Substance Abuse
1
I was flying along a highway.
It was a highway that wasn't in space or time, a highway that didn't have a right or a left, or an up or a down. It was just a highway where I travelled, which moved slowly forward, getting wider all the time, even though there was no time.
There was no road, no barriers, no lanes, it's wasn't that kind of highway either, that's just the best way I can describe it. It was a highway of particles all moving together as one.
Try and think of bubbles, millions and millions of bubbles, bubbles of light drifting along the night sky. Some are quick, some are steady, some occasionally stop and move backwards, only to be taken up by the bigger bubbles at the back, but no-one gets left behind. That's what this highway is like. That's what this highway is.
I was travelling along the highway as I always had, when one day (even though there is no when and there are no days) it all changed. Not the highway. Not the movement. Me. It all changed for me.
There was a hole. It was a tiny black gap of nothing - a slit in the middle of our road of something. It wasn't much bigger than the prick of a needle, but a hole it was. It was something I'd heard about (even though we don't hear) but never thought would see (even though we don't see).
I moved forward, trying to pretend that it didn't have anything to do with me - I knew what these holes meant and I didn't want to be even close to it - but the more I tried to move away, the harder it dragged me towards it. I could feel it pulling me and sucking me in. I'd never felt this before. No one had. There was never a wrong way.
The others were pushing me towards it as well. They all knew what it meant. They all knew what they had to do. Everywhere I moved they were there forcing me towards it, forcing me to accept whatever lay inside it. There was no way out, nowhere to escape, because apart from the highway, there was nowhere else.
Finally I accepted. It was me. It had been decided. It was me they were giving to sacrifice. I was the one who had to go in.
I closed my senses and waited for it to happen. I felt a dark void; a terrible stillness; like for a moment the world had stopped and fallen into an abyss.
Then I opened my eyes.
i.
"Elizabeth my darling!" shouted a voice across the floor of our overcrowded library of an office, rising above the clamour of slamming desks and zipping coats.
"Alfred. I'll go home in one minute," I responded. "I've just got to finish this one, last entry and then that's it. I'll be out of here, I promise."
It was Friday afternoon and everyone wanted to go home, or go to the pub, or whatever it was they did with themselves these days.
Alfred leaned across my desk, walked his spidery hands towards the off button of my monitor and pressed sharply. The screen flickered for a moment in protest then blacked out.
"Thank you Alfred," I acknowledged, rather aggrieved by this rude interruption. "You know that once I get into my flow you mustn't stop me. It's... its stream of consciousness. You didn't see James Joyce getting his type writer turned off at six o'clock on the dot every night did you?
I turned my chair and attacked my decrepit adversary with a fold of my arms and a condescending pout of my lips.
"No Elizabeth, I think not," replied Alfred bearing his crisp white dentures over his saggy, wrinkled face. "And the world is a better place for it I feel."
He began playing with the leftover cups and biscuit packets that cluttered my desk, a sure sign that he was building up to something unpleasant.
"Anyway, surely that wasn't anything too, too pressing now was it? It wouldn't be right to be imposing anything terminal on anyone on a Friday afternoon now would it?"
Alfred had one of those gentle, calming voices which only old men who have seen their fair share of the world can possess. It echoed around my ears like a baritone harp, playing its story of knowledge - easy and experienced - and annoying the hell out of me.
"No. No it wouldn't," I agreed. "I presume that signifies that this is regarding something important?"
I turned to look at his into his weary, bloodshot eyes.
"Who is it? Princess Anne? Thatcher? Salman Rushdie? If it's Thatcher I'll do overtime, I promise. However long you want."
"Ah, Thatcher," he mused, looking out of the window and over to the multi-storey car park opposite. "I'm sad to say it dear, but I have a feeling she's got a long way to go yet. As we know all too well Elizabeth, some people are just too stubborn to go quickly. If you were cancer, you'd have second thoughts before attacking that woman's ice-cold blood stream, wouldn't you now?
I eyed him impatiently, squeezing my arms tightly over my chest.
"No no, it's no-one exciting I'm afraid. But yes, it is a bit of extra-curricular activity, if you think you may have some time on your hands this weekend?"
He could sense the temperature rising in my veins.
"Now Elizabeth, Elizabeth. I know you think that I always ask you. And I know it's because you think that I don't like you, and that you think that I'm trying to keep you tied to your desk because I know you don't like socialising that much."
My eyes opened incredulously.
"But I don't I promise. You are my absolute star, and I only ask because I know that I can rely on you."
"What would you like me to do Alfred?" I sighed, knowing that I was already doomed to acceptance.
"Well, it's a funny case actually," he continued in patronising fashion. "And, I don't know, it may just be one huge waste of time, but I had quite a few phone calls come through today, all from the same place somewhere in Surrey. This place out in the suburbs, can't remember its name but I remember it well from many years ago..."
I began to drift off. I knew what was coming. This was going to be another special Saturday assignment, for special Elizabeth, for the special Obituary writing department of, well, London's most special newspaper. It was always something pointless and excruciating, that would usually involve some risible "local celebrity" whom no-one else in the country cared about - like the man who'd been cultivating the same allotment for eighty years, or the woman who'd worked in the same Children's Hospital since she'd left school - and until now, I'd almost always managed to avoid them, particularly when they were anywhere in the Home bloody Counties which... which wasn't my area of investigation.
I'd never been to a suburb, not that I can really remember anyway. I had grown up living in the countryside with my dad, in a small house next to the church. You know, the church just next to the post office? Near the pub? Opposite the farm shop?
We lived next to the church because my dad was the Rector's assistant. Yes, I was born in a Thomas Hardy novel, I know. A young girl, with an impoverished single father, living in a small cottage that looked back onto the graveyard, and the graves of my mother and sister, who were buried there after they'd died together in a horrible accident picking apples from the tree on the front lawn.
Okay, so they didn't really die like that, but they were buried there. My mother had passed away giving birth to me, or so I had been informed later in life, which was possibly not the best start I could have made. I was a murderer before I'd even been cut away from the umbilical cord, certainly I'd committed manslaughter. This, as you can imagine, did not make things easy. It was strange, but even though no-one talked about it, or even alluded to it, I'd always known that it had happened. I didn't know why I did, but I knew, and so when everyone tip-toed around the subject all the time I just had to bite my lip and try to look as innocent as possible.
It all came out in the open when I reached about fourteen, ironically the age when everyone starts to want to kill their parents anyway, and then it was all sympathy and condolence, and offers of counselling and therapy. Yes, because I'd been fine to fend myself for the decade and bit beforehand thank you very much.
My older sister was the best mother I could have had anyway. For the first ten years of my life she was my hero. I thought she was the most beautiful thing on the planet, I thought she knew everything you needed to know, I thought her and her friends were just the coolest people going. I loved listening in to all the things they talked about, how they used words in ways I didn't understand, like:
"I'm more than just an adolescent."
and
"He's like, Mr Generation X."
She gave me just enough attention to feel wanted, and left me alone long enough so I always wanted more. Much, much, more. I guess you would say that she was the first love of my life - that is, until a week before my sixteenth birthday, when I found her limp, lifeless body hanging off a makeshift noose.
"It's just off the town centre in Chatsworth Village," intruded Alfred. "Up in the new housing development in the hills. I think Jilly and I went for a walk around there. You'd like it I think Elizabeth. There are trees and woods, and a little stream running through the estate. It would be a bit like getting back into that old country air you miss so much."
