EPSIODE 39; IN WHICH THE AUTHOR FRIVOLS MONEY AND WATCHES A GREAT PERFORMANCE

Welcome to my blog which I suppose is already half-way through its preordained life. My reader is supposed to be having a weekly grandstand view of my increasing success through which s/he can become impressed and inspired. The hitch to the plan so far has been the ‘reality’ element of the enterprise for in that reality I don’t appear to have made any progress whatsoever and my income from this 40 week exercise has been exactly nil. Only the fact that I always give up is stopping from giving up.

Talking of follies…My visitors over the last fortnight have all commented on my front door which until recently was a badly painted council installed piece of hardboard that has somehow survived thirty years of being slammed by teenagers. Thinking it was letting in phenomenal draughts, I enquired about the price of fixing it and was given a quote of £1100 for two doors and a set of windows in the kitchen. Of course I had no intention to pay out that sort of money, especially as once I’d seen that what you got was one of those white PVC doors which seem so characterless. I was telling a friend about this quote and he said, I thought, ‘oh, I could get you a really nice oak door for £170’. Quite how that turned into £545, I don’t know but it seemed churlish to say anything after he did such a good job.

“It’ll take a lot to bash that door through,” said Roger proudly. Which is true. The person most likely to try and kick the door open is me. Last time I locked myself out, I immediately became frantic and furious rather than calm and rational, not least because my calm and rational props (tea and tobacco) were in the house which is the middle one of three terraced boxes. After I moaned at my kids for slamming the door at night, they took to accessing the house by climbing onto the porch balcony and pushing open the front bedroom window. This I could never do, so on being locked out of the front my only alternative is to hope I’ve left a door or window open at the back. I can only get to the back by either going through my neighbour’s front-door or going around the side of her house to the back garden. When the houses were built, there was only a token gate between the two houses at the back but recently I had that replaced by an implacable wall so when I went around to my neighbour’s garden, I could only get over to mine by pole-vaulting over the fence that divides the two gardens. A branch of rotting buddleia made for a poor pole and the brambles on the pawlonia stump did little to soften the landing. Luckily I’d left the kitchen window so with the destruction of only one teapot I was able to climb back into my sanctuary. It occurred to me then that next time I would just break down the door. Now I won’t.

Another folly will probably turn out to be the Day of the Dead that I’ve stumbled into thinking I’m going to organize. Beware of ideas, really. They have lives of their own, selves of their own, their own consciousness and desires; they are the succubae that  take over your soul, they are the demons to be exorcised. Arguable our memetic inheritance is even more mutated than our genetic one.

Certainly its chances of being a financial folly are clearly adumbrated in the opening moves which have seen me spend over £500 already on a notion, on a half-baked creation. It began in September when I was writing this and wondering how to place articles about death in magazines. Then I drifted off and came back with this big idea which actually is a total diversion from what I was planning. Now it frightens me. I am not a doer, not that sort of doer. I like to write about Kashmir Shaivism and make-up funny stories. I have no passion for this Day of the Dead, it is just an idea that is using me. I could stop it now, should stop it, haven’t stopped it. This week I’ve had business cards printed and a few letter-headed papers; in a while I’ll pick up 800 fliers designed by the world’s worst artist, me, for an event which doesn’t really exist. I should hand these out in Glastonbury on Saturday and in London on Sunday. All too too much. I must escape into empty space, Archarya Peter Wilberg and the Cosmic Vibrators from Kashmir.

But no. No space for the engaged. Amazingly the printer changed my artwork to produce something reasonable, so thus armed I decided I best strike while the iron was hot and took myself off to visit the Southbank Death Festival in the hope that I might, despite my nature and all past experience, somehow ‘connect’ with something or someone. To make life easier, I thought, I would get the cheapest train, £30 return from Yeovil Junction to Waterloo, leaving 7.20am returning 21.20. Yeovil is 45 minutes’ drive from here. I allowed an extra 15 to park the car and collect the ticket from the station. What I hadn’t allowed for was the presence of two stations in Yeovil, or in fact, out of Yeovil, neither of which is consistently signposted. As a result the train was in when I arrived at the right station. Then the coins wouldn’t go in the parking meter so I had to take a piece of paper and phone somewhere while on the train – which didn’t work because I can’t hear anything on my phone and it was an automated response system that kept responding extraneous noises. I hadn’t time to collect my ticket from the machine so I jumped on the train only to be deposited off again six minutes later at the next station when the ticket inspector noticed I’d actually booked a ticket for the 7.50 train.

