A Thousand Small Explosions

by John Marrs

  ‘Certainly a lot more than me,’ said Amanda. Richard’s sense of adventure put her lack of one to shame. And she wondered what sights of the world they might have witnessed together if fate hadn’t intervened.

  ‘What about you Amanda?’ Jenny suddenly asked. ‘Here I am rambling on about Richard and what he was like and I haven’t once asked you how it makes you feel to hear all these stories?’

  Amanda removed her fingers from around her mug of peppermint tea and looked around at the customers lifting potted plants and sizing them up. An elderly couple caught her attention as they sat, side by side on a bench, silently watching brightly coloured fish swimming in a pond. She and Richard would never get the chance to grow old together like them.

  ‘When you talk about him, it makes me feel that there’s so much I’ve missed out on,’ she replied. ‘A family man who wanted a family of his own … that’s my idea of a perfect Match. And each time you or Emma tell me about what Richard was like, I feel torn – I’m so pleased to have been Matched with him, yet I feel so sad that we weren’t ever destined to meet or be together. They say you can’t miss what you never had, but that’s rubbish. I miss him so much and I never even knew him.’

  Jenny placed her hand on Amanda’s. ‘For what it’s worth, I’d have been proud to have had you as my daughter-in-law.’

  Amanda looked away and bit her lip to stop it from trembling, but it wasn’t enough to stop the first of many tears from cascading down her cheeks.

  CHAPTER 32

  CHRISTOPHER

  The extra shot Christopher added to his espresso put an extra pep in his step.

  He was still buzzing from the smooth, uncomplicated kill of Number Ten in the early hours of the morning but wasn’t tired enough to go to bed. There were too many plans to be made that were swirling around his head. So he slipped on his trainers – lacing them up so the loops were identically sized. Then he put on a pair of shorts and a tight sleeveless vest and left his house for a run. When his thoughts became jumbled, exercise helped to balance his mind and put everything back in place.

  Christopher relished being the object of attention and he didn’t care from which source it came. His killings were anonymous so he couldn’t receive it from them, so he searched for it from other means instead like wearing his best tailor-made Savile Row suit and test driving cars he had no intention of buying, or making appointments to visit multimillion pound turn-key properties he couldn’t afford. He’d walk around the gym changing rooms naked for longer than necessary, showing off a toned physique that he’d worked long and hard on and was confident other men would envy. And when he ran, he purposely wore no underwear so passers by could see his dick bouncing from side to side in his shorts.

  His top of the range Nikes pounded along the busy London pavements and towards the greenery of Hyde Park as he questioned what it was about his condition that made him seek attention, challenges and complications. Life would’ve been much simpler if, after he had killed, he would just leave their homes and either wait for them to be discovered or anonymously direct the authorities on where to find them. Instead, he’d chosen to make things more interesting by returning to the scene of the crime with a photograph of the next victim.

  It was an original spin, he thought, and was sure to capture the interest of the press and public who liked a calling card when it came to their serial killers - films and books had raised the level of expectations and he was happy to deliver to his audience. The race would always be on for the police to identify the next girl in the hope that with each kill, Christopher would become a little more careless and leave a clue as to his identity. So far, they had nothing to go on.

  His aim was always to return to their houses to leave the Polaroid photograph and spray-painted stencil mark outside within two to three days, and as luck would have it, his victims had yet to be discovered before then. And the bonus of returning to the scene of the crime was that he could take one final look at his handiwork.

  Christopher turned the volume up on the MP3 player strapped to his arm and ran to the beat of a Spotify playlist. He recalled how he didn’t pick his subjects randomly, but based on strict criteria. They were young, single women who were on the dating scene and who lived alone, they occupied older properties with no burglar alarms and front doors with old locks. They lived a distance from their families in a large, anonymous city where neighbours didn’t just pop in to say hello and it’d take a day or so before a person’s absence was noted by a friend or work colleague, perhaps judged out of character, and then eventually reported to police.

  He paused at a pedestrian crossing and waited for the walking man image to turn green. Adele was the next artist to shuffle on his playlist and he wondered why all killers depicted in television dramas only ever listened to angry, shouty, heavy metal music in the same way all fictitious black criminals only ever listened to rap. Nobody ever killed or robbed a bank to the sounds of Rihanna or Justin Bieber.

  He ran across the road and past a parade of shops, recognising the doorway of one in particular. A Lithuanian girl lived there – he’d chatted to her online a few times and she’d made his long-list until he discovered she was advertising for a flatmate. Christopher knew what a thrill he’d get from killing two girls in one night, but the huge amount of risk involved wasn’t worth taking. So he took her off his list. She’d never know how lucky she was, he thought.

  Laying the blame for multiple killings at the door of “a man with psychopathic tendencies” was about the only thing the experts in the media had been correct about. His diagnosis wasn’t news to Christopher; off his own bat he had filled in the test questionnaires years earlier to gain a greater understanding of who he was.