I arched my eyebrows towards his mouth
"I..." stammered Alfred's croaky vocal chords. "I know Lizzy, its okay. It will do you good I'm sure, getting you out and about for a while."
I didn't know why she did it. To me she should have been the happiest, most vivacious person in the world. She brought life into others. She gave us meaning. Every time she opened her mouth she opened another part of my brain, another part of my self, that wouldn't have existed without her and she knew it, she knew the effect she had on us, on everyone. Then, on that quiet Sunday afternoon she ripped that all away, leaving us paralysed and empty. Her death had formed a crack through the centre of me that I'd spend most of the rest of my teenage years trying to fill.
The first few years were the hardest. For all its open gates, ranging fields and good-natured simplicity, village life can turn quickly into a prison cell of rumour and disapproval when it feels the need. Even from inside my pink bedroom, where I sat with my Rainbow Brite wall chart and my Care Bear collection, I could hear them - the hushed tone of suspicion as they tip-toed passed; the mocking words echoing from mumbling mouths; all upon which I projected a more and more macabre content as my solitude went on. Ours was a house of the damned and I was the harbinger of doom.
The few friends I had disowned me, mostly on their parent's instructions. My teachers ignored me as best they could, offering occasional perfunctory assistance when I was found crying in the toilets. Even our neighbour and my dad's boss, the rector, seemed to change his manner when I announced my presence around him. He would blush and muddle his words, and his hand would move nervously under his cassock, like he was running his fingers repeatedly through a rosary. I was an outcast, aloof from everyone and everything except my dear old dad.
However, after a few more years, when secondary school began and we started talking about boys and bitching about each other, I found myself part of the group again. It was when one of my classmates had decided that our P.E teacher had sexually abused her after hockey practice one day that it all began.
"He... he followed me in after all of you had left,' she spluttered, after a burst of impressively dramatic tears. "I was bending down to pick up my bag and... and... oh God I can't speak about it was so horrible."
Being children of feminism, we took pity on her plight. She was a victim, a victim of the tyrannical male and his perverse, predatory ways. We'd read about in books and magazines and knew how dangerous he could be, but she'd encountered him first hand, she had been to hell and back and lived to tell the tale. As a result her popularity amongst class 7D rose stratospherically overnight, and she became an idol, a martyr to our cause.
After a few weeks, when all the fuss had died down a bit and some swift lessons had been given about the dangers of spreading rumours around school, another of 7D cried rape. Then a few weeks later another related a harrowing story of being followed home by Richard Whelan, the sweaty fat kid from 8D. And after this there was an even more shocking incident, of exposure behind the big tree at the corner of the running track. Suddenly traumatic, emotionally distressing experiences were all the rage - and to which I was something of a child prodigy.
My social acceptability quickly spiralled. With each secret group spliff in the woods, or Saturday night sleepover at Becky's farmhouse, there came a new anecdote from my shady past, a new lurid detail of my sister's deformed corpse, and so in time my status in the cool side of class was assured. My academic credentials had never been as issue, given my isolated upbringing, but now I had the confidence to display them in the real world and go and do the English degree I'd always aspired to. At Kings College in London no less.
From the village leper I'd become an urbane socialite. The cracks in me had almost been filled.
Now I write obituary columns for the London newspaper that all Londoners hate, myself included. A strange career path some might say; not becoming for a young lady such as myself, as well as the butt of all smug journalist's jokes. However, it is an interesting thing to say you do at parties, and the odd condescending look I receive from the more conventional members of London's mid-twenties social elite - the pony club and the touch rugby brigade - elicit only amusement in me now. Gosh, at least I don't sit and make things up all day like most journalists do. That's the thing about death. There is always a life that went before it.
"So Elizabeth? Do you think I can count you in for that? Should be a rip-roaring adventure if nothing else, don't you think?"
Alfred's loquacious rhetoric had mastered its usual trick of boring me into submission, rather than offering any persuasive merit, so I agreed. There was no other alternative, aside from jumping out of my seventh storey window.
"Unless..." he paused, which he only usually did when he thought he had something important to say. "Unless you have plans of course?
He knew very well I didn't the bastard. For the last few months he'd been monitoring me like a voyeur, ever since I'd decided to sever all my social ties at work, and take some time out to work out who I was and what I wanted to be. Given what my department does, this didn't infringe too much on my sense of personal happiness or self-worth, but apparently some of my colleagues had felt a bit put out. Well, they were just going to have to get used to that. From now on I was my own woman.
"His name is Jonathan Bezrich," Alfred continued in soft monotony. "He lives in a town called Chatsworth Village in South East Surrey. And this morning I had about fifty phone calls eulogising him as some sort of local hero, an "urban messiah" or something along those lines. Seems a little far-fetched but, well, we'll see about that. Anyway Elizabeth, I don't think I need to remind you that this is one our main target areas for new readership this year, so we don't want to miss out anything even if it doesn't quite, live up, ah ha ah ha, to all its expectations. Does that make sense to you, yes?"
There were so many things, so many things I wanted to say. But in the end, through a blitz of repressed facial contortions and clenched fists I managed five words.
"Okay. But I want Thatcher."
ii.
The next morning found me rueing over and over my submission to Alfred's requests. What a manipulative shit of a man he was, preying on my self-imposed exile like a yob stealing a blind man's stick. It was his fault that I was on the train sat next to a rotund man with a beard, who read the Daily Telegraph and coughed over-elaborately every five minutes. It was his fault that a group of four grown women giggled garrulously in the seat in front of me, gushing over each other's dresses and preposterously large hats, while passing round a bottle of bucks fizz at 10.15 in the morning. It was his fault that I had just had to pay over £4.00 for a crab baguette that I didn't feel like eating. It was his fault that a slickly dressed, twenty-something bloke with olive skin and closely cropped black hair kept eyeing my up whilst he talked on his mobile phone.
"Yes. Yes, oh yes. Yes I don't doubt it."
He looked at me for the fifth time in the last minute and smiled apologetically. And then kept looking.
"She's there? Nah, I don't think so old chap. She's about twenty minutes away I reckon."
"What? Well...she's not bad I suppose. Not really my cup of tea but, she'll do under the circumstances."
"Heh, heh, heh. We'll see about that shall we?"
"I don't know. I don't think we'll have too many problems."
"Yes. I think it'll take care of itself."
"Until later then."
"Le beau gouvenera le monde."
He turned again directly at me and smiled, his tanned skin tightening over crafted, rectangular teeth. For a horrible moment I thought this was going to lead to an attempt at engaging me in conversation, so I gave my most sarcastic looking smile in reply and returned my gaze to the back of the chair of front me.
London, the city, sanity, already felt a long way away. Unable to entirely deal with the unpleasant sights of artificial wealth and artlessness that surrounded me, my brain began to form images of what was to await for the rest of the day of no doubt, relentless pointlessness
The plastic tray holding my untouched baguette became a village green, populated by men playing cricket and women drinking tea from china cups and discussing the benefits of a second home in Tuscany. There is a hazy sunshine in the air. A couple of golden retrievers bluster about jovially. The ball knocks over a glass of lemonade, much to everyone's amusement.
