SHORT LITERARY FICTION

THE NEWS FROM MY AREA

 

by Chris Madoch

 

1

 

Shortly I'll be off to get the Sunday paper. The Sunday Mirror to be exact. Well, it gets me out of my high-rise low-life flat. The Sunday Mirror- it's intended to reflect our small lives back at us bigger, better. I've never been in it. But then, I'm not eighteen, a drop dead gorgeous dog with massive tits. Then again, I do have every intention of being newsworthy one day.

And that's an ominous promise.

 

This life is proper untreated shit, raw sewage like the Spanish farmers spray on salad crops in times of drought. You'd be amazed how many people have no idea what a farm looks like, smells like. Everything comes shrink wrapped or out of skips.

Shit.

Mass ignorance. There is no escaping it- the abiding, overriding stench. No matter what the fuck you throw at it.

Now, they got what they call dirty nuclear bombs, well. Fuck me. That's all you need to know- bombs that blast disease willy nilly with consummate ease.

Cleanliness has no more relevance. Dirt up- it's the new black.

Sucking a peacock's cock in the considerably over romanticised Elizabethan age- imagine that; rolling back the grubby foreskin, liquid blue cheese.

I've read Patrick Suskind's book 'Perfume'. It was a journey of necessity. Forget the disappointing film. 

 

Here. Listen. I heard this through the paper thin walls the council calls building a short while ago.

 

'You're wearing perfume. You smell rank girl and you want me to thank you for a shag with 100 quid. There were skid marks on your grey knickers- I'm deducting 20 for that. Cunt. Pull another stunt like that and you'll be off my books. You're losing your underage looks. Got a fear of soap and water have you? Or has Christ got to you and you've suddenly decided to go all retro hippie on me?

When I lick your kipper cunt, you cunt, I want those cunt lips clean and tasty- you listening to me. I like mopping on prawn pussy when I'm watching my gay porn. 

 

Hang on.

Excuse me while I fart.

Ooh! Better out than in.

Ripper.

Beans. I been eating baked beans.

 

I have alternate meat and veg days. It was a veg day yesterday. Have a smell of that. Heinz. That's a proper smell that is. Can't you tell? Fuck me! It's a million times better than your street-market imitation Chanel muck. Muck. It sucks. Fucking sucks it does.'

 

Nice. Oh yes. Good memory me. Almost perfect recall.

Just a neighbourhood taster for ya.

 

Lived here for years on disability benefits- its not just the aftermath of Thalidomide, its the Major Depression Disorder caused by the aftermath of the Thalidomide- the bullying, the failing eyesight through all that repeat form filling. Small minded office workers love minutiae. I'm missing most of an upper left limb. Good thing it turned out I was right handed.

 

It has real feelings- my human squid. I flip out if anyone calls it my flipper.

It's Sid, Sid my squid.

 

Whenever I have a shower I give it a right soaping and, guess what,- it always gives me a stonking erection. Never fails.  Like I said, bloody good thing I am right handed. Though, all this time on me own, I have developed a great and possibly unique technique for achieving full orgasm without hands.

The mind is a marvel innit- a fucking marvel.

I lie naked on the bed, curtains open, touching nothing, just flexing the glutinous maximus, pressing my coccyx hard against the mattress; my mind does the rest. Shooting your load like that is like stumbling into Nirvana- heavenly. Messy mind, but fucking heavenly. I fantasise that in an adjacent tower block some grunt bear, still deep in the closet, has got a telescope and his cock out; that his obese wife catches him catches his ejaculate in her peach tissues.

 

2

 

Oh!

 

I'll take you with me if that's alright with you- invisible you may be but I'd worry leaving you alone up here. Fifteenth floor.

 

The last tenant flew. He was a tub of lard; how he squeezed himself through the window was quite the mystery. There wasn't much left of him. Had to be dealt with by a shovel of sorts. Did you ever see that series of images by Andy Warhol 'Purple Jumping Man'? He was jumping from much higher- you know, New York, so he was almost mush on landing. I always remember that curious cop in uniform standing over the dead lump, he had a spade in his hand. Andy see, he had an artist's eye for detail. What a wizard.

 

No. We won't hold hands. You're making me repeat myself. I only have the one and I usually tuck the paper under Sid the squid. Got it?

 

3

 

The long concrete landings give daily lessons in perspective and patience. There are estates in Paris much like this- the future made to inflict the facelessness of urban hell on an imprisoned underclass. Graffiti somehow gets to be self-defeating by being almost impossible to read but at least in this place it is sprayed in English of a sort.

In Paris it would be so street to cut in the odd English word but here the appearance of any French words would seem utterly absurd.

Yet I kinda hanker after seeing the word 'baguette' in brazen neon pink screaming on a linking footbridge, knowing as I do that that long bread stick is a lame French slang term for cock. Fresh from the bakers, who could stop themselves breaking the warm end off.

 

I survive here and, yes, I have the temerity to think.

Come on.

Mind the flattened dog turd and the painterly trail of trainer prints.

 

We take a sharp right. 

Sudden, ironic- black graffiti in support of the UK BNP, grass root fascists in a place where grass grows like comb-overs on bitter old bigots.

I am well inured to the blood red words 'nigga cunt'. That would seem to be the absolute limit of these guys' creative rage- it is exactly why I am not in the least frightened by them.

Yes, of course, I am on their lists.

I like the fact that I am on their extermination lists on three counts to date. In fact, I have made it part of my future life's work to create a fourth reason for them to have me oven baked in a state of the art stalag on the Isle-of-Wight.

 

I have watched a film of human bodies used as large candles- unsurprising, not gripping. You can buy wax candles as big as bodies at the shrine at Lourdes. The bigger the candle the better the chance of getting your petition answered by the Virgin Mary. Bollocks.

 

Indian families can be quite careless with the makeshift pyres of loved ones on the banks of the Ganges; often only half-burned they are kicked into the unclean depths and left: yes, left to be hooked out by a gang of cheap labour at the next dam employed specifically to snag the bloated bodies.

The 'holy river' is a thick and dangerous viral soup by any scientific measure.

I always remember this when I'm inclined to wince at the sight of used knotted condoms decorating the local swings- glossy grey Tibetan prayer rags hung from metal trees, seats varnished with the stain of children trying to deflect distress, the breeze carrying low-notes of their unscrubbed mess. And that's on the ground.

 

Yes, I'm on the BNP's fucking low-brow lists- Alex Biddens, Gatling Gun Tower: disfigured and disabled, half-caste, shirt-lifter.

The Front- that's a laugh, a lot of them are all front that's for sure.

I've had some- young guns wearing braces and number one heads; late teens and curious.

Clean as a whistle.

I don't do anal but I got plugs that switch the prostrate on.

I get these rabid heteros cumming and crying for joy at one and the same time. Then, mostly, they kick my head in- very half-heartedly mind, almost tenderly. The screwed lambs.

What they want is a real full blown war.

That's what they're waiting for.

What they desperately desire is the chance to participate in a life-size Xbox game, certificate eighteen. They wanna shoot the proper brown bollocks off of all living breathing fundamentalist darkie terrorists. Yeah! Just like most Americans do.

And they love Big Macs and pack banter about gang raping virgin apes on the rag; mugging Downs' boys, breaking into a mortuary and bumming dead bodies.

 

You picked a good day- the two man cesspit of a lift is working.

 

4

 

I let the rumblings of the Eastern Block mechanism do its unpleasant worst. Habit is such a cunt. I always stand here and let elevator disaster movies flood my mind then turn to take in the view such as it is.

Semi-industrial. A theme park for the uglier aspects of aspiration. Molehills of deconstructed cars and mountains of factory retail outlets. Tile wholesalers. A cramped garden centre.

It might be the last time I get to see it and, because it might be the last time I get to see it, I see it again for the first time, as if I were a recently housed refugee, maybe, from some distant desert war zone where 'sand' is so removed from being a chic colour of paint and 'blood' is real, caused by a nail bomb, not by something artfully distressed that costs a fucking bomb for those pillocks who live in clover on distant hills- utterly cushioned against the least of beastly ills.

Although.

 

They may have lost a wife in childbirth. The baby too. Gone home and drowned the poodle.

 

Equally.

 

They may have sought a crumb of fame at the BBC and been interfered with for their trouble.

 

Alternatively.

 

They may have been less than vigilant on holiday in the sun and lost their young teenage boy to someone grey, well able to drift away into the mists of Grecian history, his motor nondescript, his garage a shrine to gaffa tape and whatever else a predatory paedophile needs to effect the perfect rape in plain sight.

Sweets. Swish techno treats. Gags and chloroform.

Yes.

Family, friends and the authorities eventually following a cold trail. A life-boat launched. Home tabloids screamed at. Ribbon campaigns routinely spread like rampant acne. Appeal spot on the TV- networked worldwide. How they cried.

When whoever [pick a number] is done to friction sores with a blonde kid like that, they make a snuff movie, saw him into bits and use him for shark bait.

I think so.

It is a little known fact that the Mediterranean is one of the breeding grounds of the Great White. Like to spread the news from my area.

 

Clatter. Shudder. Bang. A comic cock in permanent felt tip gets split in two as the lift doors open. Ugh. Disgusting.

I always gasp at this regular intrusion.

It is like being belched at by a chain-smoking Bukkake tart, freshly fuelled by a large measure of rum and a lamb kebab drowning in brown sauce; very strong undernotes of commercial bleach, defeated Febreeze, stale urine and obvious fecal matter; an overlay of something expensive and out of place, a hint of Chloe.

On the floor a discarded Ferraro Roche wrapper and a JLS condom carton.

Hell! I could be persuaded things are on the up.

 

We're going down.

Get in then.

Lift tragedies are extremely rare. So rare as to not be worth a second thought.

My insane dwelling on them and the joys of claustrophobia run into multiples of ten before we finally land- my small, implausible, invisible friend and me.

 

No dramatic jarring as the descent into this other hell ends; just a startling influx of light as the doors open.

