“But not of the mind,” muttered Rod. “I’ve always wondered whether you were truly my friend, Aleku,” he said, as he exited the alleyway and merged onto another, similar looking footpath as before. Although it was cooler than it was during the day, big, chunky flies every now and then butted into his nose and underneath his eye, much to his chagrin.
“Why?”
“Because you are a contrarian.”
“You don’t believe that a contrarian can have friends?”
“No.”
“Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I have lots of friends,” chuckled Alekuhaughtily.
“I am painfully aware of that, but it has always displeased me greatly.”
“And that is why you do not have any friends of your own,” replied Aleku.
“Why?” asked Rod wonderously.
“Because you are a bitter fool; that is why you are so miserable, and that is what I have repeated to you over the years; but you simply, and I mean very simply, do not listen. Or perhaps you do listen but do not understand.”
“No,” said Rod bitterly, striking the air in front of him with a pointed finger, “it is you who does not understand.” His face reddened with humiliation as he continued, “It is you who does not understand. You and I are more alike than you care to admit, for we both want the same things.”
“And what is that?”
“Popularity. You want to be popular at the expense of my own because you are jealous.”
“Oh, of course that is right. Everyone who is ever against you is simply just jealous of you,” mocked Aleku, “everyone is simply against you. It is not that you are wrong – it is the whole world that is wrong. Is that what you are saying?”
“It is exactly what I am saying,” remarked Rod. “This reminds me of a petty argument we had in highschool. Do you remember that time you made the fallecious argument that if one believes that something is true, but everyone else in the whole world believes that it is false, that the thing one believes in alone cannot be true? Don’t you remember making such an absurd argument?”
“I believe that I do,” said Aleku calmly. “And what of it?”
“You stand by it?”
“Of course I do, you petty idiot.”
“Well, then,” said Rod with a haughty, self-satisified air, “if you cannot advance beyond a teenager’s angry and frustrated playground argument then there is no hope for me to convince you otherwise: you are as dense as you are shallow, Aleku.”
“Well, then...” said Aleku.
“For your information the argument was about whether the earth was flat or not. I remember you distinctly saying that, after another point I had made previously that you disagreed with on the account that not everyone shared my view, was that if I alone, in this hypothetical that I conjured up on the spot to argue against your contradictory sophistry, held the belief that the Earth was round, but that everybody else held the view that it was flat, that I would be wrong. What an idiotic argument! You are by definition a sellout, a populist, a fascist!”
Aleku grunted.
“Aha!” boasted Rod. “Therefore, my good friend, your insults from earlier have no effect on my self-esteem, for they are made by a worthless, sophist-minded fascist, whose opinions change with the wind. Why won’t you admit that I am better than you at least in the realm of argumentation? And if not there, then at the barest of minimums in logic?”
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“Because your personality is dogshit,” wheezed Aleku, “and that is all that matters at the end of the day. What have you made of yourself since highschool? Nothing, you have literally done nothing, while I have literally travelled to the ends of the Earth: I have slept on the streets and alleyways of Italy in my youth all by myself. I joined the army and learned to shoot a rifle. What have you done with yourself, by yourself? Absolutely nothing because you are fucking spineless, you are a fucking worthless asshole with no friends because you are an utterly loathsome idiot who will never graduate from that pathetic, self-pitying ugly-ass mindset that you have had since I met you that morning during form time in year 9. You know what? Before that day I thought you were literally so fucking cool because you did not give a flying donkey fuck just sleeping every morning at the front of the classroom while Mr. Lord kept trying to wake you up and engage you. I thought you were so fucking cool – one of the popular guys in the school as well (maybe even the most popular guy) but no you turned out to be some sad fucking autist. Yeah, you are right about one thing: you were given every fucking gift under the sun but you blew it with your absolute shit personality. You stink; you fucking stink so bad. But you know what? You know why I chose to ditch the friendship group I had? I ditched them because you and your friendship group were funnier. That’s why. I am sick of you fucking blaming me and Jam for your own fucking failure you fucking autist. Yes, you are actually autistic and I have been saying this for years. But you know what? I only continue to be your friend (if I can even call you a friend) because you are different from everybody else. I cannot speak for Jam (we had a separate group chat from you because you are insufferable) but I can speak for that women you have been obsessing over for years and years; yes, that poor Eastern European woman you scared with your unhinged persona. She stopped talking to you because you are a creep, through and through; you are an absolute creep and have deserved all the pain and suffering you have got since highschool. Fuck you, honestly, you make me so fucking mad.”
Whitehood has joined the channel.
Static suddenly blared into Rod’s ears. He cupped his hands over his airpods and winced. The word, ‘PC’, sent shivers down his spine and goosebumps across his whole body as he staggered forward under the canopy of moon-tinted leaves. The stark scent of dirt penetrated his flared nostrils as he trudged off the well-beaten path and onto the crisp, crunchy grass, whereby he saw in the corner of his eye the yellow-lit bedroom window, lonesome in its illumination across the whole row of terraced houses.
“You must be terrified,” cried Aleku, laughing. “You really have done it now; you really have summoned the demon.”
The young man trembled even more, shaking like one of the twigs hanging lower than the rest in front of him. He pulled out his smartphone and hovered his thumb over the red, ‘end call’, button. “...H-He-Hello?” he gulped, fidgeting with his left hand the hanging fibres of his jogger pants.
There was silence on the other end of the line. Rod’s heart throbbed mercilessly in his chest. He noticed right then and there that his throat had become suddenly supremely dry and itchy; and he clasped it with his right hand, covering his bulging Adam's apple and patchy, fuzzy beard, and began to stroke it fervently. Sweat pooled down his forehead and then onto his nose, and finally collected onto the back of his hand. All of this transpired within seconds, for the heat and the duration of his walk thus far served to accelerate his perspiration and heart rate.
Then he looked far down the footpath, past the puddles of silk-white moonlight which cut into the wooly darkness in front of him, past the cluster of noisy crickets hiding in the tangled weeds beside the ancient tree trunks, and saw the elusive, shadowy figure again, needlessly taunting him with her coy heart. “You are very coy indeed,” he thought; the thought itself punctured him brutally as though it was his lung which had been wounded so forcefully, “yes, that’s it...you were, ‘coy’. I should have said that to you; I should have called you ‘coy’ when I was texting you all those years. “That’s the type of women you...” he stopped short the thought; “no,” he shook his head. “I cannot think about you like that. No, I swear it I won’t think about you like that.”
“PC, Whitehood...” he repeated to himself; the name seemed familiar, awfully familiar... “Where have I heard that name...Jam’s last name was Whitehood,” he shook his head again, “he never told me that he had a relative in the police force... What the hell is going on? I haven’t broken the restraining order, have I?” he looked around in a fluster at the row of terraced houses he had just passed. “Did someone spot me and call the police? Am I that known around here? Are people after me?” he thought, choking on his own throbbing heart.
“He is right you know...You are a fucking terrible person, you fucking narcissist,” said the stranger, in a very familiar, croaky, northern-English accent.