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3. brick through the window
When I got home to my empty house, I felt alone and in need of him. Even in his drunken stupor, I knew that I was missed, and that I would miss him each time I ran away. And each time I went back he would open that front door, with his cute little boyish smile cocked to one side. 'Crystal, where have you been?' The passion and relief for us both in the hallway, followed by the horror that was only shared by me, that I was back on the inside. But tonight was different and it was the beginning of a growing distance between us. The sirens inside me after he had touched my dog would not die down. I was burning up inside and in need of action or resolution. I was steering on the verge of out of control. There had to be some relief in order for me to settle down or continue to live with myself. I knew that the answer was back at the house where the torment had originated. So I rang his house and his flatmate answered. I said, 'I want to speak to Frazer'. I heard the flatmate relay the message and then him pleading, 'She sounds upset, mate'. Then Frazer's muffled voice calling out from the sheets, 'Tell her to fuck off'. Then the flatmate saying, 'Sorry, he doesn't want to talk right now. He's asleep'. I hung up the receiver, a hard red coal inside. I searched around the side trellis in the dark for the brick. Soon the brick became my focus. It became everything important to me in the world, something to be guarded and protected like my own heart, until I could no longer focus on anything but its strength and its purpose. I left the dogs behind. It was the brick that took the dog's place in the front seat, as I drove back to Frazer's place at four-thirty a.m. I left the car engine running on the street. I slipped in through the front gate into the yard, hugging the dampness of the brick against by chest. It was a crooked old monolith caked with mud, webs and crumbling cement still attached to it. I looked around briefly and then lifted the brick high into the air. I threw it straight through the plate glass front window, where I knew Frazer was sleeping. I aimed it at that end of the bed where his head would be. The enormous crash of that whole plate glass window shattering into a thousand shards was sweet music. The absolute release of internal pressure was instant and immense. A few seconds later and I was already as calm as a street with no people left on it. I wasted no time in getting into my car and driving back home to the dogs, the big relief and fear of reprisal mixed up inside me. Feeling nervous and still hyped up I rang Barbs. At first she had a little laugh, then she became concerned that I had taken a good brick from its lodgment in the side trellis. She said, 'do you think you can get the brick back?' Later Frazer told me that as the grey blind flew up with the momentum of the projectile, in a stale room that was swallowing glass, he saw the blue tailgate of my car move off up the street in the distance. Later over the phone I was so fearful that it took me three hours to admit to doing it. Because I loved him I always gave him a confession in the end, whilst letting him think that he had got one. I did this for him. He liked to think that he was a bad apple that had fallen off his family's apple cart. He liked to think it was the same as when he used to be on the job. They would send him with a small desk and typewriter into the cells to drive the crims half-mad. Half of them confessed to get rid of him. Their heavy faces crumbled like old bricks as they endured that constant light chatter. Frazer could talk to himself for hours. He was employed for his silly smiling with his hard eyes in the background. Other cops often stood by the door just to see the expressions of disbelief on the faces of the robbers, when Frazer suddenly whispered, 'Come on, just tell me where the money is, I won't tell anyone'. Frazer had swallowed shattered glass. Glass had settled onto his bed, first like lightning and then like frost. But he was too drunk to get up. Luckily he had shifted positions that night, so that his head was at the base of the bed, and so that the brick landed on the quilt at his feet. One shoe on and one shoe off, he had smiled on the inside as it happened. Later on he was to call it 'cute'. He loved semi-wildness in a woman. He loved it especially when I was as angry as his loveless mother had always been. It really turned him on. So he tried to make me angrier and angrier all the time. But it only made me feel angry, not sexy. So there was no meeting place for us. It was an old game that he was used to playing, but ultimately he wouldn't get the love he needed in that way. The best thing he could do for love, that he couldn't figure out how to get, was to abandon the idea of it. I tried to find a focus in an emotional whirlpool and a mind gone foggy. I felt alone when I was angry and couldn't find my way back to our meeting place. It was like half squashing a beetle and leaving it under your pillow to suffer whilst you slept. This is what it felt like, this strange action he was taking towards me. I didn't know why he was acting this way, and why I loved him as he was doing it. I didn't know why he loved me and then didn't. For stupid trust and my brutal upbringing had led me firstly to accept it, and then to believe that it all would shift into reverse each time something bad or frightening happened. So that it never had happened. I concealed my despair by providing the perfect alibi, for those intent upon my emotional murder. My thick wet tears and hands trembling along the bricks in the dark. My two concerned dogs always waiting for me, patiently looking on. |