There in the toughened glass stair-well stand two waiting Indian ladies wearing blinding saris and bindis, both laden with full carrier bags from the local pound shop. They do a wide range of food stuffs now.

Their eyes immediately spot Sid my flipper. I make it dance, fiddle, dance for them.

They giggle like dazzled UFO hunters, fans of Derren Brown- look through my peculiarity, the gods have special things in mind for me. Kiss my clothing.

I smile and mumble something vaguely ethnic. Its worth it to make the effort.

I love that acrid mix of sweat, sandalwood and patchouli. Think to myself- they must miss the burning of their relatives on pyres.

Maybe they keep them in large re-conditioned chest freezers and wait for the British 'Bonfire Night'- November the fifth. All the major bonfire sites have signs saying no fly tipping but they are always ignored- especially by peoples who only have English as a second language.

Habits.

Habits are so hard to break. The casually lit candle bodies- how removed are they from hard drug addicts anyway? Not much.

We all burn out in our several ways.

In the gutter a litter of take-away Styrofoam containers stained with old curry and crushed hypodermics. A ragged, fearless, bird absurdly bathing in unclean dust.

 

5

 

We stopped at the eight foot high, rusting, wire-mesh fencing intended to keep kids at play safe from predatory pedos. I slumped against it like an orang-utan, one hand high and gripping the cold metal string, making it sing small urban anthems. There's that band Stomp. They hit dustbins with sticks. They hit anything tin with sticks. Is that hip or shit? And who is it decides?

 

No kids here today.

No teens sobbing, reading 'Dear Jane' letters over and over; not letters, texts.

Bless.

Half of the fuckers have forgotten how to write. That's some way down the road to total illiteracy. The bleeders don't even read porn.

They're all for the easy life and total suckers for graphic pictures.

Now.

Now and then you see escaped porn pictures torn from very explicit porn magazines happy to ride the thermals between the tower blocks. They're right tearaways- these escaped kites launched by terrorists against political correctness and all things fluffy.

On a sunny day they loop the loop. 

You get a sudden flash of a gaping cunt, tree high, followed by a stiffie pumping unlikely ejaculate. Some argue that that was what manna from heaven was- God's loving spoonfulls.

What a wanker.

 

On a day when the rain was light, I saw something similar attach itself to the monkey bars in the playground. You're not allowed to call them that anymore.

Beautiful black boys like to exercise their youthful muscle on that silver apparatus.

For all sorts of reasons you keep your banana in your lunch box with your Twix and stuff. That's what the powerless Community Police advise. I was told.

Fuck.

These witty young black boys, they've been known to chuck banana skins at them.

That brought a broad smile to my face. The twisted logic.

 

But why would you wheel a custom painted baby carriage in there? Because that's what's you do. You are fourteen and you have a baby and you have no idea who the father is.

You were taken to the fucking ground blindfold- not a peep out of you, and the whole gang had you. Spare me the penile details.

So you gets this half decent buggy from the social and in it is this thing in pink surrounded by a yellow stink and you think what it needs is fresh air.

Look at this place.

It is the u-bend in one of the many toilets of Greater London.

Did the kid shit before or after you left the flat that the authorities gave you for your troubles, you sad little cow? My bet is that you're a lazy bitch.

You sits your shitty nipper in the cage swing.

Happy days.

We can see her nappy off-loading unpleasant contents on both the ups and the downs. Why the fuck can't you?

That's right have a fag.

When you've finished you can stub it out on a used condom.

Nice shoes. Bought on the drip from your mother's catalogue. Lovely. Not much life in a suede pair though.

You're still not thinking as a survivor.

 

My first sighting of a paedo came when I was barely eleven.

I was in all white. It was the height of summer. White tee-shirt, white shorts. I was sat on top of a tennis umpire's ladder. Lads my own age, mates, were having a tournament on grass. All boys. Nobody gave a toss who was watching.

From my vantage point, between matches, I spotted the weird bastard.

 

He looked like, I imagined then, what an old gardener was supposed to appear to be- slightly stooped, baggy high-wasted brown corduroys. Short little fucker. Seemed old to me. He was clearly wanking through his right trouser pocket. And him noticing me noticing me brought him to a frenzied climax.

Shocked.

I watched him shuffle off with the gait of a lame spaniel. Maybe the war had ruined him. The word paedophile was not then in my lexicon or in many other peoples'.

 

But the grass courts were watered, green and pristine, and the clubhouse smelled of warm pine planks and roses. If we dropped litter it was purely accidental and we always picked it up.

 

Come on, ghoul, or there'll be no papers left to drool over.

 

6

 

The windows of our very convenient, all hours, sells everything Pakistani run Convenience Store, Post Office and Newsagent with a delicatessen counter are blinded, put out by steel planking, bolted on. It has to be very strong.

The whole building is surrounded by a henge of terrorist strength reinforced concrete bollards to fend off incursions by criminals in stolen vehicles.

I marvel at it.

Step inside the magic circle and I feel significantly more secure.

Step out with packages and I become a target for muggers.

 

Inside, the shop smells of a fresh baked chapatti crossed with a warm two day old sock. The rabid colour of its myriad contents makes everywhere you look seem like a Pollock canvass. This must be positively embraced or you would turn and run out screaming and the whole point of leaving the flat would be rendered utterly pointless.

Every other day I cross this Rubicon to dice with spices and speak with a welsh accent to a man with a brown face who does the same kind of thing back to me.

North west India the most likely root of all Europeans.

 

It's just the paper I'll be having for today, Mr Store. The usual yes. The Daily Mirror on a Sunday. Exactly. The Sunday Mirror. Love the pictures. They make my day they do. Can you see my friend. No of course you can't. You can't, Mr Store, because nobody can except me. Tarah then. No. Not The Star, never The Star my friend. Not that rag.

 

In comes an old dear with her wheelie shopper; she reeks of stale and fresh wee. I smile. It's a lie- a feeble attempt to cover up a grimace.

She's wearing Shar Pei tights and a coat that might have started life before the war. On a lapel she's got a real rabbit's foot brooch.

She'll have had that for years- for luck.

What fucking luck?

That wig's seen better days.

She always spots Sid my squid. I wave it a little and watch her morbidly shiver.

What a beauty she is.

The embittered and bigoted old blameless bitch. Navy-blue does nothing for her.

 

Come on ghosty, lets suck a holed, but perfectly round, Polo mint together on the polished concrete neighbourhood bench covered with solid, well weathered, lumps of bubble-gum, Basquait cocks and misshaped swastikas- most of them ironically invoking peace.

On the side of houses in Nepal you find them both side by side- colourful giant cocks with balls and wings and ancient signs of peace that only ding-bats would confuse with Nazi emblems.

China is there now, denigrating everything once considered holy and eating everything that breathes. Dipping barbecued spare-rib girl babies in chocolate like they do ants.

They've made such a cock and balls of communism- the neo-fascist capitalist cunts.

My cock and balls ache. Is it a sign?

I've got a migraine in my testicles.

 

7  

 

THE BENCH

 

The unmade bench, even if signed by Tracy Emmin,  could not have got into the RA's Summer Exhibition where predictability holds sway most years because of the stalwart dears who grip tight to the cheque-books. They are very much still purple rinses halfway up the arses of the St Ive's School of discovering landscape in still-life and life in stilled landscapes and hybrids of the two.

To listen to these people you would think that originality had deserted the working classes completely.

There were painters groups among the hard working tin miners of Cornwall but they were never in the eye of the shaker maker glitteratti and, had they been, they would have been dismissed as 'primitives', 'naives'.

None of those cunts would have said no to having a Lowry or two stashed away in their lofts.

Yes.

 

Signed by Tracy Emmin RA, the riveting bench might have helped her win a Turner Prize. [Kids had by local tradition lost their virginity on it at dusk] Filling a large glass crucifix with your own piss could work the same magic for your trophy entries on LinkedIn.

 

Now there's a thing- Tracy come full circle from the avant garde to a Royal Academician with little more than the drawing skills of an ape obsessed with body fluids. Menstrual discharge a constant favourite. Only women bleed. Women are the niggers of the world. Those old chestnuts. She had all the advantages of a proper education. Higher.

I read about her alleged conversion or epiphany from a traditional wild child to something way more tragic and infinitely more profitable- she had her own bonfire night in the small back garden of her East End flat, burned all her prior paintings in a smoke-free zone. The rebel.

Now.

Had she really seen the light or caught the bug of filthy lucre from Damien Hirst and his sycophantic crew. You do the maths. From that day on she never looked back.

I went to see her unmade bed.

Where was the novelty? Let me recall.

 

Back-page. That tosser bastard manager of Manchester United is spouting on about how he believes that no premiership referee would ever resort to such arcane behaviour in the middle of a match. The ego-maniacal plonker. I have Scottish friends deeply embarrassed by his fucking god-like strutting.

Let the fuckers separate from the British realm. They'll feel the cold without Trident.

I would build a giant wicker man and put the likes of him in it.

The horrid and inexplicable bagpipes would be more than welcome to drown their screaming.

Deep down in me an animal can still stir, make waves; indeed, it makes me no better than anyone else.

 

This recall. I often sit here on this bench and recall things. They sting.

 

You. Take a forensic look around us. The waste-bin cages at either end of the bench have no fucking waste bins in them. They were racing green. Someone with green finger's lifted them to pot up Mary-Jane plants for a south facing balcony.

Look. Is this ancient and modern litter art?

Tarts' flyers. Well, they demolished the telephone box. Only the base remains. The local kids painted that blue and play out their own version of Dr Who on it. You can't blame them.

You can't blame them. They've all been poisoned by Disney and reality TV. It's not a good mix. These kids want to click their fingers and be whisked away.

Now I know this, and I am, by no means, NOT the predatory paedophile that vile Sir Jimmy Saville was.

The knighthood was a papal honour by the way.

How apt is that, after the fact.

