Eventually, a
sneer began to surface on Sid’s face. He looked dead into my eyes
with the damning superiority of hatred, and replied:
‘Don’t play
this like I struck first. If you want to kill me, at least be a
fucking man abou-’
Looking back,
I can’t remember whether his hand twitched, or whether I just
wanted it to. Either way, I suppose, it doesn’t matter now. I
pulled the trigger. The back of his head exploded in a fountain of
blood and brains. His expression didn’t change, exactly, but it
froze in its place. Propped up by the kitchen counter, for a moment
he almost looked like he was still standing up. Were it not for the
small hole in his forehead, I might’ve wondered whether I’d missed.
He stared at me for a moment with those horrible, bulbous,
astounded eyes, then he slumped to the side, bounced against the
kitchen counter and fell to the floor. His cheek hit the lino with
an understated
slap
.
The song
continued to waft in from Sid’s bedroom. I didn’t recognise the
melody from anywhere, and after a few moments it dawned on me that
Sid himself was the one singing. It was, admittedly, a better tune
than any of the many that Charlie has played me over the years.
Catchy, but with a melancholic edge. Maybe not good enough to
render everything else he ever did irrelevant, but enough, perhaps,
to suggest that he could’ve got there, one day. I looked down at
the corpse, and the pool of blood seeping outwards around his open
skull. I didn’t even have the common courtesy to vomit, or scream.
Maybe Sid was right
, I thought.
Maybe I am a psychopath.
Maybe I really did want to kill him all along, just to see if I
could. Maybe it’s better to hate yourself for being evil than for
being weak.
At a certain
point, the echoes of the gunshot began to bleed into the music, and
I realised that if I didn’t leave now, I’d get caught. The angel on
one shoulder screamed in support of the latter. The devil on the
other screamed back. I strode past Sid’s corpse, rolled the
balaclava back down and clambered onto the kitchen counter. As I
looked down at the grass, three stories below, the angel and devil
broke off their argument and screamed out in unison not to jump. I
ignored them.
An amount of
time I neither knew nor cared to know later, my lungs and teeth
were burning, and I’d adopted a weird hybrid of skipping and
sprinting because my left leg had taken the brunt of the fall, and
this time the fall was heavy enough that no amount of exhaustion or
adrenaline could mask the pain. I was so tired that I couldn’t help
hallucinating blue flashing lights around every street corner.
It doesn’t matter
, I kept thinking,
just get home, and
you can sleep this all off.
I could tell
that I’d reached Jesmond because all of the wheelie-bins were out
in the street. It was rubbish day in Jesmond. The sun was almost
up, so I guessed I didn’t have much time until the bin-men finished
clearing out the whole place and went home. After making sure that
there were no CCTV cameras or windows with the curtains undrawn, I
went to a bin, heaved off the blood-stained hoody and gloves, and
threw them inside.
Within half an hour, it will be in the back
of garbage truck. Within two it will be at the tip, never to be
seen of again
.
So why didn’t
I put the gun in there with it?
That’s the question
I’m asking myself, as I stare down the barrel of the gun I
should’ve thrown away twenty-four hours ago. But it’s too late for
that.
‘Yeah,’ I say,
putting my hands up. ‘I killed him. I’m sorry, Charlie.’
‘What are you
apologising to me for?’ Charlie replies.
To my
surprise, he laughs. Well, it would’ve been a surprise if it was
anyone other than Charlie. He’s the type with whom nothing is a
surprise.
‘So, are you
going to kill me?’ I ask him.
He laughs,
again.
‘Did I not
tell you last night that I don’t give a shit about anything?’ he
replies. ‘We’re all impotent, Sundance.’ The laugh settles down
into a smirk. ‘Six chambers, one bullet. There’s no God up there to
reward or punish us, and no judge or jury down here whose opinion
is worth caring about, so what’s say we give blind chance a
go?’
‘Charlie…’ I
begin, but he interrupts me.
‘You don’t
have a choice in this, mate; just like Sid didn’t.’
He takes a
drink from his glass, which I notice is once again full of whiskey.
A pissed-up nihilist with a gun in his hand. That’s all I need.
