Brian was a dangerous character with an insatiable fascination for the paranormal. His hair was brown and never quite tidy, as were most of his clothes, though he kept his mannerisms tip-top. He enjoyed animals, post-modern art and exoskeletons, and used to frequent the local arthropod house a few roads down before it was burnt down, and subsequently abandoned as ‘kipple’. As a relatively young man of a quiet and middle class background, he felt vulnerable in his own home as it was situated in one of the most desperate districts of the city in which he now lived, where he had recently taken up vocation as a male nurse, despite the advice of his friends and family. He had not a clue who his neighbours were, and had not a care to find out, as chances are, they weren’t safe.
When he wasn’t at work, which he had by now discovered was a depressing and dead end job due to his lack of skills and the pure nature of what he was expected to do, he liked to spend as much time away from home as possible. Sometimes, if they weren’t too tired of him and/or his pessimism, he would follow his colleagues from the hospital to their ritual after work drinks, however he wouldn’t stay long as he didn’t drink alcohol, and would begin to feel uncomfortable talking about his lack of experiences with women, and the fact that he didn’t enjoy spitting, shouting or chanting. If this was the case, he could stand for hours in a news agents flicking through magazines and papers, until they would eventually ask him to leave, at which point he would just walk the short distance to the next. On the peculiar occasion when he was home, he would simply read, watch documentaries on the television, or scrub the wooden floor boards of his apartment with bleach, because he found it relaxing and peaceful. The sound of the scrubbing, he said, ‘blocked out the sound of the traffic and despair,’ which he always seemed to hear.
At night, when Brian could hear shouting or a similar occurrence outside, he would sometimes dim his lights, grab the nearest weapon to hand and sit at the window he deemed best hidden from the pavement where he would watch the commotion outside, alert and ready for any action he felt necessary. He saw drug deals and fights, sometimes a parked car being pissed on, a road sign being cut down or some other act of civil disorder. However, it was his profession, where he would have to tend to the victims of muggings, street violence and drunken disorder that fuelled his already overwhelming distaste for the youths and hooligans terrorising his neighbourhood.
He hated them with a passion, and would talk bitterly about how he was unable to wait at the bus stops near his home, and was nervous even stepping out of his own front door. Sometimes on his way to work, a pavement or walkway would be blockaded by a band of hooded hoodlums, and he would have to go via another route, which would subsequently make him late and get him in trouble. But his comrades couldn’t care less. To them, Brian was a person who would feel this uncomfortable way in any house or district. He was clearly introverted, liked to keep himself to himself; and if it wasn’t the felons he was complaining about, it’d be the salesmen with their plastic smiles, the elderly but nosey couple who live next door, or the single mother forever complaining about her lot in life. However, what they didn’t understand is the effect that such constant terror can have on a man of such weak mind and frame.
One Tuesday night, when the roads were quiet and blanketed by a thin fog which drifted slowly as if in a daze northbound, Brian could hear harsh phonetics and unintelligible slang through his open window. He slowly sat up from his single bed, and pulled aside his curtains only slightly so as to have a peek at whatever was occurring. But what he saw made his blood boil and his toes curl. It made him feel sick to the pit of his stomach and momentarily disorientated. He saw the usual suspects, about eight or nine in total, as usual intoxicated and surfing the streets for action, hands gloved and faces covered. However, instead of unleashing their anger (which had built up through their years of abuse and incest) on inanimate objects or on strangers whom Brian didn’t know, they were urinating on his own front lawn, eating his flowers and drowning a cat in a metal bucket outside his front door, illuminated by the lamp on the wall. Brian, unable to retaliate, watched in horror from his window as they raped his garden. He thought of ringing the authorities, but knew that would do no good, they would flee and come back harder with a vengeance. He felt a rush of sudden panic wash over him and he dashed to the kitchen to grab the biggest knife he could find, and then back to the window where he grasped it in both hands, knuckles white with fear. However, as soon as he pulled back the curtains for a second time, he saw something terrible. They had stopped moving about so much, and each were staring directly at him, eyes dark and covered in shadow under hoods, almost as if each had purposely attempted to dress like a bringer of death or bad news. Brian froze, and stood dumbly with his knife, which he now realised had given them reason to get violent. At that moment they all pointed, each with a single finger, and began to laugh and scream hysterically, hooting and howling at the moon as if deranged. Brian fled to the back of the room, but he could hear them kicking and banging at the door. He shut his eyes as tightly as he could, and tried to focus on the sweat now running down his arms and face, but he heard a window smash, and then another. He felt ill, and his legs were unable to carry him, so he slumped against the wall beside his bed, dropped his knife and wept tears and snot gushing down his face. He didn’t cease the tears when the smashing had stopped, nor did he when the police turned up. It really was a pathetic sight.
After that, those who knew him say that he changed ever so slightly, in such a subtle way that it was hard to put a finger on it. But the change was undoubtedly there. He was always aware, and had developed quite a skewed view on things. I think, he realised that in order to survive in such a violent and aggressive society, one must also be aggressive and violent, but more so. It’s contagious; one cannot propel oneself from such a miserable and desolate place without earning money, but the only way to earn money is to earn respect, and the only way to earn respect is to beat everybody else down with fact and reality; no talk, all walk. He became much less patient, and the people he worked with at the hospital began to hold him in much higher regard; whenever they insulted him or teased him about his ‘limp dick’ he’d either get aggressive or get violent so they stopped doing it. Brian was undoubtedly delighted by his newfound authority and did well at work, moving slowly up the ranks of the nurse world. He also managed to fend off the troublesome youths; he bought an air rifle and would load it and then aim it out the window with serious intention to shoot somebody in the foot – they took this as a good a sign as any to stay away and pestered him no longer.
However, he also found that with this authority and personality which enabled him to do so well in life, it was much harder to find peace of mind. Still, persons were reluctant to become too close a friend, and still persons beheld him as strange or peculiar, though Brian did not know why. He would often become burdened by huge levels of guilt, spawned from the sometimes excessive force with which he would regard someone, particularly if it was a person who he’d for a second thought of as intrusive or rude, then, after punishing them severely with authority, would realise their innocence and naivety.
Regret was something Brian found unbearable, and like an illness, it slowly wore away his scar tissue. It tore him up inside, and made him desperately unhappy. He was cruel to his Mother, and to his friends, and to the girl in the book shop. He would lie awake for hours at night, ruminating on his own life, what he had achieved, and at what cost he had given himself access to all the things that made him temporarily happy. He decided that society was quite simply ‘not his thing’ and went off to live somewhere out in the woods. Who knows what happened to him, it was blatantly prompted by some kind of madness, but chances are, he’s probably dead. BUT WE ALL LEARNT A VALUABLE LESSON from Brian, to an extent, and one that could be interpreted in a vast number of ways and measures and things....
