by Shaun Allan
All on board dead. And the Post Office. And the refinery. They all screamed out to me.
Dead.
Say it enough times and it becomes just a word. Dead. Dead. Dead. Four letters thrown together to mean something that was so much more and so much less. Dead. An absence of life. An absence of anything. For the few days that it took my mind to wash away the spectacle of the train crash, I said that word to myself over and over. I didn’t feel responsible for the accidents, for that was surely what they were, but I didn’t feel quite… right. But, like I say, eventually it becomes simply a word. Meaningless. Emotionless. Dead.
Flip.
Catch.
An earthquake. Turkey I think. Somewhere over that side of the world, anyway. Rivers flooded their banks. Landscapes changed their features, as if they had suddenly frowned, angry at the little humans skittering over them. They don’t know how many died that time. I do though. I know. Four hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred and ninety two. Seems a lot written out longhand like that. Seems more than 417,892. Numbers are just numbers. Written out, it’s more real, more horrific, more sorrowful. More like a kick in the teeth, to be honest. They estimated about 350,000.
They were wrong.
How do I know? How do you know the sun will rise tomorrow? How do you know that Sunday will follow Saturday? You just do, dontcha? You just do. Same here.
I just do.
I think it was around then that I started to wonder. I think I began to suspect something. I’m not sure. I mean, it’s only a bloody coin! How can I, or it, influence world disasters? Besides, Turkey? I’ve eaten it, but I’ve never been there! I threw the coin anyway. Dropped it into the River Freshney on the way home. Here little fishies! It’s a bit tough, but tuck in. Keep you going for weeks that will!
Flip.
Catch.
I didn’t notice. I have all sorts of coinage passing through my pockets during the week. Newspapers, coffee machines, petrol, Mars bars all play their part in the ebb and flow of the Royal Bank of Pocket. How one particular two pence piece could manage to remain in there was a mystery. Why it hadn’t been passed to a shop assistant in return for a bottle of Coke (diet) or a packet of chewing gum, I couldn’t guess. How it came to be back in my possession at all after taking a swim in the river…?
WHY does the sun always rise? HOW does Saturday always follow Sunday? You know they will, but why? I don’t know either. I don’t want to know. It just does.
It was four days. The earthquake still dominated the news both on screen and in print. In my head, though, it was already fading. It was going the same dulled way as the rest. The feelings of being responsible were dissolving too, like sugar in water, diluted until, no matter how hard you looked, there was just a foggy liquid that tasted just a little too sweet. I didn’t notice the coin in my pocket. I don’t remember taking it out. I don’t remember flicking it up. I just remember the arc of it through the air and the warmth as my hand closed around it.
A child. Perhaps four years old. Typical TV advert stuff to slow your speed. The ball bounces into the street. The boy runs after it. Laughing, naturally laughing. He doesn’t see the car. The car doesn’t see him. The driver feels, rather than hears, the thud.
The child bounces into the street.
It happened in front of me again, not thousands of miles away. Mere metres from where I stood. Hah! The ball even rolled to my feet! How’s that? I turned and walked away. I could hear the young woman waiting for half a dozen first class stamps. I could see the drivers of the trains. I could feel the heat from the flames on the refinery. I could taste the water from the flooded, surging river as it swept away all that stood in its path. I could hear the laughter of the boy.
I just walked away. I think I maybe even whistled a happy tune.
That time the memory didn’t fade. The horror stayed with me during the dark nights and darker days. As time went by, my oh my, my mood darkened too. I knew. I knew it was me. I knew it was the coin. I knew I was responsible. I went to the pier at Cleethorpes. It stuck out like a literal sore thumb, reaching away from the beach into the lovely waters of the River Humber, or is it the North Sea? Either way, it’s muddy and murky. I certainly wouldn’t want to swim in it – paddling when I was a kid was bad enough. Well, the two pence coin was going to find out if it could sink or swim. I knew which one I was betting on.
I held it in my hand for a second, then simply let it drop. It spun away to splash into the water. There was a brief flash of reflected sunlight just before it hit and it was gone. Good riddance.
