Another Justified Sinner Read online

  dead ink

  Copyright © Sophie Hopesmith 2017

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Sophie Hopesmith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Dead Ink, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.

  Paperback ISBN 9781911585015

  Hardback ISBN 9781911585008

  ePub ISBN 9781911585039

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

  www.deadinkbooks.com

  For James, for hope

  ‘An exaltation of spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth and the sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below.’

  James Hogg

  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

  Part One

  Black

  Chapter

  One

  I woke up to a ghost masturbating in my face. Darkness sucked in deeper darkness. This kind of ringing in the ears. Then an off-white, spectral, ethereal thing – like a splash of paint before a paintbrush gives form. Her eyes were screwed up incredibly tight, but I could still see the amber flash of fire in her eyes, I could still tell it was her. And she moaned very slightly and started to cum; amorphousness pushed against the bed frame, an underworld howl, and I could feel the vibrations of a contracting pussy…

  Hours later, it was breakfast. I pottered about my kitchen, doing all the ordinary things that someone does in the morning. Somebody who goes to work and has to be in first thing, who leads an office existence in a rich, western city. I would brush my teeth, I would shower quickly, cock my leg and unleash a fart. A quick dab of aftershave, a quick cup of coffee – never finished. Sometimes a slice of toast or maybe some cornflakes – but seldom. And somewhere between all this glutinous triteness, and my reaching the tube, I had a sudden and startling and brain-jabbing thought: why was she masturbating? Why wasn’t she tossing me off? Why wasn’t she fucking me senseless? Why wasn’t I holding her and stroking her and suckling her breasts, and telling her I loved her, and telling her I wanted her back? Who else would conjure up a dead former love in a beatific burst of 4am fantasy and have her so apart, so detached, so self-sufficiently fingering? What a loser. What a mug. To be emasculated by your own subconscious, by your own despair. I picked up a newspaper to calm myself down, but my hands were trembling and my eyes got sore. And I wept.

  The colours that morning were sensational. It was the beginning of May, and things were unfurling and unfolding with a quiet intensity. There was a burgeoning, a blast, some beckoning of fingers. The sound of dawn reaching fever pitch: this roar of relief at the death of the winter, its entrails slung up in the sun-rising sky. Every blossom of a flower, every bounce of a butterfly, every buzz of a bee, could be heard in mass exhalation, like some victory wheeze.

  When I turned to her, she was tangled up in sun motes, her hair dancing against the pillow as she coughed her way back to life. I had a sudden instinct to kiss her, to touch her, to squeeze her hand. To say I was sorry, even though I wasn’t sorry at all. To forget all the arguing and the bickering and go back to something bigger and better: the in-jokes and quotes, conspiratorial chuckles, lovingly cooked lasagne, the smell of her perfume, my arms around her waist. But then her eyes flickered open and consciousness entered, and I was seized with a hatred so fierce, so overwhelming and crude, that I had to leave the room immediately and try to wash it down the sink.

  Downstairs, she was in the kitchen with the kettle switched on, some inane radio DJ chirruping in the background like an unwelcome visitor. She liked that kind of stuff: she said it made her feel ‘cheery’, set her up for the day.

  Her lips parted open, she went to say something. I shook my head. ‘Don’t.’

  Her eyes watered up. ‘Do you want me to leave? Just tell me if you want me to leave.’

  ‘What, the flat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For good?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I meant.’ She snorted loudly, unattractively – there was obviously an ocean of snotty tears in that long, gentle throat of hers.

  I had no time for martyrdom. I raised my voice a notch. I tried to sound pissed off and angry in the coldest, I-don’t-care way I knew how. ‘There are contracts, Nancy. There are fucking contracts!’ Now my voice had risen too far. I tried to harness it, tame it – but it was a wild horse galloping away, with stampeding hooves and the dust in its nostrils. ‘Or do you want to fuck things up for Jamie and George, too?’

  Then she broke down completely. She said she was sorry. She said she would help sort another flatmate. But she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to work things out. She loved me still, she needed me. It had only been a kiss. A stupid, senseless, inconsequential kiss. She was drunk, she was lonely, I had been so distant lately, so terribly distant. And she bit her lip in that way she did, when she was scared and panicked. And she looked up at me with those big amber eyes, and she blinked back the tears and she had never looked more beautiful.

  That’s when I really hated her. That’s when I actually despised her. I can’t remember all the things I said because I was twenty-two and it seems a long time ago. But somehow, her beauty and her vulnerability and her female power made me all the more incensed. How dare she shift things on to me, how dare she suggest I was to blame? Her actions had led to this consequence; her actions had knotted my intestines with thick, heavy rope.

  So I shouted and raged and I threw something – I think. Maybe I even went to strike her, maybe she ducked beneath the curtains and yelped and pleaded forgiveness. Maybe I looked at her spongy, perfect body and I wanted to wring it dry, I wanted to squeeze out all the virtue and love and I wanted to exhaust her, to crumble it, for her to feel the shock of my temper, to be beaten down and crying and trembling from all the testosterone.

