“Willie? Why do you never
open your door for me Willie? All I want to do is chat.”
William loathed the sound
of his mother’s voice. It was such a raspy, indelicate noise that only seemed
to appear after her weekly rendezvous with an empathetic bottle of cheap brandy.
William’s parents had never found interaction with their only son particularly
necessary. They raised him until he could cope to some degree by himself then
disconnected themselves completely from his life. In fact, he only had a vague
recollection of what his father sounded like at all. He could list the number
of conversations he remembered having with his father in his life time on half
a hand, maybe even a quarter. The only tiny slither of their identity he was
truly certain of was their names. Kevin and Susanne were such dull, uninteresting
titles laced with a clear lack of personality, a lot like William for that
matter. He remembered an old news story that was spread around his local town
about an escaped murderer named Kevin; it raised suspicions for a while due to
his fathers’ frequent absence from the family home that he made clear was for “work purposes.” These suspicions were
completely scrapped once the murderer version of Kevin was found naked, face
down in a pool of blood outside the local sweet shop covered in strawberry
laces and liquorice allsorts. Who ate liquorice allsorts these days? Murderers
obviously William answered himself.
William felt choked by his
two syllables and blamed his parents for his lack of personal value, starting
at his name and continuing through their pure inability to bring him into the
world properly.
“Are you ever going to
leave your room Willie? There’s a world out there you know, with beautiful
women in it. You do like women don’t you Willie?”
Her slurred sentences always
shot through William with an unerring precision. It was as though he was the
target and Susanne’s liquid confidence was the arrow shooting accurately from
the twisted bow that was her mouth. He ignored the reference to his sexuality
because he was sure that he was not of the homosexual orientation. The ocean of
magazines underneath his bed where proof of that. The spiteful manner in which
her sand paper tongue spat out Willie was
what got to him the most. He despised that nickname - a nickname tauntingly
thrust upon him throughout his school years - and she was fully aware of that.
It must have been a decade since he last responded to her drunken ramblings
with anything other than silence. Whenever he spoke to her it gave him the
exact same sensation of suffering a deep paper cut whilst licking envelopes. He
never saw the point in engaging with the woman slumped against the outside of his
bedroom door; the door that seemed to creak under the force of every bitter exclamation.
“How about finding
yourself a girl hey Willie?”
This question if anything
simply clarified to him that she did not think he was gay, and that her
previous proclamation was just an attempt to rub him up the wrong way. She
paused for a minute, taking another unnecessarily loud gulp of poison.
“Don’t you want to give
your lovely mother any grandchildren hey Willie? Continue the family name?”
Another pause ensued. The
thought of forcing another human being into the turmoil of a life attached to
the Constadine family name made his stomach turn. Susanne’s words were
beginning to make his skin sting. It was becoming more and more difficult not
to react these days.
“You never leave your
room. You have no friends. Not even a thought of a girlfriend or a job. You’re
a bit of a loser aren’t you really Willie? Don’t you think?”
The feeling of
disappointment emphasised by his mother in this rhetoric was very much a mutual
one, and if anything more prominent on William’s behalf. There were so many
things that William resented when it came to his parents. The only thing he
could think of, if put on the spot, that he appreciated his mother and father
for was Kevin’s fortnightly delivery of ‘British Babes Go Wild’ and Susanne’s
lack of desire to make up for lost time.
“It’s such a waste of a
life Willie, it really is.”
William was distinctly
aware of this which softened to blow quite a lot. He liked facts. He liked them
because you could never argue with them, reason with them, or get particularly
offended by them. They just were.
The snide remarks
continued along the same vein for a short while longer, until suddenly coming
to an abrupt halt. The sound of footsteps echoed through the darkened hallway
like a departing train leaving its platform. William felt blessed by the
emptiness of the glass that was nestled within his mother’s sweaty palms as her
shadow disappeared from underneath his doorway. His father worked away the
majority of the time - or at least that was what he said was the reason for his
absence - and was only really home on a few rare occasions each month. William
was fairly reassured that his presence would not have changed the evenings’
proceedings much anyway. For Kevin ignorance was the utmost definition of bliss,
something he proved through his non-existent relationship with his wife and
child.
