by Adam Hamdy
‘That’s better,’ Connie said as she entered. She was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and a grey vest, and had tied back her hair in a loose ponytail. Even through the pain Wallace could see that she looked fantastic.
‘You want a drink?’ she asked in a strained tone that suggested she was trying to make everything seem as normal as possible.
‘Better not. Broke my collarbone and I’m on pretty nasty pills,’ Wallace replied, pulling down the collar of his T-shirt to reveal the angry flesh beneath.
‘Ouch,’ Connie exclaimed, recoiling. ‘How did you do that?’
‘When I jumped out of the window. Fractured a few ribs, too,’ Wallace answered.
‘You don’t mind if I have one, do you?’ Connie asked the question on her way to the kitchen. Wallace followed.
‘Not at all,’ he said, aware that she wasn’t really waiting for an answer. He watched her pour a large glass of Chablis. ‘You know what, a small one won’t kill me.’
Connie produced another wine glass – different size and style, unsurprisingly. She poured generously and handed it to Wallace.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Connie didn’t reply, but instead knocked back about half her glass. She noted Wallace looking at her, and his expression must have betrayed his surprise.
‘Well, it’s not been a normal day,’ she said by way of explanation.
‘Sorry,’ he offered. He could already feel the warm swimming sensation of the wine going to his head, or maybe it was the painkillers starting to kick in.
‘I read about the Inquiry,’ Connie informed him. ‘I could never understand why, or make any sense of what happened that night. But it was the day you heard they’d rejected your testimony, wasn’t it? You were lashing out.’
‘I’m sorry. I really am.’ Wallace’s cheeks flushed with shame. ‘It tore me up. They called me a liar, but I didn’t care about myself. It was those poor people, those children – no one would ever know the truth of what happened to them.’
Connie shook her head and Wallace knew exactly what she was thinking: his righteous crusade had destroyed their relationship and it had all been for nothing. There had been no justice, no resolution, just an angry trail of shattered lives. He felt a pressing need to change the subject.
‘This wasn’t anything to do with the Inquiry,’ he protested. ‘I haven’t contacted any of the investigators for over a year. This was something else. A guy broke into my house and tried to kill me. Then he found me in hospital and tried again.’
Connie considered him and then drained her glass. ‘More?’ she asked, turning for the bottle.
‘I’m so sorry, Connie,’ Wallace said as he gently took hold of her arm. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you did.’
He searched desperately for something to say, but Connie’s demeanour shifted before he found the words. She suddenly shook her head and smiled sadly.
‘That’s enough reminiscing. Why don’t I order us a pizza from Il Baccio?’ she suggested with forced jollity. ‘And then you can tell me exactly what’s been going on.’
Wine and pizza. Connie opposite him on the Anatolian rug. Watching her carelessly tease a loose strand of hair. Simple pleasures. Two bottles in and Wallace felt immune to his troubles. Connie had listened intently as he told his tale. Now and again his voice would start to break as he recounted the horror of his experiences, and every so often Connie would ask a searching question, but Wallace never got the feeling she was trying to catch him out. Finally, when he’d shared the account of his escape and his decision to approach her for help, they both fell silent. He watched her carefully, waiting for her to say something.
‘What did it feel like?’ she asked eventually.
Wallace didn’t need to be told what she was talking about. He thought for a moment. ‘It was beyond anything I’ve ever experienced,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I was totally powerless. I felt frustration. Anger. Regret. Mainly regret. The mistakes I’ve made. The people I’ve hurt.’
The significance of his words wasn’t lost on Connie.
‘And this tremendous feeling of loss. I would have traded anything for another breath.’
She reached out and touched his arm, then rubbed it reassuringly.
‘And the worst thing is—’ Wallace’s voice broke. ‘And the worst thing is,’ he continued. ‘Someday I’m going to have to go through it again.’
She leaned forward and hugged him. ‘It’s OK,’ she said quietly.
Wallace pulled away, and looked her in the eye. ‘It’s not. We think we’re in control, but we’re not. At some point, I’m going to have to feel myself slip away. It scares me, Connie. It really scares me,’ he repeated, with the kind of honesty that Doctor Taylor could only ever dream of inducing.
