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15. flash's warning: he hit i split
Flash voiced his objection. For a full ten minutes Frazer and I sat stunned on the lounge together, watching as Flash pawed and beckoned me. Tammy was sitting quizzically behind him, but Flash never took his eyes off us. I knew that he was talking about me going back to Frazer. It was as though he knew our language but never had the vocal capacity to express it. I thought perhaps this is the way that god speaks to life on earth. It was like the moment after the animals had talked around the manger on Christmas Eve. All animals are meant to gain 'the gift' of human speech in this hour. It was as though this one dog keeping guard outside had forgotten that the hour had passed and kept talking. My dogs were like children having their say in a parental relationship gone wrong. I was in denial so that things built up inside me like daggers. Whereas they had let it all go. They remembered the screaming sobbing moments of my unhappiness that had far outweighed my moments of happiness. They were keen enough to pick up the high- pitched sounds of crying and human suffering. They had sat by the end of my mattress on the floor, during all the hours that I had lain in the dark under it and suffered in hell on earth. Meanwhile Frazer had taken the opportunity to raid my wallet and take money to go down the shop for cigarettes, and then down the pub for a beer and a game of pool with Stuart and Nigel. 'Wild animals can't live in the city,' he had told me, 'unless they're in a zoo'. Zoos kill the heart of a wilderness. They replace it with a big rotten fake and charge money for it. Frazer was corrupted long before I met him. His wilderness had his own greedy hands running their fingers through it. His loveless parents had found a way to smash all the diamonds. When I tried to look for them, they were indistinguishable as precious stones. I thought of smashed mirrors within mirrors, and of years of bad luck, his agonised facial features crying out at me from each one. Frazer had stepped into a land of mirrors of a mirror maze and was trapped inside. He was smashed into all those smashed-up diamonds, and I was living in a house of shattered glass. The fists of his parents had done this to him early in his life. Who else had been guilty of the smashing? Who was not there to protect him when he was defenceless and young? When I felt angry and hurt I was pleased at his destroyed life and his suffering, but only as it existed in the present. Despair was my greatest emotion regarding him. I wanted him functional and healthy for both of us. If everyone was joyful it would make life less lonely. It was in my best interests to have the best interests of others at heart. In order to survive we had to help others to survive. The tragedy of him was the thing that really hurt me the most. It was not the belting he gave me or his monster chimneys trying to turn me into ash, but his agony inside those mirrors of smashed diamonds. His lost personal treasure that he hadn't been able to hide from thieves, when he was just seven or eight, or perhaps it was two or three. The time between the knife threat and the bashing was when he told me about his last lover. He told me all the details until I was enraged by them. I was building a tornado of possessiveness and jealously inside. I thought that I had to know everything, so that I could overcome it. It was a great and pointless challenge. I couldn't face that I had seen the moon in the sky and that he had seen it separately from another part of the planet. A degree or two away from each other had made a lifetime's worth of differences. I wanted our lives to be combined from the moment we were born until the moment we died. I couldn't bear that we might have lived at least thirty to forty years without each other, now that we had finally found each other. In the same way I couldn't bear that we would ever be separate, I couldn't bear that we had been separated before we ever met. |