When his mother lashed out
William always tended to switch off. He had become totally immune to the abuse
and criticisms of pretty much anybody that decided to take offense to his
being. On nights such as this one he would place himself contently upon his
ragged leather armchair and gaze endlessly out of the window. He would asses
and analyse the passing world that lay beyond the shivering glass, the world he
intently ignored and avoided so successfully. He could reel off the contents of
his front garden without a stutter or a falter, from the sinister looking gnome
with the broken fishing rod to the proud flower collection situated next to the
broken gate at the foot of the grassy patch. Susanne loved her flowers and held
particular affection to her roses. William often pictured himself trampling
them into oblivion or setting them alight with the perfect combination of
petrol and matches. He did not have the courage to partake in such an
aggressive outburst, an outburst that would undoubtedly draw attention. Even
the thought of receiving the slightest bit of external attention made his
throat dry up. She tended to her flowers daily, but complained to herself
frequently about the sheer amount of effort that was required to maintain them
thoroughly. It was as though her entire ability and desire to love was wasted
upon this small section of dirt and muddled shrubbery. William thought that his
mother’s rose bush was a perfect representation of the comparison between her preliminary
ideas and eventual results of a family. The flourishing of the buds and the
attention grabbing blood red petals the initial thought, clear and beautiful.
The surface of the concept such a desirable and glorious image until the time
consuming effort of caring and rearing on a daily basis kicks in. The eventual reality
of everything represented by the hidden thorns beneath the cloak of leaves,
pricking at your fingers the second your desire begins to slip. Susanne’s
fingertips had quite fittingly been riddled with plasters and covered in tiny
scars for as long as he could remember; an appropriate form of irony William
thought.
William knew nothing
beyond his bedroom walls. It was his upbringing that had defined him and the
way he addressed things; the same case for pretty much every living person on
the planet. He was distressfully aware that he was just another victim of his
surroundings, and his surroundings had forever been less than ideal. William
always tried to maintain a degree of humour despite the foreshadowing of his
empty future. It was the only reality that he knew of. He witnessed the
realities of strangers through his window. It was like an on-going reality
television show, of which he was always unsure of the authenticity. His mind
always tossed to and fro about the idea of a better life, but eventually came
to the same numbing conclusion each and every time. For people like him, people
of such insignificance and peculiarity, the concept of better was a total impossibility. He would see people stop and
admire the flowers outside his house, and he imagined that they painted a
completely false image of what sat stagnantly behind. He also pictured the evil
gnome suddenly sparking to life, hurdling the black brick wall with an agile
somersault and chasing them down the street screaming abusively for a new
fishing rod. William had a very active imagination, one that both filled him
with pride and unnerved him slightly at the same time. William would see people
swooning over the flowers on a daily basis. He was sure that they desired them,
lusted after the creation of a similar beauty. The wondrous array of colour and
content was, in his eyes, just an overwhelming mish-mash of never ending chaos.
Each leaf and petal just another simple yet defining reason behind his lack of
confidence, social reclusion and the unhappiness of how his life and
personality had turned out. More relevantly though they represented the
attention he should have received from his parents. The attention he could have
received if Kevin would have pursued a different attraction and inhabited a
different womb when he was a young man. He blamed his father’s clearly delusional
initial view of Susanne for every misgiving he had experienced so far in his
young life. She must have been attractive when she was a young woman because
she had no redeeming features anymore and her erraticism was near-on impossible
to live with. William pitied Kevin more than anything else though. He found
that between his mother and father, he reasoned with him for his behaviour the
most. He was stuck in the whirlpool of mid-life crisis and had managed the
greatest of escapes. He could in so many ways understand his father’s absence
because given the opportunity he would have pursued precisely the same
direction without a second thought. In a lot of frustrating and warped kinds of
ways William admired his father for achieving that one thing he craved so much.
His mother had fully retreated
by the time the hands on the clock reached midnight. Silence always made
William drowsy and acted as the warming anaesthetic that faded him gently out
of obscurity. He always found that, although it being the most comfortable
place for him, being alone was so incredibly exhausting. He spent most of his
time in his own head which was in itself was flawed and gradually slipping away
more and more as the days dragged by. He had no basis to compare of course due
to his total lack of experience in even the most miniscule instance of
sociality. He made the conscious decision to embark upon total disconnection
before he even attained the ability to understand or remember. It was as though
it was programmed into him from birth. Due to this he could never pinpoint a
specific moment in his life that made him so exempt from expression. This could
have simply been because there were just too many of course. He could not talk
to either sex or relate to people of a younger, older, or similar age. He
became overwhelmingly nervous when in the presence of other people no matter
the quantity or quality of the company. The last time somebody approached him
with a question he began to sweat profusely, panicked and threw up on their
left shoe. The shoes looked brand new he remembered; they were garish in colour
and chunky at the sole. He much preferred a simpler colour scheme when it came
to fabrics and attire.