Predatory paedeophiles, the current buzz label, know that we have bred generations of 'lost' wannabe children who dream of entering a Tardis and fucking off to elsewhere; anywhere to get away from home.

Why don't their thick as shit parents know this.

Up the duff at thirteen, it does your head in, that's why. The fags, the booze, the looser tag.

 

Shit. I get so easily diverted.

This recollection.

A morning after the night before. Regret the elephant in the scummy room.

The first of three awake in a small double- me, a black one and a yellow one.

I do like my ethnics.

The South Korean boy had pubic hair as stiff as a nail brush. The Jamaican had wine stains and only one-eye working. The grey white sheets had been starched with spunk. Nothing at the windows but loud Hawaiian shirts.

The floor a rash of Muslim mats- probably jacked or a job lot. Assorted shitty rubbers. Mugs. Ashtrays. Fag-ends smoked by faggots getting their end sucked. Polaroids of an enthusiastic spit roasting.

Tender ugliness.

 

I know what you're thinking- did I catch anything. No. Never did. Never got pregnant. Never ever did sport an unwanted kid.

That black guy had a small cock though. See myths can be proper shit.

There are black guys on YouTube complaining of the unfair expectation.

They make small BMW's now- hatchbacks.

But that bed bed there, the glee bed, we was all sixteen, that was altogether on another level from Tracy Emmin's pretentious heap of crumpled bed-linen, bras, knickers, and used tampons.

Come on! Alex Biddens, Thalidomide,  fucking RA.

 

Hang on. Here's trouble coming our way. My arse is flexing.

Shall we go or shall we stay.

Too late.

Great. That is the way with fucking fate.

 

Six of them stand in front of us, staring with malicious intent at me and my invisible familiar. I wave my Sid the squid at them. Not a flicker.

I've had two of them. Total recall.

It is Sunday. They're all bored and off their heads. Six bicycles. Two baseball bats.

Not what you'd call a social visit.

They call themselves The Cubans. None of them could place that island on a globe. Three whites. Two blacks. One in-betweeny. Eldest nineteen. Youngest sixteen.

My kind of party.

 

You looking for the football scores lads?

 

 

8

 

THE POLE INCIDENT

 

They hung St Sebastian in a tree, JC on a tree of sorts.

My ritual twig turned out to be a Bus Stop sign attacked by knock-off hammers and spray paint.

 

Some Green Party lesbo politician on the local council drove through this mad initiative to have hanging basket hooks put on all the Bus Stops in the council-tax catchment area. Being something of a pessimist I had always seen the dark side of this ill-thought move.

The very poor make plants a low priority- more so in the middle of a double-dip recession.

If the authorities saw fit to hang abundant baskets within the gift of all and sundry it was a given they'd be nicked. Free plants, compost and containers makes gardeners of the most hardened slags.

Not all the criminal fraternity find it impossible to cry.

Gangsters in touch with their feminine side- it's by no means just a gay fantasy.

Ask any prison officer with an eye for detail, someone anal enough to religiously put entries into a five year diary and keep it locked.

 

Digression has some power to dissipate pain, but by no means enough.

 

They hung me up roughly by my fawn hoodie; the armholes cutting deep into my moist armpits.

They bound my booted feet.

They unbelted my kecks, laid bare my ginger decorated genitals; the sudden fresh air strange, chill in concert with a rush of fear. I orange pissed myself.

 

They laughed, whooped, jeered.

 

I brown crapped myself.

 

They all clapped at me, picked up the loose stool, smeared it on my Sid. God!

God forbids nothing much.

The old lady from the Convenience Store passes by, the wheels on her shopping trolly chirping like spring fledglings.

She sees me in grave peril, waves like the Queen and goes on, doing diddley squat.

She is God! Yes.

She is fucking God!

And SHE has just forsaken me.

 

The gang are shaking cans of gloss black spray paint. Cellulose. Up my shitty arse it goes, under my damp foreskin, EVERYWHERE genital. 

That is me black-balled, made an untouchable.

No chance of those gracious Indian ladies saying prayers to me now, no gift of sacred saffron cake, no handmade necklaces of fresh marigolds.

I've always been an undiscovered deity on the back foot.

The point is, wraith, we are all of us, no exceptions, messiahs of something. 

 

9

 

NEWS THE DAY BEFORE THEY DISCHARGED ME

 

There's a spare view from my fogged hospital window.

In the mid-distance, on mud recreation grounds, there's growing some social fungus- a phallic neo-pagan tower of hedge clippings, pruned spruce and broken pallets. Tomorrow they'll be dousing it in petrol and setting light.

Fireworks. Family familiar delights.

Who will go missing that night, under the cover of  legitimate terrorist sound effects. All sorts of perverts revel in the magic lure of sparklers after dark.

I go on watching until the sky goes velvet blue.

 

They shaved me. Very sore I am from what they called a penetrating clean.

Look on the bright side, there is no STD known to science which could have survived that.

Of course I informed the police. The NHS make sure you do.

Still part of a community, I suffered convenient memory loss. I know my rule book.

 

The ward is all men. You'd think that was a plus. But no.

Across the ward from me, his face deeply acne scarred, a veteran of the Iraqi conflict has been having immense bowel troubles. No graces are being spared.

It is a war zone crossed with a porn movie. I am not turned on.

They've got him naked, on his knees, in a vast see-thru plastic balloon. It has the effect of distorting all his features. Something, with his challenges, he could have done without.

 

There are two male nurses wearing top to toe see-thru plastic coverings. I quickly get the gist.

Approximately ten minutes previous they'd shoved a large suppository up his bum.

The drug works fast. It's always used as a last resort and careful preparations need to be made.

The NHS guys are watching watches.

 

My eyes meet with my fellow patient's eyes. You can read his arriving realisation.

He is so right.

It was rapid, violent and not pretty.

 

The two men held the ex-gunner while he heaved and exploded shit in various arcs; bursts of arcs as his strong frame twisted on the bed.

You live to see such things, amazing things that verify life.

 

Like this new 'art-shit installation' thing, a lot of the other things verify that life is indeed unadulterated shit.

We foolishly sully it with our pretensions to being the least important. 

Every day I tell myself- this truly is as bad as it gets.

 

I'm being discharged tomorrow.

My prostitute battering neighbour is driving me home. There's a turn up for the books. Turns out he really likes me.

Yes.

Like- he REALLY likes me.

Fuck!

I got myself a right scary minder who loves it up the chuff.

 

I know I said earlier I never do anal but, when a relationship comes knocking, you've got to be prepared to be adaptable.

In the gay personal columns we say- versatile.

 

It's no news to me, a gay Thalidomide, that there's always going to be a game to played.

Play.

You've got to make yourself fit according to the cut of your communal circumstances.

If you don't do it or don't get out, one or the other, life will, too soon, be the death of you.

 

 

Chris Madoch copyright 2012. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

 

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BITES FROM THE PANZRAM CUTTINGS

 

 

1

MY ALLOTTED PARKING SPACE

In the trunk of my car a change of clothes and food to cook and feed two. I might get lucky at around midnight. The fat file that's hardly left my side for four weeks now will be entering the building with me. I only ever get fat files now, fat files with fat leads to fat links sat in repositories that testify to mankind's unkindness to itself. The recently arrived package will play its part too.

My name, in barely weathered white gloss on black, stared back at me unmoved- titular ornament and qualifications, all the implied responsibilities of a forensic psychiatrist mocking my present obsession to ensnare a massive rush of endorphins, my understandable human hunger. Like I cared- this was the third date in ten days, the first on home turf, virtually home and dry. My riverside home in Putney is quite the aphrodisiac and always seals the deal. I was, as they say, feeling it.

The padded package from Toronto: now there was a ball from the left field- if it wasn't for Lyall Watson and a 'working' understanding of serendipity, my sanity and I would have parted company long ago. The book- a disintegrating copy of a biography of Carl Panzram complete with loose papers purported to have been written by him, had not come cheap. With it came a 'poem of sorts' and a long-winded suicide note from a Mr Dogrop Rancour- clearly the former owner of the book [his signature filled the small library plate] who was not in the least dead, far from it. He was no longer living in Canada in a semi-rural suburb north of the city where my niece lived and enjoyed rummaging in second-hand bookshops. He was, in quite surprising fact, my new case; today our first scheduled face to face- itself a curiosity and, in the circus of strange circumstances, a likely rubber stamping.

In my line of work there are always firsts- another original worst to quicken the blood flow.

The very idea- divorcing yourself from your own penis with a model-maker's battery driven circular saw, but to make a public spectacle of it. Over the years visitors to Brighton beach had become inured to various, increasingly lewd attractions, but this one had the tongues clacking like old football rattles. He was naked and had shaved back to the buff of a baby and on his his xxl chest he'd scrawled in red lipstick 'I am not a homosexual.'

 

2

Carl Panzram, serial killer in the making, age 7- awkward stiffies seeming all out of proportion.

Raised in small-holding poverty, his idiotic mother plagued by migraines and dizzy spells, he and his siblings were left in a living hell, by their father who never looked back ever in any shape or form. She was idiotic for having reproduced in the first place. [NOTE: She may well have been, to all intents and purposes, kept a virtual prisoner and regularly raped. There is no evidence of her ever being caring beyond the bare facts that her children did survive.]

*

Ma had the one remaining glass, she’d briefly stop sobbing and take a sip of well water we’d all brought her. Then she’d be off again, her greyhound body made animate by weird tremors. She was always the same after pa had kicked the fucking shit out of her. Stray tears on the kitchen table made small craters in the day’s latest layer of dust.

Today was already different from any other day ever. Earlier today we all watched him in his anger gather up anything of even the smallest value and dump the haul in the wrecked car along with our dog.

The oddly reliable machine was rust countries in oceans of faded blue paint, all held together with stolen fencing wire, sweat and swearing. The forbidden road south was the one he took- away from town. The south road is as straight as a railway track is and it disappears deep into the distant horizon. We stood watching him go- me, my two sisters and my brother, holding dirty linen to our dirty faces to avoid the choking dusts.

