22 THE FINAL ACT OF MADNESS

All things must end...

Ivan Bramble was firmly of the opinion that he had suffered enough. Of course he had. Few men on the face of this Earth had suffered more, he was quite sure of that.

And he knew he was an idiot. A great big idiot who cared more for porcine monstrosities in human form than he did for himself. After all, what other man would have taken the creature that his wife had deserted him for, and let into his home? Into the flat he himself had been obliged to seek as a third class refuge rather than sleep in a shop doorway or on a park bench? And then brought him into that flat, blood everywhere and even tears on the aforementioned ex’’s shoulders where his impertinence begged forgiveness?

And let him sleep in his bed while he lay uncomfortably on a sofa that was a little bit too small for him?

But that’s just what he’d done.

She’d said, you can’t leave a fellow human suffering in that state, look at him, he’s been beaten to a pulp…

And he’d said, he means nothing but pain and loneliness to me and I don’t care even if he’s dying…

Then she’d said, just one night, Ivan, you can see the state he’s in, it would be only humane…

So was killing the Basket Case, I presume...

And it had ended up with the two of them in his bed and him on this small sofa. And to sum it up, the homeless had a bed and he didn’t. Both of them. Together. Doing goodness knows what to each other.

But that wasn’t everything.

The pattern of his life was downwards if down is a direction patterns can go.

Had he been a woman that day before Christmas, or had he imagined it like the experts said? Imagined that lovely hair, imagined the way his manhood had shrivelled to nothing whilst his chest had exploded into a glorious monument to womanhood?

He must have imagined it.

But he knew that he hadn’t.

So he was going mad, was he? Isn’t that kind of self-deception a fine and wonderful indicator of insanity? Seeing what isn’t there, even something as personal as a bosom? Being what could never be? Losing everything?

Like he’d lost Maureen to the Gerald chump. To a man so vacuous and soulless, the man who was now in his bed with the woman who was still his wife? His bed, and wasn’t he tired?

Like he’d lost his job. Yes, he was suspended and might be forgiven, but if it went to court he wouldn’t be. And the kid had deserved more than one slap, hadn’t he? Behaving like he had to a woman in a public place. Unforgivable. Or in any place, actually. It didn’t have to be a public place. It could have been somewhere as private as a toilet cubicle and it would have been as bad, though why the lout would be with him/her in a toilet cubicle stretched the imagination. But the presence of voyeurs wasn’t the point. The assault was the point, the fingers twanging his bra strap.

I had a bra strap!

No job and a bra strap.

And his ex and a lover actually in his bed.

He was going mad. That much was clear as a glass bell.

The triplets business. Had he really been one of three when he’d been born, or had that all been a piece of make-believe by authority to explain his impossible blonde hair? Would they do that, the experts with their fancy theories and fancier tests?

And the woman in the chip shop… Had she been his sister? Really?

Then, suddenly, he knew she had been because ... and he’d never be able to explain this even if he lived to be a hundred, which he was beginning to suspect he wouldn’t … because she was no longer there.

You don’t miss something if you’ve never known it was there. That was his thought at that moment. As a woman he’d missed his male tackle because it was usually there and suddenly it hadn’t been. But as one of a trio of infants separated at birth, he’d never known the other two except for the nine months they’d spent together in the womb. So he’d never known anything but the life he’d lived, and even though his ignorance had been as complete as ignorance can be, somewhere buried in layers of his mind where his conscious thoughts never trod there had been something.

He knew that now because it wasn’t there any more.

A connection. A tendril of something less tangible than the echo of a dream, something so insignificant he had never tripped over it, never suspected a single instant of its existence, but it had been there.

A connection.

Had he been a woman for that day, or had the connection become frazzled? Had a strange, unearthly distortion broken that least of tendrils? And made him believe he was a woman with such certainty and conviction that anything else would have seemed to be a lie?

And that connection was gone for good.

He was aware of its absence even though he hadn’t been aware of its existence for fifty years of having it.

I can’t take life like this…

That was the thought that came out of the blue, and dominated everything.

I’m mad.

And you know what they do to the mad… what they’ve got to do, numb their psyches with drugs until they have all the appearances of the sane… but they’re not sane, and then lock them away in sheltered places where there’s no life…

Suddenly he knew what to do.

He wasn’t insane, was he? But he couldn’t bear the thought of being treated as though he was…

If I had some drugs it would be easy, but I haven’t…

But he had a nice sharp knife, with a lovely blade that he used when the mood for creating arty things struck him. He was good at that, carving, creating, putting his spirit into inanimate objects until they almost gained a life of their own. Carved wood with a beating heart. That was madness too.

And, by golly, it was so easy, lying on that cramped sofa, and he barely felt it as the sharp steel moved with a strange, ethereal determination across his wrist.

The blood that spurted out was his, and he loved every drop of it. It was pure and would soak into everything until his front room smelt of its salty purity.

I can smell it now…

And then and there in a dark moment the final act played out as the last of a mighty triumvirate faded slowly from the world of sound and colour into another world of silence and shadow.

I’m gone… he thought, quite truthfully.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 06.01.19