  “Psycho” was a term first thrown at him during his schooldays following the purposefully over-zealous rugby tackle that broke the boy’s collar bone; the hockey ball hit with such gusto it blinded the girl in one eye; the pouring of bleach into the school’s pond to see how long it’d take for the newts to rise to the surface belly-up. The nickname didn’t bother him because he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Nevertheless, it seemed to keep potential bullies away.

  Christopher now realised his parents must have been aware there was something different about their youngest child because they’d had him tested for both autism and Asperger’s. When the results came back negative, they swept his oddities under the carpet and concentrated on helping him to fit into society the best he could. When he had told them he struggled to feel anything from sympathy to love, they taught him to mimic acceptable behaviour instead and to keep up appearances even in situations when he couldn’t see the point.

  As Christopher reached his teenage years, he fixated on how people reacted to circumstances beyond their control and, specifically, to scenarios created by him. Once, he took the neighbours’ toddler son from their garden and left him in a woodland two miles away, just to see how the child’s parents might behave once they noticed he had gone missing. Frantic, it turned out. He wondered why he couldn’t feel the same sort of terror, or why empathy was a foreign word to him.

  It also didn’t come naturally for him to detect fear in a facial expression; he couldn’t identify sarcasm and he didn’t feel guilt, shame or remorse. Even when his parents walked in on him screwing another neighbour’s daughter in the conservatory at fifteen, he turned his head to look at them until they left. Then he expected to continue, much to the girl’s horror.

  When his schoolmates began dating and finding girlfriends, he was only interested in the part that resulted in an orgasm, not the foreplay or hanging around afterwards. Love seemed like a waste of time and energy for minimal rewards.

  It was only when Christopher reached his early twenties that he examined in detail what the word psychopath meant. There were others out there like him, which meant Christopher was normal, just a different type of normal. And words like ‘callous’ and ‘cold hearted bastard’ that’d been chucked at him like stones over the years
finally made sense.

  He completed Robert Hare’s 1996 Psychopathic Personality Inventory and of the twenty questions asked to determine psychopathic behaviour, his point tally totalled thirty-two, well above the average.

  Christopher learned that some scientists believed a psychopath’s brain wasn’t wired properly; that they possessed weak connections among the components that made up their emotional system. And those disconnects were responsible for Christopher being unable to feel emotions deeply.

  That satisfied him. He liked that he was not to blame for his lack of impulse control and if he were ever caught for his crimes, then that would be his excuse. He’d land himself in a cushy, high security mental hospital with attention given to him by those who wanted to study and learn more about him. There were worse ways to live out your life than being in demand, he thought.

  He cut across Hyde Park and after a while, left the grass and trees behind for the streets and large Victorian town houses of Ladbroke Grove. He stopped to purchase an energy drink from a street vendor and smiled knowingly at a gay couple fixated by the movement inside his shorts.

  Five minutes later, he paused outside a health food store on Portobello Road and looked up at the first floor flat above it. He double checked the App on his smart phone to make sure the tenant was still at work, then used his picks to unlock her front door and familiarise himself with the layout of Number Eleven’s home. Little had changed since the pictures had been posted on an old Right Move web page and his next killing should be quite straightforward, he thought.

  As he poked around and worked out his kill position, he furrowed his brow. Usually the moment he entered the premises of a name on his list, he’d feel a flicker of excitement, a moment of anticipation of the kill to come. But today he was lacking his usual enthusiasm.

  Instead, he realised how time consuming this project was becoming, time that could be spent elsewhere, like in the company of Amy, for example. An unfortunate bi-product of meeting her was that she had stimulated him in ways no other women had - neither those he’d dated, nor those he’d killed.

  But none of his research had prepared him for why.

  CHAPTER 33

  BETHANY

  In stark contrast to his brother Mark’s reaction, the rest of Kevin’s family couldn’t have been more welcoming to their surprise visitor from the other side of the world.

  When parents Dan and Susan returned from a trip to town to buy supplies, neither could contain their joy at finding the pale, British girl with the fiery red hair that they’d heard so much about over the months sitting in their lounge. Instantly they recognised her from the photographs Kevin had shown them, and once they got over the initial surprise, they bombarded her with questions about herself and insisted that she stay the night.

  ‘We have a guest house out back with an en suite so you won’t have to share with these filthy buggers,’ joked Susan, glancing at her sons. While she spoke to and about them in the same manner as she had probably always done, Bethany sensed that beyond her jovial façade lay a deep sadness.

  ‘How long are you in Australia for, love?’ Dan asked as the family sat down to supper in the dining room.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Bethany replied, and she genuinely wasn’t. The fairytale romance between her and Kevin wasn’t playing out how she’d spent months imagining it, and the easiest thing to do would be to beat a hasty retreat at the first opportunity. But each time she looked at Kevin, the besotted expression on his face said what his words had not, and that he desperately wanted her to stay. ‘A couple of weeks probably,’ she replied instead.

  Dan served up plates full of cold meats, potatoes and salad while Mark helped to bring the dishes to the dining table. Kevin was the only member of the family who didn’t tuck into a hearty meal. Instead, he picked at a small portion on his plate. ‘I struggle to keep my food down,’ he told her later. ‘The cancer’s in my digestive system so food doesn’t sit properly.’