He soon became a black blob, then a dot, then nothing.

 

3

THE PREVIOUS DAY- SNATCHED TIME IN A CAFE 

Do you ever switch off?

Oh. It has been known. Though I confess to twitching a little when the in-tray empties- thing is, in my line of work, it never stays empty for long.

Hobbies?

[Long pause. The silence thick with gesture and sexual intimation.]

I'm writing a book.

A novel?

Faction.

Work? You see! My point exactly.

Well yes but it is not without its distractions. You ever heard of Carl Panzram?

No. But as an informed guess I'd bet he is a serial killer.

Was. Long dead. A sexually driven serial killer.

Why him?

His name intrigued me. Well obviously far more than that. I'm calling it 'The Panzram Papers'- he had a certain gift for writing; wrote things out; left a legacy of sorts. The killings span a long timeline.

When was he born?

1891- the son of a German immigrant trying to eke out a living farming in Minnesota during the depression.

You and your soft spot for Germans.

[BIG grin.]

Carl's first appearance in court was in 1899.

He was eight?

Correct. And the charge was drunkenness. There's a quarter of a book right there- a cruelly, often criminally abused childhood; a desperate need to be loved or noticed met with nothing more than violence and rejection. Yet here, taking the blows, was an evolving mind that would eventually be capable of tackling Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

And how does this relate to your current case?

It doesn't. It would be odd if it did. And my telling you even that much is a serious breach of confidence.

Really?

Yes- seriously, really. You know how it is, sharing a bed is never a free pass to the secrets in my working head.

I can watch you give evidence in court and salivate.

Of course, but believe me, these days, what becomes a matter of public record is only the tip of vast icebergs. A massive database remains firmly under lock and key.

I remember you saying there is nothing more arousing than interacting with anything perceived of as forbidden.

Exactly.   

 

4

Carl, serial killer in the making, age 8- massive little survivalist pissed off his face.

How come? I've dwelled long and hard as to the time shrouded context in which this unloved, attention seeking urchin was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. [All rug-rats are intentionally wired to be survivalist to the nth degree- utterly self-centric, magically manipulative, attention seeking aliens to empathy and any sense of community.] So. What did this brat trade or what was he forcibly made to exchange? Two cents worth of hooch for opening his gob to a turgid root? A smelly orifice? Life was cheap. The good thing about children then was that there were plenty of them going spare and alive they were warm to the touch, pliable. The trick was to make them receptive- dead easy to pull off in hard times.

*

You look like my missing pa.

How's that then pip-squeak?

He was a fucking knob.

Feisty little fart ain't he fellas? Not much meat on him. 

I bet you're those guys who wank dogs for a laugh.

Sure are puppy- ever get that feeling that this was your lucky day?

 

5

SOMEWHERE NORTH OF TORONTO

With bare man's hands, scarred hands that could easily span a cadaver's arse, he'd always wished he could pick-up a pick-up, throw it across a black-top and abandon it in a ditch with all the other sweet incriminating bits. That's why he had taken to wearing a shorn beard and plaid shirts with quilted linings.

That's why he constantly played host to ghosts of what just may have been- pent up rage, no venting it, no preventing his constant enquiry as to from where it came. His childhood was idyllic. It was idyllic. Idyllic.

Dogrup Rancour's grass grew leaden grey most every day and he knew, God always told him such truths, that there were other fields of a better hue, places where there never were ties or tethers; no fucking inclement hate-fuelled emotional weather; no guilt-trips about needing to be grateful; no rules; no judgements.

Six foot one shoe-less, twenty stone naked weight, hirsute, his major problem was there was not one thing anyone had ever confirmed was exceptional or the least outstanding about him. He may as well have been a living, barely breathing John Doe. Most days he expected to wake up and spot the tell-tale tag tied to his big infected toe, the one with moulds discolouring the thick nail, the one responsible for making large potatoes in his hill-billy woodsman socks.

His passions- poetry and the life of Carl Panzram; arguably obsessions but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

This is it. Six months previous he left a devastating crime scene, everything, something as yet undiscovered and he travelled to the UK ostensibly to stay. Four weeks later, following a bizarre altercation on Brighton beach, he was arrested and sectioned under the mental health act- a clear danger both to himself and to the rest of us. Two days ago they found the inoperable brain tumour. Given the grim prognoses extradition seems highly unlikely.

6

Carl, a serial killer in the making, age 11, encounters full on institutional punishment.

He was forced to enter a 'reform' school- a total misnomer. The dreadful place deconstructed wayward boys with a barely disguised glee and was plainly a magnet for adult sadists in search of pleasurable work that paid well. A hell's theme park for demons; one with a constant stream of fresh hellions. What the guardians reconstructed there were cracked mirror images of their sick selves.

Cruelty births some truly twisted shit, all of which is totally unnecessary.

It was common for a naked boy to be watched as he languished at length in a tin bath of stone cold water. Then he would be laid-out, planked and have his back layered with salt. When the salt was dry the lashing with straps would begin. The straps were designed to maximise pain- they all had holes punched in them so that they easily raised blisters on the skin; as these blisters were repeatedly beaten they would burst and weep and the salt would seep in stinging horrendously. [A human being at the turn of the century, their mind focussed on child-reform, thought of that as proper practice.]

I have stopped myself imagining what else went on within the many rooms of that vast place but, please, feel free to endure your own explorations as clearly Dogrup did. There are no rules. There are no limitations.

 

In his pocket-book Dogrup Rancour had noted how easily what is perceived of as abnormal can be normalised- unfailing punishment, a faultless routine; the nature of anyone could be bent out of shape. Just a few words of love, lies disguised as love, and you were home and dry. Give me the child, he wrote, and I will deliver you the serial killer.

America was evolving into a seething hotbed of sexually driven serial killers. It was terrifying. He was filling himself up with fear.

 

My practice is never to have any pre-conceptions about how to trigger the normalisation process in anyone suffering from trauma and I'd never abandoned a case before but I was contemplating it. Yes, I am selfish. I have never professed to be  good person. And, I confess to being pre-occupied with the prospect of getting my rocks off for the first time in six months in real as opposed to virtual dalliance. 

 

7

Carl Panzram, a serial killer in the making, age 14, available plaything.

The unkempt boy was repeatedly gang-raped by four male unwashed hoboes in a box-car in a railway siding. Raw straw, stale cattle piss, knob-cheese, hot spunk, muffled sobbing; not the screams you might imagine, this was all part of his life apart from life; his sphincter had become an athlete due to penal reform, ratified by the smug, the holier than thou, the self-satisfied, the beloved pioneering mothers and fathers of modern America. The bleating of the sanctimonious sheep- you make your own life. You play to your own sparse strengths and exercise belligerent enterprise. Fly the flag. Whatever.

 

An alleged Panzram Paper: one of the inserts from the ravaged biography formerly owned by Dogrup Rancour. [It colours and seasons with some degree of relevance and is, in my opinion, by no means gratuitous.]

'To call it a farmhouse only made sense insofar as it was a house of sorts and it was situated on a farm of sorts. The farm was small- a small-holding bought with pa's immigrant assets. The hardest, constant labour wrenched a small living from it- it fed us, clothed us and paid the taxes; just that. The wooden house boasted two bedrooms and a main-room where we all ate, bathed and played; a stoop and steps as wide as the building; a rickety privy. There was a swing beneath a massive tree. A barn with a lean-to containing a still. A well.

The wall between the bedrooms was simple vertical planking, ill fitted, heavily knotted, a treasury of spy-holes. There were bigger things to care about. The nearest neighbours were a mile away- a distance where, even on a clear day, a child's scream reduced itself to a hawk's cry. I have been transfixed before by the terrifying utterance of a rabbit petrified by the gaze of a stoat- at night you could easily mistake that sound for the screeching of a whore being raped, a trusty cutter at her throat. Where we lived was a small place- not much room to move freely for the pressing everyday matters of life and death. And if you strayed you always got hit for it. The ways to stray were so complicated I never got to outwit the adult tricks of it. I always lost the game and they beat me for it. I remember no hugs but the chill embrace of being constantly counted as nothing but irritating.

The laws of life and death were just a matter of observation. We encouraged animals and plants to reproduce. We were in attendance as they gave birth. We wrung necks, shot brains out and generally butchered, harvesting as and when.

Through the knot holes we regularly watched our naked parents fuck. That was animal, loud, swift, slippery, plain as day and larger than I could exaggerate it. His...[Here the page was torn in two]...My elder bro would fill my pale ass crack with his spit, sisters giggling at brazen glimpses of his stiff twig. It only hurt the once. I promised him and myself that I wouldn't scream. Never did. The more you do a thing the easier it becomes. In the end, my bro oblivious to the loss of power, used me like a buttered glove yet it was me who really called the shots. I'd learned the control needed to determine when the hot stuff erupted unstoppably to kiss my shitty guts. It was just what happened- nothing more or less. Should've killed him but the circumstance never presented itself.'

Was this damaged document genuine? Maybe it remains the invention of a fan.

 

8

THE RANCOUR HOME NORTH OF TORONTO

[Inside a real hide east-coast Canadian Indian teepee a brother and sister talk in secret.]

 

Boy: Dad said gone-mum was as good as dead- dumb in the head. New-ma, she's the squaw now.

Girl: I hate him.

Boy: Dad?

Girl: Yes. Of course. Bad-ass dad. I've seen him washing blood off knife blades.

Boy: He big heap hunter little prick.

Girl: Shit. He one massive cunt of a cunt.

Boy: He's gonna kill her isn't he?

Girl: Maybe.

