucking in. The
sand would poor out of my trainers, my socks would shake and my
jean's backside would brush clean. So simple. I reached a point,
though, when I realised not all the sand left my trainers, and no
matter how hard I shook my socks I'd still end up with sand between
my toes. I'm not sure how old I was when that happened. I grew up,
I think. How sad is that?

If you're ever contemplating
growing up, don't. Take my word for it. BORING! That's my word.
What difference does it make if your toes are sandy, or if you've a
speck of muck under your fingernails? It really doesn't matter a
flying fig. Not that I'm sure whether or not figs can fly. So don't
do it. Stay a kid for as long as you possibly can. You hear about
men hitting 45 years old and falling under the spell of the Wicked
Witch of the Mid-Life Crisis. They buy flash sports cars and try
and cop off with young pert-breasted blondes to recapture their
youth. Personally I never owned a flash sports car, and I preferred
redheads, so I didn't really have that youth to recapture. I always
figured that a man's mid-life crisis was just an excuse. Not for
anything in particular, just an excuse generally. A bit like PMT is
an excuse for a woman to tear a man's balls off. As women don't
have balls, a man doesn't have anything to aim at, so we're not
that fussy. I'm still a long way off of 45, and don't have the
money for a sports car, so I'll stick to trying to be a kid again.
I'll continue to attempt to ignore sand, and to try to run between
raindrops and see if I can jump in a puddle right up to my
muddle.

But facing that beach right
then, having realised I was still breathing, I was repulsed. I
hated every single grain of sand and every tiny shell. It was
personal. The beach was to blame. The water around my ankles had
joined in for good measure. They'd clubbed together to abduct me,
taking the piss and rubbing my nose in the fact that I could still
feel the sun on my face. I could hear seagulls laughing somewhere
off in the distance and I wanted to shoot them, one by one.

Let's see them laugh then!

I'm not normally the sort of
person to get angry. I get down, maybe moody, pissed off and
peeved, but not really angry. I don't fall into helpless rages,
tearing through a room like a tornado, or a poltergeist who's had
one too many coffees that day. That's not me. I'm fairly chilled,
not tending to get worked up about things over which I have no
control.

Perhaps that's hard to believe
seeing as I committed myself to a lunatic asylum and then tried to
toast my tootsies in a flame that Zippo or Clipper would have been
proud of. The thing was, I didn't see it - the disasters, the death
- as something out of my control. At first it was just a matter of
ridding myself of that damned coin. Once I realised the coin was
simply a focus and it wasn't going anywhere if it didn't want to,
I'd hoped the heady mix of drugs, padded cell and strait jacket
would do the job for me. I always thought there would be
some
way to stop it all. In the end, there could be only
one, as the Kurgen once informed a young Highlander.

The Kurgen. Big, bad,
mean-mother-hubbard. If ever there was a guy, immortal or not, who
had a terminal case of PMT, Kurgeyboy was he. Anger was his middle
name, or it would be if he'd had a last one.

So. My one chance to end it all
- the pain and suffering and death - and I'd ballsed it up.

I was angry. Angry to be alive.
Angry at the sea and the sand and the shells and the laughing
seagulls. Angry at the fact that I could even be angry! One of the
gulls landed a short distance away and peered at me gloating. "Ha!
Got you!"

My anger switched up a notch. I
realised my fists and my teeth were battling it out to see which
could clench the tightest. The gull continued to mock me with its
gaze, telling me what a sorry excuse for a suicide victim I was. A
breeze picked up a few grains of sand and tossed them casually in
my face. I could feel them scratching my eyes and working their way
into my mouth. The sea seemed to surge around my ankles. I felt it
wet my crotch and spray my fists as it joined in with the ridicule.
The breeze became a wind that ruffled my hair the way a patronising
uncle might his nephew.

I cried out then. Whether it was
in anger, frustration or desperation I'm not sure. Probably it was
all three mashed together like emotional bubble and squeak - except
I had bubbled, but this was no squeak.

"AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

My throat was sore. My breath
was gone. My anger had vanished. I felt empty. Lifeless. Dead.

That word again.