‘My mum always said you have to make a choice; you can focus on the destination, or you can enjoy the journey. You can’t do both,’ Connie said. ‘With time, you’ll forget.’
Wallace shook his head. The wine and painkillers kept the room spinning a few seconds after his head fell still. ‘It’s part of who I am now. I’ll never forget that feeling,’ he countered. ‘I thought I was fucked up after Afghanistan, but this . . . I’ve been . . . I’m just all over the place, Connie.’
She leaned forward. Her lingering kiss was the sweetest thing Wallace had ever tasted. She pulled back and smiled.
‘We’re all just as much the dark space beyond death as we are the light of life,’ she told him, her words slurring ever so slightly. ‘You’ve been freed from it, John. You’ve experienced something that terrifies us all, and you’ve come back. You’ve been freed from all the illusions that bind you. You’ve lived the moment of death. What else do you have to be afraid of? You can be true.’
He looked at Connie, wide-eyed. He suspected they were both much drunker than they imagined.
‘Sorry, I’ve been listening to a lot of Alan Watts,’ she explained.
Wallace hadn’t thought about Watts since university. He’d spent more than a few hazy Bristol nights listening to crackling recordings of the old philosopher. ‘No, don’t apologise, it’s good,’ he assured her. ‘It’s all good.’
He leaned forward and kissed her. They’d shared a moment too profound to be concerned about complications, and neither objected as they moved towards the bedroom.
10
A bitter coating of furry bile lined Wallace’s mouth. He opened his eyes and immediately regretted the decision, as the world assaulted him. The bladed edges of the slatted venetians sheared the morning sunlight. In their inebriated haste to consummate their desires, they hadn’t even bothered to close the blinds, and the two large sash windows would have offered anyone in the neighbouring buildings a ringside view. A sudden bubble of memory rose from the murky depths of Wallace’s hangover and he caught a vision of Connie sitting astride him, the two of them thrusting rhythmically, him pawing at her firm breasts like an enthusiastic teenager. He felt a profound pounding deep within his skull and his collarbone throbbed with the intensity of a thousand tears. Flags of pain semaphored the length and breadth of his body, the violent urgency of each signal being outstripped as new clusters of nerves sparked into life. Wallace needed relief and he needed it fast. He rolled out of bed on to his knees and then pulled himself to his feet. Naked, he staggered towards the kitchen like an unsteady toddler.
Complication, Wallace thought as he leaned against the kitchen counter. He found the painkillers, grabbed a dirty wine glass and washed two pills down his gullet with a gob of cloudy water. Complications, he mused. He was here for a reason and that reason was not romance, or its primal, physical cousin. Wallace could not believe that he and Connie had been stupid enough to sleep together on their first night back. Mixing drink with pills hadn’t been smart, but intoxication was only part of the story; he’d wanted someone to hold. Or rather, he wanted someone to hold him. And Connie was as good a person as he’d find anywhere.
&nbs
p; He returned to the bedroom and pulled on his jeans and T-shirt, looking at the framed postcards that covered two of the walls. Moments of amity memorialised by monuments from all around the world. He recognised a couple of cards he’d sent. One was a picture of the Croisette sent during a work trip to Cannes; the other was a picture montage of Paris, which he’d bought and given to Connie when they spent the weekend there together. There were dozens of other cards from all over the planet. Friends? Family? Lovers? They created a collage of some of the world’s most beautiful places and each one would remind Connie of an instance when someone else had thought kindly of her. Wallace wondered how many postcards he’d received over the years. It could not have been more than a dozen.
The tiny bathroom was empty and the rest of the flat was still. Wallace shuffled through the kitchen into the living room. Lying on the small dining table, pinned by one of the empty wine bottles, was a note.
Had to get to work early. Big project. Make yourself at home. Laptop in sitting room. Password is bootle94. Connie xxx.