*

Mrs Ann Rancour, second wife with the frame of a wren and bottle blonde hair had the air of a non-stop shrew and was a total stranger to sleep. The creature shrew has nothing more to do than constantly pursue the source of fuel to keep it fit enough to pursue more fuel- she'd read so in a Reader's Digest book. She was the one with the primary income. And the lion has a habit of staying in slumber for up to twenty-two hours a day. When he feeds, his swift and violent effort is rewarded by a short time gorging deeply on bleeding meat. They do say opposites attract.

*

Boy: Do unpublished poets go on killing sprees and eat their kids and stuff?

Girl: They sure do in the movies.

Boy: Aw. Stop yacking and suck my dick.

Girl: Money up front.

*

She'd struggled; she'd muffle-screamed into a pillow; finally he'd spewed a year's unfinished business into her bleeding rectum. Oh boy. Big dick. Man of the house- he finally got to stick his victory flag into the forbidden territory of his gobshite mouse of a spouse.

Now where was she?

Sat on the sanitary white lavatory seeping blood from her anus, tears from her eyes, colour from her chill skin; thinking of the children sleeping over at her ma's; thinking- so this is what it takes to stop us breaking up. What fucking next? Will he ever go the full hog and strap a-near-as-dammit-realistic prick to me.

Has he got the balls?

And do I get to screw him?

Now she was birthing turds across open wounds. Blood and shit- not a good mix. And was it true that she was going to cook her rapist husband breakfast?

Of course. She was in it to win it. No sonofabitch was going to sashay from hetero to bi to homo- not on her fucking watch, Sunday or not.

*

Triggers are totally unpredictable things- quite beyond the grasp of psychiatry. We are all blessed with an array of unique behaviour buttons- should any of the more 'exotic' ones ever be pressed by the requisite mechanism, its anyone's guess what we'll do. Prevention is good. In this area of thought death may have its place as a preventative measure. I wrote that.

*

9

RANCOUR WROTE 'One day there was this half-full tram. Nobody on that tram knew that, on that day, this was not the tram to be on. Goddamn. How could they? All the survivors have since turned to prayer but the dead- well why the fuck should they care. Six headless victims- the machete was sharp as a wronged woman's tongue. The perpetrator boring to the point of invisibility with no previous. He said, somewhat predictably, Allah told him to sever the flight decks from the infidel machines. The tram driver, a survivor, deeply disturbed and in care fills notebook after notebook with his recollections of the blood splatters and the repeat screams.'

[Dogrup obviously lapped this up; even said he'd knocked one out because of it. Later took the spoiled newspaper page to the yard and burned it in a brazier full of chucked out poems and paintings and rejection slips.

His kids were giggling in the teepee and he wished through the new flames to be a kid again because when you are a kid you are never to blame- you are never to blame even if you do stick a banger up the arse of a cat and light the fuse and slowly walk back to a place of relative safety.

He remembered the smell of that singed fur. The kudos given him by imaginary friends.

Now he was unemployed- a househusband.

*

There was a rabbit stew slow cooking in a log-burning oven. Chop chop- there were dumplings yet to bake. Be quick about it there might be the time to sling together a surprise apple cake- deserving to be served warm with maple syrup and crumbed-cookie ice-cream. There might be a cursory marital screw in it for him- if not then it was another night ahead nowhere near that troubled bed, dreaming on the internet, burying all regret in a mixture of identities; the elastic possibilities of which were utterly epic.

*

There was also the demonic drink, the cruel temptations of the phallic pen and the black orgasmic ink.]

*

10

A GENUINE WRITING BY DOGRUP RANCOUR [It may have been plagiarised]

 

'FAME or 'shame' or 'infamy' [maybe- fuck me titles]

 

In the house cellar-

the coal-hole long gone, he dragged her dead weight

to the basement of his mind;

laid her on see-thru polythene sheets;

bit off her depilated clitoris, chewed it, spat it out

into a gleaming kidney dish

in the bloodied mirror shine of which

he dreamed that he could scry

his future demise- [mind tricks] the infamy,

the paper column yards,

the hours of dedicated TV

all the celebrated reality of being someone.

 

In such fantastic scenes

he always seemed so handsome-

fresh meat for Hollywood; filmic face

his voice soft like a lipstick lesbian's;

a thick coat of charisma cloaking rich deceit.

Warm gusset waiting to be cast adrift.

 

DOGRUP RANCOUR'

 

NOTE: This had first been posted in a SOCIAL NETWORKING Group called 'INTREPID TRIPE'. Rancour made no secret of the fact that he wanted to own a small press of the same name. He was crawling towards making major strides from obsession to perversion, profoundly confused, perceiving the use and abuse levelled at him by no more than average writers as nothing less than love. What he eventually created from the theft of an original idea was the lab-rat opportunity in which the worst cancers of self-publishing would mutate. And it did.

*

'It was another night ahead nowhere near that troubled bed, dreaming on the internet, burying all regret in a mixture of identities; the elastic possibilities of which were utterly epic.'

*

Worth repeating- 'It was another night ahead nowhere near that troubled bed, dreaming on the internet, burying all regret in a mixture of identities; the elastic possibilities of which were utterly epic.'

*

 

11

A HIGH SECURITY INSTITUTIONAL FACILITY IN THE UK

Due to a weather blamed computer glitch the whole damn compound went into a state of lock-down before I had even crossed the threshold. It takes 30 minutes to process a recovery through its normalisation cycle. Very aware of the CCTV, I took a deep breath and returned to my car and the illustrated documentation detailing the incident that had preceded Dogrup's flight to the UK.

Driving to work I'd been listening to a podcast concerning the recent but swiftly forgotten Bosnian conflict- they were referring to the mayhem that a reporter had become embroiled in as a village was attacked by the Serbian army. In front of him was a mother and her baby. The mother was growing increasingly distraught. Suddenly the reporter felt strangely wet and warm. The woman was screaming uncontrollably. Following a local explosion, her baby's head was missing.

Letting my eyes stroke the surface of the pictures from Toronto I sensed some utterly senseless connection between the two events. My expertise was increasingly in demand. Criminal killing was by no means in decline. Was it burgeoning because the supposedly good men have run out of steam to do anything about it? The impotence of my paymasters. If it was a virus I knew of no virologist working on a solution as easy as a jab in the arm.

Sonja, Dogrup's first wife, had been eased out of institutional care into a programme similar to our 'care-in-the-community' in the UK; electronically tagged and subject to curfew, she shared a house with four similarly challenged women and a full-time carer.

Rancour had never been the slightest suspect- he could not have been in possession of a more watertight alibi. On the day of the multiple deaths his wife Ann had been made redundant, cleared her desk and arrived to an empty home early. Dogrup was picking up the kids from school.

Ann fed her children- let them go their own way inside the house and told Dogrup to clear up the mess. At the sink, in his apron, she shoved an opened letter in his face, he could feel the tip of a substantial knife pricking his coccyx. 'You pathetic cunt!' she sneered at him, 'Exchanging love letters with a fucking shit shover now! What is this- full blown role reversal; method acting for masochists? Mmm- your kids already have an insane mother; good idea- add to their pain by becoming a gay dad.'

Dogrup admitted that he wanted to kill her at this point. He said it took immense self control not to touch her at all, though she was goading him to it- prodding him and slapping him. Instead he infuriated her by saying nothing whatsoever and collecting the few things he needed for a night out 'with the lads'. 

Watched by his children from the first floor, he drove away at 4.30 pm, his right cheek bleeding, leaving bits of himself beneath his wife's fingernails. Three minutes into the journey he began to make mobile telephone calls.

At 5.30 pm Dogrup was picked up on CCTV entering a restaurant in an avant- garde quarter of Toronto. He spent two hours dining and drinking in the company of Sonja's brother- a detective in the city drug squad. The ugly tragedy that was to indelibly ink his life was, totally unknown to him, unfolding like the worst of pornographic centrefolds back at home. The police believe events started at around 6 pm.

So, much later, in the small hours, Sonja's brother after waking for a piss, checked his Ipad. The horrendous news sent him, in a naked rush, to the guest bedroom. Dogrup was still there, sleeping like a baby. Hard to break a sleep like that with information like that. Then there were the obvious bare truth implications- discarded condoms on the polished floorboards, shit splatters on the soft-grey cotton bed linen; the hard to figure fear he felt; man-tears forming in his eyes, the memories.

He didn't wake him just then. He showered, dressed for work and made the necessary call.

*

Driving the care-house car, which she had not signed for, Sonja had arrived at the Rancour household at sometime shortly before 6 pm. The police believe she found her children fucking each other in the teepee. She tidily dispatched both of them with single shots fired close to their heads. At this time they figure Ann had consumed half a bottle of Jim Beam. It seems she was in no position to put up a fight. Sonja shattered both her kneecaps with gunshots- she then tied her victim up. Forensics reports indicate that Ann's face was removed whilst she was still alive- all the material of it was buried inside her vagina. She bled to death slowly.

It is argued that Sonja then took a king-size sheet from the marital bed- it was a heavy duty Egyptian cotton, ideal as a noose for someone her weight. At some stage she despoiled the bed with her blood and piss and fecal matter.

When the police finally arrived, acting on a call from the nearest neighbour concerned at hearing the gunshots, their first picture was of Sonja hanging naked in the stairwell. Around her neck hung a small notice which read 'Dogrup Rancour did this to me. He steals people's lives. Ask my brother, the detective, who is his sodomite lover.'

*

Not being able to help myself, I stole more voyeuristic looks at the forensic photographs of Ann Rancour's head stripped completely of its surface face.

My mobile leapt into life. Re-entry to the building was go.

I suddenly realised one of the fascination's that drew Ridley Scott to direct a Hannibal Lecter movie- the removal of a face, in whatever circumstances, is at one and the same time utterly compelling and fascinatingly repelling. What was it that Inspector Pazzi was told by Dr Lecter- oh yes, I am of half a mind to have your wife for dinner; something close to that. And in the final frames of the film emulating flight from internment there was a fascinated boy who engaged him for a while, a kindred child who fancied a taste from a slab of cold pan-fried human brains in his luncheon box- because the great doctor had no regard whatsoever for airline food.

