Beneath the Folds

  No, people are never ordinary, only strangers.

  And I am no stranger. Not to you.

  Twelve months ago I lost my job. It changed me. At first, only a little but then sharply, inside and out. It wasn't a spectacular job, it wasn't changing the world, but it paid the bills, allowed my ex-wife to suck maintenance and gave balance to my life. My boss told me the bankers stole it because they lent too much money to foreigners who couldn't repay. I told him he probably contributed as well, being incompetent and all. Harsh, perhaps, but in the moment, satisfying. Anyway, bankers might be a typo from the truth but we brought them into being, allowed them to infest our homes. Blaming them is like blaming cakes for making us fat, when we shouldn't have been baking in the first place.

  So, my ex-boss. The slink told me the news on a Friday, said not to bother coming in Monday, that I'd be paid through to the end of the month and get my layoff pay at the same time. I felt like shit, but sympathy carries a foul stench and there was way too much of it thrown in my direction that afternoon. In the end it was a relief to stagger out and close the door on the place. I kept on staggering as well, right down to the pub at the end of my road, and spent a few self-absorbed hours until either my pockets were empty or I was too drunk to find them anymore. I curled my way home, fell through the door, fell over the cat and fell asleep. Out of work, out of money and out of my head.

  The next morning started late. More the afternoon. For a while the day before seemed vague, blurry and my world was on its same steady, boring axis. The Panadol cleared that. As my headache disappeared, reality crashed in and the pain shifted south. My gut twined itself in a knot. A surgeon's knot, tied to last a lifetime.

  My ex-wife. Bric-a-brac. A face like Thunderbird's Lady Penelope with, unfortunately, the grace of movement to match. She is a 'Life Coach' now and talks in strange phrases and misaligned allegories. I loved her. I still do. But never enough. A week after my job disappeared I phoned and told her about the situation. At first she told me to forget it, push on, 'dissipate the resentment'. I reminded her dole offices don't pay maintenance and thanked her for understanding. She fell silent. I left her with the thought.

  The next day she came to the box I call my house. Gave me a motivational speech, told me I have the experience to jump to the head of the work queue, challenged me to find the positive side and take the opportunity to change myself. To grow. She said many people in the same situation felt free, born again. Yes, she actually used that last phrase. It slipped out past her pink-painted Life Coach lips.

  Born again. It's a rusty cliché, worn paper-thin by drivel from the mouths of religious freaks and spiritual fluff balls. Born again. Sure, and my left testicle can do Woody Allen impressions. Anyway, as I said whilst manoeuvring her out the door, I didn't feel reborn, more buried under a metric tonne of England's green and once pleasant land.

  The first few weeks of unemployment were surprisingly pleasant. It was late summer time and unusually blue skies shone across England. In the mornings, I'd sit near the window of Starbucks reading a newspaper and glancing at the dancing hems of the office ladies as they waltzed past. At lunch time I would head over to the park and sit under the acacia trees reading a novel until the light grew too poor and I'd wind my way home.

  I had to visit the Job Centre of course and spend a few hours a week on their ass-worn benches looking suitably stricken. I would look through the job classifieds in the local paper and scan the pages of the internet job sites. I applied for a few vacancies I thought my skills fitted but there honestly weren't too many employers looking for the fifty five year old me. They wanted the younger version.

  All in all though, the free days in the sun felt a little like summer out of school and I was able to deploy one of my great personal skills, self-deception. Life wasn't so bad.

  Then, slowly, the winter closed in. Unemployment in the cold was no vacation, it was just unemployment. I guess when bones are cold it is harder to pretend skies are blue. As days shortened, everything else lengthened. Minutes, shadows, the queues at the Job Centre.

  January's arrival felt like a size 15 boot kicked hard into the soft tissue of my groin. Each day became a photocopy of the one before. The lack of money depressed me, the loss of routine depressed me, the dreary days depressed me. Even my own face let me down. My eyes marked the change clear as a red light outside a brothel. They grew darker as the ache inside me pressed against their surface and seeped out. Whatever else I retained from my former life – the pressed suit, the smile, the polished shoes – my Judas eyes betrayed me.

