Tortured Minds

by Colin Griffiths

  As I finished tidying the house, my mind was still replaying everything and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that something pure had been taken away from me. Ever since I met Molly I had always desired her, always wanted her and it was that desire that made it real. I never wanted it to be any more than that. It had been a fantasy, just a dream. The feeling of not being able to have her had made our friendship complete. Perhaps that seems hard to understand but that was the way it was with me. I needed that desire, it partly cemented my relationship with both Molly and Daniel. Daniel knew I would never betray him and now I had. In a selfish way, though, I was angry because if I ever succumbed to that desire and made love to Molly, at least, I wanted to bloody well remember it...

  With the place tidy, I sat in my usual spot on the veranda with a coffee and a cigarette. I carried with me the picture of my daughter, Maryann and I sat and studied it. She was indeed beautiful, I couldn’t believe I had found her again. In a couple of hours, I would be seeing her once more. My thoughts were interrupted, surprisingly and I suddenly felt cold as if I had been engulfed with frigid air. Then a horrifying thing happened, as the wind came up around me. I was confused, it was a lovely, sunny day, so why am I suddenly so cold? I dropped the picture of Maryann. NO, I didn’t drop it! It was taken from my hand and I watched as it flew into the air. I made a grab for it and missed, stumbling against the glass side of the veranda. Jumping up, I saw the picture I had kept in my wallet for nearly nine years, float off in the air, away from me.

  My heart missed several beats as, overcome with emotion, I ran down the stairs, almost stumbling on every step until I was outside in the gardens below my veranda. Instinctively I looked up towards the fourth floor of my house and for a fleeting second, I swore I could see someone standing there. In a wild panic, I shook off my imagination and looked around for where Maryann’s picture had gone. After thirty minutes of searching, I had to admit that it was gone and my one keepsake memory had been blown away. This was turning out to be the day from hell. I could only blame one person, the person I was now hell-bent on destroying.

  I showered and changed, trying to cheer myself up with the thought that I would see my daughter again and get to know her a little better. However, for reasons I couldn’t understand, that feeling of euphoria about seeing my daughter had seemed to disappear. I chided myself, hating that I was thinking this way. I needed to get a grip, I mean, after all, despite everything that had gone on, Maryann had to remain the most important thing in my life. I left my home to take the walk to McDonalds, convinced the euphoric feeling would return just as soon as I saw my daughter again.

  As I approached the fast food restaurant, I could see them sitting there at a table. My stomach dropped when I realised they were not alone. There was a lady with them, with a much younger child. I recognised her as the brunette lady from the park. Everyone was already tucking into their meals so I went up to the front counter and ordered myself a coffee before taking a seat at the table next to them, there being no room left on their table for me.

  “Say hello to Jake,” Lucy instructed Maryann on my arrival.

  Maryann glanced up to face me with a look that could kill, muttering “Hi”, before immediately turning back to her meal.

  “It’s so lovely to see you again,” I said to her gently. “I’ve really been looking forward to this.”

  Maryann didn’t respond, not even looking up from her meal. I glanced at Lucy and our eyes locked. She mouthed the words, “Give her some time.”

  I didn’t respond. Instead, I turned to the lady next to her.

  “Was it you I saw at the park yesterday?”

  “Yes, it was,” she replied.

  “I’m Jake, nice to meet you,” I offered.

  “Oh, I know exactly who you are,” came her snarky reply.

  Well, that was a bit of a conversation killer. I just sat and sipped my coffee, watching Maryann. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, as I studied her, trying to remember the picture I no longer had, yet it was still etched in my mind. I had a sudden urge to shout out loud as I felt my emotions overwhelm me. Finally, Maryann spoke, but not to me.

  “Can we go to the park after this, Lucy?” she asked,

  “Yes, we can sweetheart.” Then Lucy turned to me, “would you like to come Jake?” She must have seen the look on my face because she turned back to Maryann. “What have I told you about calling me Lucy,” she scolded her. Maryann looked nonplussed.

  “Sorry Mum .”

  I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, but something wasn’t right and I just had to get out of there. I was confused, partly because I wasn’t expecting the other woman to be there, but also because the image in my head of my daughter and the girl who was sitting there across from me was just not resonating somehow. I stood up.

  “Sorry, I have to leave. I’ll call you Lucy,” and with that I left them there. When I got outside I looked back to where they were sitting. Lucy and the other woman were now both giving me the, ‘if looks could kill’, look. I don’t think Maryann had even realised I had left, as she played with some toy at the table.

  In total confusion I walked around the city, going nowhere, in particular, just smoking and trying to gather my thoughts. It had been a very strange twenty-four hours and it was hard trying to come to terms with it. I found myself a café and ordered an all-day breakfast. It was now early evening and I hadn't eaten anything all day. I had a bottle of Famous Grouse waiting for me at home and it was very much what I needed at this moment in time.