Top notch. Read all the Thomas Harris books, got all the DVDs. I closed the file, made sure it was with my essential effects as I locked my car and made my way to a late meeting. Of course, Dogrup may choose not to show. My money was on him not being able to resist his ego.

*  

These bland and undemanding care in-camera rooms are always nondescript; I guess it is necessity that dictates their interior compromise. I can imagine the types that sit in fervent session deliberating over colours that might take the sting out of the nature of institutions- and they never do. These almost devout biscuit people are so deeply embroiled in their miserable failures that they must always, in the minutes of their meetings, register each one as a triumphant success of majorative ordinariness. Magnolia is a mighty smug hue wherever it is flung up- a neither one thing or another shade that has stuck to what we like to think of as 'normality' like the glue made from cow bones- they have pretentious siblings, beige, peach, eau-de-nil and taupe.

At my pay grade however I was allowed to choose my own room paint and selected a business-like shade of grey that the makers had named 'English Fog'. The name sealed the deal and proved to be the perfect backdrop for black and white artworks- all of which were associated with one or other of my books. That other, less lucrative career, a perfect antidote to hands-on criminology and forensic psychiatry. This was not that room; this was somewhere utterly secure- the few pieces of furniture were substantially rubberised and secured to the rubber floor.

I try not to expect anything but I was not exactly taken aback by how unexceptional Dogrup Rancour appeared to me. He leapt off the page of his file in diminished dimensions. But despite everything he could switch on a smile from his  deep brown wolf-like eyes. I was not to be so easily invited to step onto the game board his expression had manufactured on the table between us.

I switched on the recording machines.

Are you in pain?

No.

I hope they are looking after you. There are far worse places to be. It says here that you are post plastic-surgery and that the part is reattached- is that the case?

Yes. More's the pity.

The authorities have a duty of care. We have to get you well, on the road to full health before we can properly attend to the issue of your repatriation. You are a Canadian citizen and Canada being part of the commonwealth we share a variety of options for you.

I have nothing. I have no home. I have no family and I am not a homosexual.

Sonja's brother has written to you.

Yes. Frank's deluded. He's a good detective. Policemen are never homosexual.

I have read copies of your tender replies to him.

Have you sorted out which one of my many selves I was when I put stubby pencil to paper.

Frank's a good friend- he is standing by you.

I see. Good cop compared to what- bad me, sad me, banged up for insanity me? Eh? Eh? He would always feed me, get me drunk then shaft me up the ass. That's man-rape. Fuck! None of the charges ever stuck.

You never made any charges. You visited him voluntarily at least once, sometimes twice a week from a month after you married Ann.

She's dead. They said.

Yes.

How did she die?

It wouldn't be appropriate at this stage..

Fuck! Let me tell you something..

Go on.

My first wife used to collect the glossy magazine American Crime Monthly. She had these crazy notions. One of them mad ideas was that I bore a striking resemblance to Charles Panzram- the serial killer from way back. For one of my birthdays she even bought me the story of his life. That damned book changed me. I'd never been one for reading but I must have read that book twelve times. And then I took to writing. She thought I was good at it, said I had a natural gift. Then I discovered Thomas Harris and The Silence Of The Lambs. All his books. All the films. Ann wasn't right after the first child; she got more wrong after the second; finally entered a dark place and rarely returned, not even for Christmas. She took to believing cruel untruths- that I was a murderer in the making, that I was sexually molesting the kids. You've read this shit already.

Yes.

You look the type to be always up to speed.

You and her brother Frank managed to get her sectioned.

Yes. Yes. Things came to a head. Lines needed to be drawn. All it was was the ending of one nightmare. She was still alive. That concerned me deeply.

You wanted her dead?

Yes. Of course. I wanted secure closure.

For you and you're children.

Yes.

And for Ann. You were already dating Ann.

Yes.

You're going to tell me that she looked like a man.

*

Dogrup clasped his mug of tea with both of his large hands overlapping, drawing some comfort from the warmth and at the same time seeming to enter a contemplative state. These silent moments allowed me the luxury to explore him as one would a painted portrait. On the recordings there would be shoe shuffling, sipping, the occasional rustle of paper, distant bird song, faint breathing.

He was more handsome than he'd first appeared- would scrub up, needed attention to an unruly beard; his nose was Roman; brown eyes, wide, deep set, masculine and animal. He was not a bear- if comparisons were to be made it was clear to me he was more lupine than ursine; a great lover of dogs, I was in danger of developing less than objective sympathies towards him.

Here was a man at deep unease with himself- unable to be himself for want of an itch he could not scratch. Dogrup's skin, the one he was the least happy in, was plagued by emotionally damaging fleas and he had never found a treatment for them. What were we to do- bathe him in cruel truth shampoo, then towel him dry as he cries unceasingly. I knew he was a closet crier.

*

12

TOILET BREAK

I'd always had to live with the notion that mirrors hated me. This one was like all the rest; doing its level best to undermine my confidence with what I saw gazing back at me- always a questioning face, never at rest, forever testing my patience, demanding I do my very best. It goaded and often mocked and even though I knew for sure it was only a reflection I had often been belittled by it. This time it pleaded with me to look again, it was being of help.

As I dried my hands with crinkly cream paper towels I realised that I may have been on the point of being played for a kipper. All this was new to Rancour; it was, I was willing to bet, that a rare one-to-one, despite the ever present security, would seem to him to be far more fun than hiding behind his many aliases, all of which the police had discovered on the internet.

My patient could smell me, evaluate ever minute nuance in the flesh. Fuck it! He was enjoying himself. I had to ascertain if he was a grave danger to himself and to other people but it was hard to see him as a criminal. What was his crime- coinciding his interest in a long dead serial killer with mine; escaping from a horror that his mind could not cope with: how many of us would have wanted to do the same? Was he insane? Would he heal- be returned to society and finally enact his true purpose?

On the other side of the wall a toilet flush. Was that Dogrup's shit wending its slippery way to waltz in time with mine? I reminded myself that I had been in worse situations. That is the beauty of my job- just when you imagine you have actually covered all the bases of human perversity and deviousness something or someone comes along to send you back to the drawing board and reassess the magnificent mess that is the mind in turmoil.

Why the fuck had I put eyeliner on- it was subtle but Rancour will have noticed it, his wolf eyes were the gun-sights of a very expert sniper.

*

 

13

INTERVIEW ROOM: SECOND SESSION

Outside it was raining in rods which indicated a miserable drive home. The strong scent of institutional soap was wafting off of Dogrop's hands, nails bitten but clean as a whistle. I imagined him using the bristle brush in an habitual ritual of furiously attempting to scour away the hurt. He was far from being a stupid man- I knew he could write a passable essay on OCD with no preparation and not even break into a sweat. I noticed the smallest tip of his glistening tongue. Was that intentional? I elected to toss an invisible coin on that one. Then he smiled or maybe it would be better described as a grin.

I might have looked like a man back then but truth is I was still a boy- Rancour suddenly got engaged with an unmistakably honesty; hell I would have jumped through hoops for fanny then. Did I give a fuck for the fact that she seemed a bit of a dipstick, course not; I was walking on hot coals to get my end away and she gave out without much of a shout most every day. Besides, the allowances we always made in North America were, how shall I put it- very generous. We are still a rag-bag of all-sorts even today and hold no great store by what might be hiding in the shade. Not the smart people any road. Why should we dig deep- we still have no history worth a dime unless your interests stretch to the laundering of every kind of crime imaginable and retelling it as enterprise. The Americans are great at that- why, even a serial poisoner who drags herself up from the gutter to become a person of independent means on account of the many husbands she has killed is given a healthy respect for her pioneering spirit and them criminal Kennedys are re-branded as kiss-my-ass royalty.

I did try to get my kids help. The minute I figured out what they were up to with each other I tried to get my children all the help I thought they needed but immediately the suspicion of all the authorities fell on me. No-one looked at their witless mother and for one second imagined that there was the likely root cause. No-one, never. Men see, they've got fists and pricks- it makes them the prime suspect always. And yes, I did admit to hitting them- what man in his right mind wouldn't have done. I put padlocks on their doors. A fucking load of good telling the truth did me. The disadvantage that men face when protecting their children is countering the pre-conceptions of a whole army of social workers, the vast majority of whom are damaged women on a mission to repair a world which is dominated by men. From the start I was always the enemy. And the law in some pathetic attempt to emulate justice has every legality stacked against us why- because some klutz like Queen Victoria disbelieving that lesbians existed shaped the family legislation in a very unhealthy degree of ignorance of what women are capable of doing, even to their own.

It actually happens that their nutter of a mother had encouraged them to mutually masturbate when the youngest was only four. All of it kept secret from me. How would I know? Why would my manly mind go there? I was pre-occupied with stereotypically manly things. I was out all hours doing what men with families do- keeping a roof over their heads, putting clothes on all their backs, shoes on their feet and food on the table. It was me most weekends filling the log-shed. What time had I to finger my kids?

Do you want to take a break.

NO! He shouted at me, clearly angered that I'd interrupted his outpouring.

Listen to me, just listen to me- that's all the break I'm asking for. For now?

For now?

Well, no-one's charged me with anything. And this thing in my head is inoperable. I don't want to spend my last six months heavily medicated and hugged by cream walls.

You could possibly be released into a care-in-the community facility- a house with other patients and carers. That's largely down to me.

A man with the confidence to wear discreet eyeliner?

Yes.

Carl Panzram had very little heterosexual sex. He caught gonorrhea from a whore and the disease so disgusted him he never went back there again. You'd know that.

What?

I said you'd know that. I'm allowed books. They said the list that I'd requested put them in mind of you- that you were writing a book on the man. They said you even have a title- The Panzram Papers.

Well, yes. The staff here are not meant to divulge such things.

But they are people and people are always excited by coincidence- the slightest thing that's unexplained. That's why I think the religions have clung on for so long- they make the implausible believable in the minds of the temporarily confused or blind. They prey quite deliberately on the weak and the feeble-minded. And we have such a mystery here, don't we, you and me?