I noticed that, as it spun, it almost looked like it would had it been flipped. I shook my head. Nonsense. Get a grip. Get a life. Get an ice cream. Yeah, I really fancied an ice cream at that point. A whipped 99, a chocolate and vanilla mix with a flake, juice and hundreds’n’thousands. I checked the change – the safe change – left in my pocket. Wouldn’t you know it, I was two pence short! Typical. Oh well, that’s the way the double-choc-chip cookie crumbles.
Ooh, I just had a brief Homer moment: Ahhh, cookiessss.
I felt a few spots of rain. Good job I didn’t get the ice cream, really. My car was only a short distance away. By the time I’d reached it, the heavens had opened and it was heaving it down. Cats and dogs? Elephants and rhinos more like! By the time I was half way home, thunder was grumbling towards me with sheets of lightning to brighten its merry way. Remember that, Dr. Connors, me fella-me-laddio? Remember that? Rained for a solid seven days. Solid non-stop. Solid as Niagara Falls on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Except we forgot what that nice smiling sunshine looked like for a while there, didn’t we? Too busy wishing our cars were like James Bond’s so we could flick a switch and the wheels would turn in and we’d skim along like a boat. Too busy wondering if the insurance would pay to replace the carpets and suite and TV. Too busy eating your tea with ducks swimming around your ankles. Too busy watching your kitchen table float away like a raft with legs. It was as if the whole island, good ol’ Great Britain herself, had been submerged under two feet of water. Someone had pulled up a zipper from Land’s End to John O’Groats and the sea had come together from either side. It didn’t matter that there was no electricity – the constant lightning lit up everything like a giant camera flash.
Remember Dr. Connors? Because I certainly do.
I don’t think anyone died then, amazingly. Maybe there were one or two casualties, but considering what happened, it was a lucky escape. Did someone get struck by lightning? Can’t remember. Maybe. Still, considering… Of course so many thought that their lives had ended, or wished they had. Houses were flooded, belongings were ruined. Most of the country had waded to a standstill. It took a mighty effort to get moving again. It took a mightier effort to shake the drowning feeling I was overcome by when the cries of my other victims echoed in my ears.
Anyway. I don’t know why I ask if you remember it, Doc. I know you do. Everyone does. I just wanted you to think about it for a moment. Just hold in your mind’s tiny grasp (or should that be ‘tiny mind’s grasp’?) for a second or three. OK? And on we go.
When things got going again and life returned to its quirky little ways, I bought a bus ticket. My car, the same as just about everyone else’s, was knackered. It didn’t want to play. Well, who can blame it, eh? How would you feel if you’d spent the best part of a week and a bit with your arse end submerged in water? It probably wouldn’t do your plumbing any good either, now would it? I bought the bus ticket to town. I used to take the number 5, at one time. Never no more, oh no. 3C or 3F, they’re the ones for me. No other number will do, thank you very much. The 3F costs 20p more each way and goes all around the houses (which all buses do, I know, but this one goes ALL around them) to get to the same place, so the ride lasts a good fifteen minutes longer, but it’s not the number 5. The 3C costs about the same and only takes about five to ten minutes more, but it’s not the number 5. What is it, every half hour for the 3F and every twenty minutes for the 3C? Something l
ike that. The number 5 was every ten minutes. Of course, it still goes on its happy travels, round and round the same route it goes, where it stops everyone knows – all the bus stops and the Post Office. No, it doesn’t. That Post Office stop was a little one off special, just for sweet little ol’ me. Ain’t it nice. Why, thank you ma’am. Thank you oh, so very much, indeedy. Still. Anyhow and anyway, the number 5’s not for me, no way!
My friend, my chum, my pain in the bum was back to say a great big fat “Hello.” Right on top of the ten pence piece, to make sure I couldn’t miss it, was the two pence piece. Howdy, pardner.
Flip.
Catch.
You know how it goes.
