ONE
I met him on the night I was meant to kill myself.
At the time, I lived at Moorside. The place was student accommodation in all but name. Its close proximity to the nearest campus, cheap rent, and negligible landlord influence attracted a crowd of young, bright-eyed academic tenants soon to realise that the social scene (read: drinking scene) was far more time-consuming than any of their classes, be they fine art or classics. I speak from experience. The above was what initially attracted me to Moorside back when I was a student. Though I was, at one time, passable at drawing, and had an interest in the classics because I dreamed of a life where I was the sort of person who could quote meter in Greek, I studied bog-standard creative writing. At Moorside, I was on the ground floor, with windows facing out onto the courtyard, a small square of concrete surrounded by lawn, with a bench or two for the devious smokers like me. The building was one of those grim high-rise blocks that permeated the surrounding area with a strong smell of weed. At Moorside, there was always music in the air. The walls were so thin that laughter from four floors above would echo down into my flat.
After studying, I never left Moorside, and came to watch the ever-revolving door of tenants grow progressively younger and younger. Initially I had made friends. Well, not friends exactly. People I knew in passing, shared cigarettes with, waved to in the hallways, but now I couldn't keep up. Everyone was a photocopy of someone I once knew. I saw groups huddled in the courtyard and almost recognised them from my student days, but they were familiarity three times removed. I was probably Moorside's longest, and oldest, tenant.
When I was a student, the music reverberating from elsewhere in the building was an early warning system for the ensuing chaos of a house party that would soon spill out from the confines of its originating flat and the hands of its occupants. Neighbouring doors would open, people would gather in the hallways, and eventually, the festivities would drip down into the courtyard. Windows would be thrown open so that people could shout drink requests at each other, and drunkenness seemed like something contagious that would infect via the air. I would sometimes join in on the nights when I didn't have to go to work. I waited tables throughout my student career, and then, after that, I did it full time. Then, afterwards, when the festivities commenced, I found myself somewhat of a peeping tom, watching it all happen. I'm sure I was known as the weird curtain-twitching neighbour. Maybe creepy rumours were even spread about me. The same way I came to know Vincent as mythic amongst his community, maybe I was the stuff of legend- the older gentleman that never left.
You'd think that living in the thrum of it all would have been beneficial to me, and that these sounds of civilisation- the music, the laughter- would have given me hope. Far from being suicidal, the noise should have had the same soothing effect that a lullaby has to a baby, reminding me of when times were good. In truth, they had the opposite effect; one of the reasons I had decided on ending it all was because I was terrified of my own haunted house. I spook easily, always have, and every noise that I heard echoing from another point in the building, its source untraceable, became distorted and eerie through the layers of drywall. Music starting at random, shadows darting past my window. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night to a chorus of laughter that I was sure was emanating mere feet away from my bed. One thing was certain: I had ghosts.
I remember thinking that pills were probably out of the question because I gag when being asked to swallow even painkillers. The whole affair would have been mortifying, and I liked the idea of dignity in death, so if I was going to go, it couldn't be by overdose. Besides, no one would prescribe me pills.
After I graduated, something peculiar started happening to me. I would get these headaches. No, not headaches, exactly: worse. A pain that radiated throughout my full face, starting in the back of my head and echoing clumsily down to my jaw. I couldn't speak or even open my mouth when I was like this. They were accompanied by bright flashing lights behind my eyelids, colours that I couldn't even put names too. Alright, you're thinking, a migraine. That's what the doctors thought too, initially, but no pain medication seemed to work. Embarrassingly, an episode happened when I was out in public once, and the pain was so severe that I passed out. When I came to in hospital, I told the same thing to the doctors there that I had told all of the others. I was prescribed stronger stuff, but again, this had no effect.
Brain scans were conducted, and there were no issues there. Eventually, after my umpteenth visit to the medical practice, my doctor had fixed me with a withering look reserved for, perhaps, someone who told her that they didn't 'believe' in vaccinations. My symptoms, she had told me, had to be psychosomatic. She had thought I was lying. Slowly, the help began to recede. I had been sick of hospitals and the doctor's office, and now I began to crave them in their absence, left to float along by myself. There was nothing more they could do for me. I was, in their eyes, a nuisance. And yet, the headaches continued.
So, I slowly began to withdraw from the world. It was far better to have these episodes at home than to suffer the humiliation of potentially keeling over in front of other people. I was trapped in my own haunted house. However, this always seemed like it was going to be my fate. Even before the headaches, even before the nightly parties turned ghostly, I was always a mite terrified of the outside world. Now, this was even more so. At least in my home, I knew what to expect. At least in my home, my head could explode in peace in peace, without the unpredictable.