 

I did get there in the end and although in two days I only rid myself of three leaflets and one business card, the actual festival was mostly pretty good and quite inspiring. On the Friday night I went to see the Kulunka Teatro put on a performance of mime, called Andre and Dorine, in the Purcell Room. It was amazing, absolutely wonderful. There were moments of silence in which you could hear 400 people holding their breath and trying not to cry noisily. Moving, funny, unbearably painful, just fantastic.

Which is a positive place to finish.

EPISODE 38: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR BOASTS OF HIS TALENTS AND LOOKS AT A TREE

Welcome to my blog which is in danger of becoming a testament to the foolishness of ambition rather than the record of unfolding authorial success that it was meant to be. Since I began this journal even the two pieces of my work that have received attention, the novel, Sad Sam, and the article about Spirituality, have failed to actually see the light of day and there appears to be nothing on the horizon. I’d give up, but if you give up the small hope that makes you make an effort, then what do you do?

This week I have spent four days writing an essay (for my partner) called ‘Teaching Collocations with high-frequency delexical verbs to Intermediate Students’. I’ve turned my mind to tedious things before but I’d like to congratulate myself on this particular effort which I crafted out of the DELTA handbook and whatever internet resources I could find which included studies from Japan, Germany, Australia, China, Lithuania, Bangladesh, Poland, Turkey and Greece. Over the years I’ve turned my unutilised intelligence to a number of essay subjects on behalf of various children and partners and in addition to my legitimate qualifications I should claim degrees in Latin American Studies, Family Therapy, and Creative Music Technology. Consistent in all my encounters with other people’s degrees is the lack of clarity in instruction. For all the spelling out and deliberate use of precise language, the student isn’t quite clear what to do and the teaching support appears to be lacking. In the end it is a matter of being able to play an academic game, rather than being an excellent therapist, historian, musician, thanatologist or teacher, which seems to matter. 

In place of having anything concrete to report, I’m going to focus on empty space and first, the ‘feel-it’ exercises on the Avatar Course of Harry Palmer which, if you were a regular reader, you would know to be of reoccurring interest to me, not least because Harry Palmer doesn’t want them taught to you by an unauthorised teacher to such an extent that he may take that teacher to court, as he did Eldon Braun.

I don’t know Mr Braun personally, nor what the truth of his relationship with Avatar was. Undoubtedly he produced his own (not very good) version of the Avatar Materials and this led to an absurd court case in Florida in which a judge tried to decide which techniques and words were common currency and which were uniquely Harry’s. The truth must be that none of it is uniquely Harry’s but the way he has packaged it is extremely original and, in my opinion, effective in a way that Braun’s course simply isn’t. 

One of the main and most crucial techniques in Avatar is the series of ‘Feel-it’ exercises which Braun (based on Heinlein) calls ‘grokking’. In both systems you begin by grokking inanimate objects, then animate ones, then people. According to Braun, ‘Observe inanimate objects one at a time. Just observe whatever it is, and decide to get the essential feeling of it. Try to become it. After a short time, move to something else.’  Palmer put is like this; 1) Observe some object, location or space that interests you. Observe it carefully for a few seconds. 2) Define the object by observing its periphery, edge or limits. Identify with it and feel it.

 

When doing an Avatar Course, one may spend a number of days doing varieties of the feel-it exercises. ‘For example, if you are identifying with a stone, feels its weight bearing down on the earth as your weight, feels its exposed surfaces as your surfaces, feel its density as your density, transform the stone into you the stone,’ says the instruction helpfully. But how do you actually do it? The Florida judge says; ‘It appears that the unprotected idea is to live life with feeling instead of thinking about everything that occurs or every path to take,’ and ‘Braun copied Palmer’s advice to students for approaching this exercise.’ What is obvious is that the judge never actually tried the exercises because if he had, and if he had grasped the essence of the exercise, he would have had to agree that the experience is uncopyrightable because it is simply a description of what we do all the time anyway. It took me many days of trying to feel like a stone for me to realise this; days of frustration and expectation as I kept hoping that any moment I’d somehow turn into a tree or be able to converse with dogs. Much of this time I was doing the course with a man called Clive and each time we’d meet we’d moan about how we couldn’t ‘do’ the exercise. Then we’d go back to our ‘master’ with various stories of our experience and then he’d send us out again for another couple of hours.

