A Handicap of the Devil? (15 page)

Marcie didn't know any of this as she stood on the precipice and looked into the abyss. All Marcie knew at sixteen years of age was that the boys at her school thought she was ugly. The boys said she was ugly over and over again, as did some of the girls those same boys thought beautiful. May those same stupid boys have married those same stupid girls and lived in perdition thereafter.

No, Marcie knew none of this, as she stood poised to make her last dive onto the rocks beside the stream forty feet below her. All she knew at that moment was that her heart ached because she had been reviled. Her inner torment was absolute, and there could be no going back now. The notes were left for parents and close friends to discover after she was finally gone. Maybe then they would understand. No, how could anyone understand what she had been through? The catcalls and insults. The lack of a partner to school dances. The boy she
really
liked who showed some signs of responding until his mates chiacked him out of it. The pain in her heart and her guts, the never-ending pain and torment were absolute.

How could anyone understand the anguish as she tried treatment after treatment to rid herself of the acne that was spread across her face? The failure of the many diets she had tried to give her that
perfect figure
so coveted by the boys. The job she had gotten after school in Mr. Greasy's Hamburgers near her home as a means to earn money to buy trendy, cool clothes in an attempt to be accepted by those all-important peers.

Every move she tried failed, and she retreated into a fantasy world. Marcie wrote stories in which she was the heroine walking through a blasted landscape, admired by all who knew her, world famous for her skill with weapons and martial arts. In her stories she was the saviour several times of her world in its wars with alien creatures from outer space intent on subjugation. Lonely but loved. Admired but existential.

The real Marcie tried karate for a few weeks, but when she failed her yellow belt she quit. She shared her generational need for instant gratification. The thirty-second grab was everything.

She spent so much time sitting alone in her room tapping out her stories on an old laptop computer, that she neglected her studies and began to get failing grades. This compounded the problem, because then her parents were at her to improve her grades. She was a good student and a happy enough person until puberty kicked in. Then the media images of what she should be, how she should look, dress, smell, act, walk, talk and everything else concerned with her being, acted upon her. Ah, how sad it can be when the wine is first spilled into the blood.

It was the personal comments that hurt the most. Even her sometime friends, sensing the scapegoat who diverted attention from their own failings and imperfections, were guilty of hurtful comments. It got so that she trusted no one and related to no one at school or at home. Her parents wouldn't understand, she thought. So she didn't bother to try to explain why a happy child became—with puberty's onset—a sad and morose recluse who never smiled, never laughed and was so concerned with her own misery that she forgot that there were stars in the sky, a breeze that riffles your hair, a sun that warms your back, sights, smells and all that host of things that make life worth living.

Marcie considered herself to be alone and friendless, and that there was nobody in her world that cared enough about her to make it worthwhile continuing to exist in this world.

That was why she was poised upon this ledge forty feet over the rocks about to make the dive into blackness.
Was forty feet high enough?
What if she didn't kill herself but landed on her head and suffered brain damage? What if she was forced to live like a vegetable for the rest of her life? She looked up and saw another ledge perhaps twenty feet further up. She would climb up there and make certain she did the job properly. Marcie had just turned when a voice from below pulled her up.

"Hey, babe, whatchadoin? Bit dangerous up there, don't go no higher."

She looked down and saw two men below her. Funny she hadn't seen them before. They must have been lost in the shadows that had now cleared as the sun came from behind clouds.

"I'm okay, don't worry about me.” She could see that the older of the two men wore a caftan and had multi-coloured beads around his neck. He had long hair and a long beard, and he spoke like an aging hippie. The other man wore a conservative grey suit and tie. His hair was cut short, and he was more or less the reverse of the coin of the other man. He had taken off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers and was dangling his feet in the river. A piece of grass extended from his mouth, and he chewed on it thoughtfully.

"You're going to jump, aren't you?” shouted the hippie-looking older man. It was not a question, more a statement that he knew her intentions.

Marcie was rattled. She hadn't expected this sort of interruption to her plan. “What's it to you?"

"Everything."

She thought she detected a smile on the face of the silent man in the suit downstream. She started to get angry. “What do you mean ‘everything'? You don't even know me."

"No man is an island. Who said that?"

"John Donne."

"Ah, good, something of a scholar. Then you'll know the gist of the thing, and that is that every part of the world that breaks off, every person who dies, is a part of me. It means that we are all our brother's, or in this case, our sister's keepers, and we must care for one another and look after each other. Would you agree that that is the intention of the poet?"

"Well, yes, sort of. I guess that's as good an explanation as any other. What is this, an exam?"

"Then if you agree with that and agree with the philosophy behind the poem, how can you ask me why I am concerned that you are about to leap off a cliff and kill yourself?"

"I don't remember saying I agreed or didn't agree with Donne."

"But don't you? If you were to see a small child accidentally tipped out of it's pusher into the path of a bus and you had the power to save that child, wouldn't you do so?"

"That has nothing to do with what I'm doing or why."

"No, you're right to an extent, but the answer is ‘yes', you would save the child, and you know that is true. It has everything to do with why I'm trying to stop you killing yourself. We are all involved with one another, or ought to be. Even my friend here, with his feet in the water pretending no concern whatever, is running plans through his mind to try to get up that cliff while I divert your attention, and bring you forcibly down here so that he can talk some sense into you. That's the way he operates. He thinks you just need a kick up the bum and be told to get on with it and that all will be cool. I have known him for so many years that I know what he thinks. Extraordinary, eh?"

Marcie was becoming confused by the talk. “Why don't you and your friend just go away and let me get on with it? My mind's made up."

"Can't do that. We're committed to the end now, whatever that end may be. We are involved with you whether we want to be or not and whether you want us to be or not. Our paths have crossed and all that. Tell me, are you religious at all?"