  I was on my third whisky, sitting on my veranda when Daniel appeared. One minute the chair next to me was empty and the next he was sat there. I didn’t know if I was imagining it or if he was really there and to be honest, I didn’t care. I needed him more than anything right now and as always, he delivered. I felt him place his hand on my wrist and he gently squeezed. It didn’t really feel like a hand, but I certainly felt something holding me.

  “It will be okay buddy,” I heard him say.

  I smiled at him and he smiled back. I felt a tear come to my eye. We sat there for an hour, just staring out over the city, Daniel holding my wrist. Then suddenly, as quickly as he’d appeared, he was no longer there and I felt distant and alone once more. I was just about to get myself another whisky when I noticed it and for what seemed the millionth time that day, my heart skipped a beat. On the small side table was a photograph, it was the picture of Maryann, the same photo that had blown away. I knew who had brought it back, only one person would do that. I hugged it to my chest and let the tears flow.

  “Thank you,” I said aloud.

  I knew he would hear me. I went to put the picture back in my wallet as I noticed something written on the back. It wasn’t there before and the ink looked fresh. I cried tears of happiness as I read it.

  ’Keep looking for her buddy

  D.’

  I had one more task to do before I went to bed, something I perhaps should have done earlier, but you know what sort of day I’d had. I had to text Molly. I didn’t want to, but she deserved to know. I typed the words into my phone and sent it to her.

  ‘Please tell me you put a condom on me, as I’m HIV positive.’

  ***

  Chapter 18 – Daniel

  Sadly, I arrived a little too late to stop Molly’s devious and frankly sordid seduction of Jake. I’m not sure quite what I could have done to stop it anyway, that bloody woman was so determined to have everything her own way. I was still testing my abilities in some ways and I wasn’t totally confident in my capability to have intervened anyway. Still, what a disgusting act to have put on poor Jake. The man was clearly suffering and all Molly wanted to do was take advantage of him for her own personal gain. Not for the first time, in recent weeks, I looked at my wife through new eyes. How could I have been so blind? How could I not have seen this coming?

  I knew, right from the get-go, Molly was a manipulative cow, but she dazzled me with her feminine wiles an
d let’s face it, she had the body and the face to match the intellect. A rare combination, I’m sure you’ll agree. I should have been alerted by the whole “false” pregnancy thing, but I was even blind to all that. Who really knows if she was or not... still, it matters not one bloody iota right now. My sole focus is to try to save Jake from her evil clutches and make certain she pays for what I was now almost certain was her deliberate act of letting me go, on that building.

  When I finally did arrive at Jake's it was to see my darling wife writhing on top of an almost comatose Jake. She was milking him for all he was worth. I won’t deny it was quite a turn-on to watch, as an interested bystander, but when she finally released him and I realised Jake wasn’t using a condom, alarms bells rang loudly in my mind.

  Of course, I knew all about Jake’s HIV status. We shared everything. It wasn’t a secret he would have, or indeed, could have kept from me. He’d explained that after University, before he managed to land his first job as a stringer at the paper, he was feeling lost, confused and pretty much worthless. He confided he’d even contemplated suicide on more than one drunken occasion. I was horrified by his admission and extracted a solemn promise from him that if he ever felt that low again he was to call me, whatever the time or place and I would be there for him immediately.

  Jake had always been very, painfully shy when it came to the women. He told me it probably traced back to being bullied at school. Well, things at University had been little better for him. The bullying had ceased, but he just couldn’t pluck up the courage to even talk to a girl, let alone ask one for a date. By the time he graduated, he was probably the only twenty-two-year-old virgin left in Manchester.

  Over the ensuing years he had begun to obsess about his lack of success with women. He explained to me he had become so desperate about losing his virginity, he’d started frequenting massage parlours in the hope he could find a girl who would do “extras” for him. He definitely needed “extras” very badly, he told me. “I needed to pop that damn cherry Danny and then I just knew I’d be more comfortable around women, I knew I would.”

  The problem was, when he finally managed to find some slag, who was prepared to fuck him for fifty quid, he couldn’t get it up. I remember, sitting on the sofa, holding his head in my arms and letting him cry out all the pain as he’d recounted all this to me, one evening after a footy match. He didn’t give up easily though and he went back three or four times trying different girls, all with the same results. That was how he met Lucy actually, she was working at a massage parlour part-time. He told me he still really didn’t even get it up with her, but somehow she must have managed to get something inside her. “After all, Danny, I got her pregnant, didn’t I... with Maryann”.

  I’ll never forget the moment he lifted his head up off my lap and looked at me with those, teary, doe-like eyes of his and muttered, “... and then I did something really dumb Dan... really, really, dumb.”

  I prompted him to carry on and he told me the whole sordid tale.

  After failing to get it up with all the prostitutes, he’d convinced himself he had to be gay. After all, he said, if I can’t get a hard-on for a girl, what else is there? So, in his lost and confused state, Jake went out looking for a boy to pop his cherry. As naive as he was, he had absolutely no idea where to go or how to go about finding a suitable gay partner. He knew as much about the gay dating scene as I knew about contemporary women’s fashion. In desperation, he took to hanging around the local public toilets in the hope of hooking up with someone. It was his bad luck that he did and one evening, on the cold, slippery tiles, bent over a toilet bowl in the filthy stall of a grubby public toilet, Jake was initiated into the world of gay sex. He not only lost his innocence that evening, he gained something dark and pernicious; the HIV virus.