Human affairs are so unfathomably complex we should never be surprised, or raise to some pseudo spiritual significance the least coincidence.

Thick cunts do though. Millions of them.

Right. [Immediately, call it a sixth sense at play, I knew what he was going to say next- he was going to talk out about Panzram's perverse power over railroad men. Why was that so obvious? What more did he know about me?]

Do you get off on Panzram? He asked me.

No.

Fuck that shit. Everybody does. Everyone loves a legend. People get off on anything odd- it quickens their rush to get close to whatever God they've chosen to lick the arse of. What trick-cyclist hasn't worked that one out? That's why The National Enquirer succeeds. There's always been a gutter press, more than likely underwritten by one major religion or another. Brother, when we have rubbed their noses sufficiently in hell, we can speak laughably of 72 virgins and that vast whore-house in the sky that Allah calls His heaven. You do the fucking maths.

Do you like women?

The truth is- not much, not so's I ever noticed. And there's not a man I know who can honestly say different.

They attract you in any way?

Sure do, but that's where it ends; with an animal, all too familiar shunt and a grunt. No way is a fertile woman and a potent man ever going to be close friends. There's just no trusting them. She'll use him and abuse him for her own ends. You must have read the research- one man to provide, another to milk for his gene pool. Those bitches are ruthless- passing off one man's child as another's is second nature to them. Cunts. Ever notice how they're always right. Ever figure out that they are always on some trick or another to get exactly what they want.

Do men attract you?

Hell no. Hell! You already know. I am no fucking homo that's a fact and neither was Carl Panzram.

I'm not so sure about Carl.

The air in the room seemed to have been suddenly captured by a localised black hole; the leaden weight of it was palpable we were both being sucked into an inescapable territory, a dark mass where sense implodes and reality fragments as deceitfully as sugar glass.

I asked him- in all your reading did you ever find one thing good that Panzram had to say about a woman, because I didn't.

No.

That didn't mean he wasn't sexually driven though.

Guess so. But neither of us, you and me, we don't know what was illuminating his mind when he was pumping his prick up some guy's shitter. Maybe he saw titties and the piss flaps of lascivious women waving in his face. Maybe every time he came he believed he was screwing some tart real proper.

Maybe, but its only conjecture.

Carl Panzram was a man with a proper man's needs. It's perfectly normal for a man to want to toss himself off twice a day- there's nothing perverse in that. There's nothing perverse in wanting to engage sexually with another's living flesh. Through terrible experiences he figured women were diseased and yes, he did commit that to paper. For years he been raped up the rectum by all and sundry- what's wrong with a man wanting to right the wrong of that. He'd been buggered by those trusted members of the community into whose care he'd been placed for his own good. What fucking good? It left him little course but to do what he did. At least he wasn't in a Cardinal's gear getting all queer with a nice and dandy sweet as candy choirboy. Whenever he violated anyone- yes, often at gunpoint pressed against trees, they were men, grown men, and largely men who had abused their authority. Carl could not abide a jobsworth. You must remember that time he took a lippy ticket inspector back to the guards car and raped him, then told the three terrified hoboes lurking there to get their dicks out and do the same. Yes that was sexual release- but most importantly, to Carl, that was justice. Every time, whenever anyone suggested he might be homosexual he lost it big time. It was just a hole, nothing more or less. A hole. That what he had been for most of his childhood- someone's hole, more or less. Never as an adult did he suck dick ever. Never. Believe me I know where this man was coming from.

You've never sucked dick?

I want to end this.

Just one more thing.

Make it quick.

One of your many alias's on social network sites was Carlos P Ram?

You know it was.

You were also Dick Wolf.

Sure.

I used to correspond regularly with a Dick Wolf on Facebook of all places. Not the best of sites for a psychiatrist to while away time.

You did?

Oh yes.

What was your handle?

Oh my, now that would be telling. My rules Mr Rancour- this interview is terminated.

*

 

14

A WATERFRONT PROPERTY OVERLOOKING THE RIVER AT PUTNEY

Fuck that was good- the fuck and the repeat fucks. Mark had deliberately given me a shade more than he'd taken. Yes, the trunk of my tree had been shaken by that- fallen leaves littered my bedroom floor; already I was hankering after more: typical of me to tumble headlong into the maelstrom of love so easily- dedication to work, emotional thrift and a desert of people able to lift my spirits might have something to do with it. Grabbing life when you can is far easier said than done but, in the case of this one opportunity, my spontaneity had paid off good and proper. It was 5 am. First light was shrouding him along with grey sheeting. He was snoring sweetly like a baby pig when I got up- my mind flitting between joy and deep anxiety.

I sat on the lounge balcony with a double espresso in black china and water in a black glass; with black leather slippers and a large black velour dressing gown, I must have appeared an essay in black to the early movers on the grey Thames. If only it were that easy- but nothing is conveniently black and white; my white knight sleeping and a blackness seeping into all my pores to utterly defeat all hope of happiness. That spelled complex, very complicated. Dull as ditchwater shit is never brown; it may appear it to the untrained eye but to those who know forensics it is a shimmering rainbow of brightly coloured freebies. I was inwardly smirking at a pet hate- children's TV, Ceebeebies some bright spark without a single pubic hair called it; what a fucking unrestrained rainbow of unmitigated shit that was; pap from their mother's overworked tits replaced by crap from the powerful god-box in the corner of every room. Just like institutional schooling it is an abdication of parental or community responsibility it is, plain as day, child abuse. Send them to school or stick them in front of the TV and you might just as well be regularly using them as sex toys.

Eating away at my joy was this; before Mark had arrived for dinner, I'd ploughed through my archive of emails and made a new file of all the correspondence between myself and a certain Dick Wolf character on the internet- all the emails, the social networking messages and any Skype files. There was no way that any of this was unknown to the police unless there were multiple Dick Wolfs and they were snowed under eliminating those that were not Dogrup Rancour. They could know. They might be biding their time, waiting to see what would happen, wondering which way I would jump. Either way it took me less than twenty minutes of reading to realise that I was caught in the middle of something that I immediately wanted out of. This would be a first- never in the whole of my career had I abandoned a case.

My Dick Wolf was Rancour alright- the family history was barely disguised in the texts and he had drawn me in with a shared love of poetry and a mutual interest in Carl Panzram. When his second marriage reached a low ebb he had started writing me tentative love letters which every month grew more intense and sexually graphic. There was no mistaking what he imagined himself doing with me in virtual reality and there was the very clear intimation that he wanted to transfer these desires to real life. At that suggestion and with the letters reaching ever greater heights of perversity I abandoned the communication. He would still contact me intermittently- obviously something compelled him to but I largely ignored them. In any case, I had just found out that he had been playing the same sordid mind games with another internet friend of mine, a happily heterosexual Irish poet from Dublin. Nobody likes to be two-timed, even by a web troll meddling with insanity.

My mind was made up. I elected to take a shower and then phone in and inform the authorities that I was taking myself off the case- my impartiality was irredeemably compromised and I was quite prepared to proffer up all of the proof. They would still, of course, require some form of interim assessment of Dogrup from me. On that matter I would have to be careful, utterly professional, because I am angry, fucking furious with myself.

Carl Panzram hated labels. Dogrup Rancour hates labels. I loathe them, yet in some shape or form our sexualities share a commonality. Maybe the key is to concentrate not so much on what we are but on all those things that we most definitely are not. When Carl and Dogrup make all that public show and charade of what they are not, my instincts are to suspect that that behaviour is a major clue as to who they actually are.

Last year, [God knows I've struggled] last year I finally and for all time retreated from a transgender programme and accepted myself fully as a homosexual man. A man who is biologically set up to find other men far more sexually attractive to himself than a woman. I would go even further and say- this man, this me, does not have any sexual feelings for the laughably named fair-sex, none whatsoever; does not want to imitate her or adopt her role in society in any shape or form. I was not born to shop, ape motherliness or make a living out of marrying heterosexual men. I was not so on trend as to be a lesbian with balls and a dick. I have had no ambition to bang my head against glass ceilings until they crack. Mass concepts of 'beauty' and 'prettiness' make me want to chuck-up.

What Dogrup Rancour needs, it seems to me, is a reality check and a protective programme of counselling and if the authorities see fit to conduct that 'within the community' rather than in a secure place then so be it. I am not a parliamentarian, I don't make the laws. How is it ever going to become my problem again?

*

Power showers pretend to have the power to shower away it all, everything that corrupts and appals but they are just part of the countless human devices that promise much yet deliver considerably less. I have worked some cases where it has taken three showers before I felt fresh enough to slip into clean clothes- but then I have worked a few where I have had no other course but to incinerate everything I was wearing including shoes. One cost me my father's Rolex watch- you don't want to check the hour and every time you do be reminded of the worst crime ever, something way beyond the darkest imaginings of the greatest crime writers who are, incidentally, women. Put it this way- since the incident concerned I have been quite unable to look at any pregnant woman anywhere in the world without thinking why the fuck is she pregnant and what in hell is the unfortunate baby intended for?

That is what the various shit scared faiths loathed most about Darwin- his irrefutable evidence that we have evolved not much more than a spit from the jungle however you struggle with that word; urban jungle or third world jungle. Natural selection seems to have neglected to breed out of us shooting ourselves in our feet. Without question, it renders us far less progressive than the HIV virus. Hell, we still have no idea what 85% of our brain mass is intended for.

I open the upper window to let steam escape. It allows noise to enter. The bathroom is by the outside stairwell and I like to hear life come to and fro, I like it every bit as much as the high and low tides of the river. Then I get it- for the first time in my whole career I choose to share my fears with my new partner; I don't even know if he is a partner yet but, inside me, I am instinctively craving clarity and objectivity; no matter how hard you try that is something you never get to grips with on your own. Of course, if he's got any sense, he'll run a mile. With the shower off, I can hear and smell the magic of breakfast so my bet is that he won't. Dressed in a black T and black jogging bottoms I take a deep breath and venture to say good morning.