The isle of the carriage metamorphoses into a private cul-de-sac. A male resident is trimming the turf of the grass verge. Two small children are running around in a back garden while their parents look on proudly from the veranda. Inside the women are meeting for the weekly book club, all holding brand new unread copies of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
I can also see the slick guy in the seat opposite, sitting outside a theme pub in the town centre. He's still on his phone. Girls in short white dresses walk passed him, drinking alcopops and comparing fake tans. A glass smashes nearby. A scuffle breaks out. A fat, bald man in a ghastly coloured shirt is in a stand-off with a bouncer, pointing an exasperated finger at his mate with blood dripping off his face. The slick guy finishes his phone call, lights up a cigarette and pats one of his female admirers on the arse.
All three images fill me with instant disgust. If that's what it's like, if that's what I'm going to have to put up with all day, places like that, people like this, I'm not going to make it back. I'll have killed myself before the day is up. It won't be this Jonny character's obituary in the paper the next day, it will be mine.
My lungs expended some of the pent-up frustration of the claustrophobic train carriage and I began prodding my baguette to see if it would become anymore appetising. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mr Slick eyeing me again, before dialling out on his phone to share his opinions with someone equally as lascivious and mentally inert. Not once had I considered that it might have anything to do with me.
iii.
The first task in building up a picture of the deceased is to set up a meeting with the relatives. Like so many of the recognised procedures of journalism it is a laborious and entirely pointless waste of everyone's time - consider the members of your family trying to describe your wonderful, multi-faceted personality - but as a matter of course it has to be done. This was partly tradition, and also to avoid any potentially litigious intentions from Billy's mother, when it is revealed that the clean cut boy in the fifth year school photo was actually a crystal meth snorting, cross-dressing bisexual. So this was my task for the action packed day ahead. Tea and biscuits with a grieving old woman. As if the drizzling rain and packs of adolescent hyenas that greeted me when I alighted from Chatsworth station was not enough of a depressing spectacle.
The Bezrich's house did nothing to deter my earlier baguette-inspired nightmares of cliché suburbia. The silence was eerie as I trotted up the road, eyes following me from behind net curtains and voices whispering through manicured hedges. Each house was sectioned off with its own individual detached plot, ensuring that you never had to be intimate with anyone but yourself, and it was clear that most parties kept to this rule assiduously. Front gates were tightly shut and signs exclaimed loudly the presence of various security systems and guard dogs. On the occasional time when a resident did spot me, their eyes seemed to narrow with suspicion at my presence. I wasn't welcome. Others weren't welcome here. This was their Eden, and I was the devil.
Mrs Bezrich lounged in a deckchair in her front garden as I approached, apparently oblivious to the early autumn chill in the air. She was positioned in front of a small pond and was staring at the elaborate stone water feature at one side, looking every inch the mourning mother. She'd obviously had her hair done for the occasion and was wearing an expensive looking floral dress, that fitted far too well for someone of her advancing age. It was a rather volatile combination - a woman consumed with grief but doing her utmost to pretend that everything was still entirely normal. Reputation, counted for everything here it appeared; more than even death.
"Mrs Bezrich?' I enquired in an unfamiliar BBC accent that I'd inherited in the last ten minutes.
Her head turned slowly towards me, like a resting cat being disturbed from its inner peace, deciding if I happened to be worth the attention my request demanded.
"Mrs Bezrich? It's Elizabeth. Elizabeth Price from the newspaper? I've come to talk to you about Jonny.
Her mouth opened with dilatory recognition and transformed from an irritated scowl into a practised, approving smile
"Ah well, yes. So you are. You better come in then, shan't you?"
I was placed in the living area, "Jonny's favourite room in the house,' while Mrs Bezrich went about preparing some tea and biscuits. From the moment we'd come through the front door she hadn't made eye contact, had kept herself busy with menial tasks and had only spoken about how "she must clean up a bit more now' and "that the air is getting so much dustier these days.' She was already obsessed with domesticity, that much was obvious. It was the easiest way to deal with grief or trauma. To make the things that didn't matter, matter much more than the things that did.
To this effect, the room, Jonny's favourite room, looked like it hadn't been touched by human hands for many years, at least hands that hadn't been vigorously rubbing a cloth and a duster. I felt far too uncomfortable to dare interfere with the perfectly fluffed cushions and polished leather armchairs by sitting down, so I contented myself with perusing pictures of my new subject from multifarious positions on the walls. As with the rest of the room I could see they hadn't been looked at - I mean really looked at - for a long time. There were no thumbprints at the sides, they were stuck fast to the walls and were arranged in an almost perfect symmetry. They were calculated, they were unloved. I studied them succinctly, well aware that school photos, sports team shots, graduation pictures, all looked fundamentally the same whoever the subject and whatever the context. They didn't give you any insight into the real person apart from the simple statistics you could have gained from any public records book and maybe some spuriously contrived assumptions.
So Jonny had blond hair, an easy coolness, a good toothy smile and a bad taste in clothes in his early years. Judging by his rotund team mates, he wasn't much of a sportsman. He was late into puberty and was uncomfortable around his family. And he didn't appear to have existed before the age of about eleven. Which I...
"Ah, Elizabeth," interrupted Mrs Bezrich. "Glad to see you're appreciating some of the photos of our boy."
"Yes,' I admitted tentatively. "He looks...he looks like he was a charming young man."
"Yes, yes,' she said, moving her attention to laying out the tea and homemade fancy cakes. "Yes, indeed he was.
I continued to look at the pictures, just long enough to appear truly interested, which by this point I was anything but.
"Come," she beckoned impatiently. "Come and sit down and try some of these cakes."
Ten minutes later, and after some increasingly tiresome conversation about the lack of good tea available anywhere apart from those "dreadful" health food shops, I felt I was going to have to get to the subject in hand. There was only so much duplicity I could handle, particularly when it was combined with inedible patisserie.
"So, no Mr Bezrich?' I queried, trying to make a laboured change in tact sound as innocent as possible.
"Um, oh, um, err," she began, her hand shaking as she raised a china cup delicately towards her mouth. "No, not really anymore, I'm afraid."
"I think I must have seen some pictures of him on the wall," I prompted.
"Ah yes, yes. You know, we like to keep some of him around, certainly after we began to see less and less of him. I always thought it was important he remained in Jonny's life somehow you see. A young boy always needs a father figure around in some respects, I think."
She was desperately, desperately nervous of me and, I think, of anyone with any amount of acumen, prying into her private life. It was callous, but this meant I had to pressure her even more to engender any kind of worthwhile response and background information.
"Could I ask what happened?" I continued, fighting a wall of etiquette with a blitz of bluntness. "Did he... leave when Jonny was quite young?"
"Well, I'm not sure that's any of your business really is it?"
I opened up my body slightly to show that it wasn't, but that I'd understand if she wanted to tell me anyway.
"You do... still see him occasionally?'
"Sometimes, yes. Gosh, what are you suggesting? He's not dead you know. Goodness me. You are a morbid bunch aren't you?"
She returned her cup to its saucer precisely.
"So you're divorced?" I persevered.
"Separated. As I said, we thought he shouldn't be removed from Jonny's life completely."
"Yes, yes. I understand. As you said."
She eyed me defensively, reaching in for a biscuit.
"So did Jonny see his father often then?" I continued. "I mean, did they keep in touch regularly, go out and watch the football or rewire the electrics, something like that?"
"Yes, yes they did," replied Mrs Bezrich unsurely. "For a while, in the first couple of years, yes, yes they did. But, well, you know how it is. These boys, they want to spread their wings, want to see the world and meet new people. They don't want mummy and daddy hanging around all the time."