The unpredictable seemed to follow me wherever I went. It had always been the case. Weirdness had a way of finding me, plying itself to me. It snapped at my heels every time I left the house, and I knew that one day, its jaws would clamp upon my leg and I would truly snap, broken by the mundane insanity of the world around me. As an example- I was walking home from work one black night, at little after one in the morning, and it felt, already, like the end of the world. It had been a late shift. I relished going to work because it was something mindless that I was good at, and it meant I didn't have to be home, alone. Work was one of the few reasons I still left the house (though even then, they had begun to look down on me for my constant absences when the headaches got really bad). I was approaching Moorside, but had to go through the underpass that separated the building from the main road. A streak of white had sprinted across the path in front of me (a rabbit or a cat, I could not tell). This already had me worried, but then the wind had changed direction. I could feel the unease growing in my stomach and on my skin in prickles and bubbles like mutating boils. Still, I continued and began to walk down into the underpass, fumbling with my headphones, trying to get on some music to distract myself from the directionless dread. The old graffiti in the underpass had recently been painted over, but on top of the fresh coat of paint a new slogan had sprung up. In dark green spray paint, the last few letters dripping as if rushed, was: 'OVER HERE'. I've been cursed by perfect timing my whole life, for better or for worse. I'm always in the right place at the right time for signs. Things that set me over the edge. Omens and tricks that mean something bad is sure to happen. I had pressed play on my music. It was shuffled. The first song had been 'Turn Around, Look at Me'. I had taken off and was running home before The Lettermen had even crooned out the first line: "There is someone... Walking Behind You... Turn Around... Look at me!"
This event might not seem significant to anyone else. In fact, I'm sure it won't. But to me, all of those little things, lined up like that and neatly tied with a bow, spelled trouble.
It was these slivers of unpredictability that bothered me so, the little things. The things that are unnoticeable and when pointed out, make no rational sense. Terrified of the little things, I rarely left Moorside. I was an agoraphobe in all but name. Three black cars in a row and a crack on the pavement that looked like a five-pointed star meant doom. A specific song, coupled with the weather, and a meaningless phrase seen in an advertisement in a shop window meant that the day would be a bad one. I found it easier to see none of these things at all, so cut off my only option, and stayed in. After graduating, I had tried to pen manuscripts and short stories, or sometimes reviews, periodicals, or articles. They gradually got worse and worse the less of the world that I saw. They sounded robotic. I knew my writing was shit because they always told me to 'write what I know', but nothing ever happened to me. Nothing comprehensible, anyway. I literally knew nothing.
So Moorside, although haunted, was also a reprieve for me, in a way. There's a writing trope that we were warned against in school, but which I still love anyway: the cord of fate, the invisible red rope of love. There was indeed something connecting my soul to Moorside. I had lost my phone there, during the first year of my tenancy.
Around the back of the apartment block, once you had gone past the bins and the smashed-up bike shelter, there is, of course, the 'moor' (one of the smaller parts of it, cut off from the actual moor by the main road). In the summer, our section of the moor was a student paradise of barbeques and picnics, though a councilman always came around in late August and threatened with fines for littering and scorched grass, or for drug paraphernalia found in a bush. Another downside was the sizeable ditch that separated the building and its grounds from our section of the moor. It wasn't too deep, but it was wide enough in some places to pose a problem in crossing. In the summer, someone always had the bright idea of leaning wooden planks across it as a makeshift bridge. When I lost my phone, it hadn't been summer. It was one of the few drunken nights out that I had had back during my fresher days. Like the Lost Boys, a few of us ran rampant and blind drunk around the back of the building with torches. We wanted to mess about on the moor, but in the darkness, I misjudged the part of the ditch we were attempting to jump. I landed waist deep in sludge before hauling myself out and promptly being sick on the grass at the feet of an ex-neighbour I am no longer in contact with. My phone had vanished from my pocket during this misadventure. I went back the next morning and prodded through the dishwater with a stick, but never found it again, and went months without one before saving up enough money from my job waiting tables to buy another.
In my mind, I can picture my phone still down there, fully charged. At the bottom of the bog, it receives calls and messages from people I haven't spoken to in years. If they ever drain the ditch, I imagine they would find it stuck half in the ground, still in perfect working condition. It would be like a fossil, or an artefact. It would be the only remnant of detritus to prove, to future historians, that I was ever actually here. I would leave behind a legacy of doctor's reports, all inconclusive. An imagined pain that was only for me, that no one else would ever experience of acknowledge. I would never write a great novel, or make friends, or meet anyone that could tell my story after I had gone, but at least here, at Moorside, there was proof of my existence.