  Fortunately, the virus had never developed into full-blown AIDS, but Jake said he would be on medication for the rest of his life, just to try to keep it in check. It was something that haunted him and made it even harder for him to develop a normal relationship with a woman, or indeed, a man. He used prostitutes, sure, but he explained to me he was always very careful about using a condom and he even admitted he always pulled out just before he came, just in case of a rupture or leakage.

  Ever since he had, so tearfully, explained all this to me, my feelings and love for the man had grown stronger than ever. It seemed like everything Jake touched turned to shit. I felt so much sorrow and empathy for him, all I wanted to do was make his life better and that’s why Molly and I took to spending so much time with him. I’m no longer sure what Molly’s motives were, with regard to Jake, but for me, I just simply loved the man and I wanted him to be happy.

  After I’d seen what the devious Molly had done, I knew it was time to step up to the plate. My death and why it happened no longer seemed to matter. What mattered now was saving my friend and I would do just that. Damn her! I would make her pay, although I chortled at the thought of what her stupid little game had probably garnered her. Time to pay the bitch a little visit, I decided.

  ***

  Molly was busy in the kitchen when I glided through the door. She was very carefully emptying a used condom, full of poor Jake’s jizz, into a small jar. She had a grin on her face and was whistling softly to herself. I recognised the tune; ‘I Did It My Way!’ God, that woman had some bloody nerve, I thought. Once she had squeezed the last drop from the condom, she carefully screwed the top onto her little jar and placed it in her freezer. I supposed she was saving it for later, just in case the real action hadn’t achieved the desired result. I decided it was time to wipe that ridiculous smile off her face.

  After she had closed that freezer door, she calmly disposed of the condom into the rubbish bin and sat at the breakfast bar sipping a cup of tea, every so often chuckling away to herself. My anger was building and I cast around the kitchen for something to grab her attention. Spotting the gleaming, copper-bottomed, frying pans and pots, all hanging neatly in a row on their respective hooks, I focused all my energies on those metallic objects. Inexorably and slowly, at first, they began to sway from side to side. The inevitable happened and one pan crashed into another, with a resounding clang, that rang through the entire kitchen. The smile was gone in an instant. She threw her hands to her mouth and gasped in horror. I laughed at the expression on her face and then roared, even more, when I realised she could actually hear my laughter.

  The fear on her face was palpable. She looked first at the pans that were now rattling against each other in a violent cacophony of sound and then at where she could hear my maniacal laughter. She screamed at the top of her lungs and dived off the stool, running headlong into the downstairs bathroom, where I heard her slam the door and crash the bolt into place. She had actually run right through me and hadn’t even realised it. I struggled to control my laughter and pull myself together. God, I really loved being a spirit sometimes.

  I figured it was going to be some time before she mustered up the courage to emerge from her hidey-hole. I could just imagine her in there, probably curled up on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, crying and panting in terror. Now, what little treat could I leave her to discover when she did finally get the balls to come out and face her fears? Hmmm... the options were plentiful. Noticing the notepad we’d always kept on the refrigerator door to record groceries we needed to buy, I guided the pen to the paper and left her a sweet, little love letter.

  ‘Dear Molly’, it began, ‘I know all about your, soon to be famous article, about the pain of losing a husband. How convenient for you then that I died, wasn’t it? It rather makes the whole article more poignant somehow and, of course, more “award winning” too, don’t you think? Don’t worry bitch, you’ll get all the rewards that are coming to you, be very sure of that!’.

  That task successfully completed, I metaphorically rubbed my hands together and decided it was time to pay Lucy a visit. I wanted to find out what I could about her and Maryann... and this time, she wouldn�
�t be kicking me in the nuts again.

  ***

  When I glided into their house, Lucy and Maryann were seated at the kitchen table, eating dinner. Dinner appeared to be a very “healthy” meal of fish fingers and chips. I groaned inwardly as I looked around the place. It was a veritable tip. The sink was stacked high with dirty dishes, old food still clinging tenaciously to the plates. There was an air of damp, mould, and stale cigarette smoke all through the downstairs part of the house. Frankly, it was disgusting and no environment for a young girl to have to endure. I recoiled when I saw what was obviously Lucy’s drug paraphernalia; syringes, needles, a small burner, rubber tourniquets and several glassine packets of white powder just sitting openly on the bench-top, easily reachable by enquiring young hands.

  My God, I thought. I wondered if Maryann sensed my presence as she looked up directly at me and smiled as I entered. I’d heard children were more sensitive to the psychic phenomenon than adults, so perhaps it was true. I gave her a broad smile and held one finger to my lips to signify silence, just in case, she could actually see me. Maryann smiled back and nodded her head gleefully.