"No," I agreed. "No, most certainly not."
I took a sip of tea.
"So was it amicable?"
"Oh yes, they still got on fine as far as I know," she suggested, looking away towards the photo wall for inspiration. It was clear she hadn't spoken to her son or estranged husband for a long time."
"No, sorry I mean your separation. I presume it was Mr Bezrich who moved away?"
"Yes, well," she replied. "You know how it is. He had his health problems for a while. And then he decided that he needed to do something more with his life."
I shook my head, to share in the disapproval.
"More than a loving wife and a great kid?"
"Apparently so."
"Well, I couldn't even imagine how he considered it. I mean goodness, I'd kill for something like that...if you understand what I mean?"
I smiled and waited for the abuse, or the emotional outburst.
"Oh yes, don't worry about it. You would have thought wouldn't you?"
This was going to require more subtlety. Her emotions were still too repressed to respond to shock tactics, if there were even any emotions in there to begin with.
"So did Jonny, spread his wings to some extent?"
"Yes, he did, of course. As you can see from the photos he..."
"But you and Mr..."
"Howard."
This was better.
"You and Howard. You never considered getting divorced?"
"No. As I said earlier Miss Price."
"Elizabeth, please."
"As I said earlier Miss Price. We felt it was important to maintain the family unit. For Jonathon's sake."
"You never thought about... moving on?"
I did everything but wink and nudge her arm.
"No. It would not have been right for Jonathon for one thing."
"And your husband?"
"Look, is this really important?"
She glared at me viciously for a second, then looked down and poured herself some more tea.
"No, not anymore," I conceded. "That's fine. Sorry to press on like that. We just need to get, some family background, that's all."
"Don't you want to ask me about Jonathon?" she pleaded.
I had her now. The problem was I wasn't sure how much there was left to get. I stood up and pretended to look at the pictures again for a moment, blocking Mrs Bezrich's view so she'd have to rely on her own thoughts while we continued our interview.
"So you were close to Jonathon?" I began again, looking down at her.
"Yes, yes of course. He was our only child remember? We spoilt him rotten for a while, but I think that was only because we wanted to spend as much time with him as we could. We were there for his first day at school, at his exam results, his confirmation, his graduation, the time he broke his arm."
"What kind of person was he then, would you say? Outgoing? Quiet? Witty? Shy? Sociable? Dedicated? Relaxed?"
Mrs Bezrich looked down at the table in front of her, trying to locate some inspiration in the two crunch creams and half a chocolate fancy that sat mutely in front of her.
"He pretended to be outgoing and confident, and... and was quite the socialite for most of the time,' she mused unsurely. "He had lots of friends, as you can imagine, and enjoyed going out a lot. I let him get away with it, maybe too much now I think about it. But he was our only one and we didn't like seeing him unhappy. He was too much of a free spirit; he didn't like being stuck inside or doing the same thing all the time. Maybe we should have been stricter on him; maybe we should have given him more direction, but it's just that deep down, deep down inside me, I always thought that he was just my own little boy, that he'd be too scared to get himself into any real trouble, and too shy to get stuck in with the wrong crowd. Maybe, maybe I was wrong. I don't know."
She looked up at me hopefully, pleading for a sympathetic reaction. I reciprocated with a smile, and nodded my head to confirm I understood. It wasn't her fault at all, she was right. She had obviously not had anything approaching a proper relationship with her son for the best part of a decade, and hence she was only able to think of him through maternal clichés. That was how most good parents generally were. She didn't know him anymore and she wasn't supposed to. If I remember correctly, it becomes a lot harder to drink, fuck and smoke if your parents were around.
"But he was quite the academic?" I continued with more benevolence.
"He was," she agreed assuredly. "It was funny. He was more of a mathematician to begin with. It was only later, when he was about fifteen, that he developed an interest in literature and writing. Then that became his real passion. Gosh, I remember the first thing he wrote. He was too embarrassed to let me read it. Something about a boy who swallowed some chewing gum which never left his body, and which he became obsessed by, but was written from the chewing gum's point of view. He had a very unique imagination did our Jonny."
I finished looking at the photos, returned to my seat opposite Jonny's mother and picked up a crunch cream.
"Do you think that might have had something to do with why he killed himself,' I said bluntly. "Perhaps his imagination got the better of him?"
She clenched the arm of her seat and stared through half-opened eyes, like she was trying to brand the vitriol of her response directly into the front of my brain. I knew I had gone too far, too soon.
"I mean...he seemed to have a good life," I backtracked. "Certainly a good upbringing. From seeing you here, and meeting you and hearing you talk about him. It just... it had to be something extra-ordinary for him to even consider doing such a thing."
I could see the emotion beginning to well up in her now. The veins receded and sent blood flooding through the pigments of her face.
"You must have been a fantastic mother and I, I truly am sorry. There is no way this was in any way your fault, don't worry. I'll make sure everyone knows that."
She shook her head and wiped the first tears that began to seep down her cheeks. I offered a consolatory tissue.
"It's just, it's just," she gushed, grabbing her tea cup to her lips like it was a childhood safety blanket. "I didn't really know him. I didn't really know him and I know him even less now. That's all I have left. I can't remember him at all when he was young, then he spent all the years after that trying to avoid me, and after that he was just gone. I'd done my bit and he was out there, living for himself. He was my son, and I never really got to know him at all. What kind of mother does that make me?"
I drained off the last my tea.
"A perfectly normal one Mrs Bezrich" I stated. "A perfectly normal one."
That was what I got paid the big bucks for. Sitting and listening to grief-stricken parents venting their emotion through mundane stories about their deceased, how they used to love home-cooked meals and play hopscotch and so and so on blah blah blah. It is the same each time and well, after about the fifteenth run through, it becomes so predictable its comic. Mrs Bezrich didn't really know her son after he'd entered the latter of his teenage years, yes? Of course she didn't. Hardly any parents do, particularly with sons who, as a rule, try and remain isolated as they possibly can anyway. If they did there was something very wrong with their relationship.
As she left to resume her seat in the garden and occasionally sip from a wine glass that was steadily being filled with drizzle, something began to trouble me. Mrs Bezrich knew as much about her son as I knew about Mike Rockwell who I used to fancy at school. She was sad, emotional and mentally unstable. She probably had to reach for the Valium after a particularly tragic episode of Eastenders. But not remembering anything of him as a child, at all? There something slightly wrong with that. She should have been waxing lyrical about his first words, first steps, and first day at school. This was the part that mothers remembered best, the only time when they had enough of a bond with their children to make it worth remembering. Also there was the complete lack of any photos, as if a great chunk of his life had been removed for some reason. Was Jonny really their child? Had something happened? Where was his dad? Where had he been all that time?
While Mrs Bezrich descended back into her domestic trance I decided to make some further investigations through the rest of the house. She wasn't going to notice. She was stuck in a very different reality to mine.
Something told me that Jonny's favourite room, where Mrs Bezrich and I had shared our tete-a-tete, was more of a front - a show room where only guests and grandparents were ever allowed to sit for any length of time. Sure enough, as I delved in further, burrowing through dark and dingy corridors, I found rooms brimming with intrigue, which hadn't been arranged to fit a particular image or memory, and where a few strands of truth began to sprout from beneath the floorboards.
