I’m sick of yawning and twiddling my thumbs. Painting my fingernails to kill time. Squinting through the car’s frosty windows. Hoping someone will emerge from that mansion in the distance.
Plus I’ve learned nothing about her so far. Except that she likes walking her dog in the mornings. That she drives to the Cambridge Flower School in Linton on Wednesdays, presumably to stick flowers into pots in the company of other bored housewives. That she likes visiting someone who lives in a council flat along Grange Road. That she has questionable clothes sense. Fucking awful. She goes around in a baggy shirt and loose-fitting khaki trousers most of the time. Like a woman twice her age.
So money buys things but not taste.
No wonder her husband has an eye for other women.
But that’s more or less it: her life. Pathetic.
Funny how much of a difference a fortnight makes. Two weeks ago, I thought that moving to Grantchester was a good idea. I had to monitor the people who mattered.
But it’s amazing how little you can find out about a person. My online searches have merely thrown up the earth-shattering revelation that she’s a Mono housewife. There are a few images of her online. All taken at book signings or charity galas with her husband. Events way beyond her rightful station in life. Draped in ill-fitting pieces of garbage. Always in the background or hovering behind her husband. Wearing a pained, wide-eyed expression. Looking like a terrified doe caught in the headlights. Yet one does not glean anything useful from photos of a woman clad in expensive but frumpy gowns at parties. Apart from the fact that it was her husband who paid for those fucking dresses.
Dirt’s hard to find under such squeaky-clean conditions. But I should keep digging. There’s got to be dirt somewhere.
Nobody’s perfect.
Everyone has shit in them.
Including him. And his stick-in-the-mud Mono wife, who has less of a brain than her golden retriever does.
There’s got to be dirt.
I should stay motivated. Keep going. Deal with the demons from my past. Ghosts I once tried to forget but no longer can. Confront them head on. Reach out and throttle them with my hands.
I should start by focusing on the positives, as they used to tell us at St. Augustine’s. Because I now have the following:
Shoes. The most flamboyant stilettos I can teeter on. The higher the merrier (I don’t know who invented killer six-inch heels for the ladies, but I hope that he—or was it a she?—has since been elevated to supremacy in the heavens).
Fancy lingerie. Lace and silk slips. The more decadent the better. It must be the effect of wandering down hallways in a plain white shirt and white elastic pants for years. Arse draped in massive cotton knickers. The sort Granny would wear. Tits in no-nonsense strapless bras. No metal underwire—so inmates can’t stab each other. Feet shod in cheap socks and thin paper slippers. No belts or shoelaces—so patients can’t hang themselves.
Other people’s secrets. I’m uncovering them slowly, but surely. My dossier’s getting thicker.
Everyone has secrets. Two types of secrets, precisely. The ones they keep from others and the ones they keep from themselves. Assisted in this regard, of course, by their pathetically defective memories.
They say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So in a world full of hapless, memory-deficient people, the memory-enhanced woman has a shot at becoming queen.
I’m going to make Mark Henry Evans discover his own secrets.
Brutally.
29 November 2013
The Kandinsky again last Sunday. Foyer all Christmassy, complete with a tree full of glittering baubles. The receptionist handed me a key to room 261. Said Mr. Matthew Adams had not yet arrived. Turned the handle to discover she was right. No one inside. Stepped to the window and surveyed the streetlamps twinkling on the pavement below. The fog swirling around distant lampposts. Like one of those ethereal wraiths from my past. The ones that have returned to haunt my soul.
I suddenly felt lonely. A long night of shagging lay ahead. Yet I still felt lonely.
Sex, after all, is merely a meeting of bodies. An exchange of fluids. An outlet for animal desires.
An instrument of blackmail.
But only after I’ve assembled more tools to bring him down, of course. One does not demolish a building with a hammer and a chisel. One needs a proper bulldozer. A nice big wrecking ball. Lots of fucking dynamite.
I’ve thought about killing him. Snuffing out the light in his eyes. Oh, I have. When I first emerged from St. Augustine’s. I’ve even mulled over some appropriate methods of slaughter. Smashing his head with an ice pick, Sharon Stone–style. Tying a noose, constructed entirely of G-strings, round his neck. Watching him choke in response. Bashing his head with a sledgehammer. Hearing the satisfying crunch of his skull. Grinding his cheeks with the steel heel caps of my Christian Louboutins. Seeing his blood pool in crimson droplets, his life fizzing out of them.
I might even get away with it. Detectives would struggle to piece together the fine details of my dastardly act, especially after waking up to discover that they only have a few skimpy facts in their diaries. Because there’s no way they’ll be able to write everything down. And my victim will no longer be around to explain what happened.
But vengeance is best administered in stages.
Pain is best meted out in increments.
A protracted spell in prison is what he deserves. A drawn-out, mentally agonizing confinement. After he has been stripped of everything he has, including his miserable marriage. The slow, inexorable decay I would have faced in St. Augustine’s if Mariska had not opened my eyes. If I did not have the subsequent presence of mind to extract myself from purgatory.
At any rate, I did feel lonely at that precise moment. Window of room 261 of the Kandinsky on Sunday.
I couldn’t help it.
Nor could I figure out why. Perhaps it was the realization that I’d turned forty-three a few days before. That no one knew. Dad and poor Mum were no more. Stepmum Aggie wouldn’t have given a shit about my birthday. And I couldn’t exactly tell the man I’d been fucking for months that I’d turned forty-three, either.
I’d celebrated by knocking back half a bottle of vodka that day. With only a ginger-haired cat named Rufus as company.
A cat that wasn’t even mine.
Forty-three. An age that makes you think about what you’ve failed to accomplish in your lifetime. An age when even the smallest cut—or controlled scalpel incision—takes forever to heal. An age that makes you think seventeen years in a mental asylum was perhaps not the best way to spend the bulk of your adult existence. An age when you realize you’re not getting any of those years back.
At that point, I swore out loud. At the unfairness of it. The sheer fucking injustice of it all.
But I gritted my teeth. Decided to stop pitying myself.
Because loneliness is for wimps. And self-pity is for idiots.
Life had dealt me unfair blows and kicked me in the gut. Yet I should stop feeling sorry for myself.
I should merely take my pleasures as they come.