‘Fine,
Charlie. Do it,’ I tell him.
‘As you wish,’
he replies.
A bead of
sweat runs down my cheek.
Click.
And with that,
my life is spared. No fanfare, just a
click
. Charlie points
the gun at his own head. It’s funny; even though I believe him when
he says he doesn’t care if he lives or dies, the colour still
drains from his face and his finger shivers on the trigger. Even
against the mind, the dumb body will scrabble to the corner and
cower in the face of death.
‘Don’t do it,
Charlie,’ I tell him. ‘You haven’t done anything.’
He doesn’t
reply; he just fixes me with a thick, determined stare. The
wrinkles in his forehead grow deeper and deeper until they force
his eyes to close, and his jaw gets tighter and tighter until his
lips peel back to the gums.
Click.
Simultaneously
we exhale. I half-smile at him, in relief, but he looks at me with
something approaching anti-climax in his eyes. The fear which put
such crevasses in his expression turns into anger; the anger
escalates; the knuckles wrapped around the gun turn whiter…
Jason Statham
appears on the TV screen, and something in Charlie seems to snap.
He points the gun at the television and pulls the trigger.
Click.
The anger escalates further.
Click.
The anger
escalates further.
BOOM.
Jason Statham
- and the television containing him - explodes in a hail of sparks
and that now-familiar lightning clap. The rush of sweat out of my
armpits seems instantaneous. The muscles controlling my jaw go
slack, and my mouth falls open. Three things occur in what I assume
to be a short space of time, though I can’t tell in what order they
happen: I notice that Charlie’s attention is focused on neither me,
nor the television, but rather a spot exactly in the middle of me
and it; a shard of glass from the television screen nicks a slight
but stinging cut just beneath my eyelid, and a female voice lets
out a scream. My nicked eye closes, but the open eye follows
Charlie’s line of sight, out of the window. After leaning forward
slightly, I catch a glimpse of the owner of the scream. And her
friend. I quickly snap my head back, hoping they were too fixated
on Charlie and the revolver to notice my face pop quickly in and
out of frame. My body stiffens as the pair of witnesses scuttle off
down the street, and their screams grow more and more distant. I
can feel the searing clarity and purpose take hold of me, once
more. I stand up, and the jeans fall down from my knees to my
ankles.
‘We need to
go,’ I tell Charlie. ‘Now!’
No,’ he
replies.
‘Charlie, the
police will be here any fucking minute!’ I exclaim. ‘We need to get
the fuck out of here!’
‘No, I don’t,’
he reiterates.
‘This is your
fucking freedom!’ I exclaim, again. ‘It’s years,
decades
, in
prison we’re facing, here!’
‘It’s my
choice to make,’ he says, firmly but quietly. For the first time in
a long time, he appears stone-cold sober, and I know that there’s
no point in further argument.
‘I need the
gun,’ I say instead. He tosses it to me with the glaze of
drunkenness back in his eyes. I fumblingly catch it and tuck it
into the waistband of my jeans as I pull them back up. One last
time, I look my best friend up and down as he’s lying sprawled on
the couch, pissed.
‘Bye,
Charlie.’
‘Bye,
Peter.’
If my life was a
movie, this is the part where we’d jump-cut to a low-shot of me
sprinting down the street and something heavy on the drums and bass
guitar would erupt in the background. In reality, the only sound I
can hear is my brain screaming ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
My
last-pick-in-PE fitness levels quickly bottom-out and I stagger
into an alleyway and collapse down beside a dumpster, pulling some
rubbish bags around me in a half-arsed attempt to prevent
detection, to plan my next move. I try to view things at a
distance, as a mathematical puzzle, rather than the ugly mess it
actually is. My goal is to get out of the reach of the law; my
parameter is that no-one can see me on the way – or, more
accurately, that no-one can recognise me. The cover of darkness
will make that recognition much easier to avoid, and until then it
would be prudent not to move out in the open. But, then again,
staying put until darkness falls means somehow staying out of sight
for another five or six hours.
I look up at
the dumpster with a grimace. As if waiting for its cue, the stench
of garbage emanating from it rushes up my nose. Sometimes lucky
coincidences can be such a pain in the arse.
