Kimberly's Capital Punishment

by Richard Milward

  so anyway we got to seal sands. natalie had the idea to get in the water to look for the achewal acthual seals. she wanted to go skinniedipping becos we Only had the cloaths we had on. i shouldnt of gone in with her. tel stayed in the warm in car while we got in the water. it was very completeley freezing. i cant Stress that enough.

  I had another feeling I knew where his words were going. He’s only gone and had sex with Natalie in the sea, after too many bottels of wine. How dare Stevie cheat on me! Admittedly, while Stevie was cheating on me with a fat pentathlete, that same night I was cheating on him with a square-faced bachelor, but it’s not like I slept with him. I clutched the bag of Molotov cocktails tight in my fist, clutched Stevie’s letter even tighter, and read on:

  it was allrite at first with the seals but so cold. they slide off the rocks away from us and kept honk honk honking. we went after them but some seals wernt that happy with us tho. i think it mite of been Mating season or they were feeling thretened by us. i thought we should just leave them to It but then all off a sudden ther was this huge crashing wave and me and natalie got seperated. anyway the tide thruew me onto the rocks and suddenley ther was all this wind and the waves really getting up. i hit the rocks again and hit hurt my back really bad. all off a sudden nataliE was yelling she couldnt see me and ther was this repliy from tel saying he couldnt see me nither. i started to panick and had all this water In my mouth and was overwelmed by the waves that carryed on coming. i couldnt shout nothing becos of my stammer. it was Like i was paraliezed ther from the shock of the cold. i was scaired i was going to pass out with hyperthermier. then all off a sudden ther was this Allmighty honking behind me and then a great heavy wieght suddenley on my back. it was one of the seal bulls on top of me. it kept going honk honk honk and grey and fritening. i tryed to fight it off but it was heavy and had me pinned to the rocks and paraliezed. it had these claws on its flippers and it kept honking so louwd. i was scaired and panicking and thats when the Truly awefull thing happend. it must of been mating season after all becos the seal kept pushing and pushing me up Against the rocks and then trying to fuck insert itself into me. to my horrorr i couldnt move and the seal it was very powerfull. it kept honk honk honking and kept trying to insert itself wher. the seal must of pushed me so hard against the rocks becos i must of past out. if only i had died. when i woke up the seal was gone but ther was all this blood and pain down bellow. tel and natalie were gone aswell but i maneged to stagger and find my cloaths and fone for taxi. i am embaresed to even say now but i still have a pain down bellow and am bleeding a lot out of my ther. i think i must of contracted something off the seal. i am sorry i have to go but i can Not tell a doctor and i do not want to you to catch to give you a disese. when if they see the ortopsey results with std or gonorreorr do not tell them about the seal. please for my dignitie. i am so sorry but trust me you do not want to live with me like this. it is not the first time i have suffered fr i know what i am doing. im so sorry. this has nothing to do with you. goodbye my love. i will hopfully meet you again somewere some time. i loved you. stevie x x x x x x x ps i made a will so you can have my money. please do not tell anythi anyone about any of this but x x x x x x x and hope your happy be happy x x x x x x x pps the c

  One by one, I dropped tears onto the paper, making the blue ink smudge. I folded up the spoiled letter and posted it into my pocket. Then I cried and cried and cried, challenging the clouds to see who could make the pavement the wettest.

  All at once there was grief, relief and disbelief. Disbelief, mainly. I wasn’t sure if Stevie was pulling my leg, though the tone of the note seemed serious, and he was never one for black comedy. I shook my head slightly, and I dropped the Molotov cocktails. Fortunately, they didn’t go off. Fortunately, I hadn’t lit them yet.

  I made my way back home, with my shoulders hunched. Despite everything, I was relieved it wasn’t my fault Stevie died. Maybe he didn’t go to the grave hating me. I wanted to jump for joy, and blow my own brains out. I just wished he knew it’s natural to bleed out of your arsehole, should you get something untoward forced up there – and that, in time, it would’ve healed. And everything could’ve been alright.

