Sin (7 page)

Up ahead the road curved to the
right around a small copse. I saw the blue car with the enormous,
phallic spoiler take the curve way too fast. The driver drove this
way normally, so he could, most likely, have handled the skid. He
would have laughed as he turned into it and accelerated away.
Adrenalin, food of the yobs. Except he wasn't laughing. He didn't
get chance. I'm quite sure the tree didn't leap into the middle of
the road. I'm equally certain its branches didn't reach down,
snatching the car off the road.

I didn't see the crash, but I
heard it. I couldn't smell the smoke but I knew it was there. I
couldn't see the strange angle his bloody head was hanging at, or
the way his right arm didn't seem to be fully attached at the elbow
anymore. But I knew. I knew.

I didn't run to the accident. I
didn't believe it was entirely an accident. And when I rounded the
curve in the road, I looked at the wreckage just as I would have
roadkill, although for the squashed remains of a hedgehog or
pheasant I would have felt something. Here, I felt nothing. No
sympathy and no sorrow. I didn't feel numb, as I thought I might, I
just felt nothing for the man, little more than a boy, who had
driven too fast for too long and had mowed down a young girl on her
way home from school without even noticing. I felt nothing for the
person who could clean his car, polishing till his arms ached, to
try and hide the fact. I felt nothing for the mangled corpse of
someone who, the next day, could climb back into his car, turn up
his music, talk on his phone, and forget it had even happened. The
expanding pools of blood and oil, merging together like a ying-yang
pictogram were just something to step over.

It would seem that, apart from
our mutual queasiness, we also shared a lack of guilt.

I looked at the wreckage and
continued to walk. I didn't stop to see if I could help - it was
obvious I couldn't. I'd be hard pushed to say which was in a worse
state - the car or the body.

It had been, apart from that
spoiler, a nice car though.

Leaving the shattered remains of
man and machine, car and corpse, fillet o' fish, behind me, I
continued to let my feet take me where they wanted. I felt detached
as if the only thing keeping me in contact with this world was the
touch of my feet on the road. If I'd jumped, separating me from the
tarmac, perhaps I would have winked out of existence faster than
His Royal Deceasedness back there could take a corner. I didn't
jump, to test my theory, just as I didn't feel bad that I could
make light of what had just happened. I maybe felt bad about not
feeling bad, but that was a bizarre spiral I didn't want to get
tangled up in.

It dawned on me, like the sun
rising refreshed after a good night's kip, that, as well as being
still in the land of the living, I didn't actually know where I
was. I hadn't recognised the beach I'd arrived on, washed up
survivor of the shipwreck called my life, but that meant nothing.
Apart from the glorious golden stretches of Majorca's Alcudia or
mainland Spain's Costa Dorada, as the brochures insisted they were,
I'd only really been to Cleethorpes. Golden, it wasn't, but it was
all we'd had as I grew up. There were infrequent visits to the
seasides of Skegness and Mablethorpe, and even less so to
Scarborough or Bridlington, but none of the sandy stretches had any
distinguishing marks to stick in my head. They all looked, like the
grains of sand on their very own beaches, pretty much the same.
They had pubs, they had souvenir shops and they had tourists. If it
wasn't for the much hotter weather and the fact that the
Mediterranean Sea is a tad cleaner than the River Humber, you could
have been sunning yourself anywhere.

I'd been walking with no sense
of direction and no sense of destination. Even if I'd had a
destination, somewhere to rest my weary bones and, under the
circumstances down a few neat vodkas, I wouldn't have known what to
do once I got there. Except down a few neat vodkas, of course. That
in itself raised a problem or two. I didn't have any money. The
slacks they dressed us in were the poor relation of hospital
scrubs, and were pocketless, not to mention styleless. With the
asylum to bleed us dry of any finances we might have, residents,
patients and grunts together were provided with their every need so
personal money wasn't an issue, nor was it a temptation to anyone
else. Providing us with our every need meant feeding us slop and
doping us up, but that was just incidental. No need to be picky is
there?

