And so, he lay there for a long while on the cold cement ground, his body ruthlessly aching in all manner of places – in joints, muscles, bone marrow and little empty pockets between such anatomies. Now and then he would certainly wake up, opening his eyes feverishly and half-consciously, drool coming out the corner of his cracked and bloody splintered lip, dribbling down like the tingling, crystallised web of a spider descending out from its hidden crevice, and at such moments as these the realisation that it was now much later than when he had momentarily expired what felt like only a moment before seemed to pain him more than what he felt in his material. Even so, he did not bother to stand up, to run, to hide away back into his lonely crevice for what point was this? Where would he go? Back home? But why? What did he have there that would rid him of his existential problem? At last, he realised that if he did not get up, he would merge into the cement like a walked-on plaster or dirtied chewing gum under the heavy yellow sun and shapeless crystal sky. How it shimmered! He had not gotten up yet, and thus was still lying on his back like a struggling turtle. He did not think that he had ever seen a turtle in real life; perhaps he had, but he could not remember the last time he had seen one, or bothered to go find one. Why did he not bother to search for these interesting creatures? Was it the fact that he did not go out of his way to encounter turtles that he now thought of them with a longing desire to have them in his presence? A burning sensation soared throughout his entire body, an uncomfortable tingling from the tips of his toes and up his right leg and then to through his pelvis and down the left side. Any other day he would be panicking, his heart would be bursting out of his chest, and he would be begging God for another chance at an untainted life; but now it was time to give up – that is what he concluded as he lay there on the concrete.
Piercing, whiny cries of sirens blared bleatingly from down the other side of the landing strip towards the beginnings of the city, sounds which made his spine stand erect and his neck curl whenever he heard them, sounds which dragged up several dozens of memories, indeed, of his miserable youth. They made him permanently awake.
“They are for me,” he instantly thought, the first thought of which came into his throbbing head, “it is high time for me to be locked up. But what will they collect? Just a broken body, a broken mind, a broken soul...” and immediately he shot up, fighting the pressing, blistering wind which came suddenly from the north, from where he grew up; at once he thought of the north and how he was already in the north, but when he thought of the north what he really meant was the true north, the north that was in the villages, from where his development as a child took place. He had hated living there, had hated growing up there, had hated it all. But now, after living for many years in the south, in Wales, in the metropolitan area, he felt increasingly nostalgic for the remote, idyllic village life.
“Everyone fucking sucks,” he muttered with a deepening scowl, which made his face look like a cave.
He looked somberly at the door for a few moments, before heading the other way towards the distant sirens. His mind was lost in a dreamscape, and instantly it began to reflect on what had just happened to him – he had been beaten, assaulted, violated by his friend’s daughters! All at once, like the flash of a muzzle, his mind was overloaded with violent images of those recent events.
Suddenly, he thought that he was going psychotic again. A deep fear set into his heart; but the fear had already been there since the beginning of highschool. Now, however, he was taken over by the fear completely, so much so that he had begun to shake violently, so that his hands twitched and spun as though they were sizzling on an oily, fat-laden frying pan, and his shoulders were jerking upwards to his earlobes and then down again like an unmanned jackhammer. He limped to the door and opened it a little, terrified to find someone behind it, but clouded enough still from sleep that his brain had not yet time to piece together a coherent judgement. With disgust, weariness, and deepening, inward rage he gazed into the first room, with its gigantic white marble staircases and pristine hand railings, sparkling chandeliers and sweeping walls, wondering how such opulence could be in the hands of so devilish a man as Aleku, and not in his own virtuous, and victimised palms. It was a crime against humanity, a crime against all that made sense, for him to be here and for his highschool tormentors to be over there. Suddenly, a startling realisation hit him...
“Wait... Those people in the podcast room, they weren’t...Oh, no, they were – they were people from highschool! How did I not recognise them?” he thought rapidly, striking his palm on his forehead. “Why didn’t they say anything? Did they not recognise me? What did they think of me? That I’m a failure...”