Relieved to have avoided the awkward morning-after, Wallace returned to the kitchen and looked in Connie’s small fridge. Lots of green and red, healthy, useless for a hangover. He needed beige and brown foods: burgers, chips, substances wonderfully high in alcohol-absorbing saturated fats. The best Connie’s fridge had to offer was half a block of extra mature Cheddar. He grabbed it and ate straight out of the packet.
Chewing the last mouthful of cheese, he went into the living room and saw Connie’s Apple laptop on the sofa. He crumpled on to the sofa then leaned back, propping his head on the arm of the sofa, and rested the computer on his raised knees. Powering up the machine, he entered Connie’s password, and, within a few moments, was online with the collective knowledge of the world at his fingertips. He started typing in the Google search bar, looking for anything on staged suicides.
Wallace considered himself an extremely literate Internet user. He sought creative inspiration in all the weird and wild corners of the Web. He spent a lot of time online researching photo shoots, scouting locations and managing his portfolio, but despite his experience, he was surprised that such a dark search topic still managed to elicit adverts. The first two links were for marketing companies promoting their search engine optimisation services. Wallace ignored the commercials and focused on the genuine search results. The top links were from a website entitled ‘Practical Homicide’, an online resource for law enforcement agents run by a US investigative training company. Lower down were a series of news articles about murders that had been staged to look like suicide. A wife hanged by her estranged husband, a husband suffocated by his wife, a woman shot by her boyfriend, and a mother throttled by her daughter. Intimate relationships terminated by the ultimate act of betrayal, each made even more shocking by the prosaic culprits. One murderer was a CEO, another a bored housewife. No masks, no body armour. As he read through the cases, Wallace wondered what could possibly make a person kill someone who loved and trusted them. In addition to the profound betrayal, another common feature shared by all the staged suicides was that the victim and assailant knew each other. Wallace had turned his mind upside down since the original attack in a vain attempt to identify anyone who might have a reason to kill him. The Masterson Inquiry had cleared Captain Nash and his men. Wallace simply wasn’t a threat to them any more. Beyond the soldiers, he struggled to think of anyone with sufficient reason to want him dead. He was a photographer, an observer, and didn’t make enough impression on life to have accrued enemies.
He continued running through search results for the next hour, sifting case after depressing case of murder dressed as suicide. The number of people killed by their loved ones was simply staggering, and Wallace felt as though he could spend an eternity reading these tragic tales without getting any closer to his would-be killer. His first search had led him into a blind alley. Simon Mackay, his tutor at Bristol, and something of a celebrity within photography circles, had always said creativity was not about getting the right answers, but asking the right questions. All Wallace had to do was find the right question.
He tried searching for suicide murder, but that only yielded an endless stream of news articles about murder suicides. He skimmed a couple of articles. A family wiped out by a father with debt problems, a young guy murdering a group of college girls before turning the gun on himself. Unlike the staged suicides which seemed coldly premeditated, Wallace got the sense that these crimes were committed in the unbalanced heat of the moment.
He tried unexplained suicides next, but got a series of articles on a sudden, inexplicable rise in the number of suicides in the United States. He was surprised to learn that there were more suicides than homicides in America. You were twice as likely to kill yourself as you were to be killed by someone else. Darkly fascinating, but another blind alley.
It was one thirty when the phone rang, and Wallace let it go to the machine.
‘Hi, I’m not here right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you soon,’ announced the recording of Connie’s voice.
‘John, if you’re there, pick up,’ Connie said after the beep.
Wallace wavered, uncertain whether he was ready to talk.
‘Is anybody there?’ Connie mimicked a spooky medium.
He leaned over and picked up the cordless phone. ‘Hello,’ he croaked.
‘How are you feeling?’ Connie asked.
‘I’ve been better,’ he replied.
‘I’m not surprised. We got through a lot of wine. And I saw the pills in the kitchen,’ Connie told him. ‘Sorry I had to cut and run, but we’ve got this big project on . . . you know how it is. Besides, it spared you any awkward morning cuddles.’
‘You wouldn’t have wanted any. Trust me,’ Wallace replied honestly. ‘I wasn’t fit for human consumption.’
