DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF By Anonymous (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (3 page)

             
Later, I convinced myself that she had turned up at my shitty basement flat disguised as a prospective flat-mate. I refused to take this “applicant” seriously. When she asked where the toilet was, for instance, I resisted the urge to applaud. I thought it hilarious that she, having been in the flat hundreds of times, should ask me so convincingly anything about it. She knew more about it than I did since I was very often in blackout. But I wasn’t about to ruin her little sketch. I received each query with a congratulatory smile and answered tongue-in-cheek. Smiling too broadly and nodding knowingly, I showed the young woman out.

             
She didn’t take the room.

             
So there’s me. My baby’d left me for another guy, who had his own flat, a car and a coat. I was entering a world of pain…not all of it mine.

             
Cue the country music.

2.

             
So now I was ready to pass on my learning to the uninitiated. The unhurt. The innocents. With the girlfriend out of the way I’d be better able to dedicate myself. I was seriously pissed off and all I wanted was for others to feel this too.

             
Especially girls. A girl had caused it so a girl would have to pay. I wanted to hurt. It was a whole new world to me. I’d never known it was possible to be hurt so much. I’d been beaten up lots of times and it was nothing like this.

             
I hadn’t expected physical pain. A burning sensation in my chest as if a large smoldering boulder had somehow lodged there overnight. A kind of drawn-out slowly unfolding panic. The exact opposite of excitement. Accompanying this were shooting pains running downward along the back of my arms.What was this? Rejection? Was it really this tangible? All I could think about was that if I could be hurt like this then surely I could also cause it in others.This consoled me.

             
I studied and stored away each new flinch of discomfort. I recorded what had happened and how it affected me. I called and asked her answering machine to hurt me. To be free, I needed to hate her. It was over but I couldn’t bear the fact that I still needed her. So I begged her to hurt me, which she did by refusing to. Meanwhile, I stumbled into London’s night in search of hearts to stab.

             
A teacher from Ireland. Twenty-five-ish. A virgin. No, really. She said I had ”an enviable command of the English language.” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do to her. The answer came to me when I slipped into her bed after cooking my special boned chicken, the preparation of which scared even me because it involved so much tearing of flesh from bone. She was engaged to be married. I hated her for that. It emerged in conversation that being a virgin embarrassed her. She didn’t want her fiancé to find her still intact on their wedding night.

             
I didn’t know where to start.

             
Teach her some filthy tricks that would sow seeds of doubt in the mind of the groom? For instance, I’ve never thought much of a girl who swallows. Don’t get me wrong it feels fantastic and I’m aglow with gratitude at the time but only a slut would ever actually do something like that. Not the behaviour of a wife-to-be.

             
Somehow it was obvious that I should leave her virginity intact. It became about him. How to hurt him through her. Anal sex? That would still leave her a virgin. Did she really want to lose her virginity or was she bluffing? After a huge bottle of wine, most of which I drank from the bottle, I was supposed to sleep on the couch.

             
This I did until 4  when I awoke with a stiffy and slipped in beside her, finding only token resistance. She really did want to lose it. But I didn’t like the idea of me as sexual plumber. I wanted to be present on her wedding night. I wanted her body to remember mine the way I remembered Penelope’s. I began to lick her out. For two hours. When she became too sensitive I waited and started lapping again very gently.

             
I looked up now and then to tell her how beautiful she was. I blew cool air on her. I stroked the insides of her thighs and tried to imagine I was in love with her, behaving accordingly. I pushed a finger in and could feel the stalactite of her hymen. I was careful not to break it. At one point, I had a finger either side. She raised her hips offering the pelvic cup to me. I sipped and drank noisily, satisfied that her wedding night would be the first of many nights of sexual frustration as she tried to communicate her sexual needs to hubbykins without indicating a lack of sexual prowess on his part. It provided an incentive to develop her very own “enviable command of the English language.”