William was certain that
he had developed some kind of condition or ‘ism’ that blatantly outcasted him
from the outside world. He had even gone as far as nursing the idea that he had
invented his own personality disorder that existed as of yet without title or
explanation; a personal claim to fame. He was a deep thinker but could never
really articulate, express or show his feelings properly. Nor could he deal
with them appropriately when in his own company. When he tried to understand
himself he was met by a crippling paranoia birthed by the idea that he was
unable to even be alone without feeling a distinct partition between himself
and his own mind. William had quickly come to terms with the fact that he and
his internal conscious were two entirely different entities, but he hoped to
rectify that one day with a firm handshake and a sweet embrace. He shuffled
over to his bed after completing his usual nightly routine of dental and skin
care. Brushing his teeth always took a while. He would accidentally distract
himself and lose count of brushes and have to start all over again until he
successfully reached one-hundred and fifty strokes. William lacked a lot of
things but one thing he did not lack was a pride in his appearance. He wasn’t a
bad looking young man and he was aware of that. He was quite a tall gentleman,
six foot three to be precise, and had quite a sharpened jawline, a lot like
those Hollywood types. In a different life he could imagine himself playing the
next Bond or something along those lines. He had full, manly eyebrows and piercing
pale blue eyes. If you were to look directly at them they would be nearly
impossible to break from without effort. William would always try to hypnotise
local cats when they sat on his window-ledge by staring and whispering demands
under his breath. He once asked a black cat to crawl through his mothers’
bedroom window and urinate on her pillow; results to this were still eagerly
awaited. His skin was like that of a porcelain doll and a permanent fuzz of
stubble around his face made him look a lot more mature than he actually was. His
hair was thick and dark. Stylishly unkempt and messy as if he had just rolled
out of bed, exactly how the shows on television told him to do it. Despite all
of this though William was a strong believer in the concept that beauty was
only skin deep. He felt very much empty on the inside and thought he lacked any
defining inner content to match his appearance.
It was this emptiness that rendered any physical advantages thrust upon
him automatically void. Despite this William still looked after himself like
any normal young man would, why he did not know. Maybe there was a faint hope
of social adventure buried deep within him after all.
William’s head sunk slowly
into his pillow as his eyelids gradually began to slide shut. The lack of
consciousness crafted by sleep the most precious part of his days. He did not
dream. Every night was a blank canvas sat in the studio of a lazy artist.
William used to hear his mother explaining her dreams to his father over the
dinner table through the transparent floor boards of his home. It was without
doubt a shameless effort at attention seeking on Susanne’s behalf that was always
unsuccessful. Every day birthed a more elaborate explanation, each one a more
unequivocally blatant outcry than the last. The most recent discussion he
overheard actually made William laugh for a brief moment, something that was
just as much a rarity to him as female company or guiltless masturbation.
Susanne was sat on the left hand side of the table. William knew this because the
creaking of the chair on the left hand side was much more dramatic than its
wooden compatriot sat in the opposite position. William’s spatial-awareness was
quite impressive, especially from a distance, it had to be. Even if he could
not distinguish between creaks, there was still a fifty-fifty chance of him
picturing his mother sat in the correct place. There were only two chairs in
the kitchen; this made for good odds. In fact, there were only two chairs in
any room in the house, not including his own bedroom of course which was
inhabited by just the one. She started every story the same.
“So I had another one of
those dreams again last night.”
William always imagined
Kevin’s inner self yelping out a silent scream at this point as he braced
himself for another oncoming bombardment of nonsense.
“I’m sat in our bedroom
alone and a man, a stranger, I don’t know who he is, comes in through the
window. He is wearing all black with a hood up and he’s holding a gun, properly
terrifying he is. He starts screaming at me but it’s in a language that I don’t
understand and he starts firing around the room. He stops firing and kneels in
front of me. He suddenly takes my hand and kisses it so very gently, and then
BANG!”
