Moorfields, 8:52

I have always been thought of as a dull man. The kind of person you would pass in the street without thought or incident. Clad in the uniform of the silent millions, cooped behind dark office walls, quietly compiling and filing, addressing and re-addressing, sending and re-sending. A grey suit, a grey tie, black shoes, a briefcase, perhaps a hat if I’m feeling loose. A bureaucrat, a cog lost within the sprawling mechanical mass of the Civil Service. You’ve seen people like me, a bobbing face in a rush hour crowd outside Moorfields Station. When I was younger, I disliked the idea of becoming a nameless clerk, shuffling devotedly to a dreary office block in the centre of town. As a last desperate lunge for individuality, I grew a moustache. That moustache is still perched atop my stiff upper lip. Now, it no longer represents a post-adolescent identity crisis, it has come to be part of the uniform. In many ways it embodies the Civil Service, English reserve, reliability, respectability. People trust a man with a moustache, to an extent. Of course, no one would ever confide emotionally in me, nor clasp me in a passionate embrace, but that is not what is required of me. I am my job. I am even my moustache. Cold and rational, detached from the maelstrom of human passions and desires, I existed to work, lived to sit in a quiet room and calculate. This was my life. This was how I thought it would always be.

“Considering his predicament, I believed him to be somewhat misguided in his claims.”

It began a week ago today. It began with blank stares on a commuter train, bodies swaying in unison with the rhythm of the tracks. I sidled into a seat near a window, next to a young man, also in a suit. He moved away as soon as a more solitary seat was vacated. I accepted this dismissal of my character without insult or offence, people cannot interact in transit. That’s just how it is. We all adopt the customary vacant stare, the eyes of strangers only meeting when one is so rude as to trespass upon the middle distance. Even then, contact is broken as our eyes fervently search for a more mundane view, anything, so long as it does not contain traces of humanity. It looked as if I would be lucky, that I would make it through this journey without an exchange. Aigburth, St. Michaels, Brunswick, Central, Moorfields, work. My routine remained intact; I had risen at seven, breakfasted by quarter past, sanitised by half-past. I was punctual, today as I had been every other day in the last seventeen years. I rewarded myself with a subtle excursion up my nose, my finger probing and scratching. It felt good, satisfying, and no-one had noticed. I quietly congratulated myself. Moorfields, crowds. I set a brisk pace, not because I was late, but to ensure regularity, immersed in a symbiotic mass of suited commuters, streaming down The Exchange, individual faces disappearing and reappearing above a throng of grey. I arrive. Work, the office. White ceiling tiles, grey carpets, dull faces; bathed in neon tube light. The hum of copiers and the occasional trill of an office phone populate the silence of the workplace. I began to work. I say work, but no tangible reward follows its completion, no object instilled with my labours that I can hold in my hands. I file, I categorise, arrange and de-lineate. Perhaps I talked to another shirt and tie; maybe I feigned an interest about the football, such a conversation is irrelevant, anyway. I expect you have had such conversations countless times in your life. Sitting in my cubicle, I consumed a solitary ham sandwich. Pink meat of something-or-other trapped between two slices of coarse bread, smeared with something yellow. Calories. At five-thirty I was given leave of my labours, and set free. Enjoying this new liberty, I quietly adopted a void stare, and rejoined the stream trudging back to Moorfields. There was eye contact, this time, despite my efforts to avoid it. Moorfields, Central, Brunswick, St. Michaels, Aigburth, home. I unlocked the door, lower lock first, then twist and lift the mortis. I should really get it replaced, but it always works eventually. My wife was there, with my children, they heard me enter. People often wonder how someone like me ever managed to procreate; I admit that I sometimes wonder myself.  It is thought that people like me are never naked, that I must wear a hat in the shower and a jacket in the bedroom. Yes, it is hard to imagine how such a rigid, mechanical exterior can have any emotional substance beneath it. Or perhaps it is the opposite, that on weekends the work ethic is lost, the stiff upper lip becomes flaccid, I am transformed into a passionate, brooding Byronic hero, consumed by the liberated sexual energy repressed during the drudgery of the workweek. But no, I am not. Sometimes I leave the top button of my shirt undone, though; but only if it’s a Saturday, and no-one is home. Slovenliness feels unpleasant, wrong; it is not me, anyhow. Forgive me, for I am deviating slightly. My wife and children were clustered around the television, empty faces and open mouths illuminated by its glow. I joined them, as I always did. I thought about hanging myself tonight, but then I had a look at what was on. The Six O’Clock News, the children grew bored and went upstairs to play soldiers or action men or whatever it is children do. My wife remained. I know she loved me.