He says- is there an atheist alternative to that damned word good?

Good start Mark.

*

Toasted bagels, real butter, Marmite and a ginger preserve. Espresso.

My favourites. How could you possibly have known?

[Together they said.] It was all there was. [They laughed]

Are you always so alive in the morning Mark?

Oh no. I seldom have anything good or godly to celebrate.

I don't understand.

Last night. Last night was grand. Last night was way more than grand.

Oh.

There.

What?

I knew I'd say too much too soon.

Oh no. Its not that. Fuck! I feel the same way too but..

I knew it.

What?

Isn't there always a but.

Maybe. But this but is so far off your radar you are just not going to believe it. And I'm shit scared it might scupper our chances of taking our relationship further.

What? I mean, what was that word you said?

Relationship?

That's the one. Is that what you think this is- a relationship?

Yes. I thought it might be.

Oh. Well, so do I.

Thank fuck for that.

Well, best we get on with it then. Now what is this little problem of yours? You start telling me and I'll toast some more bagels.

*

 

15

SIX MONTHS LATER IN THE HOME AT PUTNEY

We leave habitually together at 8 am. I am always home first but never by much. I pick up both our mail and leave it on a large glass coffee table by a picture window for later sorting. I like to be in my scruffs to deal with the usual banalities of it. By 'scruffs' I mean clean casual clothes and that always demands that I shower the detritus of my day away. Today I sectioned three people and one will most certainly never see the light of true freedom ever again. The others were friends of sorts, thrown on the scrap heap, sex slaves of eastern European origin, certain they were possessed by demons and driven to do unspeakable things by the voices in their heads. Both coke users, tested HIV positive and had been caught stealing wallets in Oxford Street. As yet the 'unspeakable things' can only be seen as alleged because no-one has been able to decipher their many confessions. Give them chalk and a board and they instantly draw priests copulating with boys and the Pope blessing their fun. All very lack lustre yet they could be hiding truly vile crimes. We shall see. Evidence of pregnancy but the denial of the existence of babies was a great cause of worry.

In a hurry I neglected to open the top bathroom window. My total senses were quickly enthralled by a warm monsoon- stupid really, such an excess of steam has always distracted me, in fact irritated me. The mood forced me to rush, quite the opposite of what I'd intended. I was almost at the end of the final edit on my book 'The Panzram Papers'- one more session and it would all be behind me. There were some things that just screamed to be finished.

I opened the post wrapped in soft towelling warmed by radiators. Rubbish. Rubbish. Fuck! The finishing post to my book was staring me starkly in the face and here was an official letter concerning Dogrup Rancour aka Dick Wolf and who knows who else. The gist was simple- he had been finally transferred to an open care-in-the community care house in Camden Locks. Electronic tagging had been deemed inappropriate although he was subject to curfews. The transfer had taken place fourteen days previous and the process of re-settlement had gone smoothly. I was to report any contact with him however brief. Shit! Did the bastard ever have access to my private address? Think.

Where was Mark?

Did the same fuck-up staff who told him I shared a similar interest in Carl Panzram  give him anymore nuggets- a vicinity, anything? Think.

I speed dressed into white jogging bottoms and a white T. Catching sight of myself in a mirror, I looked like death, breathless, cooking up a panic attack. Where was Mark? Phone Mark?

Straight to answerphone. Mark, where are you?

Then the doorbell rang.

Mark! You idiot! Why are you always losing your keys.

Relieved, I opened the door. There was Dogrup Rancour- soft, scrubbed up, sweet as a lamb. Not something to immediately scream at.

Pushing me in gently and quietly closing and locking the door behind him, he said- I think you and me should talk ladyboy. We've got a fucking lot of left over fat to chew.

Ever the professional, I knew straightaway I was a dead man or something far worse; besides, Mark, the man I loved, was well overdue. And, even though I had never in my whole life believed a word of it, I found myself saying to myself- there is hope, ye dope among so many countless dopes there is still fucking hope. The Gods of all the faiths say so, and they never ever lie, they never ever let so much as one of us down do they mama? Mama?

*

Dogrup said that if I made any sound whatsoever or spoke without being spoken to that he would shoot me between the eyes: he showed me what I took to be a real gun with a silencer fitted. I believed him. He was power-tripping in the skin of Panzram. It was a bite from history. [Please. Please don't bite me.]

How is the book coming on, he asked, ripping out the phone-lines and slipping my mobile into a bowl full of washing-up water. Must be finished by now.

Oh it is, bar the very last bit of the final edit.

He took me into the bedroom I shared with my lover and enquired, where do you keep your sex toys, the lube, that kind of thing. They were not well hidden and when he'd made a selection he took me back to the lounge.

Get undressed, he told me. In the long run, compliance buys time, so there was no argument.

If you had tits, he said, I might even say you were pretty. But don't you get carried away, I ain't going to suck your dick even though it does look like a nipple in its present state. [The fear was working then- no danger of me belittling him in these circumstances.] Out of his bag he pulled knives and laid them on the glass coffee table.

The scar tissue on my cock, he said, gives me an L-shaped stiffie, impossible to shag or wank with. This magic mushroom in my head, my black truffle- well, give us a month or less and I'll be dead. You can see my position. You've got to respect a dying man's last wishes. Do you hear me?

Yes.

Well I haven't climaxed in over a year? I figure that with a bit of prostrate massage from the inside you can put that sorry position right for me.

You want me to fuck you?

No you cunt, I want you to fuck me with this. [He was waving a large but pliable black dildo]. How many fucking times do I have to tell you that I'm not a queer. BUT, not being a queer does not mean that I am required to be a stranger to the pleasures that you gays fucking get to enjoy. Why should you have all the fun. Look at this, [He took off his clothes and he was hairless.] I even got it tattooed on my chest 'I AM NOT A HOMOSEXUAL'. Now, fucking lube me up and shag the living daylights out of me. I think given the circumstances its the very least you can do.

Do I have a choice? He waved the gun at me by way of answer.

Gun in hand he bent over the glass coffee table. He was licking his knives before whispering 'begin'.

I did what I had to do. And it was practiced and deep and repeated and eventually Rancour came like a train- his climactic spunk flowing across the sharp blades he had laid out on the table like blobs of wallpaper paste. He was breathless with joy and pain and sheer exertion and he was crying real tears. But the tears did not tally with his sudden sneering.

The real climax was yet to come.

Hey you British poof, he leered at me, drunk on endorphins, ever been an active  party to a patient's suicide by psychiatrist. He picked up the cum smeared knifes and started slashing violently at his own neck; he head-butted the glass table shattering it; he thrust his head and neck through the picture window and rolled his vulnerable flesh around the great shards of glass until he could move no more.

I have never screamed so loudly in all my life.

In an upmarket residential area of Putney London, cascading glass followed by screams like that invariably work better than dialling the emergency services.

*

 

16

TWO YEARS LATER IN A PRIVATE MENTAL FACILITY IN GUILDFORD UK

You have a visitor.

I do?

It's Mark, you know Mark?

Do I?

Hello darling.

Who are you?

Sweetheart its Mark, your boyfriend.

Always late Mark?

Yes.

Always loses his keys Mark?

Yes.

What have you been up to.

Oh, writing.

Still writing.

Yes. Its a very very big book. Look- hundreds of volumes.

The room contained approximately 30 orange shelves the majority of which were stuffed with shining black notebooks, all of them used, every page covered.

Can I see your latest addition?

Of course- here it is. New. Different.

Mark opened up the notebook and, as always on these occasions, his heart sank a little; there it was again, the very same phrase repeated over and over, exactly the same as in all the hundreds of other notebooks, in capitals:-

'I  wrote the book 'The Panzram Papers' and it took bites out of me.'

Excellent, Mark said, would you like some tea.

Yes I would. Yes I jolly well would. Who did you say you were?

Mark went to the multi-dispenser and began the often repeated process.

The nurse/carer came to him and offered him some assistance saying- much more of this sort of thing and people will be calling you a saint.

Mark let out a great sigh, a combination of relief and irritation. Then he replied- I have no truck with saints and, even if I did, I would fall way short of qualifying; ha, like most of them did probably. Everything about mankind is a scam. And 'this sort of thing' as you put it, the weekly visits, they've got to come to an end. In fact this will be the last one. My last one ever. You see, life is never as the eternally happy-clappy and as all the deluded would want it to be- a thornless bed of sweet smelling roses. It is a sewerage plant, a shit processing farm attempting to divest our miserable inventions of lives of all the necessary natural harm. Besides, I'm cheating on him. Fucking cheating as life bids us to. And, fed up with lying through my teeth, I'm moving on. Not that he will ever know any different.

Oh. Right.

Yes, right. That is the bare bones right of it. We should have a lot more of that in my opinion. And, for good measure, your boss has been informed; and I have no doubt whatsoever that I'll be replaced soon enough by an equal stranger, a sincere volunteer, some deluded evangelist believing that they have God on their side and that prayer works miracles. The system talks about empathy but they won't be gay. There's no money worries here, the tax-payer is paying the bill.

*

 

17

END NOTE

The Unites States of America executed Carl Panzram by public hanging. It was his passionately, often spoken of, wish. The man loathed with venomous hatred every word of 'the too much too late', hideously righteous and indulgent campaign to have his chosen punishment reduced to life imprisonment. On more than a few occasions he'd spat in great arcs of spittle in the faces of all those who suggested it- the 'Godly' ones come to gawp at the monster with a limp; the awesome creature that their poisonous 'goodness' had created. He knew death intimately. Death was his university and his master's degree.

Death was his only constant friend. In the end-game, Death and him, they did whatever they did with each other by mutual consent. Romantics would write that they dated for a while before finally giving out.

*

Chris Madoch © 2012. All Rights Reserved.

 

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