  Bethany had yet to come to terms with hearing the C-word and struggled to associate it with her DNA Match. She had to stop herself from recoiling when it was mentioned even though the rest of the family didn’t bat an eyelid and continued as normal. She understood they’d had a much longer adjustment period to come to terms with the inevitable than she had.

  ‘It’s because of you that we’ve had him for longer than the doctors first thought,’ Susan told Bethany later that night as she helped to clear the table and dry the dishes.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After we were told it was … terminal, he did like many people do and sank into a depression and who can blame him? Having your whole life ahead of you only to be told it’s not going to last as long as you’d hoped.’ She paused and turned her head away from Bethany, like she had suddenly just relived the moment the awful news had been delivered all over again. She cleared her throat and continued. ‘It was pretty bad, Bethany. None of us knew how to react or how to help him. Then, at the darkest time of his life, he discovered there was a Match out there for him and it didn’t matter that she lived in a different country or that he’d probably never meet her in person. Just knowing you were out there and that you were in communication with one another was a reason for him to continue.’

  ‘I had no idea about any of this…’

  ‘… and he should have told you. I told him you deserved to know but he didn’t know how to bring it up, plus you were a welcome distraction from it. When you and he were texting or talking, he’d forget about what was happening inside him. He became a different person… he was my little boy again.’ Susan clasped Bethany’s hand firmly. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘thank you for being my boy’s friend and thank you for coming to see him.’

  ‘I’m glad I came,’ Bethany smiled and as the ups and downs of an extraordinary day caught up on her, she felt like crying. She meant it, she thought, she was pleased she had met Kevin and already she felt close to him.

  But there was just one problem – she knew that on meeting her Match, she wasn’t in love with him.

  CHAPTER 34

  NICK

  The feeling Nick and Alex had shared in Alex’s clinic wasn’t a fluke, solitary event for either of them.

  From the moment he spotted Alex in the trendy Birmingham bar, Nick was scared his legs might give way beneath him before he’d even reached the table. The two men politely shook hands and gave each other awkward smiles.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Sure, another one of these thanks mate,’ Alex replied, and lifted up his bottle of lager.

  Nick nodded and headed to the bar. As he ordered drinks he noticed Alex’s reflection in the mirror behind the spirits. His girlfriend Sally was right when she saw Alex’s Facebook profile picture and commented on his handsome appearance. Even as a straight man, Nick could appreciate he was a good-looking guy and much more masculine than him. He checked his phone to see if she’d received the text he’d sent her informing her he’d be late home because of a client meeting. It was a plausible lie, he thought, as he often had to wine and dine existing and prospective clients alongside his MDs and fellow account managers. ‘Ok babe, luv u,’ Sally had replied. He didn’t respond.

  Nick returned to the booth with their drinks, sat down and removed his coat.

  Neither knew where to begin.

  ‘So how’ve you been?’ Nick said eventually.

  ‘Good thanks, pretty busy at work, you know. You?’

  ‘Yeah, same here, same here.’

  Both men simultaneously looked down at their drinks, unable to maintain prolonged eye contact and risk a repeat of what they’d felt the first time they’d met. Two choruses of an old Oasis song played in the background before either of them said another word, both feeling cripplingly self-aware.

  ‘Actually, things aren’t good,’ said Nick, breaking the silence first. ‘There’s no easy way for me to say this without sounding like a total weirdo, but I need to get this off my che
st because the more I try not to think about it, the more it becomes the only thing on my mind. It’s about what happened… the first time we met.’

  He paused, realising how ridiculous it sounded when he expressed his thoughts. He looked at Alex hoping for confirmation that he might have gone through something identical, but Alex gave little away. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” Nick thought and continued regardless. ‘That feeling I got when I looked at you as I was leaving; I’ve been through it a thousand times and I still can’t explain it properly. None of it make sense because I’m not gay.’

  ‘I’m not gay either,’ Alex replied.

  ‘So why do we have this link?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve not so much as kissed a guy, not even for a laugh or when I was drunk.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘So if neither of us are into blokes, then what’s happening here?’

  ‘It’s simple. The test is fucked up, they got us mixed up with other people.’

  ‘That’s what I said. I even emailed them to check but they sent out this standard reply saying the test isn’t flawed and to date they haven’t had one mismatch. Besides, it doesn’t explain what I felt. What I think we felt.’ Are we in denial or something?’

  Alex shifted uncomfortably in his seat and took several gulps from his bottle, before leaning forward and lowering his voice. ‘Mate, all I know is that something inexplicable happened after I gave you physio. I didn’t feel anything when we met, when you took your top off, when I came into physical contact with you, when I was working on you or when we shook hands afterwards, but then, … I dunno… something happened.’

  Nick breathed a sigh of relief, pleased to hear Alex explain what he’d felt.

  ‘What was it like for you?’ he asked.

  ‘Honestly? Like a thousand small explosions going off inside me all at once but not in a bad way… it was like they woke me up. I suddenly felt more alive than I’ve ever been before and that’s the only way I can describe it, as lame as it sounds.’