  It is hard to explain. It was like one of those old clichés. A blind rage that broke my body. I was not in control. I wasn’t myself. I yelled at her, ‘I hate you, I hate you,’ as she ran up the driveway, as she was shrieking hysterically, as she shot into that scrap-heap car, and I saw her back out of the driveway with her make up in chaos, with the tears streaming down and her banging the wheel – all the time, biting and chewing that full lip of hers.

  ‘I hate her, I hate her,’ I screamed, and I unplugged the toaster and I hurled it at the wall, and I chucked plates on the floor, and the crashing and banging and breaking were the sounds of some powerful symphony. They calmed me down, brought me succour, like I was physically prising apart the hormones that surged through my body. And afterwards, I didn’t scream or break things anymore. Instead, I was rocking with my knees up to my chest, and I was thinking back on her, and how much I had loved her – once upon a time. And it seemed to me that she had destroyed all my potential, that she had ruined my life. I remember saying out loud, with a deft smile on my lips: ‘I hope she fucks off and dies. I want her to die. I want her out of my life.’

  It’s an odd thing when it happens. Like one of those police dramas or films, the kind you’ve seen a million times before – so many times that they cease to feel real when the moment comes. A knock on a door that already seems significant, to carry weight, that seems to echo in a particular way, a way that singles it out from a postman’s knock or the doorbell buzz of a chugger.

  Anyway, before all that, my fists were shaking, there was a surge of adrenalin. I called into work and said I didn’t feel well. I hung up and gazed out of the window. The sky was such
a neon, lambent blue that it looked sort of glazed. I poured a few cups of coffee, but it didn’t steady my nerves. I opened my laptop and surfed. I downloaded some porn in a spot of childish rebellion, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I tabbed back to the BBC with all the usual war and genocide.

  When the buzz happened, there was – looking back – a very small part of me that already knew, that had watched this bit already; fast-forwarded to the end. I sidled up to the door with contrived carefreeness. I think I even stretched back and sighed, maybe yawned, maybe not; but I remember pulling my dressing gown tighter, too tight, and I could feel the constriction.

  Even as I opened the door, my heartbeat was accelerating and I had twitching legs. Even as there was just a glimpse of light, a distant sun that throbbed and singed and turned its head ever so closer towards us. Even as there was nothing but a whip of wind in my face and the sound of school runs and a shuffle of somebody’s feet on the doormat. Even as the door handle lay cold and inert in my hands and my hands robotically, mechanically, tugged and twisted, and the exit turned into an entrance.

  There were no words. There were no gestures. Just the sight of two police, a man and a woman. A hat in his hands. Yes, I remember the hat. All it seemed to signify – condolences, regret, respect, remorse. It lay in his hands at a crooked angle and he held it, lightly, pathetically, with his eyes blinking quickly, betraying embarrassments. Then the woman cleared her throat.

  Sometimes people ask me, maybe morbidly, maybe kindly, exactly what they said that day: how they phrased it, the words they chose. But the thing is, I can’t remember. I only remember that moment, as if in tableau, as if in dumb show. As if nothing else ever happened, and we are still there now on that step, silently staring: the horrors of life all mixed up with banality.

  But enough about her. This story isn’t her’s, after all. Let’s talk some more about me, and let’s start somewhere near the beginning. For I was a naive child, a wretched child. The sort of child who believed in Father Christmas until I was in double digits. I hugged too much, I clasped too much. How did all those other five-year-olds get to that age and act so worldly wise, so slick and severe? It seems remarkable now, when I see the lines of children march up to the school gates. They look so sweet and innocent, with their rolled-up socks and banter and leap frogs and satchels; it seems remarkable to me now that, unknown to the adults, there lurks an ‘in crowd’ and ‘out crowd’, a strict enforcement of rules, a cruel criteria of coolness – just like the grown ups, only without self-restraint.

  I wasn’t cool, I wasn’t slick. And I had some major setbacks. I was fat, for a start. Not obese, mind, or anything reaching that level, but a little pudgier than the norm, and it wafted around me like some terrible fart. Girls with little ringlets and clear, crystal eyes, who smelled sweet and synthetic like they’d rolled around in popcorn; these girls openly sneered and poked my belly and let names tumble out: horrific, monstrous names, which they chanted like witches. If they could, they’d have dragged me to the back of the playground and sliced me open, with a gleeful skip-rope over my tumbling guts; humming nursery rhymes about Tommy Tucker singing for his supper no more.

  Oh, and I was bright. I wasn’t clever like an Einstein or a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist or any of those other clichés of genius. I was certainly no child prodigy and no teacher ever gave my parents the ‘special talk’ about my gifts. But what I had, which I quickly noticed most people lacked, was this powerful, burning, yearning, screaming, churning drive to learn. And part of the package was a ferocious conviction, an ability to sit still and listen, and really try to remember, to be determined to know. The other kids were mostly restless and bored and looking ruefully out of the window at the small rectangular strip of lawn that to them resembled heaven, a release from facts and figures and numbers and words. I was the one who found the specks of light in those things.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bigging myself up. Like I said, I wasn’t particularly know-it-all, and these things sure didn’t come easy. It wasn’t as if I just had to sit there and get the knowledge sucked in by osmosis. It wasn’t as if I were ever in the top one per cent, or had a startling revelation, or I ever truly, truly conceived of something original. But I had the staying power. I wanted to win at something, and so I chose that. It was stubbornness, I guess. My eyes on the long game, the long road to power. I never felt young, even when I was young. I always felt like somebody old but immature for their age.