I shut my mouth and opened my
eyes, not realising I'd closed them. The gull had gone, no doubt
scared off by my shout. The sea had gone too, though obviously not
frightened by me - I was no King Canute. I looked back to see the
tide sweeping towards me, a stampede of angry looked white froth.
If you don't think froth can look angry, maybe you'd like to kiss a
pissed off Rottweiler. This froth was ticked off and it wanted a
piece of me. Not wanting to become any wetter than I already was I
ran backwards a few feet further onto the sand. The water crashed
into a dip where I'd been standing, splashing me as if to say "I'll
get you some way."

I wiped the salty water from my
face wondering at the sudden tide. Had the waltz become a tango?
Were the sea and the moon having a brief lover's spat?

I turned once more to face the
land, stepping backwards slightly as I moved. I felt something
crunch under my heel and looked down.

A wing, or rather the remains of
one.

I crouched for a better look,
not really wanting to but not being able to help myself. The crunch
had been the small piece of bone still attached to the tattered and
bloody section of feathers. Small pieces of gore were slimed across
the wing, sand sticking to them like icing sugar sprinkled on a
cake.

I vomited. Twice. The first was
at the sight of the shredded wing. The second was either because of
the smell of the first, or because the wing was now covered in my
own puke, making the scene, somehow, more horrific.

Spitting a few times to clear my
mouth, I stood again. Without looking back, I started to walk away.
Without thinking about the what or the why, and certainly not the
how, I walked away. I was sorry for the gull, but I didn't
genuflect or say a prayer. I didn't look around for the remainder
of the remains, if there were any. The thought of a burial, even
one as simple as kicking sand over the wing, didn't enter my
head.

I walked away and whistled a
happy tune. Tra-la-la. No. I didn't. I just walked. I didn't look
at my surroundings, sing a song, or even think. I just walked.

* * * *

Sometime after, I don't know how
long or how far, I stopped and vomited again. As my breakfast that
morning had been the usual two slices of toast, undercooked eggs
and tepid coffee (they know how to look after you in that mental
home), my previous efforts at throwing up had relieved me of the
contents of my stomach. Dry retching was about all I could manage,
but my body had a good attempt at more.

I'd left the beach behind a
while ago, not noticing as the sand gave way to rough brush, which
in turn transformed into grass. At some point the grass had met up
with a road, maybe for a few drinks and a pizza, and I'd
automatically turned along it, my feet taking me along their own
path without actually letting the rest of me know. Perhaps they
fancied pizza as well. Pepperoni, probably. Or maybe a meat feast.
Just no tomato on the base please. I hate tomato.

I walked in a daze, feeling
amazed, phased and, sadly, not erased. For a long time, I didn't
actually think anything. I didn't notice flies on my face, though I
perhaps brushed the odd one away. I didn't hear squirrels scooting
along branches of trees or rabbits scurrying through the long
grass. I never noticed any cars driving past, except for the one
with the music blasting out. Music, nowadays, is a phrase that gets
thrown on any pile of notes chucked together, however loosely. This
particular harmonic car crash consisted of a bass beat I could feel
in my bones, and someone swearing in rhyme, shouting to be heard
above the relentless drums. The car was a pale metallic blue, small
but with a rear spoiler so disproportionately large that, if the
car hadn't have been doing 80 miles an hour, it would surely have
tipped backwards. As it was, I expected it to achieve lift off at
any moment, its escape velocity taking the vehicle into near
orbit.

I didn't see the driver, but I
assumed he wore a baseball cap, the peak curved down, frowning at
the fact it covered the head of an idiot. He'd be on his mobile
phone, shouting to be heard above the guy on the CD who was
swearing at the top of his voice above the beat. He'd drive like
this whether he was on the open road, or whether he was driving
past a primary school. It was cool. He was invincible.

I vomited again at that point.
Or tried to.

I hadn't seen the small dent on
his bonnet. But I knew it was there.

I hadn't seen the single strand
of strawberry blonde hair that was still, no matter how well he'd
tried to clean the evidence away, trapped in the arm of his wiper
blade. But I knew it was there.

He hadn't seen the girl. He was
reading a text message on his phone from one of his
drinking-smoking-drugging buddies. He hadn't felt his car hit her.
The only thing he could feel was the beat driving its way into his
soul. It wasn't until he'd pulled into his mother's drive and was
walking away from the car that he saw the dent and he saw the hair
and he saw the blood. I think he probably vomited then, but it was
a club I didn't care to share membership of.