Skip to main content

The Time Was Right

The Time Was Right
It felt right as I sat naked and cross legged on the bed. 
I smoothed down the sheet I was sat on and systematically broke each Lofepramine anti-depressant tablet in half and laid it on the smooth sheet. I had enough water to swallow the amount I needed to go from this life. 
I felt no anger or hatred for the people that had blighted my young and now old life. My mind was blank from all that life had dealt me. 
It had been a good day: counselling with Ian, a superb meal by myself in Nonnas, a few glasses of wine in Brown’s and a black taxi ride home. I never planned to do anything.
We were all there sat on the bed looking at the halved tablets, occasionally taking a halved tablet and swallowing it with a sip of water. I had to make the half litre of water last through the event. 
Young David with the kite said nothing.
The unsmiling Sir Thomas Abney David said nothing. He was glad of the release.
The gloomy David sat on the rockery at Sach Road staring blankly at the camera said nothing. He was glad of the escape it gave him after all these years of existence inside David.
The sullen David holding Mitzi the dog in the garden said nothing. He was glad of the freedom it gave him. Perhaps now he could laugh and play.
Teenage David said nothing. Why should he? He’d had the abuse branded into his psyche. His every day was filled with the memory of it. That’s why he gulped down neat bottles of Dr Collis Browne’s diarrhoea cure every day  before he went to school.
Angry David said and did nothing. His role was to remind and irritate David when he was happy. He stood watching the naked David on the bed. He didn’t know this calm David.
I was in charge of adult David. He slowly took each half tablet and sipped the water. 
The light was on so we could see the room around us. We could see what we were doing. We were in total control of this life.
I didn’t want to scare abused David with the darkness; the foxes weren’t going to bite him tonight. They wouldn’t prowl around his bed waiting for a dangling foot to drop from the bed. 
The rabid bats clinging on the window wouldn’t come in and land on his back and bite him. 
He wouldn’t be choked into submission tonight. He wouldn’t have to smell the faeces dipped fingers pushed up his nose. He wouldn’t have to smell the urine stained sheets pressed into his face again. 
He didn’t have to conjure up the paisley pattern and float gently out of his body tonight.  He would never have to gain that release from the hurt again.
He wouldn’t have to go through that any of that ever again. He wouldn’t wake up screaming as his abuser clung to his back in the nightmares that he frequently had.
His wife would never have to say “It’s me” again before she touched him when he was dozing or sleeping in bed.
None of those things would bother him ever again.
Not one of our abusers made an appearance that night.  They had no power over us tonight. It wasn’t as if we had told them to ‘fuck off’ as we did every night and waking morning.  We were so calm they could not make an appearance, we wouldn’t let them. 
Only an uncontrolled anger made them appear. They stood in the corners of the room laughing at him.  They knew he wasn’t a real man. 
We didn’t resist their appearance. They just couldn’t break into our calm routine that night. Their life decisions had affected us. I disallowed their interference in this matter; it was my decision to go. It was our decision to take this life and lose it. To take this existence and dissociate ourselves from it.
As the halved pills slipped down into our stomach David held on to his kite and looked up at the sky, he knew what we had decided. He had never had a future mapped out, he never knew that; he stood on the beach watching his kite float higher and higher into the sky. He was lost in the thoughts that kept him going. They were innocent thoughts of a child that had a future. The warm sun toasted his back and outstretched arms as he bobbed the kite string backwards and forwards making his kite sail higher and higher. 
That future was soon to be brutally robbed away from him.
The next half tablet slipped down and the next and the next. 
Then we lost count and slept or died. 
The former wasn’t wanted the latter was.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protein Man of Oxford Street- Stanley Owen Green.

I wrote this Obituary piece for The Guardian about Stanley Green while I was an undergraduate at Goldsmiths' College.  I contacted The Guardian and asked them if I could submit it for publication. It was sent off to them and I waited in eager anticipation for their reply. It was published on Wednesday January 26th 1994,   the Editor  made no changes or additions except by adding some photographs (the photographs used here are later additions by me): "A Consuming Passion.... Stanley Owen Green who has died aged aged 78, was that tall thin man with steel-rimmed glasses who marched it seemed for an eternity up and down London's Oxford Street. It was his banner that made him famous, held high above his head and proclaiming "LESS LUST FROM PROTEIN" in large white letters. Underneath the banner he endured the taunts of sticky schoolchildren and the spittle of office workers alike, to bring his unique, indeed puzzling message to the people of London. He later wate
3 comments
Read more

The Roswell Returns

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” As those words echoed around Mission Control in Houston a round of spontaneous applause broke out across the site and in the control room. There were yelps and hollers of triumph echoing around the whole of NASA that momentous day in July 1969. In the Command Module Michael Collins was monitoring the vital controls that kept it orbiting the Moon. He flipped the carbon dioxide uptake switch, looked at the battery charge meters, oxygen levels and closely watched the radar screen. He sat back in his flight chair and watched the instrumentation flick and whirr. He daren’t relax, he didn’t relax at all. He paid great attention to the radar screen as he was commanded to. He had to monitor it for spooks, intruders or ghosts. He knew he was looking for Foo Fighters. They did show up on radar, aircrews had confirmed that as fact. It was how fast they appeared and disappeared that threw most pilots. There had been warnings by the
Post a Comment
Read more

Christmas Gothic - The Sojourn of The Soul

As the man came in from work, he looked on the hall table as he did every night, ostensibly for any letters that had been delivered that day. There were none that day. There was, however, a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. The label on it was addressed to him, ‘To Harry, With Love’ it read. It looked like his wife had bought him a book, which was unusual for her to even go into a book shop let alone buy him a book. He picked it up and felt its weight it was quite a weighty tome. He unwrapped the book and looked at the title: A Goode Wyfe: The Sojourn Of The Soul. He noted the archaic spelling of the title; she had chosen well. It looked very interesting and was certainly very old, the leather binding and the gold lettering on the spine and cover gave that away. It was well thumbed too and the pages fell open on their own.   He looked at the imprint, last imprint 1818, first imprint 1313. He did a quick sum in his head, those two dates added together made 3131, a mirror image of t
Post a Comment
Read more