My first encounter was with the music room, which, spurred on by the illicit nature of my explorations, I cantered into with rather too much excitement and almost fell over a lone bass drum cumbersomely placed in the middle of the floor. As I picked myself back up, with the realisation that I was far too clumsy to start raiding tombs any time soon, the true extent of the Bezrich family's cultural obsessions opened up in front of me.
A full drum kit had been entirely disassembled and thrown about the room. A piano stood anonymously in one corner, looking like it had never been played. A cello leant languidly against a dusty curtain, and at centre stage, was a stool, a microphone, and a recently strung acoustic guitar. I began to visualise Jonny there, with blond greasy hair and a badly knitted cardigan, playing Neil Young or Nirvana covers.
Scattered over the floor were some well thumbed tablature books:
"The Best of Robert Johnson"
"Spanish Guitar Workout for the Advanced Player"
"Classic English Folk"
In the first page of each Jonny had etched his name, leaving no doubts as to the identity of their unlikely owner. This didn't seem like the angst-ridden fodder of the traditional teenage outsider. It was serious, rather obscure, adult-orientated stuff, with introductions from apparently famous guitar players I'd never heard of. Jonny was either a prodigy, years ahead of his time, or very, very ambitious.
Who was his muse? Robert Johnson - the blues guitarist who sold his soul to the devil after a drinking binge, and then subsequently died? Or was this too obvious to signify anything? There was something else, something about the way all the instruments sat waiting for the performer to return for the second act.
Next up was the library, usually the most revealing or most depressingly predictable room in any house. If our minds are merely a vast collection of recallable quotations, then a bookshelf should give a pretty good basis for working the nature of quotes this has built up from, but this is not always the case. Thankfully the Bezrich's did not disappoint, because all their books appeared to have been read - and read relatively recently, judging by the folded page corners and creased covers. Second there were obvious favourites. These people had not just bought by numbers. Every Hardy was here, including two copies of Tess and three of The Mayor of Casterbridge; the Greek philosophers appeared to have a good following, with what must have been over twenty books on Plato alone; then there was Kerouac and Burroughs and the rest of the 'beat' gang, who struck as potentially Jonny favourites - I could see him reading in his jeans, with a cigarette protruding lazily from his mouth and a four pack of beer providing occasional refreshment and inspiration.
I looked around the room to try and consider this image further and noticed a little reading desk pointing out at one of the windows, cowering secretly behind a curtain. I pulled it to and sat down, and a warm feeling spread quickly over my body. I was right, there was something here. It was something that immediately told me more about who Jonny might have been than all of that painfully contrived chat with his mother. It was a clue. And more to the point, it was a clue that seemed to have been placed there deliberately.
There were three books. Three books lying on the table, closed firmly shut and placed methodically adjacent to each other, an equidistant level apart. Three books that had been left there on purpose to make a point to someone. I doubted that person was me, but I was certain it was Jonny who was making the point. The three books were:
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
Ethics, by Baruch Spinoza
The Social Contract, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
I looked at them for a minute, racking my brain for any kind of knowledge as to what they contained, what they had in common, what they'd bring to the mind of a suicidal man and quickly realised that the tissue of quotations that formed my mind was rather damp and unabsorbent these days.
"Rousseau lived in the woods." I thought. "He thought that society corrupted the mind. He was French.
Spinoza wrote one of the most complex books on philosophy in history. He was Jewish and best mates with Leibniz.
I'd studied the Canterbury Tales at school, well The Wife of Bath.
"For ever since I was twelve years of age,
Thanks be to God, I've had no less than five
Husbands at church door--if one may believe
I could be wed so often legally!"
That's all I can remember. That and sitting at the back of the classroom giggling at all the smutty jokes.
I stood and stared at them for a minute longer, but there was nothing. Nothing without spending a couple of days sifting through each of the works separately to try and find some connections, which I didn't have time to do and didn't have the mental capacity to concentrate for. Something would come up before that. It always did.
I picked up the three books, put them in my handbag and walked quickly away. He'd been dead for a few days now hadn't he? No-one else was going to find them, it wouldn't make any difference.
Feeling rather self-conscious and guilty I had a very quick check around the kitchen and dining rooms, but to no great surprise they provided limited insight into Jonny's thoughts and feelings, and rather more about Mrs Bezrich's drinking habits. I was on the point of leaving when a door slammed violently from the upper regions of the house. I stopped, froze and thought. Outside. There she was, still sat by the pond, bending forward and talking to garden gnomes, although I knew, I knew by the violence of the sound it couldn't be her. I thought again. The drizzle was still coming down outside but it was almost at right angles with the ground. There was no wind. Nothing could have moved that door on its own. It had to have been the slam of a human being.
I found my way up a perilously unstable staircase, which creaked and groaned painfully with every step, and alighted onto a badly lit landing. As with the rest of the house it was cluttered with a variety of bizarre junk, but here the objects were bordering on the surreal. There was the steering wheel of an old car, a stone bust of a man with half a face, a large coil of barbed wire with fairy lights attached to it, four vaudeville masks, and four coloured doors with first-shaped dents in them. It was unnerving to look at and even more uncomfortable to think about. My mind was going through all the times it had been in a situation such as this, in films, in nightmares, in embarrassing visits to new boyfriend's houses. Behind doors exactly like these lay disembodied pensioners, my sister giving birth to my mother, a middle age couple having sex and Mike Rockwell's younger sister waking up and crying very loudly. With trepidation I grabbed the handle of the first door, a large, heavy wooden handle, and opened it up.
It was a bathroom. With an old shower, a regulation toilet and an odorous, rotting towel on the floor. It had a small window that was locked closed. It was the wrong room.
The hallway looked back at me mockingly as I turned back; the masked faces laughed, the crumbling bust shook and part of his lower chin fell off. They all knew it, they knew what was happening, they knew all the secrets and they weren't going to tell me any of them.
I decided to confront their mutual taunts head on, leaping over a pile of garishly made- up dolls heads and throwing a small wicker cat from out the way of my face as I made a dash to the next door. It was small and brown and looked as anonymous as a door possibly could, concealed in the darkest corner of the landing. I pushed it open with a flourish and stood expectantly in the entrance, waiting for the secrets within to be revealed in a gushing crescendo.
A guest bedroom sat plainly ahead of me. Inside it was a bed, a wardrobe with nothing in it and a little table and chair; and nothing else. It looked like an antique version of a cheap hotel room, with vapid features, inoffensive décor and a stench of banality.
I did my best to ignore the landing after this second failure, whilst it tried hard to conceal its laughter beneath the varied piles of junk suffocating it into silence. It knew what was coming. I was about to find what I was looking for. Then who'd be laughing?
It was another room; another normal room, that was almost completely empty. It didn't have any furniture. It didn't have a carpet. It had a wooden floor that creaked with an embarrassed squeal. It had old, peeling wallpaper, covered with mould, pinholes and blue tack. In fact it only really contained three things. A chair, a painting and a cat.
The chair was situated in the centre of the room, facing the wall on which the painting hung, dramatic and dominant. The cat sat on the chair, which was facing the wall, and stared at the painting. It didn't even look round as I entered the room, so gripped was it by the image that stood proudly in front of its eyes.