Somewhere along the line, there was a turning point, neither dramatic nor revelatory. I was sitting in a pub pretending to be a door, as you do, when the door moved and for the slightest nano-second I ‘felt’ that I was being moved. From then on I decided I could ‘do’ the exercise and my master seemed to agree. Of course I’ve no idea if I’m really ‘doing the right thing’ but this recognition of the feelingness of perception seems crucially important. (And also an excellent reminder that it is the engaging in the doing of the exercise, rather than the preconceived benefit of doing it, that one should remember.)

This week I came across an excellent work called the ‘New Spanda Karikas’ by Peter Wilberg. Here he talks here about perceiving a tree:

If you look at a tree and regard it as a mere illuminated object for your eyes, that it one thing –an ordinary visual experience. But if you now attend, with your whole body, to your awareness of seeing the tree, then you will begin to sense it as well as see it – and to see and sense something quite invisible to your eyes.

You will sense your entire body surface becoming ‘all eye’.

What you see with your eyes you will also begin to subtly sense within the aware inwardness of your whole body.

What you begin to sense and experience will not be the tree as a mere ‘object of consciousness’ but those qualities of awareness that manifest as the tree and shape its consciousness.

Now if Harry had told me to do that, I’d still be trying.

EPISODE 37; DAVE'S FUNERAL

Welcome to my blog where it is six in the morning; frost is on the ground, ice on the cars, and the half-moon is bright in the clear sky; a touch of winter at last. It’s probably foolish to say so but a winter that doesn’t begin to mid-January feels that it can’t be so bad.

It turned cold last week as we drove to Manchester to be at the funeral of Dave whose place in my life I mentioned last week, although I forgot then, in my meditation on ‘you never know what would have happened,’ that after he took over my life I was at a loss for a few months and then I went to India where I met a guru and learned the thinking that is the support of my life now. After I came back I had another family, the three sons of which accompanied me to the funeral, out of their respect for Dave and their solidarity with their sister. When I picked up my middle son, his son, aged nearly two, was waiting for me holding a large packet of chai tea bags. More memories to burn the soul with.

On the way we stopped at a motorway services station and I noticed a group of five or six people looking uncomfortably smart. Yep, fellow mourners. We went to Dave and Barby’s house first where I was surprised to see a hundred or so sympathy cards which perhaps shows just how ‘expert’ I am in my supposed expertise because it hadn’t occurred to me that this is what people did.

During a three hour waiting period more and more family and friends gathered at the house so at any moment one could observe the oddest pairings as brief conversations between people who didn’t know each other hubbubbed throughout the house. For me it was quite moving to see Chris, Barby’s twin brother with whom we lived in Anglesey 40 years ago, and his 3 kids mingling with mine and Dave’s sons and trying, but failing, to make any sense of their parents’ distant love lives.

After a couple of hours my daughter took me upstairs to practise the reading she had prepared to express her feelings about Dave. All I could do was cry.

When we arrived at the chapel-crematorium, having driven in a funeral cortege, (nb to self, leave instructions, don’t drive me slowly anywhere), we were amazed to see what seemed like hundreds of people gathered, most of them looking distinctly northern in their black suits with the jacket buttons undone to let in the cold. Because there were so many people, my partner, me and my 9 year old grandson were sent in first to make sure we had places to sit. (In the end only half the mourners could fit in the chapel.) We, therefore, we’re the only people in the chapel when the coffin led procession came in which meant that my grandson got to see how upsetting his mother was finding the pall-bearing role. It was a shame for my grandson, I think, that he was the only child there but he behaved himself remarkably and even when he was in tears he just dealt with it himself. It felt that as he sat next to us he suddenly became a lot older.