She really exaggerated the
gunshot in an attempt to wake Kevin up from his seemingly comatose state. Her
voice went up a pitch as she began to spatter out her sentences more
frantically and with a sprinkling of quizzical venom. It had gone from a casual
recitation of dreams and fiction to what seemed like a full interrogation.
“He shoots me dead and
starts to laugh psychotically above me. Can you imagine if that actually
happened to me Kevin? Can you imagine if somebody killed me and you weren’t
here to even try and help save my life? I mean I wouldn’t be able to sleep at
night if I wasn’t there for you in that situation? I couldn’t cope knowing you
were alone at night crying yourself to sleep through missing me. Pulling your
hair out going crazy because I’m not around to tell you everything will be
okay, lashing out at colleagues and friends through the pure frustration of
feeling lost without the person you love, swimming in alcohol every Sunday
night because it’s the only escape from the hurt of your husband not being
around… Do you know what I mean Kevin? Do you understand anything I’m saying to
you?”
The topic of his mother’s
story was not necessarily the thing that he found humorous. William actually
found it quite pathetic that the only way a wife could express her truest
feelings and emotions to her husband was through a collection of fictional scenarios.
He quickly realised though that he was in no position to criticise or comment
on self-expression or emotional declaration. It was not the image of a gun-wielding
foreigner dressed in a homemade Batman outfit clambering through a window and
screaming obscenities in a brand new form of gibberish, although the image did
tickle him slightly. It was not the way that she completely strayed off topic,
which was something that suggested the entire dream itself was nothing but an
emotive lie used as an attempt to draw reaction or change. It was her
transition from calm and collected housewife to ranting and raving lunatic
simply through Kevin’s lack of response that tickled him. Over and above
anything though, it was his father’s ignorant and tactless response to the
whole debacle that made William blurt out an unfamiliar chuckle.
“Was he Asian? I bet he
was Asian.”
William was previously
unaware that his father was a racist. He felt slightly closer to Kevin after
this.
*
* *
It was the critical light
of the sun piercing through his dusty blinds that woke William the following
morning. His blinds usually provided him with an added protection from the perverted
sunlight, but that was not the case on this day. The weather was stunning, as
much as he hated to admit it, probably the best it had been all year. The sound
of laughter and general merriment filtered through his walls like the fog horn
from a lighthouse warning nearby ships of an imminent danger. It was a Monday.
William loved Mondays. The reason behind his adoration towards this typically
morose day was solely to do with the way that it assisted his avoidance of his erratic
mother. Susanne started work at an incredibly early hour and returned home from
her daily exploits at a time that was late enough for William to make himself
scarce. He did not actually know what her occupation was, not in the slightest.
He never asked her or even had the desire to ask her. The Constadine’s were not
the type of family that existed around many questions or discussions around
their day to day comings and goings. William had no idea what his father worked
as either for that matter. All he knew was that it involved him wearing a
cheaply made, poorly tailored black suit that sat far too tightly around his
broad shoulders to provide any sort of comfort. He also knew it involved a
battered suitcase filled with blank paper, empty biscuit wrappers and stale
crumbs from sandwiches of days gone by.
William didn’t have a job,
nor had he ever particularly craved one. He knew that it would involve too much
public interaction for him to deal with. Another thing William was certain of
was that, as a twenty-two year old man, this was something that would furrow
plenty of brows and entice feverish criticism. He did go for one job interview
when he was seventeen at a local coffee shop though. He was having a confident week
that week, probably stemmed from some sort of minor positive interaction in the
school-yard. William thought back to a day that a new foreign exchange student
asked him for directions. HH H DJJHDnnnsdhdhde sent the eastern
European sounding gentleman in entirely the wrong way as a joke because that
was the cool thing to do he assumed. In the following weeks he found out that
the young man he boldly misinformed ended up stumbling across the girls
changing rooms and was immediately sent packing back to his home country branded
a pervert by a letter written by the school head-teacher. William guessed that
this was the week he was referencing. This was the only confident week in
living memory and one that was incredibly short lived. He remembered getting
through the interview with a decent amount of his nerves still intact and was
given the opportunity of a trial shift the following afternoon. William also
remembered accidentally knocking over a boiling hot jug of milk and scalding a
small boy within the first couple of hours and immediately sprinting out of the
establishment faster than he had ever moved in his life. Despite never walking
over the threshold of Carlton Coffee House ever again he was more than assured
that he was not the right person to fill the available position. He definitely
was not expecting that days’ pay check to drop through his letterbox any time
soon either.