For a moment I stared in blank confusion. The whole picture was so surreal, so minimalist and aloof from rhyme or reason that it felt like I'd stepped into a modernist installation at an art gallery. I remained still, feeling like I should stay behind the invisible rope, making sure that nothing was overly disturbed, but it was too late. I had been spotted. Slowly and arrogantly the cat turned its head around, gave me an accusing look, then alighted from its pedestal and wandered passed my leg, ignoring me conceitedly all the way. This was Jonny. Jonny sat trying to get a moments peace, forever distracted by interruptions from the outside world, unable to find solace in anything apart from him. Himself and...
I placed myself in Jonny's seat and looked up at the full vista of the painting.
...and well, who else?
It was a brilliant reproduction of The Ancient of Days by William Blake. The figure of God was sat in a three quarters sun, lightly stroked with red blending into yellow. He was crouched down in the heavens, looking down at the earth, his expression focused, disguised partially by his flowing beard. His left hand held a great, pointed compass that seemed to extend out of the sun itself, with which he is measuring the earth, to create it in his image. He seems malevolent, the compass resembling forks of lightening eliciting from an evil creator.
"The world was a bad place," I thought out loud. "And its creator must, by definition, have evil at its core."
It's a wonderfully dramatic painting, I could see why the cat had found it so distracting in comparison to my rather nervous appearance in the doorway. And it also explained everything for Jonny. The world was an evil place, it had been made with precision to be that way, and it was always going to stay that way, just as its designer had intended. Like the rules of mathematics and geometry there was no changing it. That was how it was and that was how it had to be. That was why humans were able to populate it so successfully. They all had evil at their core too.
I turned back, satisfied at rather rapid conclusion of Jonny's entire life ethic and the human race in general, and looked out of the window into the front garden. Jonny, the cat, was striding quickly towards Mrs Bezrich, who lay sat in her deckchair combing her saturated hair, while the rain steadily pelted down on her. He leapt on her lap, and started rubbing at her cheek and then, with an unnerving coincidence, turned and looked up directly at me standing at the window. It was time for me to go.
iv.
I sat on the train again on the way to my next and only other planned destination, the scene of the crime, Jonny's bedsit flat in a small town called Upper Fordleigh. What was I going to find? What did I need to find? How was this all going to tie together somehow?
I perused once again the three books I had removed from the bedroom in the Bezrich house. Spinoza, Chaucer and Rousseau. All they had told me so far was that I was too intellectually inadequate to bother to open their plain, studious covers, something I could have quite easily told them myself.
Spinoza's Ethics was proving the least approachable of all and on my third attempt on the journey I had not managed to get passed the first page.
My eyes began to wander away from the chapters and chapters of dull, methodical logic, out of the train window and onto the football pitches next to the tracks, which we were passing at the leisurely pace befitting a Saturday lunch time. Grown, unfit men - probably bank managers, estate agents and economics teachers - were running around muddy fields, shouting and swearing loudly, tackling and fighting, each treating the game as a personal challenge to prove they were still men, hunters, gatherers and winners. It was hypnotic in its childishness.
However, Jonny's books were whispering at me from below my eye line, coercing me into finding out the dirty secrets that lay within, so I bypassed Spinoza and approached The Social Contract by Rousseau.
"I conceive that there are two kind of inequality among the human species; one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or the soul; and another, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorised, by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges which some men enjoy to the prejudices of others, such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more powerful, or even in a position to exact obedience."
Maybe I'd been wrong about the football playing cavemen. On the pitch, the disparate mixture of social classes, were no longer bank managers, estate agents and economics teachers. They were all equal again and all returning to their natural state, where they weren't defined by the prejudices and judgements of society. They all became loud, gobby, aggressive, unthinking oafs whose brains had regressed to the stage of badly brought up apes, and who seemed to love one another one minute, then despise each other the next. It was a sad indictment of the human condition. Remove the moral and political inequality and we regressed back to base level competition to compensate. The concept of everyone being equal would never be applicable, it just wasn't humans natural make-up.
So what did this all mean to Jonny? Was he trying to reject this, reject society and humanity as a whole? Was his suicide some kind of altruistic act of rebellion against the system? Was he trying to find a world of true equality, that only exists in death? Or was he trying to define himself, the same way Spinoza was trying to define his conception of the world, through death? And Blake? The methodical, measured creation. Did he feel that he wasn't a party to this; that somehow he hadn't been created in the same way, that he wasn't from the same malevolent source as everyone else and that death was the only way to escape?
Suicide. It's the one that no-one can ever really tell you why. Disease is easy. Accidents have a cause. Even with murder there's usually someone alive who knows. But with suicide - our basic, down-to-earth slit wrists or self-hanging, you can never really say for sure. Does anyone really know anyone well enough to know why? I'd just prescribed several situations behind Jonny's death, and each was equally believable to me. Who was going to tell me different?
The Canterbury Tales was my last current avenue for clues, but as with Spinoza, five seconds into The Wife of Bath and the words began to lift off the page and drift away into thin air. I needed a break; I needed something empirical. You couldn't find answers from just reading a book. Upper Fordleigh was approaching and, with its high rise offices and posh residential flats, it looked like a hideous new town of the 1960s.
"Scuse me,' intruded a voice next to my right ear. "You getting off here, yeah?'
"Yes, I am,' I replied curtly, getting up and deciding that the tones of the speaker didn't indicate someone worth making eye contact with.
I alighted to the platform and a lingering curiosity made me turn back for a brief instant, and there, stood at the train doorway, helping a woman with her pushchair, with cockney promptings of "old it, old it,' "nice one,' "any time petal,' was the same "slick' character I had encountered on my train journey earlier. At least... was it? He looked the same - the close cropped black hair, chic designer sideburns, white teeth - but his expression had completely changed, like someone had reached inside him and replaced his soul with someone entirely different. I met his eye momentarily, but there was no hint of recognition, no acknowledgement, nothing at all. Was it me? Did I ooze death? Was it a sign, another furtive clue, a symbol of the effects of Jonny's demise? Or was it just a completely different person?
I decided that I must have let my analytical mind get the better of me and shuffled amongst the crowd towards the station exit, unable to stop as a familiar voice echoed behind me:
"The beautiful girl is returning to the nest. Si. Si el es.
v.
A quick moment of madness, that was all it had been. My mind had travelled to a creative plateau; it had begun to mix reality and memories, like a dream, a dream from which I had just woken up. I needed to concentrate on the matter in hand, not get lost in the actions of the local populace, which were none of my concern.
"You get distracted too much," Alfred had once told me. "You get too caught up with the present, when you should be thinking about the past."
"I'm a gonzo obituarist," I tried to explain in riposte. "I try and live the life of the person I'm writing about."
He'd put his head in hands and shook it with frustration.
"These people are dead!" he'd growled through gritted teeth. "Try and remember that."
Toeing the company line then, I decided to keep my thoughts away from Chaucer, and Spinoza, and Blake, and Rousseau, and Mr Slick, and Mrs Bezrich and her garden gnomes, and did what Alfred would describe as "some proper research.' I went to the library and looked up his death in a paper - journalistic heresy, in my opinion, but who was I to argue with the orders of authority?
Death of Local Man Not Suspicious Say Police
Popular local budding author Jonathan Bezrich was found dead in his apartment yesterday. He was 28 years old. A coroner confirmed the cause of death as suicide by asphyxiation. His mother Christabel Bezrich described him as "someone so precious we thought he'd live forever." Police have confirmed the death as not suspicious.
Oh great, well that was hugely informative wasn't it? Fascinating journalism. Jonny had killed himself, apparently, in a not very newsworthy manner, and his mother had made a banal comment about it that the editor had probably made up. Presumably the West Surrey Times had some infinitely more important stories to focus on that week?
