The phone buzzed in his jogger pocket; and it would not stop. He cocked his head and looked out at the mass stream of people with a raised eyebrow, wondering where it was coming from, and then he realised, as though it had just occurred to him, that it was in fact his phone attached to his leg which was alerting him to something. Then, he looked down at his right upper thigh with a marveling gaze, his mouth agape, before it dawned on him that it might be the police; he started to sweat fervently down his face, and he raised his claw-like hands and scraped down slowly his nails across it. If an onlooker did not think anything wrong with him before, he or she certainly did so at this pathetic sight. Perhaps further out of the centre, in some deprived areas of the city, like Ely or Llanedeyrn, he would look not out of place at all. But there was some sort of self-awareness attached to this act, to which he was now engaged in like a dramatic actor at the Wales Millennium Centre, for if one were perceptive enough, he or she could see the young man’s bulging red eye between the slits of his fine fingers, looking ominously at the young women as they passed by; not our of lust did he peer at them with a heavy heart, but with a hunger of a street urchin. Despite this, however, a woman he perceived to be attractive did look at him, and he her for a moment, and went so far as to smile at him, and he, at the sudden sight of those glimmering blue eyes which reminded him of her, he looked down in cowardice at the gum-plastered cobblestones. It was all that his eyes were comfortable with beholding.
“It is the police,” he said to himself with a sunken heart, “they have come to tell me off. They don’t realise that I will never be a good citizen like all these lot. No, I am a bad man. I am the worst of the worst. I am a brute; an animal; a horrible person! Give me a child and I could easily make him like myself – easily! I am not fit for society: these people would be happy to see me dead. They are stupid – yes, so very stupid. Do they not realise that if they had the childhood that I had, if they had been treated like an animal they too would do and think and believe and perceive the sort of things that I do and think and believe and perceive every day? Oh, do they not realise that they are the ones who are driving me to commit a crime? Any day now...that’s where I’m heading: any day now I will commit a crime and be where I ought to be – housed in a place that I was born and bred for...With my intelligence and self-awareness I should be given accommodations. They should realise that something is very sick and wrong with them – with society! Society itself should change...After what she said, after all that I have done, after all, she did tell me that my behaviour was what made her end our friendship...What is the point in blaming others, and wanting things to change. For all my life I have wanted to be accepted and liked, and when I was for that brief period of time in my first year of university (oh I remember it vividly like it was on a TV screen), when I had lots of friends and women interested in hanging out with me, I ruined it...I ought to be put to death. Better yet, I ought to be locked away forever like I have always wanted.”
The phone must have buzzed in his pocket at least fifty times before he finally pulled it out; he was not going to answer it if it was indeed from the police: the shame would certainly send him over the edge. He would rather them take him by force because the thought of it excited him. In reality, he was extremely sensitive to bodily pain, so much so that when he was constipated, he prayed fervently to God that he would renounce all his prideful ambitions if he would be healed; but then he added, thinking of that woman again (because he thought of her more often then than he did now – although not by much), that he would gladly take the pain if it meant He would return her friendship to him. Now almost half a year later, since that incident, and the subsequent anal fissure that resulted, and to which he still retained in some limited capacity, he thought about thinks a bit differently. To him, God was to make good on His promise to restore their friendship, and thus there was no need for more pain. All the discrimination and suffering this time around was needless in his eyes, for he had already suffered much and had yet to be compensated for it reasonably. That is how he thought about suffering, about his present condition. Although, this young man would have done anything to restore his friendship with her – even if it were to kill him in the process.
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With butterflies in his stomach, and a frightful imagination, the young man answered the call. But before he placed it to his ear, he looked up at the billboard once again and grimaced: “They’ll let you do anything as long as you have the means to pay. A billboard on the castle wall, really? How tacky...Who could this be, anyhow, calling me on a social media app? I have no friends, so who could it be? It couldn’t be her...No, it couldn’t be her.”
He waited for the caller to speak first, his breath heavy and hoarse in time with the rapid beatings of his heart, and licked his lips, for they were so dry and cracked with neglect. “If it is the police, how would I react? Should I be scared? Terrified? But I am a villain! No... I am so weak because I am terrified. Why am I worried? I could eat my own heart it’s up my throat so much!” he thought as his fingers dragged from his scalp to the sides of his ears his dry, brittle hair. “They think I am a bad guy,” he went on ruminating, “they know all the things that I have done! Impossible... They’re wasting their time.”
The young man stood still, the ice-cold wind beating him as it pushed past every now and then from the south, as it does in all of Wales, and listened for the first time in almost a year the familiar expulsion of air of his childhood friend: that thick, stuffy, hairball having, tickly, throaty and tinny retch which, to his curiosity and delight, had not changed at since he had met him in the secondary school.
“Oh, just the man I wanted to speak to. How’s life, my good man?”
“It-It is just alright. Why now, why have you called me?” stammered Rod, half-excited.
The man on the other end of the phone paused, as though he was thinking of the correct answer; then, sighing, and groaning a little, he said:
“Can you handle it?”
“Handle it, eh?” said Rod to himself; the thought pierced him in the chest like an arrow. He was a little offended at the insinuation that he could not handle something that other people could handle, and a little resentful. “Who does he think he is, talking down to me like this? He always does this no matter what; but now, because he has a little success, he thinks that I am truly below him?” he thought with a rising temperament.
“I have lots of friends that I can run this by, but none of them think like you do, Rod, my good man,” said Aleku as the sound of a mechanical keyboard clicked away in the background.
“Oh, really? Well, of course that is true!” thought Rod, and a smile erupted on his lips, so rapidly and unexpectedly that the cut on his bottom lip reopened suddenly and began to bubble its dark crimson. He thought about wiping it away with the back of his hand, but he was distracted by the brightly lit billboard across the street. His friend was lying down on his side, propped up by his elbow, and staring deeply at the audience with his big, brown eyes. “He isn’t this photogenic in real life...” he thought. He coughed. “You’re on a billboard now,” he said.
“I’m not several. Which one are you referring to?” Aleku replied nonchalantly.
“The one in Wrexham.”
“You’re still in Wrexham?” asked Aleku dryly.
“He doesn’t even remember,” thought the young man, “I deserve better friends.”
“Of course, he only calls me when he wants something from me. Everyone who ever talks to me wants something from me,” Rod thought again, and he looked again at the father-daughter pair sat down a few metres away from him eating in the outdoor seating area of the restaurant. “Look at them,” he thought, “she is living in an illusion.”
“Are you there?”
“Yes,” replied Rod, “yes, I am still in Wrexham, and I see that you’re here as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“The billboard. There’s a giant ad on the castle wall with your face,” said Rod exasperatedly. “It is because of me that you are there,” he thought, shaking with anger.
“Have you not read Forbes recently? My company was number one in tech innovation,” his friend said proudly.
“What tech have you innovated?” asked Rod bitterly,
“Well, that’s what I want to discuss with you.”
“Ah, so a business consultation. Don’t you usually do those over fancy dinners,” said Rod as he stared at the young woman’s back, wondering what her face looked like, and secretly hopeful that it was indeed his ex-girlfriend.
“With normal people, yes. But I don’t have to do that with you, now, do I?”