“I thought you'd gone forever. You've been out of it for two days like a bloody zombie!” Lenny said to me.
I was in the stained bath at Lenny's place. He'd been plunging me into cold water to see if he could break me out of my catatonic state. I was wet through and fully dressed in the same dirt stained clothes I'd arrived in.
“You've got to stop doing this. Throw those clothes away. Stop doing the acid!” Lenny said.
The memory of me in the bath knew what Lenny was talking about. I was starting to get the idea I'd been at Lenny's for more than two days.
“I'm trying to forget what Bob did. I take the acid to go somewhere else. I don't know why I keep putting these clothes on,” the other me told Lenny.
At this Lenny punched me hard in the face, stunning me with a blow to the jaw. After the blow he started to rip every shred of clothing from my body, and pushed everything into a large carrier bag until I was naked. Not even the shoes were spared. All my fine bird pulling clothes from the old days disappeared. Lenny fumbled in his pocket and produced a small glass bottle, and from it he took a very tiny pill.
He grabbed my face in a vicious handhold, his fingers bruising my cheeks. Forcing my mouth open he pushed this small white pill between my teeth and then put his hand across my mouth until I swallowed.
“You either forget whatever it is, or go and sort it out with Bob! If you don't straighten up you can fuck off out of my house!” Lenny shouted as he marched to the door with a bag of soiled clothes I'd never see again.
It was one of those drifting memories. The next thing I was in the same bath naked and wet with warm water, half drunk on champagne. Sharing the now very clean bath with me was a pretty girl. We were both drunk and having a whale of a time. Lenny staggered past the door with a very dark-haired naked girl clutching his not inconsiderable hairy girth. He disappeared into another room with a look over a shoulder and a big wink of the eye.
“Things are looking up, and by the look of it everything's looking up!” Lenny said, laughing as he left the room.
The next thing I'm laid back on Lenny's sofa watching snow come down outside. Months had passed since the August day when I set off to lose my virginity. Things were very different in the house. The room was decorated and furnished with good taste. The dirt covered broken old furniture had disappeared. Lenny was bent over a small desk in the corner, a very nice bureau, possibly an antique. After a few minutes in which I was content to watch the snow, Lenny stood up from the desk in his usual lumbering manner and came over to me. The wad of notes must have contained £500 in a variety of denominations. You could put a deposit on a nice house for less.
“Here's your share this week. We're doing really well. Are you going to buy the place in town or that poncey flat?” Lenny asked.
I watched as the other me put the wad of money with a confidence I've never possessed into his top pocket, then the other me announced his intentions.
“I'm buying both. The poncey flat for me and the place in town as a base when I'm pissed or I find a pretty girl,” I said. I was laughing all the while and smug with my success.
Lenny threw me a can of beer, one of those new ring pull ones. I pulled the tab and the bloody beer squirted in my face and all over my new clothes. It was burning my skin and I was nauseous with the movement. Everything was wrong. Seawater surrounded me on all sides, and because I was alone in the open ocean the only shadow in burning sunlight was cast by my solitary figure. All around me this water burnt into my skin like a million fire ants trying to devour my body. I was screaming loud and long but nobody could hear me. I wasn't drowning, I was burning to death.
Such pain, such a time trapped inside it without release. One minute or was it five minutes? I had no idea. People quote things from the movies, “like a sea of pain”, and I was immersed in it. So intense was the burning that I believed it had reached my bones. I was trying to drown myself without success. This time I couldn't scream at the pixie to put me out. My lungs were burning on the inside full of corrosive liquid. This time I was going to die, going to crumble away to nothing in a sea of acid.
My mouth was full of liquid. I was going to drown and not suffer this agony for much longer. There was no saltiness to this water, it tasted like real ale. My eyes were closed tight in an effort to prevent the acid water dissolving them. Hops and barley persuaded me to open them.
Across the table Jennifer was putting her glass down and smiling at me. I was dry.
“I've never seen anybody underwater for eight minutes. Pretty impressive,” she said, then asked me an important question. “Where would you like to eat in Paris?”