“How was your day?” She’d ask.

I graced that perfectly pleasant question with an inaudible grunt, more often her query would merit the customary response: “Fine, dear”, but not today. I would certainly not have endeavoured to recount the tale I have just recounted to you. We sat in silence, our minds pleasantly numb, as the tragedies of the day were presented to us by a man in a suit and tie.

“I asked him if this was relevant. Perhaps I should have stopped him there, and set him free.”

So you see, I am a dull man. I was a dull man, until I murdered my wife. You look shocked. I can’t quite understand why, that is why you brought me here, isn’t it? It was that same night that I did it. Something had become clear to me, the fog of doubt dispelled by an undeniable realisation. I had trodden the road to Damascus: I knew, I understood, it was as if I could grasp the truth which lay shining before me, a truth which had evaded me for the entirety of my protracted and meaningless existence. I smothered her, in her sleep; she neither writhed nor cried out. Such an abhorrent act it was, to be the instrument of torture for someone who truly loved me. She appeared resigned, no screams, not even a protestation as I clamped a pillow over her soft, featureless face. Every muscle in my body entreated me to desist, to release her from my suffocating grip. My murdering hands trembled, as if in revulsion for the deed I was committing. But I could not relent, not now. It was not long before her heart issued forth its final beats, and we were still, my grip relaxed. The spark of life had departed, and I was alone. My body had been forced to commit the vile bidding of a truth my mind could not erase.  I almost wished it could, as I retreated across the room from her pale, lifeless body, her shallow blue eyes staring back at me, innocent in death as she had been in life. As I looked into those open eyes, those eyes which had done nothing but devote themselves to my happiness, to my imperfect human desires, how close I came to entreating God to allow me to return to my meaningless mechanical existence. To have sunk to such depths of hateful brutality all but thrust my physical form into outright rebellion. I shook violently, blood drained from my features. Grief and sorrow filled me until they poured from my eyes in a surge of tears, tumbling down the contorted features of my despairing face. I could not bear to look upon her pallid, inert form; yet despite my desperate prayers I could not turn my eyes away. I drew my knees into my body, and lay curled in the corner, cheeks sodden with tears. I remember it began to rain, droplets darting against the window with a ceaseless regularity. I had to escape, break my body of the paralysis inflicted by its failure to understand the complexities of my mental revelation. Alas, my moment of epiphany had long since faded, and my mind had become overwhelmed with an inertial primal terror. I longed to break out, to run away from what I had destroyed, but my limbs somehow resisted this desire. My spinal cord had overthrown the tyranny of my mind, and now exercised dominion over my actions. I felt that I was safe, as a child in the womb, sheltered with my knees pressing against my chest, my sobs lost in the folds of my arms. Yet my gaze was fixed irrevocably upon the corpse resting peacefully upon the bed, arms outstretched, towards me. I cowered all night, coiled like an unborn foetus. It was not until the first light of morning that I overwhelmed the security of inertia and summoned the resolve to burst from my house into the downpour of a summer storm, fleeing into a new world.

“He became more animated towards the end of this monologue. One of his pale, sallow cheeks began to twitch. I saw something in his black eyes, but not malice or hatred; more the look of a hermit, or a monk. It was as if his mind had been engaged in deep contemplation whilst his body languished with the sterility of routine. He ceased glancing furtively round the room as his gaze met mine. Something about his eyes had a captivating power, as if I had been mesmerised by some curse, they appeared bottomless, as if they were holes torn through the night sky. He became restless, his thin hands fixing a vice-like grasp upon the table in front of him.”