             
Next came Lizzie. She had her own flat. Beautiful hardwood floors and lovely high ceilings. She also had hairs on her arse. That was crime enough but crime number two? She really liked me.

             
Soon take care of that.

             
She was freshly jilted from a long-term relationship and was very delicate. I had two others on the go when we met for our first date. My nervousness made Lizzie more comfortable. She thought it was because I was unsure of her feelings for me.

             
The truth was less endearing.

             
I was an alcoholic who needed a drink.

I ended up having sex with her on the kitchen floor in the middle of her making some bullshit vegetarian meal. On the dirty tiles as the pots boiled symbolically overhead. The windows steamed up. Her face. Looking up at me in disbelief, her chin buried under her pushed-up jumper and bra. Eyes wide. Childlike. After I left her there like that, I never saw her again. Later, she left a message on my machine saying I’d raped her.

             
Emotionally speaking maybe I did rape her, but physically she was up for it. No question about it. She was loving it. I could see her already storing away the memories as I fucked her. Her face scanning up and down recording the images like a flesh covered camera, close-up of his face, pan down for a wide-shot of the action below…cut.

             
Maybe there is a law after all. Of nature. Like gravity. An unwritten axiom that governs our emotional dealings. What you do comes back to you with twice the force, fuck it, three times the force. We are not punished for our sins we are punished by them.

             
From the moment I met Jenny, I knew I was going to hurt her. It was just a matter of where and when. I suppose it was no fault of hers that she even looked a little like Pen. It was that fact that seemed to sanction my actions. After being out all night, I was reluctantly heading in the general direction of what I mockingly referred to as home, when I realized I needed more booze. There was never enough of the stuff. I even dreamt about it. One night I was drinking whiskey and even as it was going down my throat I was thinking, “I want a drink.” Tricky one.

             
Anyway, one of the main obstacles to getting more booze was lack of money. And money ran out because I couldn’t always depend on getting more freelance art direction. I had no rent to speak of since I was ripping off the local council who paid my rent and electricity. All I had to do was go and sign on the dole once every two weeks.

             
Parties were a good source, especially parties nearing some sort of end. The amateurs were either passed out on the floor or tucked up at home in their little beds.

             
The music. The brightly lit window. I didn’t have to be Sherlock to figure out there was going to be a fridge full of booze. Everyone brought something to appear generous. Especially if the area was fairly well-to-do but that was a bit more difficult because I had to have my wits about me for the inevitably intricate verbal exchanges. I had to resist bursting into flames with the fury I felt towards these fuckers. I hated these people most of all. The ones who had their lives given to them, who, in my mind, never had to work, who didn’t appreciate what they had. As a teenager in Kilkenny I’d had to pick sugar beet in freezing cold fields, wearing only old socks as gloves. The beet would freeze in the furrows and we’d have to kick each one out of its frozen hard earthen socket before snagging the stalk with beet knives. The term “hard work” is relative.

             
So I’d press the buzzer and say,

             
“Sorry I’m late.”

             
The door would open and I couldn’t help smiling as I took the stairs three at a time. If it wasn’t already open, the door soon would be. I never looked like a drunk, I just was a drunk. In I went. Hit the toilet first and either puked up to make room for new booze or just get the lay of the land. Then the fridge. Oh, happy white oblong. A miniature hospital in a bruised world.

             
The clink of music as it opened. The glow from within. There. A full and as yet unopened bottle of cheap wine with some assorted cans of beer, stragglers from six-packs.

             
Back to the living room with the wine and got it into a pint glass so that I wasn’t clutching a bottle that might be recognized by its owner.

             
And there she was. Sitting on a couch all alone. Alone on a couch at 4am, at a party where only three people were left standing and I was one of them. Long legged and elegant and definitely out of place, she reminded me of a Vogue photo shoot. Beautiful girl in dingy surroundings. The rich well-read daughter of some English MP slumming it in Camberwell.