Things were looking up. That's if you consider chronic fatigue and urinal incontinence are improvements over before. The other option: you don't have treatment and your disease metastasises into bone cancer or other secondary cancers. So, all in all, things were looking up. The treatment was over, but I had to wait for three months until next blood tests which could reveal if it had all been for nothing.
I'd fought my way through the last week, every day a struggle, with one goal in mind. To finish the treatment and say goodbye to all my friends in the radio club. With that goal taken away from my sight line, fatigue from radiation sickness grabbed me with both hands throwing me down a hole into what I knew wasn't depression.
Totally fatigued? The doctor usually assumes you're depressed. This is the most depressing thing about doctors. I wasn't depressed I was tired from radiation sickness. Once again I'd retreated into the cool dark of the cave house. Being half alive with drowsiness wasn't helping fight my desire for absorption in alternative universe. The last few times when returning from the sensual universe my emotional response had changed.
The last couple of journeys into paradise I'd woken with emotions more muted in their angst. As I learn more about my dark period (my wilful insomnia) I suffer far less from the feelings of a dark hidden guilt. I suppose with some of the truth now in my consciousness I no longer have secrets prisoner in a tortured corner of my psyche. The new emotion I experience is regret, a large regret that I live in this hard and dull world. Though I've fought against it, I remain addicted to Jennifer and all the sensations of the alternative reality. I am determined to break this habit, but conversely I hope to visit the other reality periodically for the rest of my life. I need this to survive.
Courage is a strange word. People keep telling me how brave I am, how courageous I've been against the cancer. In truth at first I was terrified, then I came to except my illness, after which what do you do? Curl up in a ball and die? The alternative is to fight.
Rachel's courage came from a cold corner of hatred. She had to kill Maximilian Hauser by thrusting a Nazi ceremonial dagger through his evil heart. This vile beast of a man had kept her alive by using her as a sex slave. He'd made her his toy, gave her food, kept her away from disease and the gas chambers. Rachel knew she may not exist if it hadn't been for his sexual cruelty. Then she thought about the poor other girls who he shot in the face, one whilst in the act of so-called lovemaking! She had survived because her young body had looked like a prepubescent woman, and he had some unaccountable fixation with her.
She was staying with Mila once more. Five days had passed in which she sat in the window seat and watched the traffic go by. Sometimes she would read an Agatha Christie murder novel; this wasn't to give her ideas for the execution. Was it only to pass the time? She knew standing face-to-face with Maximilian was the way she wanted to kill him. At the moment he realized the beautiful shapely woman in front of him was his little Rachel she would drive the dagger through his heart and look into his eyes. Once he'd looked into Rachel's eyes as he shot another girl in the face. Smiling, always smiling.
On the sixth day after several intense personal arguments, Rachel decided she would execute him that evening. Months earlier she'd stalked him all the way to his exclusive apartment where she waited and watched until a light came on in a fourth floor room. She hung around watching the window, and finally was rewarded by a sighting of Maximilian as he strolled past the window his head buried in a large book.
Later that same day as darkness took the light, Rachel walked round the back of the building to discover that the staff, one porter and a caretaker, propped the fire door open so they could slip out for a fag. Even in the early 1950s in this class of establishment only the clients could smoke in the hallways. The staff members were always polite and never smoked; not in front of the gentlefolk. This would be her point of entry, and if it was closed she would have to think of something else.
To prepare herself she dressed in the oldest clothes she could find. They would be incinerated in the heating boiler down in the basement of her sister's block of flats. It was so premeditated. She carried a roll up plastic mackintosh, not to put on before the murder. She had brought this to cover the bloodstains because she wanted time after the murder to feel the life force outside his body, proof in the stains on her clothes that this death blood was real and not some illusion. She arrived at 6:30pm. It was dark and the light was on. He was at home. At that moment a new panic emerged, Rachel never imagined he might live with someone, and at the eleventh hour this disturbing idea came to her. What if he had a wife and children? Could she slaughter the pig in front of people who almost certainly wouldn't know his crimes? The rear fire door was propped open, only an inch, but it was open.