I don’t want you to think that I was motivated by hatred.

“A bead of sweat trickled down his brow, coalescing above his left eye. His hands, still gripping the desk, began to tremble violently. He was not a man of great stature, but I began to fear him. His manners were unpredictable; it seemed as if the answers to darker mysteries remained embedded within his mind. A confession was not adequate; somehow it didn’t seem right that this man would succumb to a perverse, animalistic desire to eliminate those near to him. His murky unending eyes, and his hermit-like manner gave the impression of a deeper perception, another level of understanding. Such an impression of assuredness unnerved me, I began to feel uncomfortable. A desire to share in this unspoken knowledge overcame me, and I was unable to prevent the exclamation:

‘Then why did you do it?’

An ominous smile carved its way across the sallow, pockmarked face of this hermit, becoming etched beneath the moustache perched atop his lip.”

I don’t want you to think that I was motivated by hatred. You mustn’t think that the regularity of my lifestyle mirrors the regularity of my thoughts. The shattered automaton you see before you is not what I should have become. I was young once, I dared to dream and desire. I loved. Not her, not my wife, I couldn’t have loved that sweet, gentle woman. I even loved God, before my devotion to Him became nothing more than a meaningless ritual, lip-service to something that had long ago withered and died. My marriage mirrored my faith in God. By the end, it had become an empty husk, a shell built upon pretences of love, empty words of adoration.

“He began to cry. I should have been gladdened at the sight of such a heartless beast weeping pitifully, but I couldn’t bring myself to hate him for what he had done. He had strange powers of speech, his words made me believe him to be a tragic case. Surely this was a false impression. The man was insane, he talked of a yet unknown truth and had murdered his wife without provocation. I feared the gush of tears from my own eyes. Why? Why? Why should I sympathise with this monster? There was something tragic about him, I was sure, something convinced me that he genuinely lamented the death of one close to him”

You mustn’t think me a brute, a worthless killer. Ha. It is futile, you do, I know you do. What kind of man murders a quiet, pleasant, feeling being for nothing? You must understand! Understand, as I do. I was not always like this, I loved once! With such intensity, I loved, with an animalistic ferocity. The joy it brought me, such elation accompanies the knowledge that a creature you have deified, that you deem to be so utterly perfect, sees you in the same light. I remember her now, her face is as clear to me as if she was standing beside me. Dark hair fell to her shoulders. Her eyes, Lord, how I could stare into her eyes for hours. The marks on our faces would align as we faced one another. We were one, together, one and the same. Symbiotic, I’d say, but symbiotic is a cold, scientific word which seems to trivialise the fury of my love. It was during this period, when I was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, that I’d dared to harbour such grandiose ambitions of happiness. Then that I’d dared to dream of amounting to more than life as a machine. But it was not to be, such foolish aspirations of happiness were wrenched from me, not by a tragic death, nor by a passionate affair with another. No, it was simple inertia which was to be my downfall, bloody, brutal inertia. She left this city for pastures new. I did not, I chose to remain and languish in the familiar. After she left, I never saw her again. It was as simple as that, really. No cathartic moment of grief or climactic moment of rejection. Distance was simply driven between us, to forming an immovable wedge. Poets and artists are full of bold claims that love is forever, love is immutable, love will always prevail. I believed them; I drank liberally from the streams of idealism. It doesn’t, by the way. Love will not prevail, love will not prevail if you allow lethargy and complacency to overcome you, then inertia shall, and your love will be lost. We drifted apart, with a sense of grim inevitability. I didn’t grieve, but I abandoned any faith in humankind, slotting myself neatly into a mechanical job, sticking to a mechanical routine, becoming a mechanical man. God perished with our love. I met my wife, a woman working behind the biscuit counter at Woolworths. I didn’t love her, but she was safe, she was pretty, she was unobtrusive. The longer I worked at that cursed office, the longer I indulged in my facade of a marriage, the less human I became, the less I felt, the more my job, my routine became my life. I wasn’t happy, but nor was I despondent. I felt numb, I ceased to feel, I only did.