  I crept along the rest of Philip Lane, avoiding eye contact with myself in the silver-screen paving slabs. I never realised seals were capable of such cruelty. There I was, thinking a photograph of my tongue in a square-faced person’s mouth was enough to sentence Stevie to death, when, by the sound of it, the culprit was a sexually aggressive bull seal. It was laughable, but I didn’t laugh. I just carried on walking, shaking my head, shaking my arms and legs, shaking all of Tottenham’s houses out of their foundations.

  And now for a short lesson on seals:

  Strangely, the common seal, Phoca vitulina, is not as common as the grey seal, Halichoerus grypus, at Seal Sands. I’m not sure which species is more likely to sexually harass a human being (if either) – however, the male seal is a polygynous mammal, renowned for breeding with a whole slew of different partners. While it’s not uncommon for a seal to mate with a seal of a different species, it’s largely unheard of for a mammal to try it on with a completely different class of vertebrate – for instance, a 200m sprinter. The more I mulled over Stevie’s encounter with the bull, the more I thought Stevie had lost his mind. However, as I paced solemnly down Philip Lane, my thoughts kept wandering to this story I’d seen in the tabloids, a year or so ago. The article reported a sighting of a fur seal ‘raping’ a king penguin close to the Antarctic Ocean: the first example of a mammal shagging outside its class. Perhaps seals are the sex pests of the sea. Apparently, the young bulls are the worst, them being pumped full of hormones, and yet last in line to mate with the best broody females. They get what they can.

  The thought of it made me feel ill. For weeks afterwards, I tried to block out the image of Stevie and the bull. I preferred the idea he’d just gone mad. However, one midsummer night I was listlessly flicking through the TV channels when I came across a sorry sight. Channel 5 were broadcasting an hour-long programme about an American girl who was born with a sort of mermaid tail instead of two legs, and I nearly choked on my Somerfield’s Worst™ lasagne. I wondered to myself: what if the girl’s mother had been through the same ordeal as Stevie?

  How many poor victims had that seal had its flippers on?

  When I got back from Philip Lane, the first thing I did was cancel my direct debit to the anti-sealing charity. It was a painful phone call. The woman on the other end clearly had qualifications in making folk feel guilty, and she scolded, ‘But you do realise over 500,000 innocent seals are clubbed to death every year?’

  I stared blankly at the plastic handset.

  ‘Aye, but you do realise at least one innocent human being got inhumanely bummed to death by a seal this year?’ I considered replying. I looked at the ground, scratching my neck.

  ‘To cancel your much appreciated charitable donation would be to side with the hunters,’ the woman went on, in that machine-like monotone you get from working in a call centre. ‘Can you imagine yourself going out and butchering the seals yourself?’

  I poked my lips out. As she continued reeling off horrific seal statistics, a plan hatched in my head. With the phone nestled under my chin, I slipped through to the bedroom and began fashioning a selection of harpoons from a pair of knitting needles, a bread knife and a bent javelin Stevie had stashed behind his ex-sock drawer.

  Dressed in full Arctic clobber, I bounded across the dunes, sniffing up the fresh ozone. It was around nine when I got to Seal Sands, the oil refineries and chemical plants just beginning to go to sleep under their purple, dusky duvets. There were still a few birdwatchers, sealwatchers and petrochemicalplantwatchers out in the nature reserve, but soon enough a dark shroud would descend on their binoculars and camera lenses, and they’d have to head home for their teas.

  I jog-hopped down towards the mudflats, my makeshift harpoons hidden in a black binliner, fraying the polythene. My feet felt like they had
weights attached, dragging me down to the shore. I yawned. I didn’t have enough money for the train, so I was suffering the morbid, false tiredness and deep-vein thrombosis you get from sitting on the National Express for six hours; not to mention the thigh-cramps from my journey to Seal Sands on the back of a stranger’s motorbike. It took a good half an hour before someone stopped for my Burger King napkin with SEAL SANDS PLEASE? scrawled in Cheery Cherry lipstick, and it felt strange cuddling a masked stranger as we hurtled at top speed towards the nature reserve. I hummed to myself, transfixed by the chimneys belching and breathing fire in a series of industrial processes as mysterious as the chemical processes that go on in your heart when you fall in and out of love. I sighed into the stranger’s back, wondering what his face looked like, underneath the helmet.

