I said out loud, “Wow, that really is Really Bad.” People thought I was talking about Cal’s death, rather than the poison. I was trying hard not to smile. I looked up at Beth, three or four stairs up the flight. I started up those three or four stairs. She was looking at me in a way that made my insides melt and dribble out through my shoes a thousand times over.
“You’re in my Cell Biology class…” she said, staring at me, whilst her boyfriend lay dead on the floor beneath us. I had no idea why she would choose to say that, but instantly had the most perfect reply…
“I…
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE BETH?”
I knew that voice. Mr Bertram. How many times were my bowels going to try and betray me tonight? Beth’s attention was ripped from me to her furious, curious father, who stood over Cal’s body whilst several of Cal’s friends tried to resuscitate him. “Ummm.” began Beth
I turned to face the man slowly. Mr Bertram recognized me instantly.
“YOU!” he managed, before descending into a spluttering rage and, stepping over Cal’s body, started towards me, his hands in the “I’m really going to strangle you now” position.
Run.
I grabbed Beth’s hand and sprinted upstairs, and upstairs again, down a hall, and upstairs again to a tiny little attic, and up a little step ladder to a rooftop balcony area, and up onto the roof itself, and…
I stopped to assess the situation. Why escape to the roof? I’ve been reading too much Batman. Beth stood behind me - I hadn’t let go of her hand yet. I savoured it. It was a warm hand. Her warm hand. I could hear her father ascending the stepladder. Shit. Beth started saying something in singsong, “Paul, wait! What are you do
She stopped talking halfway through a word, frozen in an instant. I turned to look at her, but Beth wasn’t looking at me, nor turned in anticipation of her father’s arrival. She was looking at something behind my shoulder.
When you notice someone is looking behind you instead of at you, it’s a natural human instinct to turn and see what they are looking at. Unless that other person’s face has an expression like Beth’s did at that moment. What words would describe it? Certainly there was terror, but it was more than that, there was confusion there as well. An extreme combination of the two, as if she was confused about everything in, on and under the world except for one fact – that she was terrified. She was shaking her head from side to side at the exact same slow speed the clothesline was spinning last night, but her eyes weren’t moving, they were shifting their relative position - always focused on that one spot behind my left shoulder, up, higher on the roof.
When you see someone with an expression like that, your instincts go beyond trying to find out what the problem is. They know death is coming, freight-train like, definite-like. They don’t want any further information. They’d prefer to just stand there and wait if it’s all the same to you thanks.
And so it was with me. I just stood there, refusing to turn around to face Whatever It Was. Instead I concentrated on Beth’s face. Blood started trickling out of her nose – fear was messing with her physiology on every conceivable level. She lost control of lower body faculties.
Why would Stephen say that? It was so …common, toilet humour. Didn’t he know he was in mortal danger too? Damn it, it wasn’t right. Beauty must reign at the end. And the end was now apparently, so fuck it. I reached up to Beth’s face and wiped the blood from her upper lip. It smeared across her face, but she was catatonic, didn’t notice. Fuck you world, I thought, I got to touch her face and it was worth it.
In these seconds, Mr Bertram had arrived at the rooftop balcony. He saw what Beth saw, and was going through much the same experience as her.
“It’s him”, he said. This roused my curiousity enough to override my instincts. The “him” from last night. I wanted to know who this “him” was.
For the third and final time that night, I turned around to face a weird guy that I didn’t like.
At first, I didn’t see anything, just the night sky, the chimney, the TV aerial. What’s the probl…oh. ..
Not a TV aerial. A coathanger. A coathanger. An upside down coathanger that had its hook straightened out, like people stick in the back of their TVs or amputated car aerials. Except it wasn’t stuck in a TV or car. It was stuck in a young man’s head, a young man who now stood before them, up there on the roof, staring at Beth.
That guy up there, I thought, has got a coathanger stuck in his head.
“Alriii-i-i-iight gang. We gonna rock the house or what?”, said the Coathanger guy in what seemed like a bizarre impersonation of a commercial radio DJ.
“Hi” I said. There was no sound from Beth or Mr Bertram.
The coathanger guy casually walked down the slope of the roof towards where Beth and I stood. As he did, I looked down at my hand – blood smeared on my finger, Beth’s blood. I had killed for her once tonight. This coathanger guy didn’t seem hostile, but judging by Beth’s reaction to him, he posed some sort of threat to her. I made sure he stayed between the two of them as Mr Coathanger approached. He stopped in front of me. An awkward moment passed between us.
Coathanger appeared to be a few years older than me, by all accounts just a normal looking guy, kinda spaced-out looking, wearing a cheap, filthy black suit with a coathanger in his head. He didn’t say anything.
Ridiculously, I said, “Is there something I can help you with?” Coathanger smiled. From that smile, I got a taste of what Beth and Mr Bertram were currently choking on.
Coathangerhead, moving slowly, simply reached out to me and placed one hand on my neck, the other on the top of my head, and snapped my neck. “Why didn’t I stop him from doing that?” I thought vaguely, “And why can I still think things?” as Coathangerhead lifted my limp body up over his head and threw me off the roof, into the backyard. As I sailed through the air, I saw Coathangerhead take a step towards Beth.
I soon discovered why he could still think. It was because my last moments needed to absolutely jam-packed full of irony and humiliation. Otherwise, I hadn’t been punished enough, right God? And so I fell, and landed badly, spine-first on the old Hills Hoist clothesline. There was a horrible noise from inside me, best described as a wet snap, which was followed by the dull thud of my body hitting the perfect lawn. Head-first? Of course head-first – would the forces have it any other way? Then, finally, thankfully, the blackness came.
That should have been the end, but it wasn’t. Yes, the blackness was there, and it was the special endless kind of blackness called death, but not quite. It subsided temporarily. For a while, I distinctly experienced things – there was beauty, there was blood, there was water, there was lacy female underwear, there was tiredness, there was relief.
There was a cat.
Why was there a cat?
I opened my eyes. I was laying on the Bertram lawn, under the Hills Hoist, which was broken, bent out of shape, all saggy wire and angry metal bits. (Hey, looks kinda cool from this angle. Must remember to get a photo of it for my multimedia assignment. No wait, that’s right, I’m dead now.)
A cat was sitting by my head, peering down curiously at my face, tentatively sniffing my nose. The same one I tripped over twice last night. Bastard. Doesn’t make sense…
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