It is always strange hearing a funeral celebrant talking about the person they didn’t know and you did. Also you get input from various members of various family systems wanting to describe the man they knew; all-in-all, however, it was a fair and honourable reflection of a man who more or less kept himself to himself but did it so well you felt you had almost shared a deep moment with him.

After the funeral came the pub which is not a comfortable environment for me a) because I don’t like the noise and b) the more dunk people get the less I care what they are saying, so I played outside with my grandson who by that time was in an excellent mood. And then the long fast drive back everyone sunk in thought.

This week I read that heart attack risk is 21 times higher within the first day of a spouse death and six times higher than normal within the first week. Fortunately Barby has survived thus far (and didn’t have a previous heart condition) nevertheless she will be exceptional if the stress and grief don’t leave some physiological trauma. Grief, not surprisingly, was a major Unit in my ‘Death and Society’ Master’s Degree and I must admit that as a neophyte sociologist I was both excited and stunned by the discovery of how much of our behaviour is culturally conditioned. The word grief is, of course, a highly imprecise one and covers a multitude of emotions, cognitions, behaviours and physiological processes. There was much in the literature on grief that I felt was somehow flawed, not least that in most cases the grief that followed an event – such as a death – was seen as being caused by the event, rather than triggered by it. I have begun looking at these things again today although I’m rather hoping I don’t get too obsessed by it as I suspect I did with my articles on spirituality, the second one of which seems less popular than the first.

So it goes.

EPISODE 36; YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED

Welcome to my blog which today will update you on the non-developments in my writing career and then turn its attention to syncronicity and the death of a companion.

My reader will be aware that back in the summer, a publisher read the first chapters of a novel of mine and said as soon as i finished the book he'd like to e-publish it. Early September, I finished the book and sent it to him. Since then all I heard from him was promises to read it 'soon'. Last Friday I sent one last despairing email and what does he say? Sorry mate, must have lost it, could you send another copy?'

The good news is that my article 'No Need for Spiritual Needs' has been accepted by a magazine; unfortunately I've now rewritten it say that the spiritual need is the paramount need. It isn't a change of mind as such but a development in the argument separating the abrahamic religions from Hinduism and Buddhism. And now to a christian...

‘You never know what would have happened,’ is a quote from the C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books that I have never forgotten even though I have failed to remember all the other great words the wise have passed on to me apart from, ‘It is the bright day that bring forth the adder,’ which is from Julius Caesar and is so cynical that it can never be usefully repeated. Today is not a bright day; the wind is blowing a gale and the skies are dark with rain. Six hours ago, my daughter’s stepfather died. He is 58 and has died from a lung cancer which is hard not to blame on the culminative effect of 45 years of constant tobacco smoking. Naturally there is a certain amount of anger and frustration that sensible people like Dave, and myself, slowly kill ourselves in front of the ones we love.

Of course when we began smoking was acceptable in society and it was the age we began at, not the smoking itself, that was considered wrong. In the college I went to before going to University I was allowed to smoke in tutorials and it was drinking I had to hide. (Neither of my parents smoked by the way but all five of their children did.) It was probably the drinking that got me into Aston University because I turned up to most of my interviews a little drunk and consequently tended to underperform and not be offered a place at anywhere decent. It was on my first day at Aston that I met Dave. We were in the student bar, both I think already aware we’d gone to the wrong university, wondering what to do with ourselves and Dave offered me a cigarette.

And if he hadn’t?

A few weeks before meeting Dave in Birmingham, I had met Barby in Reading where I lived with my parents on the campus of a Teacher’s Training College at which Barby was a student and my mother one of her disapproving tutors. Barby was easy to spot as she wore a fantastic long red velvet coat which delighted my hippyish eyes. I met her at a party. I don’t remember how it happened but I do recall going home on my bicycle so happy and so stoned that I was stopped by the police for riding around in circles at a traffic-lighted crossroads – and subsequently was given a £3 for being drunk in charge of a bicycle. When she came to visit me in Birmingham a fortnight later I stood at the bottom of the escalator at New Street Station wondering how I would recognize her because in those days I was too vain to wear my glasses and could only identity people when they got close-up. Fortunately she was wearing the famous velvet coat. (That was meant to be an allusion to Leonard Cohen’s whose dulcet tones graced many a student block and went well with intellectual melancholy.)