  Seal Sands is, hands down, the most beautiful place on this planet. The sands themselves are a mixture of black and white crushed glass, surrounded on all sides by the elegant Etch-A-Sketch outlines of chemical works. Rather than being put off by the pollution, the wildlife has grown to love the industry, nesting in its myriad metal nooks and crannies, plus the artificial moonlight emitted after dark provides an extra hour or two of playtime.

  As I strode along the edge of the shore, it felt like the insoles of my boots had turned to sandpaper. I cringed, wiggling my toes. Round about, the birds were having a good gossip before bedtime and, over on the foggy horizon, matchstick sailors were no doubt staring at matchstick factories, in their matchstick ships and tankers.

  I pressed onwards. It was a surprise to feel such a gale against my face, giving me a complimentary temporary face lift. The Capital never experiences this kind of weather, thanks to its monumental, skyscraping windbreakers, which also double up as offices, Monday–Friday.

  I gasped, almost forgetting how to walk and breathe. The industry was glowing so much you couldn’t see the sky, but I followed the North Star-like beacon on the top of INEOS along the mudflats, to where a group of blubbery dots were basking on the rocks.

  I took out my harpoons, which had various messages attached to them, for the seals:

  I smirked, enjoying the witticisms again. As I raised the harpoons aloft in a bundle, the laminated cards hung like paper Stevies in my peripheral vision. I scanned the area for spying sealhunterwatchers, then crept towards the seals, along the wet leopardskin sand. I could hear my breath going wild in the surround-sound of the hood.

  Before long, the blubbery dots in the distance became blubbery dots with flippers and whiskers, then fully formed blubbery grey seals. I paused for a moment, glaring at them in the fake, fluorescent moonlight. Then, I made my attack. The hum of the power plants masked my crunching footsteps as I charged full-pelt towards the seals; however, perhaps I shouldn’t have let out the screech.

  As I skidded across the slick sand, I accidentally made a breathy ‘Eeee!’ sound. As soon as the first ‘E’ left my lips, the seals turned their heads at me, then nonchalantly slipped off the rocks, back into the safety of the sea. Unfazed, I carried on striding towards the water, aimlessly firing harpoons at its silver surface. Each impact with the water created a vast, transparent, oscillating dartboard, with the harpoon disappearing into the bullseye. Sadly, though, I didn’t manage to pierce any real seal bulls’ eyes.

  Exasperated, I carried on launching harpoons at the shadows of the bastards beneath the surface, growling at them, ‘Die!’

  All the roosting birds scattered, thinking I’d lost my mind. Even the light on the lighthouse turned away from me, pretending to beckon in one of the matchstick ships, which had since turned into more of a cigar shape. Meanwhile, I continued gritting my teeth, blindly firing the PISS OFF BACK TO THE ARCTIC knitting needle, then the SLIPPERY TWAT javelin into the low tide. Now and then, a seal popped its head out of the water to spite me, honk honk honking, and I felt my temperature rising. I carried on squealing ‘Die!’ at the nature reserve, and the distant metal factories sang ‘Die’ back to me, the word pinging off their shining surfaces.

  I crouched in the sand and sighed. My collection of harpoons was spent already – without them, I suddenly felt cold and pathetic. Off in the North Sea, the sardonic honking of the seals had faded to muted trumpets, leaving me with just the swishing sound of the sea, and a distant police siren. I watched the smoky waste products of the industry twist and pirouette in the night air, like ghost ballerinas. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself, so I just squatted and listened as the distant police siren got more and more pronounced on the wind. At first it was just a whisper, then, suddenly, it was roaring at me from the nature reserve car park, and a man in a CLEVELAND POLICE outfit was striding over the hillock.

  It was time to leave. I shot up from the sand, thrust my hands in my pockets and, Plasticine-legged, hiked back up the sand dunes. I figured one of the birdspotters, or sealspotters, or petro-chemicalplantspotters must’ve spotted me harassing the seals – or heard me crying ‘Die!’ and reported me to the authorities. Choking on the breeze, I sped into the marram grass, kicking empty winkle shells and rusted pebbles. The word ‘Stop!’ rang out behind me, but I didn’t stop. Apparently, Stevie used to come running on the dunes here when he was younger, long before he was tormented here. Gritting my teeth, I imagined myself as a young, strapping Stevie, egging myself along the egglike dunes.