Local Children Celebrate as Town Blooms Again
Children of local primary school Knutsbury Manor celebrated the town's win in Surrey in Bloom, by dressing up as their own favourite flower.
Head teacher Ned Lancaster said:
The children have been really excited about the competition this year, and have seen all the displays around the town centre. Let's hope they bloom as well as the famous Knutsbury tulips!
That's the problem with suicide - it just isn't cool anymore. It used to be a respected act, with women throwing themselves in front of horses and monks dousing their cloaks with petrol, but not any longer, now it was just passé attention seeking. There was nothing clever or post-modern about it, that's why people didn't care anymore, and as I read more about the case, I got the sense that Jonathon knew this too.
At 11am on a Monday morning he'd got up, phoned in sick for work, had a shower, put on his usual T-Shirt and combat trousers, had a toasted cheese sandwich, gone back into his bedroom, made a noose with his bed linen and hung himself. No drama, no contrivances, no secret messages, no nothing. He'd wanted to stop living so that's what he decided to do, in the same way you or I would decide to watch Neighbours or make a cup of tea. It was mundane, it was mechanical, it was clinical.
This was why it was such a mystery. People do not just commit suicide in this way. Only life prisoners and the terminally ill, no one else. Trust me, I know.
There was something more that needed to be found out here, something that Nigella Doyle of the West Surrey Times obviously hadn't been bothered to think about. Nothing about Jonny had seemed particularly abnormal so far. He had a pretty conventional family in contemporary terms. He had a lot of friends. He was good looking. He had some kind of talent. But yet he'd made an unmitigated decision to kill himself. He didn't appear to have been fighting for some valiant cause; he hadn't struggled during the act - the medical report confirmed that there was no sever bruising or tissue ripping - so he didn't consider that he may have made a mistake; he hadn't developed an elaborate of way doing it to make it more appealing, like jumping out of Upper Fordleigh bell tower or something like that. He'd just done it. It was so calculated that there had to be something more to it.
Armed with my pilfered literary works and a morbid sense of imagination, I entered Jonny's bedsit, certain that it would be a veritable Santa's Grotto of character, motive, lifestyle and truth. I opened the door and was immediately given my answer. There was... nothing. It was...it was a lonely man's version of purgatory.
There a cream carpet. A brown sofa, with some unruffled cushions. A glass coffee table, unstained, with a loose copy of FHM lying on it. A TV, with a DVD player. Two DVDs on a rack: Memento - the one about Guy Pearce travelling backwards in time, and Easy Rider - which I hadn't seen, but knew it was about hippies on bikes travelling across America. There was a cupboard that folded out into a bed. A small table and chair, which he'd used to hang himself. A kitchen, sparsely populated with brand new and hardly used appliances. And... and nothing else. That was it. It looked like it had been entirely cleared out before I'd got here, but PC Cartwright from Highfield Police had assured me that this was exactly how it had been found by the landlord the next day, minus the dead body hanging from the ceiling of course. It was so bare it was frightening. Where were the pictures on the walls, of Jonny and his great mates? Where were the Playstation and the leftover cans of beer? Why were there no books, no art, no plates, no curtains, nothing except the absolute basics? Where was the personality, the individual? Where was the human being?
I paused and studied the room again. There had been a person here, I could sense that. This wasn't a room that was empty of self; this was a room that had been emptied of it, a self that had gone absent without leave. Perhaps Jonny had suffered a loss of identity, had lost himself somewhere along the line. Something had happened to him that had destroyed all his belief in life, all that he had lived for before he'd had to start again from an empty shell. But after a while he'd realised that that he couldn't start do this, that there was nothing left to put back into the room. So he'd decided to kill himself and leave it empty for good.
A question kept bugging me, something that Alfred had mentioned yesterday, about all the calls he'd received praising Jonny and saying what a wonderful human being he was. It didn't quite fit. Why would so many people call about a lifeless, soulless, lost personality? He couldn't just be nobody. There had to be a better reason why his flat looked like this.
I tried to recall what my sister Alice's room had looked like before she'd killed herself, to see if I could draw any comparisons.
She'd covered her walls with posters and art, and pictures and little tit-bits of memories, to an obsessive extent. It was one big collage of herself and what she was about and couldn't not have been more different to Jonny's. However, they were expressing polarities of the same problem.
According to some ridiculous book I'd read about how rooms reflect your personality, Alice's décor was a perfect representation of depression and self-loathing. A person suffering this condition would normally decorate the personal space around them more than usual, because:
a) It gives them a way to express themselves without having to justify it to others. It's THEIR room. Others aren't invited.
b) They can create an image of themselves to aspire to. Cool bands they haven't heard; art they don't understand; films they haven't seen; until the created self decides it has
c) They overload with images so that they don't have to be anyone in particular. Confusion becomes normality and therefore okay.
But in my experience it's when you look further in, that the real truths come out. The photos in the bottom drawer, the box of keepsakes that they refuse to throw away, the CDs they hide at the bottom of the stack. That's where you find the real person, the face behind the mask.
So if Jonny was masquerading as a bland, soulless, sub-human entity, then where was the self he was hiding?
I had another rifle around, but still nothing. Two dull CDs. Some cheese and a bag of old tomatoes in the fridge. A screwed up bank statement in the bin; but nothing of any significance. No notes, random mementos, no hidden stash of pornography. It was starting to freak me out. I ate some of the cheese in consolation. Honestly, I would have preferred an inverted red cross made up of rabbit's bones, or a dressed up effigy of his mother. Just something. Something that said something. Anything was better than this.
Feeling suitably anti-climactic I went to quickly visit the bathroom, to relieve some of the after-effects of Mrs Bezrich's home-made tea, and then I was out. There was some unfinished business here, something lay dormant, looking at me and leading me on before it revealed its true hand. It was very, very uncomfortable.
I took a quick glance in the mirror before I left and decided that I looked more awful than usual. My hair, which is a straggly mess at the best of times, was suffering from the after-effects of the continual barrage of suburban drizzle; my clothes were out of shape and sticking out in all the wrong places; and my face looked sweaty and flushed and... and... God, disfigured somehow. What was happening to me? What was this job doing to me?
Then I noticed it. It wasn't me after all. The mirror was making me ugly by design. It had been warped very exactly, at the point where the average person would see the line of their eyes, and if I wasn't vain I probably wouldn't have noticed, but it was definitely there and I presumed it was there for a reason. Jonny had purposefully made it so that his, and other people's reflections appeared subtly flawed somehow. He was surreptitiously trying to remove the obsession with self image. Or he did not want to like what he saw in the mirror, so he distorted it, to project his fragmented mind onto his outer self.
I peered in, to examine myself a bit closer, then noticed that the bend was there for another purpose - as a compartment to pass on a message, and not an abstract or interpretative one this time. An actual note, which read:
To the one who is looking.
Narcissist.
Proposition: If you look perfect, you only have the potential to be ugly
Conclusion: Find him to find me.
I read it again. And then again. And then I felt slightly sick for a minute. I wasn't ready for this, and my body needed to defend itself against what my brain wasn't quite able to take in.
My eyes looked around the room to try and find a quick explanation to placate the feeling in my stomach, but one was not forthcoming. It couldn't be, it couldn't be, could it? The books and the painting had just been arbitrary evidence which I had deconstructed and reformed to try and create a persona for Jonny. I'd never thought that there was anything of actual significance to be made out of it. It was my imagination running away with me, it always was.