Dave and I were on a four year ‘Behavioural Science Degree’. What we’d actually gone to study was psychology which we thought was the study of the human mind as illustrated by R.D. Laing, Cooper, Scaz, Jung, et cetera, what we got was frog’s brains to cut up. After about six weeks at the University, I wrote an essay on suicide which I thought was unbelievably brilliant. When I received a disappointing mark I quit. This was as typical of me as it was of Dave to finish a course he had no fondness for or desire to continue with after University.

Barby and I took lots of LSD, lived hedonistically and worked when we had to.  We had a daughter that we doted upon. Dave would come to visit over the years whether we were in Reading, Bristol or Anglesey. He and I liked to talk books; Le Grande Meulnes being a great favourite of us both and to explore ideas. He wasn’t into the drugs but liked the countryside and the manly pursuits he followed with Barby’s brother, Chris.

One day when I was on mushrooms I realized that Dave and Barby were having an affair. I was gutted at the time to lose my daughter but from what I recall I was mostly decent about it all and over the years we patched up our friendship although we never talked what had happened, only about how much he cared for and loved my daughter even when she was difficult. When I later became a step-parent myself, I realized what a good job he’d made of it. I suspect Dave always found me to be irresponsible or flaky and our conversations over the years have been brief, albeit fond.

Then 35, 40, years and half a million cigarettes later, just like that, the blink of an eye, and here we are at the end of it all. For all our ups and down, my life has been better for accepting that cigarette from Dave.

EPISODE 35; AN ATYPICAL STORY FROM THE AUTHOR.

Welcome to my blog which today consists of a story.

                                                         THREE WOMEN

   I don’t know what was in the white powder that I gave to Lucy. I did know it would kill her. She drove off in her little red car, smiling and waving. See you soon, she said. I knew she wouldn’t but as there was no point in saying anything, I waved back and then came into the caravan to make lunch for my boy, Duggy.

   Lucy was the first. I wish I could remember who the other two were.

  I was a little confused by what I had done. She’s such a nice person, Lucy. She talks a lot but doesn’t really bother anyone. I put the powder in a drink and said, Try this Lucy. It tastes horrible but it’ll fix your cold in no time. She believed me. Why wouldn’t she?

   She won’t know that I caused her death. No-one will. If it wasn’t for the other two I wouldn’t really have anything to worry about. Did I give them the powder too? On the same day? Or did it take longer than that? It’s dead weird not being able to remember things properly. If I don’t know the truth, what will I say if anyone asks?

   I have this nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach. I could get into big trouble over this. They’ll think I did it on purpose and lock me up for years. Suddenly I’ll be gone and what will happen to Duggy then? It’d really hurt him to lose me and it’s not fair that he should. Sometimes I cry when I think how unfair everything is. This time it’s partly my own fault because I’ve not been good at seeing the consequences of things.

   There’s so much to think about yet most of the time I can hardly think at all. I’m in a sort of fog, a bit adrift from the world around me. I feel like I’m in a movie where the sounds and mouth movements don’t match. Do you know what I mean? Does it happen to you?

   I call Duggy my boy. I’m not his real dad. I sort of ended up with him when me and Sue split up a couple of years ago. She said she didn’t want him anymore but I reckoned someone should so I’ve been giving it a try. It’s hard being a man in this world if no-one teaches you properly. I’ve shown Duggy lots of mean tricks like how to handle a knife and skin a rabbit. When he’s big he’ll know how to look after himself. He can even drive the car. We get along fine most of the time. I don’t smack him and I don’t shout at him. But he knows who’s boss. He was eight years old a couple of weeks ago. I laugh when people say he looks like me.

   I suppose Beth was the second one. That’s my guess, that’s what it feels like. She’s the most likely, being the only one I’ve got anything against. She shouldn’t have left me like that. I’d been good to her, the best I’ve ever been. I would have given my life for her. She’s the only woman I’ve asked to marry me. And she said no.