One thing Joy had done for me
was make me comfortable. I don't know how she'd managed it, but she
must have been a far keener financial wizard than I'd ever hoped to
be. Because she'd taken her own life, her life assurance, to the
sweet tune of £100,000, had not paid out, but her shares and
various other monetary wotsits certainly had. I knew nothing about
tax and accounts and bonds and such myself. I'd never had the money
to warrant me finding the knowledge. As far as I was concerned, a
bank account was somewhere to pay your wages into before everyone
else leeched them out. My future-thinking financial security
extended to a limited stakeholder pension, but that was about it.
Everything else seemed as complicated as Sudoku, so I kept well
away. Joy, it appeared, didn't have that problem. She'd invested
extremely wisely, in such a way as to ensure her standard of living
well into her twilight years. It was a pity her twilight had come
so fast, like a candle snuffed out by an errant breeze.

More surprisingly, though, was
the fact that I was named beneficiary of the whole shebang. Not
because I wouldn't be, don't get me wrong. Joy and I were as close
as any brother and sister might be. Granted she never, ever wrote
me a letter, except one in particular, but we always shared a bond.
I always thought that bond was one of simple sibling love.
Naturally it wasn't. Joy was joy and I, Sin, was sin. I found out
too late how closely we were connected. Too late to save her and,
perhaps, myself. But whip-de-do. At least she made sure I could
afford Dr. Connors' rates.

I think, sometimes, I sound
callous and uncaring. I make light of the deepest, darkest
subjects, as if I couldn't give a rat's banana. That's not the
case, though. I might joke about my sister jumping off the Humber
Bridge to take a little dip in Pollution Central, but it doesn't
mean I think it's funny. It doesn't mean it didn't tear me apart.
It doesn't mean it doesn't still.

Perhaps it's because that's
exactly what happened. It tore me apart, just as everything else
I've caused has done. The bus smashing into the post office. The
seagull ending up as if it had been supper for a pack of hunting
dogs that had somehow mistaken it for a fox. The boy, a young
boy
, driving his car into a tree. Each time something
happened, I was fed through the shredder, then stuck back together
with a great, hefty staple gun and a few rusty nails. With some
blu-tac and spit to make sure I didn’t come apart at the seams.
After so much of that you either deal with it or you end up
insane.

No comments about my previous
residence, please.

So that was my way of dealing
with it all. That was how I bit the big cookie. I took the piss,
just a little. It was either that or gouge my eyes out with a rusty
fork. They didn't give us metal forks, rusty or otherwise, in the
mental home, so I didn't really have that option. Humour, however
inappropriate, was my only course of action, my only weapon and my
only form of defense.

So, I wasn't rich, not by any
stretch of the imagination, but I was comfortable. I couldn't buy a
twenty seven bedroomed, eighteen bathroomed, ten kitchened, six
garaged, one partridge in a pear treed mansion, not could I fork
out for a Ferrari or two to run about town. I couldn't afford eight
cruises a year. I couldn't afford one really. Well, maybe I could,
but Dr. Connors vampiric fees made sure I didn't take it. But that
was OK. It was all well and fine and dandy. I'd voluntarily
incarcerated myself into Hell's Kebab House and accepted the fact
that they'd bleed me like a leech, all nicely bloated and
disgustingly fat.

It was a good job their
standards of care were right up there with the monkeys. I imagined
Dr. Connors performing lobotomies with a steak knife and a knitting
needle, giving the knife a quick wipe before he sat down for a nice
bit of sirloin, chips and peas, hold the mushrooms. Was I being
unkind? Perhaps. The good doctor might well use a clean knife for
his dinner. Was it deserved? Yes. It was. Dr. Connors was like
Stephen King's It. All smiles and happiness while he eviscerated
you.

Apparently he liked Chianti
too.

My problem was, although I had
money in the bank - assuming that it hadn't been totally siphoned
yet (and we know that assuming anything turns me and you into a
right donkey's arse) - I didn't have access to a bank. I didn't
even know if there were any banks around here, not knowing
precisely where 'here' was. I could have been in my home town, or I
could have been in Outer Mongolia. Both options were pretty much
the arse end of Nowhere to me, but at least Grimsby had its fair
share of banks, building societies and those cash-point machines
that rip you off a couple of quid every time you make a withdrawal.
I knew that Outer Mongolia had come a long, long way since the days
of Genghis Khan, but I was sure trying to get hold of any cash, if
indeed that's where I'd landed, would have presented me with one or
two wee problems. All I could do, in my current situation, was keep
walking and see where I ended up.