Across town, apparently, a seventeen-year-old kid was fed up. He was bored with his life and himself. His dad was in a shooting club. The gun was locked away in a secure box hidden in the attic, in line with all the police requests. The boy knew where his dad kept the key. He got the key, then the gun. His name was John, which makes it every bit worse. I know his name. He’s not anonymous. I know his name, I know him. He left a copy of Terminator in his DVD player to make it look like he was influenced by action films where every gun held a million bullets. He wanted them to think that, even though he knew it was crap. People, he thought, did what they did because they wanted to. A film was a film, that’s what he thought. Sure, Arnie might waste a few bad guys, but that didn’t make him want to do it. No, John did it because he wanted to. He was bored.
Besides. His dad’s .22 pistol only made a little hole.
He would have taken the 9X bus to town, I guess. At least the number 5 doesn’t go that way. The shopping centre was, naturally, packed. It was a Saturday, so it would be. John chose the Starbucks coffee bar to start his little performance. He didn’t think it should cost nearly three quid for a coffee, even if it was a Mocca-Chocca-Locca-Shocka-Artery-Blocka. It was as good a place as any. It wasn’t what he expected. There were the bangs. There were the screams. There were the crumpled bodies and the pools of blood, but it wasn’t what he expected. He expected to feel and he didn’t. He just didn’t.
So he used his last bullet on himself. He yawned as he pulled the trigger.
How do I know so much about John and his thoughts? Ask me another.
I didn’t feel so much from him, as he didn’t feel much himself, but I felt the terror and pain of those around him. Oh, an old woman of seventy three, with two children and five grandchildren, was trampled in the stampede as Starbucks and the shops around it emptied in seconds, the people scattering like birds off a telegraph pole. The window of Clintons Cards was shattered and the grandmother was showered in a rain of glass slivers. She didn’t feel anything either. Her heart had given up the ghost, so to speak.
I was sitting third from the front on the 3C, on my way to the war zone. I was staring out of the window watching the world go by, wondering if the bus was staying still and the Earth was moving. I remember seeing a young boy jumping on the bonnet of a Mondeo. I smiled to myself, knowing if it was my kid or my car, I’d go mad. By the time the bus pulled into the station near the precinct, only a few minutes away from Starbucks, I was shivering. I wondered if perhaps I’d cried out, as a few passengers were looking at me strangely. Or did they know? I didn’t want to go in anymore. I knew what I’d find. People were running about. Some were crying, others were standing there, dazed. One or two acted as if nothing had happened. Which one did I fall into? I don’t know. I don’t think I was crying. I didn’t run. I couldn’t stand still. I think I acted as if nothing had happened. I didn’t want to go in, but that’s what I did.
It was just as I’d thought. Just as I’d felt.
I walked past the bodies and pushed through the crowds. I bought some cookies from Millies – the assistant behind the counter looking at me as if I was crazy buying cookies at a time like this, but not willing to miss a sale. Maybe I was crazy, but I was also suddenly starving. All thoughts of why I’d actually gone to town in the first place were forgotten. I turned in the direction of Starbucks and said goodbye to my very good friend John, a young lad whom I’d never met. I dropped the half eaten white chocolate cookie into a waste bin and walked home.
I slept well that night. Like a log. I had a dream. At first I thought I was in the middle of the Never-ending Story, you know where Fantasia has been consumed by the Nothing? Well. The world had broken into thousands of pieces and each was floating about in space like lifeboats after the Titanic. I watched as families smiled and waved to me as their little pieces of Earth crashed into their neighbours’ and they spun off into space. I awoke knowing, finally, that it was all me. I was responsible. Me and that damned coin.
Joy convinced me. That nice Mr. Postman only brought me one letter that morning. He was early for a change. It was a white envelope with my address elegantly printed in blue ink. Joy only ever used a blue pen. She thought black was rude. She didn’t write to me very often. I can remember only a few times in our lives that I’d received so much as a postcard off my sister. My heart drilled its way through my chest like John Hurt’s Alien as I sat at my kitchen table. Hey, it could have simply been a ‘Hello’. I hadn’t seen her in a month or three. She could have merely been dropping me a line saying she was fine, sunshine. But I knew she wasn’t.