   Making love with Beth was like making love to the other half of me. It wasn’t that the sex was fantastic or anything like that but inside of me, in the heart I guess. I was warmed and happy. It was a terrible shock when she upped and left saying, I’ve changed, I want to try something different. Of course I know she meant someone rather than something. As if he could love her even half as much as I do.

   It is possible she came to see me here. She does sometimes when she wants her car checking out. She drops in on the way to pick her kids up from school so that she doesn’t have to stay any longer than she needs to. She smiles and flirts a little, just to make sure I’m still interested, still in her power. Then she casually mentions the car and that it’s been ‘not been sounding right’. We both know what she is doing. I feel ashamed for her but I still fix the frigging car because I love her and can’t bring myself to let her down. If I’ve killed Beth then she has to take some of the blame.

   Three. I’m sure it was three. There’s a hazy picture in my head, like a photograph that’s coming out blank. I can see a white border and I just know there should be three faces there. Lucy, Beth, and someone else.

   Will the police connect Lucy’s death with Beth’s? I doubt it. Lucy said she was going to drive up north that afternoon. I think she’ll have died at the wheel of the car. The powder takes three or four hours to work. I can remember that. When they find the body they’ll just assume she crashed. All her friends know what a poor driver she is. She’s written off cars before. With that powder in her body she shouldn’t have felt a thing. She was so pretty, it’d be a shame if she were disfigured.

   I could ask Duggy if Beth came to visit that day. She brings him sweets though I’ve told her they’re not good for him. But I don’t want him to know I’m worried or that I get the days mixed up. And I don’t want him speaking to the police.

   I’m so tired. If only I could sleep properly. That’s why I got the powder in the first place, to help me sleep. I haven’t dared use it because it’s so damn strong.

   Maybe it is time to move on, to get away from this field of half-remembered sorrow. We could go abroad. Duggy could learn French or something. I could fix cars. I wouldn’t need the language to fix cars. Maybe we could find somewhere near the sea. I love to swim.

   Molly must have been the third. Molly’s my best friend. We can talk about anything. Not like Lucy does, not all surface stuff. Real talk. About men and women and what goes on inside our heads. She’d be shocked if she knew what I had done. But why would I kill Molly? Without her they’d be no-one to talk to, no-one to listen to. No-one who can make me laugh.

  I wish I could get rid of this sense of something being wrong. It’s like a shadow on my brain that stops me settling in myself. I snapped at Duggy earlier when he asked for a drink. I had no reason to. I’m too easily irritated. Perhaps I should see a doctor about my nerves because I don’t usually let things bother me so much. Maybe it’s having a child around all the time. People say I should let Duggy go to school. He’s been asking to go but I don’t like the idea of them getting hold of his mind. They’d turn him against me and he’d start wanting all those stupid things that the other kids want. There’s got to be a better life for Duggy than TVs, phones and computer games. I can’t afford any of that stuff anyway.

   Death happens all the time, doesn’t it? The police don’t have to be suspicious. They wouldn’t have to link Beth and Lucy at all. And if they did, they wouldn’t think of me. Even if they found out that both of them had been here, it wouldn’t have to seem so strange.They could see I had no motive, no reason for upsetting anyone. I’m just anxious in case they start asking me questions. I don’t want them to notice how confused I am.

   I don’t think I can stand much more of this. I don’t feel good at all. I’m lost in this field. All I want is for things to be all right, to get on with my life. It’s not reasonable that I have to go through all this. I’ve never been a bad man and never set out to hurt anyone. Molly understood that. It’d be great if she could turn up now and make me smile.

   It doesn’t seem possible that I could have given the powder to Molly. She would have noticed any deception in me. She was clever like that and I could never lie to her.

   I hope Duggy didn’t see anything. I wouldn’t like him to think that his dad was horrible to his friends. This whole thing leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Believe me, there was no premeditation, no foresight. It wasn’t planned. I’ve never made plans, never known where I wanted to go. When I travel I just get the feeling to leave where I am. I pace up and down for a couple of hours trying to guess what’s wrong then I call out, Okay Duggy. We’re going now. He never asks me where anymore because he knows I don’t know and he knows I don’t like being asked about what I don’t know.

