How to Make Monsters (15 page)

The radio droned from the side of
the bed, some late-night deejay spouting banalities from a studio fifty miles
away. Spinning platters of love and heartbreak to soothe the sleepless nights
of the lost and the lonely. A voice in the dark who pretended to care, to
empathise, but who would climb into his car after his shift and drive home to
his wife who waited in their expensive house somewhere in the suburbs. Just
another fraud, another talking head exploiting the misery of those who were
always left behind.

Pierce flushed the toilet, the sound
of the water swirling in the bowl sounding like wet feet slapping against stone
in the cramped room. He walked to the window, looked out at the street, and
wondered if he had lost his mind. The view outside offered no response, and
life carried on around him. Buildings sat in silence and people slept or fucked
or masturbated in the dark. Pierce felt like crying, but knew that he would
not; his tears had dried up long ago, before he had accepted that life was what
happened to others. People like him knew only the faded wallpaper of cheap rented
rooms, the sound of rain on dirty windows, the forlorn and pitiful smile of a
tired waitress over the breakfast table.

Pierce sat down on the bed, feeling
the thin sheets bunch up against his arse as he settled his weight onto the
squeaky mattress. He picked up the notebook, handling it with care and
affection. He opened it with his eyes closed, savouring the moment. When he
looked down at the first page, his heart felt swollen with some unnameable
emotion. It was always the same. The words on the page seemed to promise so
much, yet reveal so little.

He wondered again if he had lost his
mind. Then he read the words one more time.

Is something in the way?

Five words in red ink on the
narrow-lined page. A cryptic question that probably meant nothing to the rest
of the world’s population but had come to mean so much to Pierce. A razor-edged
enquiry, a hurtful truism: yes, but oh so much more than that.

A clue.

II

It had begun one Friday
night in a little dive of a pub near the Victorian town hall building. Pierce
was stood up by a girl he had met a few weeks before, a slight young thing with
bottle blonde hair and too much make-up who picked him up in a Dixie Fried
Chicken place on Pilgrim Street. She took him home for the night, sharing her
body and her bed, and he skulked off early the next morning, not wanting to
speak to her again. An empty one-night stand, a cheap fuck after a drunken
night; but he telephoned her the next day and arranged to meet up for a drink,
feeling particularly alone that evening and desperate to use up some nervous
energy.

But the girl didn’t arrive for their
second date, and he got drunk all over again, necking pint after pint of
two-for-one Stella from dirty glasses while loud dance music blared like the
soundtrack from a nightmare around him. Some time after ten o’clock, he
staggered to the gent’s, his guts aching and his head feeling like someone had
smashed a chair over it. After vomiting in the toilet, he sat down and lit up a
cigarette, fighting the nausea that still raged within him.

That was when he saw it. Amid the
vulgar graffiti, the thickly scrawled telephone numbers and promises of
deep-throat blowjobs, the dirty jokes and the casual abuse of people he would
never know, those five words shone out at him as if they were written in light.

Faded red ink on the back of a
battered wooden door. The words had called to him in a way that he couldn’t
even begin to understand. So he memorised them and stumbled outside to find a
taxi home.

The next day Pierce awoke to find
those words scrawled on the wall above his head in thick black marker. He’d
obviously written them when he’d returned home, drunk and angry and needing
something that he could never define. There was an empty vodka bottle on the
floor by the door, and the intense pain in his head told him where the contents
had gone. The note from Sandra was there, too; lying next to the bottle,
heavily creased from where it had been balled-up and smoothed out time and time
again. He knew what was written there by heart, and memory didn’t make the
message any less harsh:

I’ll be back in a week, and then
we’ll talk.

If you have any love left for me in
your heart, you’ll be here waiting.

If you’re gone, I’ll take it as
goodbye.

After all, there’s always something
in the way, isn’t there?

Sand. x

He’d read that note a
hundred times; left a hundred times more, then come crawling back through the
door filled with drink and self-loathing and regret. He thought that he still
loved her, but it was difficult to tell for sure. Their marriage had become
like habit; something that they both went through without thinking, and whose
impact barely even registered anymore. The lust and abandon of the past had
changed to routine and over-familiarity.

Yet still…still, he knew that there
must be a spark of passion hidden deep within them both. Otherwise, one of them
would have called it quits a long time ago. Fifteen years was a damned long
time, and you couldn’t write it off that easily.  There must be something left
to salvage, but it would take a lot of digging to pull it kicking and screaming
back up into the light. It was always the same, whenever they were together.
However hard they tried to get through the damage, there was just something in
the way.

Later that day he bought the notepad
and the red pen. Over a liquid lunch in a pub filled with hungry strangers he
copied down those words from memory: Something in the way?

Writing them down had seemed the
most natural thing in the world at the time, but now, thinking back, his
motivation was unclear. Perhaps he had sensed some latent power in them, a
talismanic force he was willing to follow wherever it may lead. Lying on his
narrow bed in that cheap room, he thought that he must have known the words
were the first point on a map of the mind; a co-ordinate point, after which
many more would follow. Where that map would take him was still unclear, but he
was still willing to track the route. And he knew that his life might change
forever by doing so.

It was three days later when things
took a turn for the bizarre. Sandra still wasn’t back, even though her note had
promised a brief sojourn. They’d spoken on the phone, but their conversations
had been stilted, unsatisfying. Amounting to nothing more than the vocal
equivalent of walking on eggshells. She promised that she’d return soon, and
that they’d talk, but didn’t say when. If he was honest, Pierce was losing
interest, the gap in himself widening each day to consume his emotions and
leave him feeling empty and washed-out. If Sandra was coming back, she’d better
be quick; if she left it too long, he would no longer be there to greet her
when she walked through the door.