Joy was a joy to be around. Everyone liked her and she made everyone happy. As I held the letter in my trembling hands with my coffee going cold and my Weetabix going soggy, I thought about that. It had never occurred to me before, but Joy was joy, and I, Sin, was basically sin. Good and evil, light and dark. Two sides of everyone’s favourite two pence coin. Oh, I needed to get a life! I was talking crap! Yeah, everyone liked my sister – she was a nice person! Why wouldn’t they?
But, sitting there, forgetting to breathe, I knew I was right, at least almost. Maybe I was a little wide of the wotsit, but I was close. You know how I knew. That’s right. I just did. I opened the envelope, pulled out the neatly folded sheets of paper and started to read. Joy’s handwriting was smooth and flowed like water running across the page. Everything about my sister was… silken. Her skin, her walk, her voice. Perhaps that was why she was always so popular.
Ah.
Perhaps not.
I read the letter three times, then calmly laid it on the kitchen table. I stared out of the window. A sparrow was flitting about on the window ledge. Something busied the bushes at the bottom of the garden. It wasn’t just me. I wasn’t alone.
Joy, it seemed, had found a coin one day. It was years ago when we were children. A two pence coin. I’d never seen it, nor had I seen her toss it. She had, though. But whereas I ruined lives, Joy… Joy made lives. “I make people happy,” she said. And it messed her up. She caused couples desperate to have children to become parents. She rendered poor people rich. She stopped accidents from happening and natural disasters from occurring. It was as if I was looking into the dead eyes of my mirror.
You see, Dr. Connors, Joy killed herself. I’m sure that’s in my notes, or you’ve found it out, but rather than simply being words on paper (even as these are), I want it to mean something to you. Joy, my sister, committed suicide. She even told me exactly what she was going to do, something I won’t go into, as I’m sure you already know. My first instinct was to ring her, to try to stop her before she’d had chance to jump but I knew there was no point. It was too late. Joy was dead. I wanted to feel sad, but I didn’t. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I still want to feel something. I still want to cry. But I can’t.
“I make people happy,” she wrote, “and it’s killing me.”
I found my coin a mere few months ago. Joy had been found by hers years before that. She’d know almost straight away what was happening. I had only known, for certain, that morning – that morning when Mr. Postman kindly brought me the letter. At first it made her content. She was bringing happiness and good fortune to almost everyone around her. That was at first. Being contented I mean. Then it stopped being a pleasure and became a frustration.
The frustration turned to hate. Joy was alone in her world. While everyone else was enjoying life, my sister was drowning in the responsibility of keeping it up. She felt stripped. One more good turn was one more piece of her torn away. Every smile was another knife twisting in her heart.
She had tried, early on, to rid herself of the coin. She couldn’t. No, really? It kept coming back like the not-so-proverbial bad penny. That’s almost funny, dontcha fink, Doctor? No, me neither. So she decided, if she couldn’t get rid of the coin, she would get rid of herself.
Joy had noticed something. At first, she said, the incidents were erratic. Flip, catch. A man would not take the step into the road as the car burned around the corner. Flip, catch. The bully would see the error of his ways and would apologise to his victims. Flip, catch. The baby would smile at her father. Flip, catch. The mother of seven would win the lottery. Some were big, others were small. One would change the lives of a country, another would make a man feel good for a second.
It didn’t stay that way though. The results of her coin levelled out, then began to increase in both momentum and… Joy left the word out. She couldn’t find it. I knew what she meant. Each time, it would be more. She saw herself being eaten away. She saw herself living only for the world and not for herself. So she planned to leave. She planned to jump.
She had realised something. She didn’t know if I would believe any of what she had written, but she had to tell me. She realised it wasn’t the coin. The two pence piece was simply the catalyst. It was the trigger.
It was her. She was the cause. Joy was joy. She said that, when she understood, she could throw away the coin. When she understood, it was as if a floodgate inside her had been opened and a torrent of happiness was unleashed. That was how she put it. If she didn’t end it, she would drown.
I took the coin out of my pocket, where I knew it would be, and placed it on top of the letter.
The coin was the trigger. It was her. It was Joy.