   So I reckon that’s how it was this morning or whenever it happened. I was probably having quite a nice time with Lucy as I usually do. Or maybe she could see the fog in my head and wanted to get away. Somewhere in this mind the idea would have arisen. More than an idea. Ideas are things that live in the head and can’t get out. This would have been something more, like the moment when I discover I’m leaving, a complete event in itself that isn’t really anything to do with me. It’s not that I don’t think about what I’m doing. I move around the caravan putting everything in its place. It hardly takes me any time at all now. Then I check out the car and make sure Duggy is fed and ready to move. For a short time everything is just right and the fog lifts.

   Once the decision had been made, I bet I felt real good. I bet I moved with grace. Lucy’s a good person to practise on because she’s so naïve and trusting. I don’t know how people get to be like that in this day and age with the world being so hard and everything. I guess it makes you want to protect her. You wouldn’t shout at her or get pissed off with her, even though she says such stupid things. Maybe it was wrong of me to take advantage of her innocence but at least she wouldn’t have sensed anything, wouldn’t have become disappointed.

   Beth told me she wasn’t going to see me anymore. Today she told me.

   When I was little we lived by a wood. Mum would send us out to play by the swings at the far end of the trees. I loved being outside although my sisters usually complained and told mum they wouldn’t look after me unless she gave them extra sweets. I didn’t think I needed looking after. It wasn’t my fault that I was younger than them and I hated it when they laughed at me. The day the man found me stuck in the tree, they’d made me go up and then run away shouting and dancing. I wet myself up there. I called for my mum but I knew she would never come.

   I’d never let anyone treat my Duggy like that. Especially girls. I’m not sexist or anything but when women won’t love men properly then what do they expect us to do? There has to be consequences. If there’s a problem here then my sisters ought to be punished for what they did. I hated them from that day on but they never cared and never said sorry.

   I loved Beth too much to ever hate her. I know what people say about love turning to hate but it was never like that for me. I’d pay money to hate her. I awake in pain because of her. She’s that feeling inside, of everything that has ever been taken away from me.

   Beth said she wouldn’t see me anymore because she didn’t think it did either of us any good, that it hurt me and made her feel guilty. That’s what she said. I nodded and said I understood but I didn’t understand at all. I’ve known many women. Made love to loads of them. I’ve been left a few times too but losing Beth was losing myself. I’m just not there anymore.

   I told her I’d been given a chinese medicine that would help her kidney complaint. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist taking one more thing from me before she left. If she had cared about what I thought, I would have spoken then, would have told her how much I loved her and that if I was harming her it was only because I couldn’t stand the pain one more damn moment and that she was standing in my sunlight, taking my life away.

   She would have looked at her watch and said she needed to pick up the kids.

   I’d forgotten the kids. I hope they’re not around when she dies. Beth was such a selfish person. Maybe their father will be glad to take them on. She’d never given him the chance. I was doing well with her kids too. They were part of her so I gave what I could. I think she should have appreciated that.

   If Beth has gone then it really is time to move on. I was hanging out to be with her. I bet tomorrow I’ll get that feeling and I’ll be gone before I know it.

   Molly went too far, that’s the truth of it. She didn’t say anything when I told her what had happened, what I’d done. She just listened like she does, like it was nothing special. I hadn’t meant to say a word but my head was fogging up and I thought it might help to talk. I felt a bit embarrassed when I started because I don’t find it easy to chat about what goes on inside of me where people can’t see. I worry that I won’t be understood, that people will judge me without hearing the full facts. I thought Molly knew me, really knew me. I thought she was on my side. When I saw that look of doubt on her face there was no choice in the matter. I grabbed the breadknife and lunged, all in one movement. She wasn’t frightened. Not at all. I think she could have swayed out the way if she had wanted to. She smiled. Not at me, at death. I was sorry to make such a mess of her though I knew she had no great liking for her body. I dragged it out and tried to bury it beneath a tree but I was tired and a little dizzy so I just left it there.

   There are people outside now. I can hear them. I don’t think I’m going to get away from all this trouble. I really hoped it would be all right.

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