  In February though, my ex-wife's words delivered themselves.

  He was on the television. The BBC I think. Paxman was interviewing him anyway. I used to regard him like any other politician – self-serving, conceited, faintly creepy – but different circumstances paint different pictures. He was talking about The Big Society. He capitalized it to ensure we understood its gravitas. He wanted us to take it on board, share his vision, make efforts to embrace it. But you know what I kept thinking? What my intelligent brain kept generating from its billions of cells? Screw you and your Big Society. Screw you, Cameron. Screw you, screw you, screw you.

  Not my most academic thought-pattern. Not one that is going to win a Nobel Prize for anything except perhaps repetition. But, it marked a - when anger, like a manic midwife, pulled me kicking and screaming into a new world.

  We think we understand anger, it is a basic human emotion. But, there are different types. There is the everyday kind, the anger we feel when someone drives badly or gives us poor service. There is childish, spattish anger. There is the kind which is not anger at all, but well masked disappointment or hurt. Women especially know that type.

  Then there is a more dangerous form of anger. This type stomps around the dark crevices inside us like a drugged up street gang looking for someone or something to slash. The longer it stalks without finding prey, the more it guts our insides. This was my anger.

  Cameron. Right, wrong, who cares. He is the guy standing there with his spammy face above the parapet. He wanted the rewards of putting it there, asked us to elect him our leader. He even got my own pencilled cross to help him on his way. Now he calls for sacrifices but doesn't make any himself and hands out privileges and positions to his cronies.

  The night I watched Cameron my anger shed my skin like a goddamn python's. Not on the outside, but inside, where it really matters, where we actually exist. When I woke, my old self lay beneath the bedcovers and the man who rose and shaved in front of the mirror was focused, fresh-eyed and new. Born again.

  My left testicle was going to need its own show.

  I am fifty-five. The lights have gone out and I am pointing a finger directly at Prime Minister Cameron. Examined closely the causal logic might collapse, but I'm in no mood for analysis. My anger has found its prey. The one who purports to lead our great nation. The one who smiles. The one who talks shit about a Big Society.

  I read about John Bellingham. The only man in history to assassinate a British Prime Minister. He did it the right way. No subterfuge, no grassy knolls. After he fired, he didn't flee, he stood there, pistol down by his side until he was arrested and led away. He never denied guilt but calmly stated the reasons why he acted as he did, why Spencer Percival, First Lord of the Treasury and appointed leader of our great nation, had to sacrifice his life. It was a matter of honour, righting wrongs. When they hanged him Bellingham went with no regrets.

  I walk with him now, Bellingham. His footsteps are beneath me as I pace my room. Each day they deepen and mingle closer with my own. I feel his spirit growing stronger in me, and I have prepared, tuned, visualized. The mental preparation was easy. Anger dictates and right is always right, even if the law says otherwise. Physical preparation and planning was tougher, but not beyond reach. The internet is a bible for angry men seeking knowledge.

  Daily I have visualized Cameron in front of me, tasted the saliva building in my mouth as m
y finger pulls the trigger. I watch him hit the ground, limbs splaying at odd angles, the plastic smile on his face, gone forever. They grab me, those around him, wrench the gun from my hand and wrestle me to the ground. I stay calm among the panic. My task done.

  Tomorrow I will no longer need to visualize. I'm going to cross the terrain between fantasy and action. I know where he is going to be, how I will reach him. I am ready. By nightfall my face and name will be on the Ten O'clock News, the front pages, trending on twitter, chirping the wires, sparking debate. Changing our country forever.

  The clock ticks. The security forces fear it.

  The lunatics, those on the fringe, religious fundamentalists, Mark David Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, Anders Breivik. The security forces track them, infiltrate their groups, listen to their noise, take them off our streets.

  But I'm different. White, no religion, fifty-five years of quiet Englishness.

  They don't hear me, they think me ordinary.

  But people are never ordinary, only strangers.

