Oh Marina Girl

by Graham Lironi

  ‘ — Lies!’ I insisted.

  ‘ — Truth!’ he yelled, hitting me over the head with a book. Then he stopped thumping me, cast the book aside and, wracked with grief, began to howl like a mortally wounded animal.

  But it was me who was injured and there I lay, too weak to attempt an escape or a further attack, resigned to waiting for the culmination of this story, unsure whether it was mine or his anymore. As his anguish subsided to be substituted once again by anger, his nervous twitch punctuated the climaxing onslaught he delivered whilst tearing pages at random from the piles of books scattered around us.

  ‘My reaction to Lisa and William’s deaths was the opposite of your own. You sought solace in words. I sought solace in action. You retreated from the real world. I attacked it head-on. I went to war to fight the good fight. For a decade. So what brought me back to you and why now?’ he asked, reading me like a book again.

  ‘This,’ he answered himself, thrusting a copy of Original Harm into my face before resuming his wanton vandalism of any remaining copies within his reach.

  ‘You cowardly hypocrite, entirely lacking any courage of conviction, who would publicly proclaim the sanctity of life in your bogus autobiography on the one hand whilst, on the other, furtively reducing the most precious gift that He gave us by putting words in the mouth of your thinly disguised alter ego, that anti-Christ mouthpiece Igor Harmnail (do me a favour!), to reduce it to nothing more than “a sexually transmitted terminal condition” that can and should be terminated on request! You, who would roundly mock my courageous, crusader Amino brothers and sisters, all of whom would die willingly for our beliefs; you, who believes in nothing, fabricates an autobiography that places yourself squarely on the moral high ground whilst directly responsible for the death of my own flesh and blood! You, who would savage A Halo Ring Rim, my extended love letter to you; who would slaughter my paean to an innocent, pure and tender spiritual love by warping and distorting it into a vile travesty through wholesale plagiarism: Original Harm? There’s nothing original about it! Were you really so naive to think you could publish this infernal satire of my magnum opus and spare yourself damnation?’

  At last I intuited Liam’s intention and recognised him as my nemesis.

  ‘I returned to make you eat your words,’ he whispered in my ear, easing the first page into my mouth. I spat it out.

  ‘Eat your words!’ he screamed, stuffing pages down my throat. ‘How could I stand by while you violated the memory of Lisa and William in your plagiaristic parody of my words? This perverse attempt to absolve yourself of guilt by dedicating to your victims the very means by which you desecrate their legacy?’

  The next thing that happened was so unexpected and so sudden that it still strikes me as surreal. Although it all happened in an instant, in my memory it occurs in slow motion. I remember Liam distracted by a piercing wail and turning to see Pardos, my would-be saviour, mid-flight, her teeth bared, pouncing on him. For an instant they were locked together in a momentous struggle, then Pardos sunk her teeth into his neck and drew blood. Enraged, Liam struck her. She crashed her head against a corner of the bookcase and crumpled to the floor alongside me. I scrambled over to her to determine the extent of her injuries and was stricken with horror when I found no sign of life.

  In retrospect my forgetfulness remains inexplicable to me but it was only then, when I realised that I’d lost Pardos, that I remembered the skean dhu letter opener in my coat pocket. At once I unsheathed it and, before Liam had the chance to react, I had pounced on him and sliced his throat open from ear to ear, gutting him like an envelope.

  The surprised expression on his face set a seal on my triumph over the destiny Liam had ghost-written for me. I had resumed my rightful place as author of my own story. Now that I’d regained control it was my turn to whisper into his ear.

  ‘If Lisa had informed me that she was leaving me, as you say, might she not also have informed me — or maybe inadvertently let slip — that you were Will’s true father?’ I whispered, for no other reason than to torture him with the cords of his own twisted logic. Then, as I listened to the strains of his dying breath, I bowed over him to ensure that I’d be heard and added, ‘And, if so, then, correct me if I’m wrong, but surely that would mean that I’d have had no compunction about disposing of Will too — wouldn’t it? And that would mean that Will’s “suicide note” must have been written by someone else. Who could that have been I wonder?’

  chapter twenty-three

  a death sentence

  I found myself marooned in the dead of calm that follows a storm leaving a landscape forever blighted by destruction in its wake. All was still. All was quiet. All the words that needed to be said had been said. There was nothing more to say and no one to say it to. I sat contemplating the bloody letter opener in my hand. I listened to myself breathe and tried to assimilate what had just happened. The more I thought about it, the more fictitious it seemed to me to be and I had to keep returning to the letter opener and the scene of death and destruction surrounding me to force myself to accept the indisputableness of the fact that what just happened had happened.