  Two minutes later, I was exhausted. The Arctic gear had turned into a sort of paddling pool, and my nose stung. I couldn’t hear the policeman behind me, so I decided to take a breather, hiding myself in the long, tickly marram grass. I sat there pondering my situation, in the cool of the moon. How had all the raggy threads of my life led me to this? How had I ended up being so nasty, hunting for seals and hiding from the authorities, when all I wanted was to be nice?

  I slurped back snot, feeling wrong in the head, like I couldn’t quite make sense of reality any more. I scanned the dunes for the soft pitter-patter of footsteps, or the twinkle of a CID badge. The whole place was still and silent, though, apart from the cooling towers still steaming away in the distance, like huge grey cups of cream tea.

  In a way, I almost wanted the policeman to come back. Not only would the company be nice, but I might need someone to save me from myself. It was almost tempting to feign madness, to get in the warm of a padded cell for the night – which might well be a sign of madness itself.

  Staying in an insane asylum would at least be like a cheaper, more secure version of living in a flat in the Capital. Plus, I’d be presented with a platter of magical mood stabilisers every day and, with minimal effort, I could keep up the nutty act as long as I fancied. All I had to do was shriek ‘Die’ at people for the rest of my life, with a glazed look in one eye, and I’d be granted free access to a squeaky clean, padded hotel room, with all mad cons.

  I brushed the sweat from my forehead. It did worry me, though, that the men in white coats might expose me as a fraud, after a few prods and probings of my grey matter. Perhaps I was better off disappearing altogether – on a plane to Japan, or encased in cement on the bed of the Thames, or in a battleship-grey unit in South Tottenham – and never bothering anyone again. Either option was preferable to taking the long walk of shame to Stevie’s mam’s in Marton-in-Middlesbrough, and asking for his bed for the night. And having to explain what had gone wrong with my life.

  I slipped out from behind the dunes and stamped back down to the shore. There wasn’t a seal in sight – just the green, swaying marram grass, dancing to the beat of the factories’ off-kilter techno. I pushed onwards, keeping my hood up with one hand as the coat turned from a kind of paddling pool into a kind of kite.

  I wondered if there were many dead bodies lying undiscovered in the depths of the North Sea, gathering seaweed in their ribcages; growing coral on their back molars. I wondered if I should add mine to the collection, and be done with it, once and for all. Just as Mother Nature chose not to strike me down with lightning in the internet caff, I decided to put my fate in the hands of the elements a
gain. I kicked off my boots and waded into the water. I figured I’d either drown, die of hypothermia, or be rescued by lifeguards/policemen/mermen, and get a bed for the night. There wasn’t another National Express back to the Capital for seven hours – so something had to give.

  My feet killed in the surf. I tried to imagine Stevie skinny-dipping in such icy waters – the pain was unbelievable. As I waded through the shallows, I kept stealing glances behind me, praying for that policeman to come back and Baywatch me to safety. After a bit, it was obvious no one was going to come. I walked onwards; my eyes fixed on a wishy-washy horizon I’d never reach. Impromptu Suicide Attempt #7 looked to be a winner. I only wished my heart was in it.

  As the tide crept up to my kneecaps I squawked ‘Die’ again, in a spazzy sort of accent. I felt like the anti-Venus, retreating back to the black murk, all life coming to an end around me. I was ready to drop to my knees when, suddenly, I found myself spasming uncontrollably. I was vibrating. I wondered if I’d gone mad after all, or if it was shock setting in. Of course, it was just my phone going off in one of the Arctic pockets. It was a number I didn’t recognise. My hands carried on vibrating long after I’d pressed ANSWER. I prayed for the Teesside Mental Health Action Unit.

  ‘Hello?’ I groaned, in the spazz accent.

  ‘Hello,’ the phone said back. It turned out to be Malcolm’s dad, calling from the Wethouse in Shepherd’s Bush. I dropped the accent – I didn’t want him to think I was taking the mick out of his boy.

  ‘Kimberly,’ he carried on, ‘how are you, love? So sorry to hear about the restaurant thing. The job. Malc told me. I just thought I’d check in, see how you’re doing and all. Are you looking for work? See, we’re up to our necks in it over here. There’s a bit of a job going, if you want it? Half-decent wage, and all …’