I had tested out the shower curtain railing. I had tested the light fixture in the kitchen. I had tested the curtain railing in my bedroom a bit too vigorously and the whole thing had come away from the wall and down onto my head. Hanging was definitely out.
All I did back then was smoke, and occasionally go to work. I had begun smoking twelve years prior, aged fifteen. I had been to see a photography exhibition featuring local artists- there was one picture titled 'The Bride and Groom Share a Cigarette After the Service'. I must have been at a very impressionable age, because that photograph and its title really stuck with me, and a day later I had bought my first pack.
When I was a student, cigarettes and coffee grounds weren't the only things I bought from the corner shop. I used to eat decently, even knew a few recipes that weren't half bad. Now, my diet had gone to shit. Back then, however, some signs and some little things could still mean that good news was on the horizon. It was far easier to live a normal life when there was a mix of good and bad in my fortune, now, with only the bad, I had really let myself go. I was a weird build, with ropey limbs and a sharp face with cavernous eye sockets (that only truly looked concerning when I took my glasses off), but also a bit of a gut, and a heavy gait. I couldn't really grow a beard or moustache, and my hair was in locs, off-putting to look at even though slightly longer hair on men was fashionable at the time. I didn't consider myself to be a good-looking guy, and my apathy with my own appearance had become, over the years, an apathy with the appearance of others as well- I never really found other people attractive, never had a burning desire to go to bed with anyone. There were no brides or grooms with whom I could share a cigarette after the service. My longest relationship had been eight months. I had ended it simply because I wasn't really sure what I was doing: I didn't know if I was meant to think about them every waking moment, what it was like to be head over heels. Didn't they deserve someone that was head over heels for them? Because I couldn't say for sure if I was in love or not, every waking moment in that relationship- every date or movie night, holding hands, sleeping with each other, even just sitting down and talking about nothing- felt like a dishonesty. If I remember correctly, they took the break up without complaint. I never dated anyone else after that.
I had once known, in passing, another student who was the bane of the rest of the student body due to his blase attitude about deadlines and studying, yet his ability to consistently score high marks with his writing. It all came so easily to him. We were paired once for a crit: he had hummed under his breath, frustrated, whilst he read my piece (which, in fairness, I had written with a migraine, the ghost of ongoing sickness yet to come). He called it needlessly dark. Whatever, I had thought at the time. I had liked it that way- so what if he hadn't got it. Right before I made up my mind about offing myself, his first novel was published. The first in a trilogy deal with the publisher, I had heard. I bought and read it, and was unmoved.
In my flat, books lined the walls. From the ground up, there were stacks taller than me in height. Piles and piles everywhere you looked. Some on the windowsill, some on the kitchen counter, some on the armrests of the sofa. My collection had far outgrown the cardboard bookshelf that came with the rest of the furniture when I moved in. There were some, near the bottom of the stacks, that I hadn't re-read in years. I had put his novel on top of the shortest pile once I was done with it, huffed, and sat down to have a think. My eyes wandered over the stacks and came across a book that was sticking out. I slid it out with the intention of just making the pile a bit neater, but when holding up the books on top of it, I had seen the creeping black stain on the wall behind. Mould. I shouldn't have been surprised- there was, after all, mould everywhere at Moorside- but this was far worse than I could have imagined. I pulled the stacks down in a frenzy to survey the damage. There were veins and veins of black mould, the wall practically dripping with condensation. I looked at the book I was holding and devolved into a coughing fit when I realised that the pages had dampened to the point where they had solidified together. It was a lump of mildewed pulp- unreadable. Most of them were like that upon closer inspection, having rotted away at the core, leaving only their lying spines, outward facing, to convince me that nothing was wrong. Some of the books were speckled with black, and some fell apart lazily in my hands as I pulled them out of their stacks. When the stacks were all down, books and wet clumps of paper strewn across the floor, the odour was so foul that (coughing and coughing and coughing) I went to throw open the window and realised it was snowing.