But the message knew; it knew it would be me reading it, and it knew what I would be thinking at the time. This meant that I was no longer in control, there was someone else dictating what I was doing, someone from behind the grave.
My body shuddered to try and remove the claustrophobia, paranoia and nausea that all hit me at the same time. And...
"Oh, my... fucking... God!"
The mirror fell off the wall and crashed into the floor, shattering it into a hundred pieces, making a noise that reverberated around the room like a crescendo of tortured screams. I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable reaction. And waited. And waited. But there was nothing. All there was again was silence, silence of the deathly flat lingering relentlessly, like a cold, thick fog.
I ran straight out of the flat, without stopping to look at the remnants of the mirror beneath me, and slammed the door of the apartment block as hard as I could.
vi.
The world returned itself to me about half an hour later as I sat in a taxi on the way back to Chatsworth Village. The comfort of movement, the seclusion of the back seat and the benevolent red glow of the electronic meter meant that I was able to think rationally for a second, without fear of being watched or controlled, or being scared the crap out of.
First, I decided, this could still quite easily just be me constructing things in my mind. Three books set out on a table in a library, could have meant absolutely anything and most likely absolutely nothing.
A random individual seemingly following me on a train? Probably a very, very plausible coincidence.
And a mirror could fall off a wall at any time, particularly in a flat as cold and damp as Jonny's was.
No, the only thing that was really worth pursuing with any serious consideration was the message behind the mirror, a message that could have been left for anyone, not just egotistical little Miss Elizabeth Price.
To the one who is looking. Find him to find me.
This was it, the only part that meant anything specific. I was looking for him. But then so could have anyone - the police, his friends, him mother, his dad, his girlfriend - anyone. There was nothing actually addressed to me.
The writing style was reminiscent of Spinoza in the book I'd found, but this could just be another coincidence. He was quite obviously a fan and this was probably the main reason it was sat on the desk in the library in the first place.
The most likely explanation was that the message was some simple philosophical etching that Jonny had decided to write on a creative whim; or it was an explanation as to why he had decided to kill himself, through which he was trying to encourage attention that would come to him after his death and motivate himself into carrying the act out in first place. Either way both were vastly more probable reasons than my paranoia-driven ramblings, that Jonny was watching me from beyond the grave, clandestinely guiding all my thoughts and all my actions. That was completely insane now I thought about it and I chuckled to myself, much to the cab driver's bemusement.
The one thing that I had gained from this brief experience was a sense of meaning to my hitherto wasted use of a Saturday. The whole escapade now felt more like a morbid treasure hunt, even if it would still most likely turn out to be as dull as most other deaths proved to be. I sat back in my seat, stared out at the trimmed hedges and long driveways, the meandering river of identikit neo-Georgian homes that cut into the countryside like an outhouse in the Garden of Eden, and waited for my brain to make its next move.
vii.
I decided that I was going to get off my cynical high horse and play the game that Jonny may, or may not, have decided to start in his apartment bathroom. The cab pulled up at the end of Chatsworth High Street, by the unbelievably expensive Vienna Fish Restaurant and I alighted back onto cobbled streets, with the sole proviso of trying to find "him," "the one who looks perfect." This wasn't a decision I took lightly I can tell you, but I thought I'd take on the burden. It may have been a Saturday, but this beat interviewing grizzly war veterans and politicians any day of the week.
So what was I to make of "perfection?" What was it exactly that I was supposed to be looking for? My perfect man? I somewhat doubted that. The archetypal perfect man: tall, dark, handsome and rich? Perhaps. It depended on what Jonny's conception of this would have been.
It sounded like he would have put this vision of perfection on a pedestal, as something above human, or maybe sub-human. His note was gently mocking but retained a latent sense of envy and bitterness at the same time.
"If you look perfect you only have the potential to be ugly."
This was as complete a denunciation of the cultural desire for physical perfection if ever I'd heard one. I understood what he was saying: humans cannot quite cope with things being perfect, they always need some room for improvement and are all striving for something that fundamentally they don't really want. But then did anyone ever believe they were perfect? Did anyone look in the mirror and see no fault with themselves whatsoever? We are all way too self-critical for that - or we are all manipulated into thinking that way by consumer culture, which would fall apart at the seams the moment people stopped concentrating on their appearances.
Maybe that was what I had to find, the one person on the planet who did actually think they were physically perfect. But where would they be? A cave or a modelling agency? Did they even have to look beautiful?
I decided to get some lunch. All this thought about bodies and physique was making me hungry. I'm not some kind of overweight, power-dressed, blubbery, office worker by the way, while we're on the subject. I'm not honestly. I'm not perfect of course, but I'm reasonably pretty in a fresh-faced country girl kind of way. I've got freckly skin, strawberry blond hair and I'm certainly not fat. Ever since I went to university I've been basing my image on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, if you can believe that, and I've always managed to stay thin since. I've never had a mother, you must remember, so I've never really had anyone who could feed me enough to get fat. My dad was very much a pie and chips kind of man, and he couldn't really understand that once we passed the age of about eleven or twelve, girls will simply not eat food like that. So I learned to cook myself, with help from magazines and TV adverts, and ate a balanced daily diet of Special K, Tuna and Lettuce Sandwiches and Chicken Caesar Salad, which may have stunted my growth a bit, but did ensure that I was going to be skinny for the rest of my life. Maybe that was the perfect way for a woman to look these days anyway? I'd never really thought about it.
I walked around Chatsworth's attractive cobbled high street for a while, looking at all the pretty faces walking around, all children of the good genes brought in by high wages and limitless credit cards, but was still not entirely sure what I was looking for. All the tanned, handsome types seemed to gather outside quaint cafes and fashionable independent shops, that sold expensive salads and slacks, but from what I knew about Jonny, I couldn't imagine him frequenting any of these places. He seemed too down-to-earth, too repulsed by the collective superiority of the "beautiful people." Yet he must have formed some kind of relationship with one of them, with the "perfect one" he was guiding me to.
I sensed I should be searching in less elitist climes; somewhere where the good-looking crowd would still deign to hang out, but where the mere mortals with their puffy chins and lazy eyes would happily sit alongside. I came across the usual city centre chain bars, but imagined that the post-pub violence would present too greater risk to their soft skin. Then there was the customary quota of traditional pubs - The Mary Rose, The Packhorse - but they were too common, too working class. I saw Jonny considering himself as a mix between Dylan Thomas and F Scott Fitzgerald, a trendy man-of-the-people, if that made any sense. So I needed a place where the upper classes still frequented, but those who didn't subscribe to the established values of their station, those who spent daddy's money on cocaine, decks and doss-houses for their friends, and a place where the workers hung out. No, the ones who were a cut above, who dealt the drugs, who knew ten times more than you but never went to school, who were incredibly attractive yet didn't know it, who didn't spend the night shouting and downing Stella and Ecstasy tablets, who had too much sex to care. The place where the working class met high society and found somewhere in between.
I meandered aimlessly down a small lane off the High Street and there it was, hiding away like the town centre's deformed younger sister. It looked amateur, ill-mannered, had flyers in the window and a shopping trolley full of CDs out the front. It was as welcoming as a family of pit bulls with social issues. It was called The Foundry and it had Jonathon Bezrich written all over it.