  I fluctuated between a vertiginous sense of relief that all the anxiety that had been mounting since the receipt of Liam’s first letter had been resolved and a spiralling tailspin of foreboding that, far from having reached a resolution, it had only just begun to accumulate. This eternity of morbid reflection and self-recrimination came to an abrupt conclusion when a possible escape clause occurred to me and I leapt to my feet and into action.

  Moving with a swiftness and a precision borne of a determination unthinkable a moment earlier, I kissed Pardos’s forehead, put my ear to her mouth and, neither hearing nor feeling any breath, transferred the letter opener from my hand into hers. I then emptied a sackful of rotting vegetables and filled it with all the copies of Original Harm I could find — taking care to retrieve every last one. Then I fled down the hillside and headed home to dispose of the sackful of books amongst the rest of the refuse at the bottom of the back green. It was only then that I permitted myself the luxury of a bath to soothe my aching limbs and attend to my numerous cuts and bruises. Then I poured myself a couple of stiff whiskies in an attempt to calm my jitters and rein in my racing mind.

  Where did I go from here? I spent the remainder of the day and most of the night searching for, but never finding, a satisfactory answer. Instead, whilst my over-active mind replayed the events just described over and over again, I listened for a dreaded knock at the door and envisaged, all too vividly, the police breaking in, arresting me, dragging me down to the station, battering a confession out of me and throwing me in a cell where I slowly asphyxiated from a massive claustrophobia-induced asthma attack ignored by my brutal captors. This notion was, in itself, enough to trigger a real asthma attack, in the midst of which a means of finding an answer to the pressing question of which course of action I should now take occurred to me.

  I picked up a pen and began to jot down what had happened to try and sort things out in my mind. The words I wrote are the words you’ve been reading. For all the drivel Liam had spouted about me — and, take my word for it, it was drivel — he was right about one thing: I do seek to write my way out of predicaments, even if, on occasion, I find subsequently that I’ve written my way into them.

  The following morning I rolled out of bed, gulped down cornflakes, showered, shaved, shit and caught the 44 into work, scanning the paper en route. The front-page story told of how an intelligent missile had gone astray, exploding into a primary school, killing scores of children. I read the first couple of paragraphs then turned the page.

  On disembarking, I headed straight for the office, my head still buried in the newspaper. It was only when I lifted it to behold the burnt-out shell of my former office block that I remembered the fire of the day before and made my way instead to the paper’s temporary premises, where I took a deep br
eath and squeezed into a different but familiar crowded lift to the first floor. Once there, unable to resist the temptation, before I even removed my coat and hat, I stopped and glanced at the purple paperweight pinning down the pile of letters on my different but familiar desk.

  As I rifled through the pile, one particular letter grabbed my attention. My name and address had been scrawled in familiar handwriting and I saw from the postmark that it had been posted locally the day before. I tore it open. As always, I’ll reproduce the anonymous letter it contained for you verbatim:

  I know you don’t want to accept what I told you about Lisa and William but, if you still doubt the truth, pay a visit to your doctor who will inform you of your impotence (a death sentence if ever there was one).

  Reading this short letter, it struck me that perhaps my pet theory about how the consistency of the space left between words can be used to identify their author by acting as a kind of subconscious fingerprint might require some revision. This was because I could tell instantly that the wider-than-usual spaces between the words in this letter were the exact same as those in Will’s letter to you. My revised theory, therefore, is that the space we leave between the words we write is part of our genetic code, secreted within the amino acids handed down from one generation to the next.

  ‘Morning,’ sighed Kirsty Baird, teacup in hand, catching me off-guard on her way to the different but familiar kitchen.

  ‘Morning,’ I obliged.

  ‘How’s the missus?’ she asked. I hesitated a moment before answering her.