Every day was roughly the
same for William no matter the weather. Being a big fan of routine meant
certain things had to be adhered to. He would bathe and groom himself in the
same way that anybody else would, taking his sweet time in the shower. He loved
the feeling of the water beating against his face and his chest and his back.
It made him feel alive and tickled him slightly, in a way that he imagined a
woman’s fingers to tickle during times of passionate physicality. He would work
out using his massive leather armchair as a bench press, although it was
becoming too easy for him over recent weeks. He would have to find another
piece of household furnishing to smuggle into his room as a replacement quite soon.
The garden bench was a definite contender. He would follow that up by jogging one-hundred
laps around his small box garden, even if the filthy rain was pouring down in bucket
loads. The rain reminded him of being in
the shower. He would then finish off by doing varied sets of push ups and sit
ups until his arms and stomach began to quiver beneath that infamously arousing
burn. William found that no matter how much exercise he did though he never
seemed to add to his muscle content. His was quite a gangly frame, one that
found it impossible to retain any form of bulk. After his daily exercises he
would sit and learn a new word from his dictionary and use it in five separate sentences
that he would then write into his brown leather notepad until its definition
was forever engraved into his mind. His most recent word was
‘sesquipedaliophobia.’ This word when simplified meant ‘the fear of long
words.’ He wondered, due to its definitively clear definition, why this word
was made so lengthy. Its inventor was obviously a sadist and a frequent
sufferer of bullying as a child. William knew that he would be able to remember
this word in fewer sentences than usual due to its distinct irregularity and so
settled on inscribing just the one that he found most relevant.
The man who invented the word sesquipedaliophobia is a
prick.
He liked this sentence; he
was proud of it. It was to the point and definitely factual. He liked facts. William
did not mind curse words - both in written form and verbal form - and thought
them to be appropriate in this day and age. He felt strongly about the topic at
hand and therefore thought it necessary to extenuate his point with a curse
word. They were so obvious and brutally honest. It was the twenty-first century
after all and swearing was such a relevant form of language within his
generation, and in many ways an example of modern-day poetry. He felt prophetic
when stabbing the full stop onto the page. He felt like he had made a
difference.
One thing William was truly
proud of was his increasingly impressive vocabulary. He wished sometimes that
he had somebody to share it with. This wish was quickly squashed by the
realisation that if he were to share some words that they would become more
common and lose their singularity. After his extended afternoon nap William
would typically spend the rest of the day watching news channels and re-runs of
nineties American sit-coms. He found American humour inferior when put up against
that of the British, but far easier to comprehend. William appreciated ease.
Sarcasm was not something he thought to be necessary or amusing but understood
its relevance to his nations’ heritage. British comedy was riddled with it,
like a linguistic chlamydia. Susanne would return at roughly twenty-five
minutes past eight every evening. This was the point where William would
scuttle up to his room, close his door and stay put until he was greeted by the
niceties of the following morning. She never came up to check on him or
acknowledge he even lived within the confines of the four walls of their home.
This was the only thing his mother did that William appreciated. He found her
consistent ignorance of him more a compliment that anything else; consistent at
least until the brandy came knocking. Every single time she arrived home she would
shout the same question through the house the very second her feet landed upon
the facetious welcome mat.
“Kevin, are you home? Are
you home love?”
He was never home, and
even when he was he did not respond to the coarse cries of his wife with
anything more than a forced grunt. William could always picture the look on
Kevin’s face as he heard Susanne’s malicious keys rattling together behind the
front door. He imagined his father running to the book case next to the fire
place and pulling a secret lever that span the wooden frame around and hid him
in the confides of the walls were he spent weeks on end, like a Borrower.
The weekends were always
different for William. Routine was nullified as soon as Saturday came along.