I spent the summer
before my first year at university working for a catering company.
Not being the owner of a particularly infectious or charming
personality, I found myself stuck in back-of-house, washing up, by
myself. I hated it. Not because I hated being alone – I’d rather
daydream whilst scrubbing plates than attempt to make chitchat
whilst serving them up – but because the place seemed to have such
a strange effect on the flow of time. I’d be in at 10AM and
immediately get to work scrubbing at the yolk-stained china left
over from breakfast. To pass the time, I played through the
improved version of the
Star Wars
prequels I’d spent all
summer writing in my head. I’d run it over, scene-by-scene,
occasionally tracking back to edit a shot or a piece of dialogue,
telling myself I’d reward myself with a peek at clock on my phone
when I got to the end credits of
Episode I
. But then, when
the John Williams came in, I’d think: ‘No; I’ll hold off until the
end of the second movie.’ By that time, I figured I’d be able to
toddle off for lunch, sit on the grass on my own and maybe
Facebook-stalk whatever girl I happened to be in love with at the
time. I’d redo scenes again and again and again, as much to pad out
the running time of my daydream as from some Kubrickesque sense of
perfectionism. Even when I was sure I’d accidentally worked through
my lunch-break I waited until the last tea-boy’s credit rolled
before I allowed myself my well-earned peek. Finally, with a
flourish of self-satisfaction, I’d whip out my phone, and discover
that it was ten-thirty-five.
So why do I
tell you this tedious anecdote? Because lying in a dumpster in the
dark, hidden under bags of weeks’ old food and feeling cold garbage
juice seeping into my clothes, with the only moments of excitement
coming when the lid suddenly opens and I experience a trill of
terror that the person opening it might spot the edge of my trainer
poking out from my putrid duvet, followed by an
oomph!
of
pain as yet another sack of rubbish lands heavily on top of me, is
a lot like the experience of working on the pot-wash that summer.
The six or seven hours until sundown unravel themselves into weeks.
I lie there, contemplating phoning Freddy to warn him that the
police would be coming for him, then remember that I don’t have my
phone. I try to count up what evidence was left in the house, and
how it could be used against me in court. I squeeze an arm up
through the filth and lift the lid of the dumpster, just a crack.
Still light. I wonder how to get out of her majesty’s reach with no
money and no passport, and decide that I’ll have to go and dig up
the stashed takings from the moor, because - fuck it - it’s each
man for himself, now. I wonder how the fuck my life has come to
this. I squeeze an arm up through the filth and lift the lid of the
dumpster, just a crack. Still light. For what seems like hours, I
think about how my fucking life has come to this. I lift the lid.
It’s still light. Then I fantasise about lying with Liz on my sofa,
watching a movie. Then an image of the look on Sid’s face when he
realised I’d murdered him flashes in front of my eyes, like a
crackle of lightning. I slam them shut, but the gory spectacle
remains projected onto the back of my eyelids.
The deeper I
bury myself into the garbage bags, the more insane I turn, and the
more looped and knotted time becomes. Memories begin to transform
into presents. Images of Sid against closed eyes transform into the
unshakeable sensation of his presence, lying twisted up in all the
refuse beside me. The wafting scent of rotting food becomes his
last, lukewarm, stinking breaths, seeping out of his now-quiet
lungs. As if to prove to myself that he isn’t there, I wriggle a
hand across my chest and attempt to feel where his head would, but
shouldn’t, be. My fingers slip into something wet and sticky. With
a jolt I snatch them back to my side. Something sharp jaggedly
slices across my forearm. It’s one of those small but piercing
pains that you’d probably let coax you into tears if only you were
still young enough to get away with it.
And with that
I’m a child again. Curled-up in a dumpster just off the school
field. The lid has just slammed shut, and I can hear a gaggle of my
howling friends attempting to heft a breeze-block on top, because
they know that I’m too weak to push the lid back open with a
relatively heavy object holding it down. Desperate, feral, I pound
my fists at the plastic, making obscene threats, which lose most of
their potency due to the fact that I’m shouting them through
tears.