  So I devoured everything in front of me, took the path that led to straight Grade As and a decent education and a better quality of life. And if I had… What? A different character, a different upbringing, a more traumatic birth? If I hadn’t been breastfed? No, wait a minute, I wasn’t breastfed. OK, if I hadn’t been fat? Yes! If I hadn’t been fat, they might have accepted me straightaway, I might have kissed a girl at kiss chase, I might not have looked so stupid with those stupid freckles that clustered about my nose. I might have stared at the playground too, with a premature lust, and a longing to escape the confines of learnedness. I might have flung the alphabet book to the floor and decided to be a different man, a different person. The trail in front of me would have shifted somewhat and I would have lost my footing for a moment, but only a moment – and then carried on, never to know the difference, never to pay any attention to these facts that have given me form.

  Oh, who knows. Maybe it wasn’t being fat. I don’t really know what made me, but I do know that I can feel the five-year-old still in me, and I can feel the adult me huddling in that five-year-old freak. We are most definitely one, and I can feel his shyness, his innocence, so painfully, that I have a pain in my side, even now, just talking about it; I mean – can you believe that? His mannerisms, his speech – though the voice is a little higher, of course. The way he swept his floppy fringe to the side. The way his feet looked too big, precursors to their future size 12s. The way he made up stories about the stars at night when he huddled beneath his bedcovers; carving characters from constellations. The way he often slipped his hand into his mummy’s purse. The way he hid things around the house just so he could watch people look and then save the day by ‘finding’ them, by taking away the panic. The way he often told tales on his brother – and his parents always believed his side, always. The way he saw his father once, wrapping up the presents, and drinking sherry with his mum, but he so wanted to believe, that he willed the memory away, and only recalled it, later, much later, when he was walking down a cobbled street at university, and the snow toppled down, and carollers accosted him for money, and he suddenly wanted to give them his debit card, he wanted to get down on his knees, and he wanted to sob, gratefully, mournfully, winching up their white robes and kissing their ankles.

  ‘No time for daydreaming!’

  ‘Oh fuck off,’ I muttered. And I punched something into my phone, to try to look convincing.

  ‘You fuck yourself when your clients go shove their hardwood pulp up your arse.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I flashed him a smile as he thwacked me on the back.

  This is how we speak around here, this is our dialogue, our wonderful way with words. All we do is yell and holler and then lurk autistically in corners and mumble streams of incomprehension to people across the world.

  Some of the older employees here remember the days before online trading platforms, when they got to stand in the pits and arb rather wildly, palms facing outwards, palms facing inwards, bobbing heads impatiently to demonstrate blocks of ten. (In case you don’t know, ‘to arb’ is to hand signal. It was a kind of a code in this world of commodity exchange. Now we’re through with all that, and all we have left are sneers and explosive expletives, and we blow each other up with this weird smile on our faces, like a mask we wear constantly.)

  Sometimes I stand at my desk like it is a pit, pretending I am in an amphitheatre in Ancient Rome, orating on philosophy, love, democracy, wisdom. Except our values have changed and, just like the Romans, we are tumbling towa
rds excess and our rule is nearly at an end. This time there is no hidden poison, no half-concealed dagger. We are both murderer and victim. Now I stand at my personal pit and I am yelling out ‘Sell, sell, sell!’ and someone else is calling out ‘Buy, buy, buy!’ and there is a new kind of beauty in this open outcry, there is something harmonious and whole, like a negative and a positive coming together and forming something new. Except now we have a global cancelling out. Zero. Nothing.

  For this is a world of illusion, and it is no wonder it hooked me instantly, it lured me in, it sought me out. I was drawn to this world of commerce and commodity, where future contracts get stacked up like giant houses of cards. And I remember my first break as a floor trader, when I made a massive windfall on wheat, and I didn’t think about the prices of the goods in the grocery stores, of the farmer who tilled the land, no, nor even the client. I thought of myself and the profit now stockpiling, the money that enmired my feet. I wanted a lifetime of flash little flats, wads of cash, penthouse apartments and convertible cars. I felt like I was snapping the neck of every little brat who had ever mocked me. It was a fist shake in revenge. A maniacal laugh, for what got me here was a foray into falsehood, an understanding of untruth.

  At first I thought I had made her up, too. She was beautiful, though I’m not sure if she really was, it is hard to be objective. But she definitely had a way of voice, the way her voice would dip and dive and drip caramel all over you. Her legs were long and slender, she went in and out in all the right places, as they say. And she had this terrific laugh. She would put her hand up to her mouth and it would tumble out in fits and bursts, as if she were desperate to stifle it, but never quite could. And, most importantly of all, she was into me. She mistook my fear for confidence, she miscalculated me as solid and dependable because I was doing an economics and finance degree, and I seldom got pissed like the rest, and I always woke up for the 9.15 lectures.