I just hoped I'd end up
somewhere fairly soon. Dark clouds were looming ominously not too
far away. I could see them planning their attack on me, making bets
on which would manage to drench me the quickest. I wished I'd
brought me brolly.

My thoughts, drifting like a
strait jacket on the water, returned unbidden to the crash scene
I'd left behind me. I'd trained myself to not dwell on the things
that happened, that I caused. 'Trained' might be too structured a
word. It wasn't really that conscious, or that regimented. It was
more a case of I'd learned, through instinct or pain or sweet self
preservation, to not think too much about the deaths and the
screams and the things I knew. The fact that I had wanted to turn
myself into a strawberry Pop Tart might decry that admission, but,
while I could want to rid the world of Me because of everything I'd
done, I didn't concentrate on individual atrocities. The situation
as a whole made me want to, let's be blunt, kill myself, not
because of anything specific, but because I was a monster
ass-ay-hole.

I think that makes sense. I
could turn a blind eye to causing the death of a family, but not to
the fact that I'd caused death.

I looked back, briefly. I
couldn't see the remains of the car. The scene back there seemed as
peaceful as if it was an autumn's day, just before the rain. The
trees and hedgerows stood out in stark relief against the
blackening clouds. The air felt charged as if the sky was winding
up a dynamo ready for a lightning display. I certainly didn't want
to be caught in any downpour but didn't see the point in quickening
my pace. I could be 100 metres from sanctuary, just around the next
gang of elms, or it could be 100 miles, over the hills and far
away. Who knew? I, for one, didn't, so why bother breaking into a
sweat when it might be pointless? If the heaven's opened, as they
surely were planning to, I'd take shelter under the branches of a
tree and wait it out.

The car. The boy. The blood and
the broken glass and the crushed metal.

I flashed back to him flying
past me. He'd been a blur, but I saw more in retrospect than I had
at the time. He was driving on the left hand side of the road. He
was sitting on the right. The number plate was a UK one. FX56
something or other. A new car. Nice one. I wasn't in Outer
Mongolia, nor was I in deepest, darkest Africa. Darkest England was
a fairly safe bet.

I smiled. It had been a long
time.

There was a body. There was a
wreck. There was death. But hey, there was also the chance that I
might be able to find a pub and have a few neat vodkas.
"Yippee-ki-yay, you mothers," as Bruce Willis might say.

I blotted the crash out. What
could I do, that I hadn't already done? Come on. I'd rid the world
of an idiot driver, one that had gotten away with running down a
young girl? Was the world a better place? Was it sweeter smelling
and fresher? No. Not to my nose anyway. Not to my senses. Not to my
heart. He was an idiot. His idiocy had resulted in the death of a
girl. Who was I, though, to dictate that he should die? I didn't
wear a great black hooded cloak and swing a scythe like Tiger Woods
does a nine iron, or my old mate Tony tries to. I don't live on a
cloud, have a long white beard and lightning shooting from my
fingertips, having to be careful if I wanted to pick my nose. I was
just me, Sin, a mortal more mere than most.

But anywho-be-doo. Hi-ho, it's
off to wherever I go.

The light was fading and the
distinct lack of any street lighting meant it was becoming much
darker than I was used to. I hadn't thought enough time could have
passed since I left the hospital for the day to be leaning towards
night. I knew I'd been walking for a while, but I had nothing to
track the hours by. Watches weren't allowed - yes, you could
possibly hang yourself with the strap if your shoelace happened to
snap, and I didn't have Tonto's skills in telling the time by the
position of the sun or the song of a cricket. If I didn't have my
Pulsar or my mobile phone, an hour could last five minutes or be
about five days long. It meant the few years I'd spent in Dr.
Connors care had lasted about six millennia. Even so, I would have
guessed that only a couple or three hours had loped by since I'd
blown apart that gull. Even in September it doesn't begin to get
dark until around seven-ish. The clouds, my Reaper's cloak made
real, were dragging across the sky, as if they were readying
themselves to wipe us all out, although that was perhaps wishful
thinking. The sun had disappeared, either behind the cloak or
beneath the horizon I didn't know. Still, it didn't
feel
that late. It didn't
feel
like I'd been walking seven hours
instead of two.