These were the days where he was unable to avoid contact with his parents if he
stayed within the safety of his home. Their presence forced him out of the
house which was an inconvenience to say the least. On these days he wandered
the surrounding maze of streets and alleyways, each time a different route. He would
sometimes treat himself to a wander through the local park depending on how
busy his surroundings seemed or how pleasant the weather was. He had a
favourite spot though. Somewhere that nobody would bother him or invade his beloved
privacy. There was an abandoned scrap yard roughly six blocks up from his house
and twenty minutes down the adjoining road to the right of the pharmacy. William
always enjoyed pausing outside the pharmacy every once in a while to see the
embarrassed faces of teenage boys buying condoms or sexual aids. It was the
only form of embarrassment that he craved. Hours would be spent at the
scrap-yard rooting through the mounds of discarded memories, searching through
the forgotten remains of lives he would never live. It was his home away from
home.
William’s hood was a
permanent fixation around his pale face when he ventured into the chattering
abyss. He found that people tended to ignore those sporting a hood. There must
have been some form of interesting psychology around this that he could look
into, but for now the simple fact that the method worked was enough. No
explanation was required in this instance. Every now and then he would get lost
beneath the fabric and accidentally bump into oncoming pedestrians. He would
naturally mutter “sorry” under his breath as any normal person would. William
though was not a normal person. Each time any word left his mouth that was
directed at another person, he seemed to subconsciously speed up his walk to a casual
run, as if the very fact that he had spoken to another human being would cause
his brain to implode beneath his skull. William had a peculiar run. He moved with
the similar awkward wobble of a penguin and the directional abilities of a
dyspraxic crab, which was probably why his classmates taunted him so much
during PE lessons at school. Whenever he spoke he was reminded of how whiney
his voice sounded as it echoed right through his body. This always made him
feel embarrassed. His voice made him cautious to communicate and filled him
with anxiety. It was a Monday evening though. He often had to remind himself of
days because he would far too often allow his mind to wander towards future
misfortunes. William had another four-and-a-bit days of safety before he had to
dive head first back into the chasm of public awkwardness again.
Susanne didn’t drink on weekdays,
only Sunday nights. The concept of routine was obviously something passed down
to William through his mother’s side of the family, not that he was aware of
any other family beyond his parents. She had become accustomed to the piercing
hangover that wrapped itself around her head every Monday morning. On the first
evening of a new week she would water and trim her flowers and immediately head
straight to bed. At least she would unless Kevin was home, which was not often.
Every other night of the week, after her moment of affection in the front
garden and the discovery that Kevin was once again absent, she would place a
cassette tape into the dated music system in the front room and crank the
volume up unforgivably high. It was usually country and western. William always
wondered what the attraction to this horrendous genre of music was. Maybe this
was the real reason his father could not bear to spend any time at home.
Whenever William heard it, no matter where he was, he wanted to drive his head
through the nearest available brick wall until he was gifted the pleasure of deafness.
His mother would then raucously sing along to each and every track as if she
were on stage in the Royal Philharmonic. She probably didn’t have that bad a
singing voice in reality, but to William it was the most aggressive sound that
could possibly pollute the air, like a thousand glass bottles crashing together.
He would push his ear-plugs as far into his ears as physically possible and,
after preparing himself for bed, would zone out reading the daily local
newspaper that was delivered by the whistling postman each morning. Susanne
thought that the delivery of the paper had stopped because the postman had
taken a dislike to her for some unknown reason. In reality it was just William
that kept stealing it away and their lack of communication that caused the
entire ridiculous conspiracy. He would read until tiredness gratefully embraced
him and rocked him to sleep with its shy, unassuming lullaby. On Monday nights
the ear-plugs weren’t a necessity. William was sure that his ears had begun to
droop due to the force so regularly placed upon them. They were probably just
as grateful for the start of a new week as he was. At least they would be if
ears had the ability to feel in the same way a human being could. Feelings were
quite an alien concept to William which meant he could sympathise with inanimate
objects quite well. He always pictured himself coming back as a wheelbarrow in
another life, if he were a Buddhist. This was due to his ability to keep
rolling onwards despite heavy loads; the heavy load being Susanne and Kevin the
majority of the time. He also believed the wheelbarrow to be a void concept due
to the boom of motorisation, and imagined they lived a peaceful life. His puddle-blue
eyes closed and slipped into another dreamless sleep. As William lay motionless
breathing in and out accompanied by an almost silent snore, his rigid body awaited
another typical, pre-planned day. Exactly the type of day he excelled in.