             
Anyway, I vowed to fuck her up as soon as I plunked down beside her. Even in my very comatose state, I knew that asking her to dance, though not being able to get out of the couch, was endearing. Dancing with a pint of wine in one hand and a joint in the other was mischievous. Before either of us knew it, we were kissing.

             
Two weeks later she’s throwing beer in my face and three hours after that I notice her car parked outside my shitty basement flat. I was drunk and wavering on my bicycle. She was in a Ford something or other. As soon as I turned the corner, the car started up and jolted ferociously forward.

             
The vehicle resembled a mechanized insect that had had its legs plucked and was being poked awake for new tortures. I laughed loud enough for her to hear through the open window, which emitted cigarette smoke.

             
I tried to behave like I was on a horse. She started the engine again and steered it angrily away. Angrily because I could hear gears being shoved around. What had caused this futile display of emotion? Mere words.

             
Earlier that evening she had asked me how I had enjoyed my weekend.

             
“Not bad.” I said. “Got laid.”

             
Stunned she looked at me with the same inquisitive smile that belonged to the question she had just asked.

             
Beer hit my face with such force I thought she’d slapped me. But I had not just delivered the line; it had been accompanied by The Smirk. Penelope had felt its girth and now it was Jenny’s turn. I’d never had beer thrown in my face before. It was flattering. Jenny rose, whipped her jacket from the back of her chair and left. After slowly licking some splashed beer from my lips, I exchanged a look with the barman that said Chicks! and returned to my as yet untouched beer. Not for long.

             
Speaking of slapping and the art of The Smirk, it had been a long time since I begged to be beaten up. The Swan in South London was the ideal setting for just such a beating.

             
Very Irish, very fist-happy. Many many bouncers. They’d stand on stools, the better to police the goings-on consisting mostly of heavily drinking Irish exiles like myself. I was deep in conversation with a tall red-haired man from Dublin. There was much jostling for position as the other exiles attempted to get a little closer to their beloved homeland via Guinness.

             
The spot that the Dub and I occupied was sacred. Right in front of the counter. It was necessary to get there at 3pm in the afternoon to occupy such a position. I’d been there since 1pm. So I turn to the Dub and quite truthfully inform him,

             
“I’ve been listening to your shit all day and I’m fuckin’ sick of it. I wouldn’t mind but to top it all off you have to be from Dublin.”

             
He immediately head-butted me with such force that I was able to see blood dollop into my pint glass. And I debated whether I should try to strain the blood through my teeth in order to salvage the inch of cider left in the bottom of the glass. I began to see it as important that I contain the dripping blood in the glass. Mustn’t for some reason get the place all bloody.

             
I decided instead to announce,

             
“One of us is going to leave this bar and it isn’t going to be me.”

I looked up at my assailant whose face bore the throes of bloodlust.

             
Freeze frame.

             
I have only seen that expression three times. This was the first, the next was when I was knocked from my bicycle by the“hired” motorcyclist and was waiting for the ambulance people to ascertain whether I had serious injuries.

             
I was lying on my back afraid to look down at my legs. On the top floor of a passing double-decker sat an old lady in a brown coat.The bus had to stop presumably because of the general commotion. The old hag’s expression was exactly the same as the one our Dublin friend is wearing now. Look at him. Ginger stubble, tongue slightly protruding from between fleshly lips…a cunt if ever I saw one.Other heads protruded into what might have been my last patch of sky…but it was her face that dominated my wait for the ambulance.

             
Lying there I was still listening to Elvis Costello’s “Accidents Will Happen,” I kid you not. My Walkman, although askew, was still on and still playing. That old cow up there looking down from on high seemed to be nodding in time to Mr Costello’s sentiments. I tried to read from the old lady’s face how badly I was hurt. I wished I’d known her better because if she was a complete bitch, the slight smile on her face meant that I was fucked and my legs were mincemeat.