Delete-Man: A Psychological Thriller

Delete-Man

by Johnny
Vineaux

I tore the carpets up
from the edges of the room but found nothing underneath. Then I
broke off all the legs from the desk and chair—still nothing. I
tore the mattress apart, broke some of the bed frame, and ripped
open the pillows. Slammed the window open to the cold November
gusts that came in off the street and felt around outside under the
windowsill.

After a while, I didn’t
need the pretence of looking for something. I punched the walls
until my fingers were raw and limp. I threw myself around and
kicked at the furniture—put my foot through the window.

Then I ran outside. I
ran forever. Everything appeared to me in various shades of black.
I only felt my gasping breath and pounding feet. I ended up in an
alleyway by some bins and collapsed to my knees.

Everything faded. I
hadn’t lost focus like that since I was a kid. I lost my sense of
time: of reality. I felt like a speck in some vast blackness,
grasping for thought.

Maybe I could have
dropped dead right then, extinguished my bare sliver of an
existence through decision alone. Perhaps I could have given up.
Become cold and impersonal to life, but still somehow living. I
don’t know, because I didn’t do that.

Instead I chose to
return to reality. To refocus, gather my unravelled thoughts, and
relinquish that unreal moment. I came back, but I brought with me a
knot. Deep in the pit of my gut. It twisted inside me. A perpetual,
overbearing sense of something unresolved.

The school doors opened and kids
came running out of them like freed animals. Vicky skipped towards
me, all flapping arms and dirty-brown locks. She was a cute girl.
Her killer green eyes made me think she would grow up to be a
heartbreaker, but her gangly, awkward way of moving hinted
otherwise. She was only a few years away from puberty, so I would
find out soon enough.

She took my hand and we joined
the parade of homeward-bound families. As we walked she repeatedly
threw her head back, puffed out her cheeks, then bowed her head
down as if bobbing under water. She screeched weirdly from her
throat.

“What are you being?”

“I’m a dolphin.”

“Ah, nice. What kind of
dolphin?”

“A fast dolphin.”

A young boy from Vicky’s class
pointed towards us. I glanced at him just before his mother pulled
his hand down and dragged him away. Vicky noticed and dragged me in
another direction, making the screeching noises even louder.

“Eeegh! Eeegh! Aaeegh! Do you
know what I just said?”

“What?”

“I said your name in
dolphin.”

“You speak dolphin?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you teach me?”

“I don’t know. Depends if you do
your homework.”

I laughed, pushing the pang of
defensiveness to the back of my mind. It had blown over, mostly.
The whispers of ‘one-armed bandit’, the diverted glances, and the
kind of brazen attention unique to children that I used to get. I
had been picking Vicky up from school for over a year. The
fascination had worn off for most of them.

When we arrived home I went
straight to the kitchen, a small area segmented from the living
room.

“Are you hungry?’ I asked.

“Yes!”

“Do you know what dolphins
eat?”

“...”

“Fish.”

“Ewww! But they are fish!”

“Dolphins aren’t fish.”

“Yes they are!”

“No.”

“What are they?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Tell me!”

“You’ll have to find out
yourself.”

Vicky scrambled to the computer
in the corner of the living room and turned it on. If there was one
genetic trait we shared it was the need to understand things.
Neither of us could stand secrets. I used her curiousity all the
time to get her to learn, although she probably knew it was a
trick.

Half an hour later she gave me a
full lecture on the definition of mammals, the birth process of
fish, and the games dolphins play, then asked me if we could have
one as a pet. I told her I’d look into it. I warmed up some grilled
sardines and we ate them with vegetables and rice in front of the
TV.

In the middle of a cartoon the
phone rang.

“Hello, can I speak to Joseph
please?”

“Yeah that’s me. Who is
this?’

“O my God! Have you lost your
mind?! The landlord just saw what you did to Josie’s room—”

“Monika?”

“—and is asking me to pay for
the damage. Three hundred pounds, Joseph. You’re gonna have to call
him and sort this out.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry about that.
I’ll pay.”

“He’s going mad. I’ll give you
his number so call him as soon as you can.”

“I’ll just come by
sometime.”

“Call him, Joseph. He’s angry
and has just spent the past two hours here taking it out on
me.”

“I’ll sort it out. I’ll come by
Friday. I want to talk to you as well.”

“I’m busy all this week,
Joseph.”

“I’ll bring the money.”

“God. You’re such a pain... I’m
going out on Friday. Come round about five or six then. Can you get
three hundred pounds by then?”

“Yeah, don’t worry.”

“Ok, I’ll see you then.”

“Bye.”

After lunch, I worked out with a
dumbbell and ran for an hour whilst Vicky occupied herself with
books and the computer. I pushed my body harder than usual but a
sense of frustration remained. There was a fog over my thoughts
that wouldn’t clear. I let my mind wander, and it kept turning up
the same idea. I spun it over and over in my mind, wondering what
Monika would make of it when I told her.

Vicky was asleep by eight—or at
least pretending to be. I knew she would sometimes read by
torchlight or listen to her cd player under the covers. After
wasting a few hours in front of the TV I slung on my coat and went
out.

Was it synchronicity that put
those memorial flowers by the lamppost? The flattened pigeon, the
ambulance, the murder story on the news board. Everything seemed
somehow imbued with death, as if the world had felt the loss as
much as I.