  And I am no stranger. Not to you.

  You know me.

  I am your Lev.

  END

  YOU ALWAYS HURT

  Today is the eve of my 29th birthday. I am sitting in the armchair in front of the open fire, writing. I need to explain about Mika. And the boy of course. I need to show you where to find him if you dare. The air around me is chilled and soundless. A spear of sun from the side window casts a rectangle of light on the carpet beyond my feet, its shape shifting slowly as the minutes pass. On the wall facing me is a mirror, under which the embers of a lunchtime fire smoulder and fuse. It is a vacant mirror. Like those of my past.

  I remember. My fifth birthday party.

  We played Pass the Parcel, Musical Bumps, What's the time Mr Wolf.

  My mother took photos. She had a Polaroid, the pictures sliding out of the camera doubling the delight with immediate snaps. Mums and kids clamoured to see, smiling at the photos, pointing, laughing. I pretended to be happy as well, smiling, but inside I was terrified.

  My mother pointed "Look at the smile on your face, Finn. So proud of your cake." Her hand was in my hair, stroking. Her breath smelled of cherries. I looked at the photo and silently died inside. I was not there. Just a blank space at the tip of my mother's finger.

  I could always see from the inside out. Sitting here now, I can see the knife resting in my lap. It is long and sharp, with silver edges honed to the point of a razor. I can watch my fingers fondle the curves of its handle grip, smoothing my senses, quieting the inner voices within. If you were standing near me, I could look up, see your face, take in your smile. My eyes and brain rationally observing the world, and my place within it. From inside out.

  But, looking from the outside in, towards myself, my eyes were born without sight. From a boy the visual instruments of self-image – mirrors, photos, footprints - the pictures we gather of ourselves were denied. I left no reflections, imprints, no echoes. My eyes could not see myself.

  I remember. My first day at school.

  I had a peg to hang my coat. It is labelled with my name, in case I forget.

  In the classroom I had to sit between two girls. I was not happy. I didn't know girls. Teacher read a story about a cat and we drew pictures with bright crayons. I drew my mother, but with blue hair because I couldn't find the yellow. And her handbag was bigger than her body. Teacher said it was okay and smiled at me.

  When my mother came to collect me in the afternoon she ruffled my hair but didn't say hi. Her eyes looked dark, her skin smelled peachy. I forgot to give her the picture.

  My name is Finn McIntyre. Finn, short for Finnegan. My eyes are different colours, the left one green, the right, a soft speckled brown, the colour of walnut cake. From the age of twelve I read poetry and science journals and held a recorded IQ of 141 - the same as Benito Mussolini. Smart but weird, that's what kids at school used to say of me. Smart, but too goddamn weird. They only knew the half.

  When mirrors are empty and photos hold blank spaces where you are supposed to be, you ask questions, tell your family, friends and teachers. No one understands. Your mother gives you weary looks, your father thick ears, friends disappear. You learn to stay silent, hide it, but it remains inside and seeps deeper into your personality. Now you are the boy who can't see himself and you separate – just a little - from the world.

  Dr Goldburg is the psychiatrist Social Services arranged me to visit from the age of nine. One day I asked him if there was a name for my condition. He mumbled indistinctly but I caught the phrase 'voluntary self-denial' as it slipped through his cat-gut lips. So now you know the medical opinion…I was voluntarily denying my own existence. Except, of course, I was not. I bled, I felt pain, I read books. I did all these things in awareness I was here on the planet. I loved and feared my mother, hated my father, lusted for Sandy Buckly from class 13a. I didn't deny my life. I just despised it.

  I am a single child of parents who had grown to hate each other by the time I was born. A father who resents the ties of his unwanted child and a mother who, despite her religious fervour, never knew how to love her son. My father used to joke her bread of heaven was soaked in gin. He left home when I was ten and mother became an alcoholic.

  I remember. She lay on the couch. I stood on the hearth rug, my satchel still on my back, and watched her. She was not dead. Her mouth was open and I heard gurgling.