‘That I can believe,’ she giggled. ‘I’ll be back around seven. I’ll make you something healthful and fortifying.’
‘Does it involve lentils?’
‘My secret weapon,’ she said light-heartedly. ‘And no more boozing.’
The line went quiet, but they were both eager to prove how much last night didn’t matter and started talking over each other.
‘I found your note,’ Wallace began.
‘Were you still in bed?’ Connie asked simultaneously.
‘No,’ Wallace replied lightly. ‘I’m searching the Web, looking for some sign of the guy.’
‘Any luck?’ she asked.
‘Just lots of dark stories about people killing each other.’
‘Have you run a description? It’s where the police always start.’
‘No, I haven’t done that yet,’ Wallace admitted, almost slapping his forehead at the illumination of his stupidity.
‘Like I said, no more boozing,’ Connie joked. ‘I’ll see you later.’
And with that she was gone. No awkward references to the previous night, no searching questions that tried to ascertain each other’s feelings.
Wallace could no longer ignore his gnawing gut or the rising pain in his collarbone. He went to the kitchen and fixed himself a salad and mayonnaise sandwich on spelt bread. Pudding was a couple of Paramols washed down with a glass of orange juice. After a quick trip to the tiny bathroom, he returned to his position on the sofa.
His next search was for murder suspect body armour mask. The search results were dominated by stories of the Aurora cinema shooting in Colorado. Wallace tried suicide body armour mask. The screen filled with a random collection of results. An article on gunshot wounds, another on how jogging in a gas mask may cause panic, a link to a movie called Rampage, and a Wikipedia entry on Ned Kelly. Wallace flicked through to the second page, which was similarly eclectic, and then on to the third. Halfway down the page of ten search results was something of interest: a forum post on a website called ‘Suicide Methodology’. Wallace clicked and was taken through to a discussion thread started by a user called Screw The Trolls. The subject of the
thread was weird suicides and Screw The Trolls had got the ball rolling with the tale of a man who had chosen to drown himself in a septic tank. Wallace scrolled through various accounts of the sick and unusual ways people had chosen to end their lives until he reached a post by a user called Death The Romantic.
A couple of months ago I heard about a guy who’d killed himself in his garage. Hanged himself. Boring as fuck, right? But the wife says he was offed. Guy kept saying a dude in a mask tried to kill him. Armoured up like Batman. Not a weird exit, but a weird story.
Wallace felt a powerful surge of instinct telling him that this was a possible lead, and he scoured the rest of the page. The posts immediately following were full of pointed remarks that instructed Death The Romantic to stay on topic. Wallace clicked Death The Romantic’s name and was taken through to the user’s profile. One hundred and eighty-three posts and Wallace read them all. There was no further mention of that particular case, but Wallace built a picture of this person. Death The Romantic claimed to be female and spent the majority of her time trying to console and advise would-be suicides against taking the final step, but when they demonstrated how determined they were, she would give simple practical instruction on how to end a life in the quickest, most painless way possible. She’d been an active user for three years and her most recent post was six days old.
Wallace wondered what would possess a person to trawl the bulletin boards of a suicide advice site for three years and put themselves in such close proximity to some of the most desperate people on the planet. Just a couple of hours on the site had made him extremely uncomfortable. He read the musings of individuals resolved to kill themselves, he saw responses from twisted voyeurs, some of whom actively encouraged death in the most hateful ways, and he observed the glee with which some of the voyeurs greeted news of a suicide. Then there were the messages of hate directed at the site, posted by religious groups and individuals who disagreed with the existence of such an easily accessible, comprehensive manual of self-inflicted death. This was a dark community at the edge of society, one that would never have existed without the Internet, and one that he did not want to be exposed to any longer than necessary. Based on what he’d seen, Wallace felt some sympathy for the opponents of the site; suicide was an insidious pestilence that could take root in the correctly cultivated mind. The experiences of the past few weeks had taught him that even a seemingly healthy mind could be unbalanced by traumatic events. The existence of sites like ‘Suicide Methodology’ were permanent scabs on otherwise fleeting wounds, and as with any scab, there were some people who were doomed to keep picking.