He leaped back from the house like a startled jungle cat. It was cold enough that his skin was bit by the bitter, frigid air, which coiled around him like venomous snakes he could not see. There was still time to get to Cardiff by train before lunchtime, and he began hurriedly walking back away from the house, his eyes scattering all over the grounds like a pool table: what if she was here? But he realised that whenever he went out looking for her, he would not see her; when his head was lowered, however, when his eyes were glued to the pavement, that is when she would appear as though to remind him of herself before she could be removed from his short term memory. He began walking more quickly, shuffling almost, his breath visible before him it was so cold. Bending at the waist, he rummaged through his mental apparatus like a hoarder, his hands sprawled across his sweaty, oily face, trying desperately to figure out what was wrong with him. He hated himself, he hated her, no, he could not possibly hate her – it was wrong!
But there was nothing that he could do, nothing, not one thing except to somehow go back in time and change things, change himself to fit more in with the contemporary world. He had this image of the world; he had grouped up everyone outside of himself into one conglomerate blob, assuming for ease of cognition that all thought and acted the same – a generalisation! But she did not act like how he had imagined all women to act – she did not fit into the neat configuration of mental organisation he had conjured out of necessity when he was a young child to understand the world and what was happening to him. He had become stuck, like his friend, Jam, had said long ago: he was a perpetual child. When he thought like this, he hated himself utterly. By now, the blood beneath his trousers had dried and crusted over.
“I want to love you like you were the last woman on Earth...” he thought to himself as images of her flashed across his teeming brain; he walked like a corpse towards the city. “I want to kiss those jewel-shaped lips, that jewel-shaped face, those jewel-shaped eyes...” he thought of writing her yet another poem that would inevitably be ignored.
Suddenly he remembered why he had come here in the first place and that it was in the house that existed the System which could change his entire life, only if he were to grab it. He had not seized the opportunity presented to him because he did not think that he could. Why? He could not articulate the reasons as to why he could not; he just could not. But he wanted that woman to return to him, to be his friend again! He could not fathom falling in love with someone else! No one but her could understand the depths of his soul; no one but her could face the eternal fire that was his self! He had not even enjoyed the embrace of a woman – no, not enjoy! What then? What shall he do? Instantly he began to rush towards the front gate, which loomed tall like the Corinthian Columns of Ancient Greece from the distance he was at. When he had reached the wrought iron gate, and stood close enough to its bars to be able to clasp them with his own rigid hands like a child, he stared out into the T-junction and the columns of terraced houses which permeated outside the wealthier regions of the city of Manchester, namely that of Castlefield and Deansgate; however, where Rod found himself situated was that of Bowdon, the most affluent area in Manchester.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
A few years ago, Bowdon was a suburb, but now, thanks to Aleku’s terraforming mindset and his newfound wealth, the estate was now entirely his, having bought out all the footballers and doctors that used to reside there. All those who refused his generous offer, though, were subject to a series of devastating and exposing lawsuits, which eventually ruined them all.
He had not the faintest clue as to why he was so hated by his peers wherever he went, or at least so ridiculed by them. Therefore, his mind still resembled that of a child more than an adult, and so he resented the world and all those who expected him to act contrary to his nature.
The iron bars were burning his hands blue from the frosty temperature, and he was at once stricken with an inexplicable, crackling pain in his rectum as though it was being opened involuntarily with a surgical knife. He yanked his head back suddenly and violently, yelping aloud into the bitter frigid air.
“I don’t understand,” he muttered in frustration, “I don’t understand why I am treated like this.” The young man started to push and pull himself from the bars, thrusting himself backwards and forwards like a bored schoolchild; he forgot momentarily where he was or who he was in fact. “Why can’t I die?” he cried out into the sky.
He stopped for a moment in exhaustion and let go with one hand and hung from the other, so that he was nearly perpendicular to the ground. Every now and then he would look up and through the iron gate to see if anyone was about to watch him, but there was no one. The siren had by now stopped. All he could hear was the thudding of his heart and the chaos in his brain. His eyes shut by their own accord. Soon, his hand began slipping from the rail and he caught himself before he tumbled over, before crawling into the fetal position on the ground, where he lay there in immense drowsiness and fatigue and self-hatred, his ribs aching from the humiliating beatdown earlier.
“I do not care if people think that I am rude,” he thought all of a sudden as he lost consciousness, “I am not willing to pretend for their sake."
