Acid Bubbles (40 page)

With surprising suddenness the mirrors rolled back away from me, going further and further away until they disappeared into the fabric of the courthouse. I'm left looking at Jennifer who is crying bitter tears.

“The sentence is final and without appeal! Jennifer, you will be alone with only the love of your child! You can go with him but your child will die, the same as the young girl” The pixie said this in a grave tone. Jennifer had no choice, and I experienced the solitude coming from her. It was a cold space.

“The sentence is final and without appeal! Paul Redondo, known in your world as Peter Robert Jackson, you shall return to your world. You shall never return here. The misery you suffer for your sins is up to you! I hope you enjoy it!” After this statement the pixie known Hysandrabopel the Lylybel burst out into a hail of hysterical laughter. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and as they fell to the floor turned into bright bubbles that floated high into the shafts of sunlight, glinting like diamonds. She was free from my sinful past. This pixie was no longer a conduit for my wrongdoings.

Jennifer walked over to me and took me in her arms for the final time. The kiss that followed for a few seconds held more passion and love than all the kisses I've experienced in my entire life. She broke away and smiled at me. I was about to say something when I woke up, crying hard hysterical tears.

I knew without doubt the fabulous universe had gone forever. Never again would I experience life so vital and raw. All the beauty of molecular sensation and movement was gone. The blueness in my soul turned to grey, and then to the deepest black. It was the longest three days of my entire life. Every moment was like waiting on death row for an execution. One every day!

Nothing brightened my dark soul. I had survived the mental and physical rigours of cancer with its terrible treatments. I was getting healthier every day. In a few days I would start work again after nearly a year, a year of teetering on the edge, and sometimes looking over it and seeing darkness, and at other times light so brilliant it changed your soul.

I walked out onto my terrace holding a very large brandy in my hand because my course of action was to get blind drunk hoping to fall into an alcoholic coma. This course seemed like the only answer to my bleakness. It was a cold winter's day outside, and on the distant hills I could see fresh snow had fallen. Higher up in the sierras it would be powder. The skiing would be fantastic. A day to change my state of misery, so tomorrow could become my perfect day.

Positive action and positive thought followed. I tossed the contents of my glass from the terrace and went inside to plan. I looked at the snow forecast on the computer, making a decision. I couldn't keep my life on this black level any longer. Things were going to change.

I couldn't stay off the drink altogether. As I watched a Tarantino war movie I downed three or four cans of lager and pondered the coming tomorrow.

I was going to make sure that this one fabulous day was going to happen. I was positive this would be a life changing perfect day. I was becoming very optimistic for the outcome.

Me being optimistic? I think so!

More stuff to add to the voice recorder.

The digital recording device ran out of words. The story was told. I travelled 300 km out of my way, zigzagging across the country, using the motorway system as a reading room. The more precise explanation would be a listening room. I got close to home before I realised how long this story was going to be. I didn't want to sit in the quiet of my apartment. I wanted the world to pass by in the physical sense as the timelines in the story passed into my consciousness. What seemed like hours later than intended I was filling up at a petrol station. During this stop I studied the readout and discovered I had several chapters more to listen to. I headed off in the other direction at the next interchange. I wanted to experience everything this man who'd thrown himself to his death had experienced.

The truth is I did experience everything this man had lived through. If you haven't already guessed, this was my story. We are one and the same. My alter ego had thrown himself off the parapet and into the deep void to be shattered on the rocks below. The intention was to have a perfect day, unspoilt by the knowledge of a bleak tomorrow… I'd planned to have my perfect day with an optimistic ending. No pessimism at the thought of tomorrow bringing back the horrors of my past grievous mistakes and the all-pervading misery of a lost love.

I'd survived the cancer and lost the will to live because my mind or some other outside force had insisted I face my turgid forgotten years. I was sickened by what I learnt, but in all seriousness I could learn to forget again. I'd done so once so why not again?

What had broken me was Jennifer. The reality we shared together was far more than the sum of any number of normal lifetimes, so intense were the sensations in the parallel universe. I do not believe for a single moment it came from inside my head. This place is parallel to us and they somehow dragged me there to show me the truth.

After the early morning discounting my day was full of hope. The snow was perfect, and a bonus was I got to ski with good company for more than the two hours as I mentioned at the beginning of this strange confession. What a day. I started with the intention of throwing myself to my death, to make it a perfect end to a very imperfect life. I met the London boys, after which I met one of their sisters who was on the long weekend skiing trip with them. She must have seen it in my eyes because she didn't hear it in my voice. I couldn't speak. Alice wasn't similar to Jennifer at all! Alice didn't remind me of Jennifer… Alice was Jennifer, every single perfect part of her!