  I thought of waking her, but held back, afraid of something I couldn't quite touch. She looked cold. I covered her legs with a blanket from my bed, She stirred but did not wake. I made a sandwich and waited, sitting on the rug, until the light faded and I fell asleep.

  From an early age I would destroy soft toys, tease pets, rip up family photos. My mother told me when I was six years old, she came into my room to find my teddy bear, Okie, emptied and torn, his legs in my hand, inner filling spread across my carpet, and his head, held by one ear, hanging from my mouth. Little Okie, who wouldn't respond to my love, who never saw me.

  Then I grew and became a teenager. As a young boy I simply disappeared in mirrors, but my skanky adolescent mind soon realized I was there, but simply unseen. This was my singular power. In my special space, I was invisible, as were my acts. I experimented. Animals and inanimate objects can't see themselves in mirrors. In my hands they hung in mid-air like magic and, so long as I only looked towards the mirror, the actions were not mine. Dumpy, our pet rabbit was my favourite, but there were others.

  The other aspects of my teenage years are fuzzy, the memories from them merging into one mass, out of which the only certainty is I grew from strange sad boy into isolated, angry young man with the boy still inside.

  Until it all changed. I was twenty one.

  I remember. She was sitting reading at the corner table, underneath the picture of coffee beans nestling in an old man's hand. Her shoes lay empty under the table, her legs curled up on the seat like a child's. When she bent forward to sip her drink the light shadowed her face, but when she leant back to return to her book, she was bathed in soft orange glow.

  Her hair was pink and tumbled down her forehead on one side. As she read, she lifted her hand and flicked her hair back, only for it to slowly return until she flicked it again. A beautiful girl, with an oval face and tear-drop eyes, her bright hair a stark contrast to the soft autumn brown of her skin.

  I sat about twenty feet away, trying to close the space between us. We were the only people in the room. I drank my latte out of a paper cup, watching her gently, whilst the orange lampshades swayed lightly in the air.

  Then she looked up and smiled at me and the world changed colour.

  Mika. Japanese, beautiful. Her love blew away everything in its path. She and I saw each other every day in the following months, we ate together, sat together, slept together. She changed me, but I saw subtle changes in her too. She laughed more, dressed in brighter clothes, wore higher, bolder shoes, used less makeup on her face. After
six months or so she stopped dyeing her hair luminous pink, but I guess by then it didn't matter. I would have seen her from the other side of the world.

  When it felt safe, when I trusted her implicitly, I held my breath and told her I had never seen my own face. She didn't react like others, she giggled, took my hand, stood with me in front of a mirror and asked what I could see at that moment. I told her truthfully - only her and a blank space beside. We stood still and silent for moment and then Mika said true love is not two people gazing at each other, but two people gazing together in the same direction. She spoke it in Japanese, but translated it for me. Then, in English she told me when we learnt to love each other I would see what she saw - the person I am.

  She was right. I'm a testament to the power of love. In both directions. Standing beside her I became present in the world. It wasn't sudden, at first just a mirage, only faintly seen in window panes, but over the days the lines of hardened until, at last, mirrors accepted me next to her, photos showed us together, our footsteps mingled behind. I learnt to see myself through her love.

  Imagine you have never seen yourself, have been only what others have said you, and then are suddenly confronted with your own face. A twenty one year face that feels like it has just been born. I knew about my odd eyes, everyone told me about them. Mika said they were the first thing that attracted her, how to her the green was my male outer casing, the speckled brown, my flaws within. I was not exactly as I pictured myself to be.

  I remember. I stupidly touched the glass, like a puppy patting what it believes is a friend in the wall. I am looking in the mirror, the shaded one in the hall of my flat in Clapham. My first opportunity to study my own face.

  My nose has solidity, my jaw, sharp chiselled lines. My ears are flat, mouth curved, even my smile is playful. Individually each feature looks fine, but the combination disappoints. All the right ingredients, in a badly baked cake.

  I decide I look best with a strong, sinister expression. I practice in the mirror until I have the look right, embedding the movements into my muscle memory.