‘I still didn’t understand why he’d done it. His story of lost love, tragic as it may have been at the time, was in the past. Besides, his description of a dreaded “mechanical life” seemed to concur with a healthy inclusion in society. We all felt like that sometimes, I imagine, just that not all of us allow such abstract discontent to evolve into violence.

“But why then? Why did you kill her? You still haven’t explained. Of all times, why that night?”

It was the epiphany, you must understand. I had an epiphany.

‘“But I don’t understand. What could possibly provoke such a reaction, to murder another?” His tears had dispersed; his eyes were wide now, as he stared at me from across the table. A sudden fury appeared to possess him, his fists clenched, and he banged them upon the desk in front of him, thrusting his face within inches of mine”

It was on the train, the train, between Central and Brunswick. I saw her. Not her, but her child, standing, alone, at the back of the carriage. Fourteen years old, perhaps, her face bearing the both legacies of her mother and of an unknown usurper. It was unmistakeable, her eyes, deep and brown, identical to those of the woman I had loved, the woman I had always loved. They caught mine for a passing moment, before darting back across the carriage. It was that moment, that singular moment, that I was wrenched free from my mechanical state, brought back to humanity. She should have been mine, that girl standing alone should have borne my features, my brow, and my nose, not those of a transient infatuation. My prison walls had been revealed to me; all along I had been trapped in a cell of my own creation. I had not been free; nothing I had done since I’d lost her had been free. My job, my wife, my children, even my damned moustache, all chains binding me to a life I should never have had. And now, a life I could never escape. She was here, she’d returned, she must’ve done, but I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t. The life I had created for myself couldn’t just vanish, couldn’t collapse like the walls of Jericho. I could talk to the girl, talk to her, but I wouldn’t be able to say or do anything that would bring my love back. My body, something within me, made it impossible for me to sever all ties with my existing life. I would stutter and fret, and the girl, who should have been my daughter, would edge away fearing that I was some dangerous madman. I am not mad! You must realise! The only madness I know was that I saw that only one path, one action would liberate me. I must murder my wife, and only then could I shed a way of life that had become such an immovable part of me over the past seventeen years.

“He was mad, I was sure of it, still. But his speech and his eye possessed such a strange power over me a, that a deep, irrational part of my mind could not help but understand his plight. This man was no monster, he was human.

You may see before you a contradiction. What I have said today will surely be used to convict me of a truly wicked and brutal crime, a crime for which I will be rightfully imprisoned. The remainder of my life will be spent staring at blank prison walls, eating blank prison food, fearing blank prison stares. My fate is hopeless, you may say, but I sit before you more free than you or any man. I have but one more task to perform, and I will have acted utterly independently of any system, any machine, and obtained true unity with my emotions. But first, I must shave.

“I left the rope with him in his cell. You could say that I murdered him, perhaps. But he was free now, detached from the follies of his past, no longer bound by their possessive yoke. I thought it better this way. His words and his crime had disturbed me, had dislodged some preconception in my mind. It was not his insanity that terrified me, had he been the babbling loon he had first appeared, I could have dismissed him out of hand. It was the reason behind his eyes, his despair over his existence was not insanity, it was simply something I had subdued, placated with piecemeal goals of status and material acquisition. Something about the life I lead, the lives that so many of us are conscripted into undergoing, is inhuman. We do not create, we are not subject to our emotions, but we comply. Compliance is better. It is easier to lose your humanity than to struggle to retain it. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we can allow ourselves to be subsumed by the clockwork mechanism of our collective effort. I would like this to be true. I like this pessimism. Humans are intrinsically flawed, we are like that murderous beast and we must be gagged and restrained by routine. I still twist and lift the mortis after work, I look upon my own wife with dead eyes, but I cannot erase the hermit’s words from my mind. They are with me still, peeling at my mechanical bliss. I thought that, by killing him, it would remain; that I would free myself from his glare and live as I always had done. It was not so. His death and his freedom only served to immortalise those words.”