I walked aimlessly, lost in
thought, finding myself by the river Thames, along one of the quiet
alleyways along the north side where people rarely go but there are
still benches. It was cold. November winds in full flow. On warmer
days, Josephine and I had passed along the north bank a couple of
times. I remembered comfortable silences, affectionate grasps, and
silly conversations. Like Vicky, she’d always walk on my left so I
could hold her hand.

We’d spoken about suicide once.
She had thought about it before, she said, but could never have
gone through with it. I was surprised. She pulled up her sleeves
and showed me the marks. Blushing slightly, she referred to being
‘stereotypically teenager’. I had joked about my own arm and we
left the subject. Death was nowhere near us then.

I remembered it with a flinch of
regret. I had said suicide was weak and selfish. Something only
idiots with no responsibility did. Maybe I had taken her for
granted. I should have spoken less, and listened more.

I tried to imagine her in that
room, sitting on the bed with the bottle of pills in her hand;
thinking. What would she have thought about? Me? The picture didn’t
feel right.

‘Was there anything in
particular troubling her?’ the policeman had asked me, and the
question still echoed inside my head, because it was something I
felt I ought to know—that I did know. ‘She had no reason to kill
herself,’ I replied.

*

I rapped my knuckles and waited,
feeling a little strange to be outside her house once again. Monika
opened the door in a towel. She was almost six-foot. All long limbs
and sharp features, but there was something unrefined about her
that hinted at a tough upbringing. London was full of girls like
her; Eastern Europeans born and raised in places with little money
or prospects, who came to London and found themselves by way of
having thin bodies and sullen good looks in the right place, with
the right opportunities. Suddenly thrust from one end of society to
the other.

She said hello and turned back
into the house.

“Do you want something to drink?
There’s a beer in the fridge, or you can have tea.”

“Yeah, tea would be great.”

I followed her into the kitchen.
We knew each other, but only barely. We had had brief, superficial
hallway conversations, eaten meals together, and the occasional
lazy Sunday morning or tired weekday evening in front of the TV:
Her, Josephine, and me. There wasn’t much about Monika that
interested me. Josie had sang her praises often, but to me Monika
was a regular girl with good looks.

I was also reminded, as I took a
seat in the kitchen, that Monika was someone who could not remain
still for more than a few seconds. In the kitchen a radio blared, a
pot was exuding some hot exotic aroma, and upon the table, amongst
some jeans that she was apparently altering, there lay a whole
basket full of make-up. She leaned over a mirror on the counter and
meticulously applied foundation. A few touches later, she swiftly
moved from the counter to the cooker, put the kettle on, then
grabbed the jeans from the table and began deftly jabbing a needle
into them whilst talking.

“It’s nice to see you again,
actually. I didn’t think I would. How have you been then,
Joseph?”

“Not bad. How about you?”

“O God. Busy. Work is crazy
right now. I’m going to a store opening tonight—ugh.”

“Is that for the modelling
company?”

“The agency? Yeah, kind of. I’ve
been doing more admin work for them than modelling recently though.
I’m a bit tired of it to be honest.”

“Yeah, I know. I hate being
objectified for my looks, too.”

It took her a few seconds to see
I was joking.

“Funny.”

“Are you saying I’m not good
looking?”

She laughed immediately this
time.

“No, you’re fine looking. Your
clothes are a bit drab though. So you don’t have a job still?”

“Not now, living off disability
benefits. Who’s going to hire me anyway?”

She stopped stirring the pot on
the stove and turned to look at me properly for the first time
since I’d arrived.

“I don’t want to sound funny,
but there are a lot of jobs you could do still. And a lot of places
actually try—”

“—to hire guys with one arm,
yeah. To fill quotas and get tax cuts. You think I want to be some
token for a company? Like I said, I don’t like being
objectified.”

She winked sympathetically at
me.

“Good point.”

I picked up the cat that had
begun clawing at my jeans. Monika left briskly, clutching her bath
towel above her breasts. She returned holding a small make-up
pencil and went back to applying make-up. A tacky song began
playing on the radio. The unspoken subject hung in the air, neither
of us comfortable enough yet to introduce it.

The electric kettle clicked.

“I’ve got it. Don’t worry.”

I pulled cups and teabags from
the cupboards, just as I had done before for Josephine in that same
kitchen.

“You want one too?”

“No. I’m fine, thanks.”

I sat back down with my tea and
played a little with the cat, who was now perched on the table and
playfully boxing my thumb. When he got bored and left I pulled the
money out of my pocket and put it on the counter.

“Here’s the money. Sorry about
what happened.”

Monika shot me an embarrassed
look before taking the money and placing it inside a cookie
tin.

“Thanks. I’m sorry about that,
but our landlord has been hassling me every day since he saw the
room.”

For a second I almost drew
attention to her saying ‘our’.

“What were you thinking, Joseph?
That room was destroyed.”

“I don’t know. I mean... I
just...”

Monika turned the stove off and
sat down next to me.

“It’s ok, Joseph. Never
mind.”

“When is the funeral?”

“Next week. Sunday, I
think.”

“I’ve not even been
invited.”

“That’s her mum. You know what
she’s like.”

“Yeah. But still, the funeral
isn’t about her. It’s about Josie.”

“You want me to talk to
her?”

I shook my head and sipped my
tea. Monika watched me.

“I can’t even think properly
these days. I spent the other night walking up and down the Thames
remembering random things like some madman.”

“I remember things all the time.
I lived with her for over a year, Joseph.”

“It’s like I’m on drugs or
something, numb all the time. I remember things, and it’s nice, but
then I always have to come back to reality, and that...”

“I know, Joseph.”