"I used to go to church with my mum."

"Used to, eh? An unbeliever? God forbids suicide according to the bible. Can't use that one then?"

"I don't know what I believe. All I know at this moment is that I have to stop the pain."

"But why are you in pain? Because some pimply little boy said you were ugly? Or a number of pimply little boys and girls? A boy you really fancy told you to get lost? What you have to realise, what I have to make you realise, is that this moment in time is a mere blip in your existence. In five years, eight max, you will look back at this moment and wonder how on Earth you could have arrived at the point of standing on that ledge about to cast yourself into oblivion."

"Please go away.” Marcie was in a dilemma. Killing herself was one thing, but killing herself in front of other people was something she couldn't contemplate. Besides, he might be loopy, but his voice had hypnotic qualities. He seemed to be a nice old man, even if he was dressed like a refugee from the sixties. She didn't want him or his friend to have the experience of seeing her brains dashed out when she hit the rocks.

"I've been alive a long time,” continued her tormentor. “And yet I still take great delight in living. I want to make you see why I delight in it and why so many other people do and why you will again. The taste of food. The smell of fresh brewed coffee. The smell of asphalt and fields after first rain. Real friends. The beach on a nice day. Sunrises and sunsets. The poem of a tree. The capricious sea in sunlight or in storm. The sheer joy of real love. Oh, I'm not denigrating your feelings now, but believe me, the first one that's not puppy love hits you like a ton of bricks. You are too inward looking right now to know what I'm talking about. You must grow, not just older, but emotionally, and in awareness of the beauty and splendour that is around you. The real beauty of people is within them, not in their physical form. Not that there's anything wrong with the way you look. If you want confirmation, do some volunteer work around a disabled people's hospital or residence. Some of the most twisted looking people in humanity have a great light that shines out from them. You know why?"

"No."

"It shines out because they accept themselves, who and what they are and how they look. They live with things and with pain you can never know about, but they LIVE, and that's the difference between them and you. You are willing to throw away your lifetime because of feelings of lack of worth. You have never suffered. Yours is an extreme form of self-indulgence—yes, I know that sounds hard and I'm not here to insult you—it is self-indulgence because you haven't yet really begun to live, and you're going to call it quits. People can only define you as something if you allow them to define you. What about the you that you know and they don't? You are a beautiful, caring, sensitive—perhaps too sensitive—human being. Don't let them do this to you. Don't let the bullies win. Do you know what the best revenge is?"

"No, I don't."

"Success! Go on to succeed in your chosen career in a way that these vain fools never can. Let them look in later years at someone who has made a mark. At someone who has made a real difference, a contribution of some kind to the human race. Show them all how wrong they are."

Marcie stepped back from the precipice and digested all that had been said to her. The hypnotic quality of the voice had worked to quieten her emotions. No longer did the storm race through her. She was quieter inside herself than she had been for a long time. Could this old hippie in his caftan be right? Should she try to walk tall and live forgetting the slings and arrows cast at her by outrageous bullies?

"You mean you think I've let people define me, and therefore that's who I've become?"

"You're an intelligent girl. It would be a great pity for the world to waste that intelligence. There's not enough of it around."

"I don't know. I just don't know?"

"What don't you know?"

"Whether you're right or not."

"I have said all that I can to dissuade you. I cannot go further. It is you who must decide whether or not you throw yourself off that cliff. But I put it to you that if you are going to you better hurry up, because my friend is more than halfway up the cliff toward you."

"It hurts so much."

"Living is never easy. We all have to have some courage to face what we must face. You think you have suffered so far? You will find that you have not the first time you lose a loved one to death. The first time your supposed true love proves false. You will find that what you are going through right now is mere aggravation."

"You mean it gets worse?” Marcie moved back towards the precipice.

"Worse and better. Life has its sorrows, but it also has its great joys. It is the balance that makes it worthwhile. If there was no sorrow, how would you know what happiness is? True love and friendship, old people, children, generational change, the great beauty that surrounds you. That's what it's all about, if only you allow yourself to see it."

Marcie decided to live and took Peter's hand when he arrived, and they both descended to the ground. She hugged both of her benefactors who said no more words to her. They went away, walking along the path by the stream, until they went around a bend in the river and disappeared from sight.

Marcie went home and resumed her life. She became interested in things outside of herself. She found a circle of true friends and left the vainglorious fools who had come close to killing her. She studied hard and achieved top grades—finishing as dux of her school—and went on to become an outstanding university student. Her studies culminated in a doctorate at the young age of twenty-two.

Marcie turned her back on the promise of a great academic career in favour of journalism, where she concentrated on bringing stories of injustice and oppression to light. Marcie was the shining light of the Daily Bugle.

She served as a war correspondent in three war zones and saw some terrible things during her time working in that capacity. Although the experiences hardened her, they forced her to look even deeper into herself and to analyse the motives and actions of her fellow human beings. Marcie became a vegetarian in direct response to the bloodshed and killing she observed as a journalist. She believed that no human—a supposed being of the highest intelligence—should kill to live. Her philosophy was as simple as that. She never became cynical and never forgot the deep lessons in humility and caring those two strange men on the riverbank taught her.

She had looked over the precipice into the black abyss and had been pulled back thanks to the efforts of two kindly strangers. Marcie often thought of that dreamlike scene in later years. Surely it must have been a dream. How could the old hippie have known so much of what was going on inside her?

Yes, she knew Jonathan and knew where he was coming from and why. Jonathan was one of the oppressed who had been bullied just as she had been. He had the courage to live with his burden without the intervention of a kindly old hippie and his conservative friend. Or perhaps he lacked the courage to die.