Chapter Six, ‘The End’
My sister is dead, by the way. In case you couldn’t already tell, it was all my fault—and it’s a good thing, too, or she’d be involved in all of this stuff and I’d have two sets of people to let down.
No one really knows why she died, but there you go. I should have spotted it sooner, because I was with her, and then I left her again when I really should have stayed. When I came back, she was dead.
The most annoying thing of all is that no one else will let me do the same thing: I keep angling for a speeding car around every corner, a violent drunk, a misplaced step on a railway platform to get me out of this place, but none of those things ever follow through and I don’t know why. Maybe that’s the real reason I stayed here: it’s much easier and quicker to die by someone else’s hand than by your own, and for this reason I get up off my newly-found porch step and wander back aimlessly to the high street.
That’s what’s so insulting about this damn war—or whatever you want to call it. No one is paying attention to me, which means that no one will kill me, and I’ll just be left to deal with the same shit all over again and I won’t ever have a way out.
I stand in the doorway of the alley, I look out along the whole road like a dumb tourist. It’s a parade, almost, of ridiculous uniforms and normal people running away, or uselessly attempting to stand their ground.
I’m only an observer. Sure, I can jump in whenever I want, but do I really want that? No: I want one of them to see me, really see me, pick me out from the crowd, and go ‘ah!’ (or whatever it is that they say in their language, which I haven’t figured out yet) and shoot me on sight. I feel like God or whoever is sticking his fingers in his ears at my thoughts, and he’s making all the others think like that, too.
That’s why it’s so difficult to write about what I’m seeing—because I’m not really seeing any of it. There are shapes, movements, terrible things, but my eyes are so bloody unfocused that I can’t even snap back into my normal functions long enough to tell you all about it. Please believe me, there are things happening: I just can’t see them well enough to say anything at all. They brush past me like the mindless wanderings of a fruit fly, and it’s very clear that this has nothing to do with me at all—all of this would be happening without me, whether I wanted it to or not. It’s not my town, not my country, and certainly not a life that I’m interested in hanging onto.
If it makes you feel better, I don’t end up killing anyone at all that day. The weapon in my pocket was useless, and I end up throwing it away just as I’m properly turning into the street—I leave it in an open place, just at the side of another shop, so that if someone wants to pick it up and murder me, they can feel very free to do it.
That man’s body is still in the doorway of the pharmacy. I should move him, but then I judge my own lifting abilities in my head and they’re coming up short for what’s required to move his sort of stature. Despite this, I give his shirt, his shoulders, a complementary tug and leave it at that.
Maybe he’ll find out somehow that I at least gave it another half-hearted go.
I decide to turn my attention to finding my girlfriend, wherever the fuck she is. “Emily,” I sort of call out into the street; my voice gets stuck halfway down my throat. It’s pitiful. “Emily, where are you?”
It’s not like she’d ever hear me with that kind of volume, but I don’t have enough air in my lungs to do it properly. I’m too scared that I’ll come across the same thing that I saw before, the same cold limbs and open, dead, dry eyes, and the worst part is that I don’t even have anything to show for it. I’m not paralysed, I’m not shaking; my voice is completely steady, even though I’m unable to shout much. No one will ever be able to tell that I can barely make my way up the street, because I do it without talking to anybody—no one remembers that I can still hear my own screaming in my head, that I can make myself listen to it over and over if I want to, no one remembers that I lost my voice.
I can’t do that again. I want one of these soldiers to make a pathetic name for themselves and take me out so I don’t have to discover anything awful. It feels the same as it did then, the same shoe to be dropped, or whatever that stupid phrase is, the same something that separates me from the real reality that everybody else experiences, so that I am left alone and distinct.
There’s a group of soldiers up there, I can make them out if I really focus in on the traffic lights. Yes, there they are: they seem to be ignoring us for a while, as if we’ve been forgotten, as if the main thing was to get to the town and then they’d figure out how to get across it over the next few weeks after they’d fully settled in.
Either way, they’re not putting much pressure on moving forward: for now, their focus is elsewhere.
They’ve arranged themselves in a huddle around the little island, a small strip of pavement in the middle of the road that gets us from one side to the other; two sets of traffic lights herald either side, and they flash orange, motionless as they blink towards me.
Something’s drawing me to the other side of the road, and so I cross quickly. I want to know what they’re doing: I can’t see it clearly from here, although I can make out that frightened soldier from before. He looks a lot more comfortable now that he’s back amongst his friends. I give him a wave, but he’s too engrossed, too entranced by whatever’s in front of him to notice.
Maybe they do care, after all: there’s an anger about them, a real visceral hatred spitting from them that I haven’t seen before, although I’ve certainly felt flames of it from dangerous people in the past. Whatever it is, they’re making an example out of somebody on our side. I can tell from here that their eyes will be dead, black, a sinkhole to look into, and there’s a sound that grates sharp in my ears—hard metal that clangs against the railings and anticipates the low sob that follows—and from here I can make out a harsh, awful movement. That group of soldiers has gotten hold of whoever it is, chained them up to the railings; they can’t even fight back; there’s one soldier shoving into them repeatedly, over and over and over…
For the first time in my life, I pass out.
***