He was drunk again, and staggering
home after being ejected from a nightclub a few miles from his house. Passing a
public call box, he decided to ring a taxi. The night was cool, and he was
wearing a thin shirt; he’d lost his coat in the club, when he was chasing some
girl onto the dance floor.

He fell into the phone box, wincing
as his shoulder struck the slowly closing door. The receiver fell from its
mounting when his groping hands reached for it, plastic clattering against
metal in the narrow space. He groped around in the dark, trying to grasp the
handset, but his fingers were clumsy with alcohol. Then, as a car passed on the
road, its headlights illuminating his awkward display, he saw the words written
in red ink on a sticker that was pasted to one of the small square windows. It
was the same handwriting, he knew it: a sloping, almost artistic hand with
stylised little curlicues above the letter “a”. The words were different this
time, but just as resonant:

Talk to us and discover what’s in the
way: 08008675982.

Pierce could barely believe his
eyes. The telephone number after the words was like a kiss in the dark from a
stranger: frightening, yet exhilarating in a way that made him feel sick in the
pit of his stomach. He knew that he would copy down the message even before he
was reaching into his jeans back pocket for the notebook and pen. He’d begun to
carry them with him wherever he went, in the unconscious hope that something
like this would happen. His hands were suddenly steady as he jotted down the
words and telephone number. He glanced nervously at the phone, but knew that he
could not ring the number tonight. Not here, in this badly lit street somewhere
south of nowhere. No, he would ring the number from the safety and comfort of
his own home, where he could feel at least partially in control.

III

Two am in the morning,
and Pierce sat in his living room, the telephone perched on the coffee table
before him. He had been staring at the number on the pad for over an hour, and
only now felt ready to dial. He picked up the receiver and punched the numbers
into the keypad. The ringtone took so long to sound in his ears that he thought
the connection would not be made, or that the number was a fiction. Then the
ringing began, sounding muted by distance. After ten rings, he was ready to
hang up. His hand tensed as he began to take the receiver from his ear, then
there was a sharp clattering noise as someone clumsily picked up on the other
end of the line.

“Hello.” The cultured male voice he
heard was tired, slightly slurred, as if the speaker had just woken from a deep
sleep - as he probably had.

“Hi. I…erm…I found your number.”

“In a telephone box somewhere in the
city? Or on a toilet wall in some shithole boozer along a pissy back street? Or
maybe scrawled on a demolished building on some derelict industrial park?

“All the lonely places.

“I know, my friend. I know. You
found the number and just had to call. Something in the words that were with it
spoke to you. You want an answer to the question.”

“Yes, something like that. Something
in the manner…in the way they were written.” Pierce no longer felt afraid. The
man on the phone sounded tired and friendly and open; it was the way he
imagined someone who worked for a suicide hotline might speak. There was trust
in that voice, and a bruised kind of dignity. The man sounded …world-weary.
Yes, that was the clichéd description that sprang to mind.

Then the phone went dead, and Pierce
almost screamed.

Frantically he tried the number
again, but knew before it happened that the line would ring out and never be
answered. Soon it went dead, the automatic cut-off system breaking the
connection. All he could hear was a thick wet crackle, like tinfoil being
dragged through mud. He replaced the receiver into its cradle and lay down on
the sofa. Closed his tired eyes.

Later, wide-eyed in the early hours,
he tried to watch one of Sandra’s DVDs – a film they’d both enjoyed: a light
romantic comedy set in some idealised version of London. After putting the disc
into the machine and sitting back with a glass of whisky, he stared at the dark
screen.

No matter how hard he tried, Pierce
was unable to make out anything apart from the vaguest suggestion of movement
within that slightly reflective gloom: a stirring, coiling motion, like
fattened intestinal tracts pulsing, or huge snakes tying knots in themselves.
He gave up after several repetitive moments, feeling afraid and slightly
nauseous. Sitting before the empty television screen, both TV and DVD player
unplugged, he watched the same dim, peristaltic scenes unfolding before his
unbelieving eyes until the sun came up and burned the images away.

IV

The following day Pierce
walked the streets of Scarbridge in an exhausted daze, ending up in an
unfamiliar and quietly threatening district sometime shortly after noon.
Starved of ideas, he called into a pub called the Royal Doubloon and ordered a
pint of Starapramen. The strong Czech lager cooled his throat as he drank, and
he felt light-headed after only a single mouthful. The events of the past few
days were having a strange effect on him, making him lethargic, thoughtful and
lonelier than ever before. His thoughts turned often to Sandra, and how he
should probably return home to save his marriage. But the motivation was not
there. It was all too tiresome, and he doubted that there was any real love
left between them anyway. Loneliness bloomed within and around him like a vast
black flower, its odour an overpowering charnel stench. He felt enveloped by
his aloneness, and a great weight was pinning him down onto the earth, where
other people seemed float above the ground like angels.

Something deep inside - some vague
and distinctly parasitic sensation - seemed to enjoy his pain. It was as if he
was wallowing in it, feasting on his own turmoil like a beggar at a banquet. He
wondered if other people sometimes felt like this, or if there was something
profoundly wrong with him at a psychological level. Then he ordered another
pint of strong lager, hoping that if he drank enough of them the pain, and his
secret enjoyment of it, would fade into the background.