I encountered Alice as a real person in a very real world. She was tangible, alive and there with me. Alice was Jennifer in the absolute sense. It wasn't just in the physical; she was in every sense the same person. It was a miracle beyond miracles. We understood some incredible fusion was happening between us the moment we met in the sandwich cabin. The boys stayed on for a few beers, and we skied on for two more hours. It was the strangest thing. We didn't have to speak, we'd known each other all our lives, and knew in a single moment we would be together for the rest of them. She was divorced with two children, now teenagers. I had lived alone for some years by choice. It was instant and magical between us, and so incredibly close to the sensation of oneness I felt with Jennifer in the strange alternative universe, that it made no difference.

They were leaving late that night to catch an early flight back to the UK. She would return to Spain or I would go to England within the week. I'd used my smart phone to find a number of vacancies open in my field. The job I had here no longer seemed important. I didn't have the job in England at that moment, and I didn't care. I would find one because I'd found something far more important.

We had to be together, and it wasn't just me thinking this. Alice admitted she felt an instant bond with me but had been tentative at first to suggest some connection. When I replied that I felt the same we just moved into a strange knowledgeable contentment. We parted with just one kiss between us. It held everything, that final beautiful kiss in the courtroom with Jennifer had held. In that lingering moment in the cold sierra air it seemed this was the end of a kiss that had begun in a courtroom in another reality. In a handful of days I'd gone from bliss to bleak to black, and now I'd returned to incredible bliss in a real tangible world.

I was amused to sit there on that terrace looking at the girls, thinking to myself that I'd got the best girl in the world coming into my life. I was amused to imagine myself ending my pitiful existence by plunging off that parapet, exaggerating my movements whilst hanging on the ornamental lamp post, and playing to the crowd to give them maximum horror. If I'd killed myself that afternoon the probable course of action was to drink the most expensive champagne on the wine list, or the finest brandy. Once in a state of numbness I would have run at the parapet and dived over like an Olympic swimmer starting a race. No showboating for the crowd. Now I amuse myself by laughing at what would have been if not for Alice.

You may be asking why Alice isn't with me now. This is quite simple because she is the organiser of a significant birthday celebration for one of the other ski trip guests. Being with her had distracted her from party organising. We knew our love would remain with us for the rest of our lives, so with that lingering beautiful kiss I bade farewell until we are together to enjoy thousands of days more.

Now the story is over and I'm only a few kilometres from home. It was a little bit shorter than I imagined, or I stuck in too much of a diversion by going halfway to Madrid and back… Suddenly I have to brake!

The road in front of me is blocked, and there's lots of flashing lights. Hazard lights on the back of cars blink orange, dazzling my eyes, and all the traffic has come to a halt blocking the two-lane motorway. Up ahead it looks like a nasty accident, and being the middle of the night I pull up to a halt only fifteen cars back from the carnage. Time passes slowly as I wait for things to be cleared. Like everybody else I'm curious to see if there's anybody injured. An ambulance coming from the other direction stopped on the hard shoulder of the other carriageway. It was not called to the scene, but was there only by circumstance as it was returning to a hospital somewhere.

The police arrived on the scene coming down the centre of the two lanes of stopped traffic. Their headlights illuminate the mangled car. Under the bright lights I can see that a large saloon has run into the back outside corner of a small low loader; a lorry used to bring single cars in for repair. The car has a quarter of its roof cut off where the back of the lorry punched its way into the passenger compartment. It looked like the car had hit the lorry first, and I think the damage wouldn't have been too bad until the lorry hit the barriers coming to a dead halt, after which the mass of the car pushed its way onto the cutting blade that was the loading bed of the lorry.

The car in front of me was empty when I arrived, a large Mercedes-Benz, with its engine running, the keys in the ignition and no driver. There was a man leaning in through the front window on the passenger side of the mangled car. He was dressed like me in lightweight skiing clothes. It turned out he was a doctor coming back from a late dinner at the ski resort. He'd come across the accident and rushed in to help the injured. The ambulance man could be seen picked out in the bright lights of the police cars. He was carrying a large medical bag equipped for emergencies, but he seemed to be hesitant in his movement.

The ambulance man left the scene carrying the bag with him. I thank God that the injuries were not sufficient to use his medical expertise. The doctor remained leaning into the car as if he was comforting somebody. Whoever it was sitting in the car was probably a little bit fazed by the shock of the accident, not requiring medical attention for physical wounds. The ambulance man returned carrying something else. A large white sheet was illuminated as he opened it. With the contrasting black shadows from the lights all around, the inside of the car could not be seen clearly. I'm glad I never saw it.