Rachel was very careful not to make a sound as she pulled at it. She could not stop herself and impulse had her stepping inside all too quick to look casual. If somebody watching had seen her, suspicious would be the only word to describe the way she was acting. It wasn't dark enough, it wasn't late enough and she wasn't sure if she was courageous enough. She could hear the sound of a radio playing in a small room by the front entrance. This would be the doorman's cubicle where he rested when he didn't have duties to perform. He was listening to some music on the BBC, humming along with the string section.
The service stairs didn't leave the front entrance hall. Her luck was in because they went up towards the rear of the building only a few feet from the back fire door. Fate seemed to want this thing to happen, giving her a good hand to play.
The building was a very fine example of art deco architecture. The entrance hall was glass fronted with a full sweep of curved glass broken up into dozens of small panes by a curved steel frame. This was repeated all the way up the main stairwells for five floors. Maximilian lived in the second apartment to the right on the fourth floor. Coming from the back of the building she would only be visible through the front glazing for a few moments. The gods were with her that night because the light bulb on the fourth floor stairwell was broken. Her visit to Maximilian's would be unseen. The door she must knock on would be the second along the corridor. Would she hold her nerve and knock?
She was going to talk her way into his apartment if she could find the courage. On the way across London she'd bought a clipboard and would pretend to be from the water board, surveying who had lead pipes that needed removing. Copper was now the thing and the lead dangerous to your health. She laughed at herself. This was her plan and it didn't inspire her. With her nerves in tatters she reached his door. It was a massive oak structure with a huge brass knob in the middle. The door also featured a spy hole but not the modern tiny glass monocular. This was a four-inch square eye level hatch. You could see out and, but with the massive door as protection, nobody could get in.
Rachel could hear music playing inside the apartment. This was no old-fashioned record player. He owned a radiogram that played those new long-playing records. She could tell by the quality of the sound. Wagner, he was playing Wagner, and singing along with it. This gave her confidence because Maximilian's singing was as atrocious as it was loud. With her ear pressed to the door the full power of his terrible singing could be heard. This convinced Rachel he lived alone. No wife or child could stand such an awful sound. His singing made her want to kill him all the more, plus she hated Wagner.
A minute passed, followed by another agonisingly slow minute, after which another minute passed. Her arm was frozen by her side. The music played on and the arm disobeyed any order inside her head to make a move. It was frozen solid, incapable of knocking on the door, incapable of acting out this slaughter. The record finished and all was silent for about a minute until Beethoven burst onto the scene. The intro to the fifth sounded like somebody knocking on the door. For reasons she couldn't understand, her arm decided to move in synchronicity along with Beethoven's music.
Da da da, daaa. Knock, knock, knock, knock! Her eyes opened wide in surprise. What the hell was she doing? She was a pregnant Jewish woman attempting to kill her Nazi persecutor in the hallway of a nice London apartment block. She'd never get away with it. He'd realise who she was and murder her along with her unborn child, my future friend Bob.
“Alright, alright, I'm coming, no need to make too much of a fuss!” Maximilian shouted above the music. From the sound of his voice he was only feet from the door, and she was only moments from attempted murder. No, not attempted murder, but rightful execution. She could hear him fumbling, but not with the door lock. No, he was fumbling with the little door, the spy hole. The plan melted away in less than a second, and in less than another second she turned and ran, making the corner onto the landing before the spy hole opened. She told me she could hear him bellowing through the hole, something about the bloody doorman being a lazy idiot! The sound of his angry voice made her shiver in terror, she was fifteen again and naked at his behest.
Rachel didn't slow until the ground floor where the radio played on and possibly the doorman slept on, though Rachel would never know this. She started the six-mile walk back to her sister's by throwing the Nazi dagger and the clipboard into a dustbin in a nearby alleyway. Crying a deep mournful sob with every step away from Maximilian's apartment she was as low as possible, and every step back towards her sister took her away from the stainless steel blade. She was halfway back walking in the rain, the water on her face hiding sorrowful tears.