I didn't open the window, but instead sat down at my kitchen table, numb. I surveyed the mess of my now-ruined book collection absently, thoroughly and suddenly exhausted. For the first time, the final time, I was sick of it all. As I sat and stared at nothing, I saw the dust and mould spores settling onto the head and shoulders of an invisible man, who was sat on my sofa. I looked for something to blame, and briefly toyed with the idea that setting down the novel of my old course-mate was the instant tripwire that had poisoned the rest of my books, turning them mouldy and unreadable, but that was petty. After all, his was now the only book that I owned in any decent condition. That book was the future. It was a tomorrow that I had no part in, and it would soon belong to the invisible man. This had been coming for a while, I now realised. The invisible man would become less and less opaque over time, a reverse ghost, as I would recede into the shadows. Eventually his heart would beat and he would open his eyes, flesh and blood and real, and would look around the flat and sigh. He would call the landlord and after a bit of back and forth, they would come and de-mould the place. They would clear away the rotten books the last tenant had left (he would keep the only undamaged one for himself). He would throw open the windows and with no shadows to cling to, I would recede into the walls, which would then be painted over. The invisible man would start his course at university in September (fine art or classics), and I would be too apathetic to move around in the wall, so I would simply go to sleep forever. My phone in the bog would let the water in, and its battery would wither and its screen would go dark. The invisible man would leave in three years and a girl would move in. She would start her course. Eventually the wall would just be a wall, and I would be gone.
It was then when I decided.
The very next day, I handed in my notice at work. Polite until the end, maybe, but the real reason was that I didn't want anyone to cause a fuss at my sudden absence. Don't get me wrong, I was never the most reliable employee, so I knew that my boss wouldn't exactly have sounded the alarm bells if I was to not show up one day, but still. I wanted to leave no ties unsevered. I had a two-week notice period. "Moving on?" my boss has asked, and I had nodded. We had winter temps in to help with the extra customers during the holiday season. Despite my frequent absences near the end, I had been one of his longest employees, and he always knew that I had dreams of becoming a writer. So, probably assuming that I was starting a better job, he said that he was happy for me, and that I only had to come in the next day and then he would let me go. A clean break. I made £2.55 in tips on my last shift, kept it in my pocket, and when I got home, I lined the coins up in size order on the kitchen counter, and left them there.
I smoked with increased vigour throughout the next few days, taking to lighting new cigarettes with the still smoking ends of the old ones. The flat became hazy with smoke and I could almost imagine not seeing the piles of ruined books, and the mould. And it meant concurrently that the invisible man could not see me. It was a fumigation. I lay in the bath with a cigarette hanging from my mouth, having already flicked three butts into the toilet, and began contemplating the actual procedure. After my various tests, I had come to the conclusion that a wrist-slashing was the way to go. After the curtain rail in my bedroom had come down, I did a bit of research on the topic. Apparently, wrist-slashing is one of the most painful methods of suicide, so much so that people lose their enthusiasm half way through. Done wrong, it could cause nerve damage. People survive and are unable to write for months afterward, having to undergo physical therapy to aid with movement in their fingers. The idea of my hands being haunted by the ghost of my suicide note, unable to move and rigid with fear, was enough to convince me that if I did it this way, I would do it right. No survivors.
The idea of the suicide note itself was another thing that I agonised over in the following days. After buying the razor blades (along with a can of shaving cream, so as not to arouse pity from the corner shop guy who I had seen nearly every week for the past few years, and who I was convinced could smell crazy on me), I decided that I would opt to die in the bath, rather than on the bed. That way, the clean-up wouldn't be too difficult. Overall, I wanted to expedite the process from my imagined future- them coming to clean every trace of me away- so I had already begun scooping the sodden books up, bagging them, and throwing everything into the big skip behind the building. I had heard the phrase 'you can't take it with you', but looking into the cavernous black abyss of the skip, I couldn't help but feel that it was some sort of portal to another world, and that everything I threw in there, I would be seeing again soon. 'You can't take it with you' was a myth. With the flat almost clean, I remembered the note, which I was set on doing because it seemed like the thing to do- everyone leaves a note, right?
I had come to terms with the fact that I'd never write a great piece of literature, so the actual contents of the hypothetical note didn't bother me. Moreover, I was worried about whom to address it to. 'To whom it may concern' scared me, as I didn't want to have a key moment in the life of someone that I would never get to meet. I didn't want to be a problem. I couldn't address it to my father, as I hadn't seen nor spoken to him since I was five years old. I had never met my mother. My grandmother raised me, and she had died a year prior. After I had left for university, we hadn't been close, and it was always an idle regret that I hadn't made more of an effort to see her. Idle, not burning, because it was never something that I had cried about or lost sleep over. She hadn't always been the nicest. Still, I surmised, she was all I had had and she'd done her best.
In the end, I wrote the note addressed to her and posted it forward by throwing it into the skip, to go along with my books to the next place. That way, she could read it before I got there, and if we ever met again, she wouldn't be as surprised to see me so early.