The doctor and the ambulance man draped the sheet over something in the front passenger seat, and moved away a short distance in deep discussion. Now I could see a white lump in the front of the car, and it was obvious that whoever was beneath it was no more. Within seconds I could see black shadows forming, coming through the white. Whoever was in the front had been brutally injured. The accident had been quick and bloody. I thought about my own death that afternoon and how lucky I was that my life had changed for the better. Then I thought about how these people in the car who were going back from somewhere, or off to visit someone had experienced violent change in a matter of seconds. Now they would face misery and a funeral. Recriminations and guilt would probably follow, after which tears for Christmas and at birthdays. The police were doing their best to move the car to open the outside lane so everybody could move on. We'd all seen too much.

Every time they attempted to move the car there was an outburst of rage. I couldn't hear what was being said but it was loud and angry. Then the biggest shock of all that cold night; the man who wouldn't let them move the car wore only his underpants! I wondered if he was drunk coming back from one hell of a party. Had he caused the accident driving drunk in his underclothes with bare feet?

No, that wasn't it.

Then I saw the other two and my heart went cold. One was another man in his underpants standing in the cold, helping the police calm down the angry man. The other was a woman in her forties, a woman who kept herself in good shape. I could see this because she only wore small panties. She wore no bra and her breasts were exposed to the cold night air. Such was her state of distress that under the bright lights she showed no sign of noticing she was nearly naked. I couldn't imagine why they were dressed like that. In one cruel instant the truth struck me as cold as a sledgehammer made of ice.

They were naked because their clothes were all covered in their friend's blood and brains, or was it the wife of the screaming man? It could have been a sister. I didn't know and I didn't want to know. They had thrown their blood and brains soaked clothes over the buckled barrier into the darkness expunging that part of their horror. I was saved and they were lost and I couldn't imagine what it must be like to have a loved one's shattered skull sprayed all over you!

The big man was really going crazy every time they tried to move the car. You could see the police trying to explain, and I could hear the shouts of anger coming from him.

“Don't you touch her, you bastards!” he said. I was shocked he was speaking English with a London accent.

I went cold right through to my soul as I noticed he was Tony, one of the London boys. The other man in his underclothes was Michael, his friend. The woman I knew to be called Jacqueline. She was Alice's best friend. They'd all been travelling together on the short ski break. They were all returning to England on an early flight the next morning.

I closed my eyes and prayed that when I opened them it wasn't the same grisly picture. I open my eyes and everything is more horrible than I thought. The woman in the car is a love I will never have. Alice is decapitated and spoiled. The vision I met only hours ago who saved my life is dead!

She was going to change everything in my world, and now, like Jennifer, she'd gone forever in a more horrible way than I could ever imagine. People dressed only in their underwear on a freezing night screaming and angry only feet from her body. It was the thought of their discarded clothes soaked in Alice's brains that turned my stomach. I walked over to the barrier and vomited until I had nothing left inside me.

I had nothing left inside me before I vomited.

The road wasn't cleared for another twenty minutes, so I sat in the car thinking and not thinking, a constant loop of horror going round in my head. I'd killed enough people in my life. Did I make their car thirty seconds slower in leaving? I was talking to Alice on the phone as she was walking to the car. She told me it was very slippery and she couldn't concentrate on both things. She stopped and we made plans for several minutes. These minutes would have changed the history, so I'd managed to kill Alice before we'd even begun.

I couldn't look at them as I passed. I could hear their frantic voices, and involuntary nerves made me glance for a fraction of a second towards the gathering. Jacqueline was now wrapped in a white blanket, little spots of black coming through showing on the surface. I don't know if she had small cuts or it was blood from Alice's body. Inside I was reflecting on everything that had gone before. As I passed by my senses were invaded. I could smell ruptured diesel lines, puddles of fuel evaporating on the road surface, and I think, or hope I only imagined that I could smell the metallic odour of blood, the leaching away of Alice's life force.

At the next interchange I took a detour and headed back to Sierra Nevada by a different route. The forecast for today, because now it was today, was brilliant. The snow would be fabulous as it was yesterday. On this day I would spare no expense. I would seek out the best hotel and catch three hours sleep waking to the most lavish breakfast. I would spend the entire day skiing, stopping only to eat and drink, again nothing but the best available. Today I would satiate my desire for perfection. Every piste would be taken in a delight of ice crystals and sunshine. I would enjoy every moment in my last attempt at the garnering perfection.

I would then go to the terrace bar and have something exquisite from the menu. The drink would be selected from the very pinnacle of the list. Nothing would spoil the experience because I wouldn't need to worry about tomorrow or future miseries. On this, my second day at the slopes, there wouldn't be two of us sitting together, only me, the killer, broken on a wheel of sorrowful truth… This life wasn't going to end as the light slowly fades to a dying dullness. My life was going to end after a day of taking pleasures in the sunshine.