Five minutes later, he struggled to his feet, and immediately faced the gate and grabbed its bars with fury, shaking them with trembling hands. “What am I doing with myself? What should I do? How can I let myself become depressed over such trivialities as that? I am a man! Yes, yes, I should take what I can get. I am Napoleon...no; I do not like Napoleon. I am Alexander the Great. Highschool is my Persia. I must conquer it: It is my destiny. There is something inside of me that does not want to die; instead, it hopes. I need a shit, but where am I to go?” He turned to look over his shoulder at the white mansion, and continued to think, “Am I really to trek all the way back there to use the toilet?” his face soured into a grimace. “I must squelch this desire because it keeps me perpetually suffering.”
He considered for a moment what he ought to do, before deciding to return to the mansion. He wandered, though, between two points as though he was torn, as though he was pulled by a rope on either side by excited schoolchildren.
“They will hurt me again,” he said to himself. “But they won’t see me.” He shook his head. “What idiots. Do they not know who I am, who I am going to be? No, they don’t because I don’t do what I am supposed to do. I need to use that damn system; then why am I not using it? Why did I run away like a little coward when it was presented to me? Why did those girls try to dissuade me from using it?” He thought about possible reasons to explain this conundrum.
“Perhaps it is a conspiracy,” he wondered, sticking a finger up in the air. Then he shook his head, “Rod, don’t go down that route,” he warned himself. “Could I even change my past even if I wanted to? Would I be able to? Why did they try to pay me off? Oh, I don’t understand all these mysteries. Why is my life such a mess?” he repeated, walking slowly towards the palace, and contemplating with painful intensity what he should do with himself. “I had so much potential to be great, but why then am I here; why am I like this?”
He pulled at his collar fervently, sweat trickling down his oily breast, the centre of which had become dry from the cologne he used to wear on his nights out; it had become patchy, flaky and white-specked. It grew colder, and his pants stuck to his legs, which irritated him to no end. He therefore hurried down the lengthy landing strip, which took him, with his slow gait and all, about fifteen minutes to traverse. He looked at the grass at the side of him, where the trees hung archly over the spiked fences on the other side like jutting dark green elbows, and he considered quite seriously, after remembering vividly as a child first doing the same behind the local pub, depositing his fecal matter into the ground and wiping himself with a big leaf or two.
“Yes, yes, shitting on that evil man’s property would be a right laugh, wouldn’t it? He definitely deserves it since he pissed on my own a while back; yes, yes, let’s see him try to argue out of that. The fucker will, of course. But why, then, am I venturing forth to his house?” he asked dumbly, concentrating on his feet as they moved seemingly of their own accord. There it went again – the razor-sharp pain in his rectum! Had he become delirious? He clenched his buttcheeks tightly and clasped them with both hands, feeling them intimately through the thin fabric of his joggers. “What am I doing?” he exclaimed in confusion, shaking his head once again. He asked over and over this question, as though he had no control over his own decisions.
“Surely I am not supposed to be alive,” he muttered in distress. “What is wrong with me?” he cried louder into the unblinking sky. Then he changed his mind once again and pursued a different avenue of thought, as though it was a premonition of things to come, “I love you,” he said, “I love you deeply.”
As intoxicated as he was with this flurry of emotion, he noticed something strange; perhaps it was the woman in question, perhaps it was one of the daughters, perhaps it was someone entirely foreign to him, but was assuming, or hoping, that it was in fact her, so that he would follow her into the house and fulfil his destiny. It looked like her – a dark brunette, slender, with hips that swayed from left to right and back again like a boat. He watched, his eyes in a trance, and suddenly he started to slavishly follow the mysterious woman like a fool... his reasoning was impaired...Suddenly he realised that his heart had doubled in rate. “Ah! I am going to die if I follow this phantom any further, for my body is afraid terribly.”
"Come back to me!” he whined, clawing at the air like a distraught child. Then he stopped trying, his body aching all over. “There is no point even in trying because I anger everyone anyway.” As he thought this, he let his chin drop and burrow into his collarbone like a delirious drunk.
“So, woman, why did you not kill me before you left? Why did you leave me here in this crib? You do love me, don’t you? I know that you do...If you did not, then, well, why do I think that you do? Am I deluded? You never did say that you did not love me...” then he grasped his polo shirt in frustration and pulled it, scratching against his oily, sweaty, flabby back. “She has to love me,” he thought proudly, with a sense of relief; “it’s because I am unique, I am special, I am somebody great – somebody who will be great someday. I am Alexander the Great. It’s the world who oppresses me!” Then, as rapidly as his face softened, it scrunched up tightly like a balled-up towel, wet and warm from drying a bathed man.