The night before my planned expiration date, thinking about my grandmother made me dream the weirdest thing. When I was younger, she had told me that if I ever misbehaved, she would know about it, even if she wasn't there. I asked her how, and she had pointed to her sewing kit, which she always left out on the kitchen table. She explained to me about they 'eye of the needle', and that even if she wasn't present, the needles were always watching me with their eyes, and would tell her if I had been naughty. My grandmother's house was full of crinoline statues and small porcelain figures- women with children, the nativity scene, shepherds. She even had a crucifix, adorned with a bleeding Christ, hanging on the wall above the mantlepiece. She had fridge magnets of famous paintings, and many framed photographs of relatives I had never met. I was terrified in her house because I felt watched from all angles, eyes everywhere. The circular bathroom window also felt like an eye, and when I was very, very young, I became too anxious to use the toilet at night and consistently wet the bed. The red rings of the hob were eyes, gazing up at the kitchen cupboards: I never ate more than was absolutely necessary. The rounded doorknobs stared at me as I passed from room to room. Flower patterns on the curtains were disproving of my very presence, the disks from where their petals sprung had glared at me. I was a problem child, and my grandmother never really knew the best way to deal with me. I was too sensitive, and she was too insensitive. I was never the little girl she wanted, and when I grew up and turned out to be a man, I guess she was less impressed. All of her eyes came to me again that night in my dream, as I tossed and turned. In my delirium, I imagined one big bloodshot eye, glowing red, looking at me through my bedroom window, which had been uncovered since the curtain rail incident.
However, when I woke up the next morning in the middle of the afternoon, despite the hell of the night terrors, I wasn't exhausted, but instead refreshed and clear-headed. I immediately groped for a cigarette from where I had been keeping them on my bedside table. I lay there flat on my back and smoked, staring blankly at the ceiling, not a thought going through my mind. It was the most peaceful I'd felt in years, knowing that I'd die that night. I didn't even lift my hand to take the cigarette from my lips as I exhaled. I let the ash fall onto my chin and chest.
Eventually, I began to mentally plan my day, and there was no dithering, just a clear, concise list of things to do that were set in stone the moment they popped into my head. For example, I knew that after breakfast I would set about getting rid of the last of my books, bagging and throwing them into the skip-portal, which I did. Finally, there were only two left in my flat- the one written by my old course-mate, and another, which I had considered to be my favourite read of all time. I had had a more profound relationship with this book than I had had with my eight-month-er. It bore the marks of ups and downs, the cover faded in patches, sun-damaged from where it had sat on the windowsill of my childhood bedroom. It was utterly ruined, of course, the pages clumped together with damp, more brick than book. Although casting the rest of my possessions into the skip had seemed natural, some of my real-world sense returned to me then. I didn't want to throw it away because I didn't want to be apart from it while I was still alive. To send it forward and to not have with me, where I could touch or look at it, for however brief, would be like discarding a limb. I eventually decided that placing it in the skip would be the last thing I would do, and sat it down on top of my old course-mate's book, which I did not plan on taking with me.
I knew that I had to do the deed at night, for whatever reason. In my mind, it would have been like going to sleep. That's all I wanted really, to finally rest, to be free from the signs and omens, the headaches. Funnily enough, the headaches, though they happened near daily at their worst, had not plagued me while I was making my preparations. There was something else my grandmother used to tell me. She had said that everyone had a path in life. I had wondered if my headaches were some sort of celestial punishment for deviating from that path in some way. I wondered if my path had come to an end, if I was truly meant to die, and my headaches, which often seemed to pull me out of the world, were a sign that I was no longer meant to be here. Their absence had confirmed this to me. Finally, I was back on track.
Whilst I was cleaning the remainder of my flat, I found my old ideas corkboard, a remnant from my school days and the few days after that when I was sure that the whole 'writing thing' would pan out. My grandmother had been many things, but she had never been discouraging when it came to my writing. "The pen is mightier than the sword," she had always said as I scribbled away in a notebook. Of course, she had probably had to say that, looking at child-me, all thin and weedy and nervous: the idea of me wielding a sword was laughable. The corkboard had been festering in a drawer, untouched for some time now, but way back when I was still motivated to write, I had used it to plan out stories, pinning thread from one note to another like a spiderweb of ideas. My stories rarely were linear in the planning stage- they spiralled out of control as each idea got bigger and bigger, had larger ramifications, as characters fell into madness or depression, or the consequences of their actions caught up with them. All the while, I would piece these ideas together with twine. A few notes still clung to it from the last time the corkboard was in use. One read 'he is the flea'. The piece of thread that had connected this to the rest of the idea web was severed, and I was momentarily mystified as I tried to remember what exactly I had meant by this. I pulled the rest of the shit off the board, but left the flea note, as I had found it funny and it had made me smile for a moment or too. I had needed a smile.
I looked around and the smile became genuine as I realised that there wasn't much else I could do. Nothing remained. I sat down and waited for night to fall.