  ‘Fine,’ I smiled. ‘She’s fine.’

  chapter twenty-four

  the footnote

  My initial reaction to receiving this death sentence was an instinctive sense of freedom, followed by a feeling of weightless worthlessness. I felt as if the arch-villain in the film of my autobiography had bent the director’s ear and swapped roles with me so that he was now cast as the tragically heroic male lead whilst I was consigned to play the walk-on part I’d sketched out for him. I felt as if I’d been reduced to a footnote, a one-dimensional character in my own autobiography. I did not live and breathe. I was not flesh and blood. I amounted to no more than words on a page in a book nobody read.

  And then it occurred to me that, whilst I might be writing these very words for myself, in an attempt to make some kind of sense of it all, I’m also writing them for you — and that was the moment when a means of resurrection, an ingenious way to reclaim the lead role, struck me: by casting you as my female lead.

  Oh, I know that this might come as something of a shock — and if I didn’t know that we already knew each other intimately (if only through our correspondence) then some might consider it somewhat presumptuous — but the wonderful fact is that I’ve already fled my previous life, consigned it to history, to start afresh, here, with you!

  On impulse, suddenly unable to bear the thought of Kirsty Baird’s innocent enquiry about my missus for a single day more, I packed my bags and boarded the first available flight to Toronto on a one-way ticket to hitchhike my way across Canada to be with you in Vancouver Island.

  And as I sit here in a solitary cabin somewhere in the Rockies, struggling to express my thoughts into these last words, before embarking on the last leg of my journey to you, my ultimate destination, I find myself distracted by the view of the snow-capped mountains rising out of the deep green and brown forest to pierce the bluest sky framed by the window and I inhale the all-encompassing emptiness. I’m surrounded by nothing. And nothing matters to me. Anymore. Except you.

  There’s nothing to do here but write. And read. I’ve found ample time to re-read Original Harm and A Halo Ring Rim and have discovered that, not only had Liam’s diatribe been sprinkled with fragments lifted straight from Original Harm but that these self-same phrases also appear within A Halo Ring Rim. Was this coincidental, or had I subconsciously plagiarised him?

  I know what Pardos’s response to such speculation would be, but then Pardos is dead.

  I’ve also found time to re-read a lot of old letters and, in retrospect, I can see now that I’ve known, from the first time I’d read your first letter, that it was our destiny to be together: letters I’d written to Liam; letters Liam had written to me; letters Will had written to you; letters you’d written to Will; letters I’d written to you under the guise of Will and letters you’d written to Will (me). It was the need to confess this deception — masquerading as my own dead son — that was part of the impetus behind penning these words. But I know that you’ll forgive me, won’t you?

  Oh, I know that your bookshelves, like mine, are heaving with unreliable narrators but, trust me, I’m not one of them. Liam was right about many things — the need to live rather than spend a lifetime reading and writing about life — but, I implore you to believe me, he was mistaken about me.

  Oh, the anticipation of being able, finally, to read the letters that Will had written to you; to gain insight into both sides of the story! And, at last, I can deliver, in person, Will’s precious last letter to you.

  And so here I find myself, in self-imposed solitary confinement, the bloody vigour of sheer excitement coursing through my veins as, impatiently, I count down the days and nights and hours till, at last, that momentous moment arrives when we meet, finally, in the flesh!

  But now, at last, I’ve had my fill of words. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the words left unwritten are as important as those that are. Of at least equal importance is the ability to read between the lines.

  It’s time for me to take a leaf out of Liam’s book; to forsake words for flesh and blood. Oh Marina, perhaps together we can find a way to elude the death sentence of the full stop? Maybe the end of this story can mark the beginning of a new chapter in both our lives? Let us together, you and I, take a leap of faith and jump off the page…

  chapter twenty-five

  a new chapter

  …

  ..

  .

  Acknowledgement

  Thanks to Craig Hillsley for helping to extricate me from the tangled web within which I’d contrived to ensnare myself.

  Copyright

  Contraband is an imprint of Saraband

  Published by Saraband

  Suite 202, 98 Woodlands Road

  Glasgow, G3 6HB

  www.saraband.net

  Copyright © Graham Lironi 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN: 9781908643919

  ebook: 9781908643926

  Publication of this book has been supported by Creative Scotland.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.