This was the moment fate told Rachel it wanted her to take his life. Outside a public house, a poor excuse for a pub, the low end of the low end, a couple were arguing.
“Always think you're right, don't you? You're a stupid bitch!” the red-faced skinny man was shouting.
“You don't tell me what to do you drunken slob!” a little sparrow of a woman in poor clothes was screaming back at him.
He hit her as hard as he could in the face, his fist catching her between the nose and her top teeth. Blood spurted everywhere as she fell to the floor.
“That's what a real man can do. Don't you know you women are nothing? Stupid cow!” He turned without looking at her and walked back into the pub for some more drink. She was nothing!
Other people rushed out of the pub to help the woman crumpled in a miserable heap on the floor. Rachel could see the thuggery in this man's brutal attack, and this brought back memories of brutal buggery by Maximilian. If only one man in the world wasn't going to get away with his crimes it was that German, that Nazi officer. The thin man came bursting out from the pub doors. A heavy set grey old man had him by the throat, and he was beating him without mercy, all the while whispering to the skinny man, “If you wanna fight, fight a man!” Rachel was frozen to the spot watching this tableau unfold. A big crowd was forming and she could hear a police whistle. This wasn't a time to get involved with something like this.
Panic had set in. She had lost the SS ceremonial dagger. It was in some dustbin. She knew exactly where it was, in an alleyway one street after the apartments, three miles away, and no telling who could have looked in the bins since she threw it there. She started to run, and this wasn't difficult because she wore flat shoes put on for balance if she got into a fight with Maximilian. By the time she arrived at the dustbins she couldn't tell if she was soaked in sweat or rain. She had to get the dagger back. She had to use it on him tonight!
Rachel started to search in the over laden dustbin. The clipboard could be seen clearly lying on the top of the rotting garbage. The dagger was nowhere.
Old vegetables and God knows what else filled those bins. She didn't care about the squalor. Rachel dug furiously into the stinking rubbish, it had to be found. The dagger which carried brutal significance in her plan had slipped down the side of the rubbish to the bottom of the bin where it was half buried in a stinking jelly of rotten goo. She didn't care. It was a glorious moment. The weapon had returned to her hands. There wasn't a thought for the stench of rotting food on her clothes. Her hands were black with this sticky filth, but she didn't care. Nothing so trivial was going to move her from her purpose. She was blinded by the desire to kill, blinded by the desire to penetrate his body.
It was a lot quieter now. I was nodding off.
I suppose transport of information could be looked on as lines or conduits. This is what I was starting to think on reflection about my parallel universe. I slipped off into a dream remembering nothing of Rachel joyously standing in the rain in rapture at finding her ceremonial dagger. I was now in the best of all worlds, waiting for the train, or the bus, or the ferryboat.
I had a feeling of
déjà vu
because we were sitting across another table from each other. This time no breeze played in Jennifer's hair. The boat was fully glazed, and the interior was
haute cuisine
, beautiful white tablecloths covered in an array of crystal brilliance. There was a glass for absolutely everything in the world you could possibly think of, and in this universe, some you couldn't. We were enjoying a very fine steak, and I don't think the flame had kissed it for more than three seconds. It was melt in the mouth delicious, and in this world delicious meant out of this world. The boat moved along with a smooth elegance. A string quartet played light lyrical music in the bows of the restaurant, and our conversation was intimate and fascinating. The whole day passed slowly in an array of light, sounds, smells and stunning sensation.
No briefcase was visible, no pixie anywhere to be seen, nothing to spoil this perfect day. We were finishing the gourmet experience with a gin and tonic, a beautiful effervescent green gin from France. This was the perfect
coup de grace
to the whole afternoon. I placed my empty glass on the table looking at the melting ice in the bottom, when Jennifer pointed something out to me. In the bottom of my glass among the ice I spotted the dead fly.