A Thousand Little Squares

A THOUSAND LITTLE SQUARES

A human face is really just a thousand little squares. A mosaic. Or like your newspaper, or TV screen, when you get too close. Red square, yellow square, blue square, red square. You have to be careful, when you get that close. Sometimes you don't know where reality ends and your TV screen begins. Sometimes they slip.

What would be the best way of pulling those pieces apart? A gun is quick, but too abrupt- you want to do it nice and slow, to savour every moment. Perhaps you could take a very sharp knife and peel each square off. One by one. You could make it last for weeks.

These thoughts have been with me as bathtubs and coffee cups have turned cold. I have invested my days with them. So have you. On buses people have the milky gaze of cows, blinking long lashed at their destiny, not knowing what they're waiting for, chewing the cud, not knowing that they are living for their ending. Victims waiting to happen. It's like the force that seems to pull you downwards as you stare over the edge of a waterfall, the temptation to jump up in church and shout 'wibblewibblewibble!' at your grandfather's funeral. To do something inexplicably stupid, that would, in an instant, turn your world on its head.

In dreams I am astonished by the ease with which it happens, how easily a skull cracks. They crumple between my fist and the pavement like eggshells. In this way I have murdered almost everyone I know.

I live in a city of mutually assured consumption. Like vampires we drain each other of as much as we can, as quickly as we can, and relish the tingle of being stripped of something in exchange, a thousand times a day. In a city like this, it isn't difficult to find a victim. In a city like this, your victim finds you. It is too easy. We are just animals, after all. Though I'm not sure if I could kill an animal- a kitten, say, or a chicken.

I knew before I left the house that tonight I would meet my victim. I calmed my thumping blood with the ritual of preparation and a glass of cool white wine. I starred into my own eyes as I pulled my straighteners through my hair, terrified myself with their delicious stillness. I softened them with false lashes and a smudge of kohl. I watched my skin skim across my ribs and muscles as I stretched and twisted into my underwear. Slowly, as if I would never do this again. I would want to fuck me too. I saw the livid venom of my lipstick clinging to the edge of my glass. It marked where I had been. Evidence.

The setting for this meeting is an inappropriate opening for romance or tragedy. Greasy fogged up windows on a cold night. The humidity condensing on your frost bitten cheek as you step inside. But it is in places like this that human narratives begin, the quiet, unwatched places. JD Weatherspoon's and Ponana's. Left to their own devices, people will make their own audiences. I timed the removal of my jacket carefully, my walk was well rehearsed. I made men fall in lust with me. Glances caught, exchanged, returned, shamelessly, then more furtively with men with other girls.

I didn't see him at first. He arrived late. He made me wait. He had that class. I could have changed my mind, slipped my jacket on and disappeared alone, I almost did. I almost changed my mind. 'Another drink', I told myself 'and then I'll go'. But the glass of wine was my companion, and then the barman was, his clumsy flirtation distraction from my wilting will.

So he appeared beside me abruptly, in my peripheral vision. Before I turned my glance I recognised him, though I didn't expect it to start this way.

George was beautiful of course, as a butterfly is. Creatures such as these carry their mortality about with them, their most graceful sky dances and lofty elevations are haunted by their transience. Fragility makes them fascinating- it is easy to love what you cannot possess. Well, I had lit my candle, and he drew close.

But as we spoke I realised he wasn't a butterfly, he was some animal with more fight and fire. A dragonfly, then. Good. I enjoy a challenge.

At first there was resistance. Always the same game, repeated eternally. And always the fight is over too quickly, revealing the struggle as sham. I was disappointed with how easily he gave in. I expected more. I guess he was drunk. His kiss had a reminiscence of vomit.

I drew close to him as we walked through the sugar clipped darkness. There were stars like cubes of ice and a fat overdue moon. He drew me close. His body's warmth fostered the sky's blackness. Some ancient architect must have conceived the nook George pushed me into, as if looking down through the elapse of history he was complicit with his desire. But the contrast of heat and night was unbearable. 'Not here'- a disembodied whisper, dropping through the breath misty air as if weighted with cement.

My home is carefully constructed to reveal nothing. The lighting is low, the worktops stainless. Sometimes I see little traces of myself encroaching, blemishing the surfaces purchased expensively for their lack of personality. It is this that angers me when nothing else can, and only the hours spent frantically removing the marks can quiet me. I shouldn't have been surprised, then, that this frame absorbed him more easily than me. It was this performance it was designed for, after all. He had a white T shirt and Gap khaki pants. He fitted in.

I wouldn't show him into my bedroom. 'Not yet', I said, closing the door with a shy smile. I pressed him against my steel surfaces, then draw away.

'A drink?' He turned his back to me.

He had his back to me. His head was tilted forward, his hair clipped short so his neck was exposed. It was long and paper pale. I am a stranger. How could he trust me with his expanse of skin like that?

The Act. Take a knife. Shiny, sharp, Japanese, purchased for the purpose. Expensive. Not Just Any Old Crap. Take the knife. Move up behind him, where he lifts a bottle, whiskey humming onto cracking ice. Slide one hand inside his trousers, rest your hand on the blank skin above his dick, wait for it to rise. For one moment you are one. Your breath speeds up together. You feel his pulse tick through the flesh compressed beneath your finger tips. A human pulse can only tick a certain number of times.

Then the catch of light flutters through his lashes as you lift your weapon, mortal butterfly kiss, and you see what you didn't want to- his reflected look of fear.

Wait. A suspended instant. This isn't right. Here you could stop, change your mind, change course. Laugh it off as a slightly distasteful joke gone wrong, or a weird kinky sex fetish. But he breathes, he starts to turn, and it's an impulse, not a decision, that forces you forward, drives you to plunge the blade into his neck somewhere beneath his perfect jaw.

And nothing prepared you for this, for the resistance of the human body. His surface does not yield immediately. It is a sort of sawing, hacking motion that is required, the rugged teeth of the knife come into play. You encounter gristle. He does not give way softly and fall to the floor like a bag of flour. He makes a grab at your hand, takes a firm grip on your wrist and tries to push you away. The sound he makes comes from somewhere deep inside him. It isn't human, that sound, surely? He is bigger than you, and stronger, and he is fighting for his life. Why hadn't you anticipated this struggle? That is sinews beneath your blade. Your fingers are getting wet. For a moment you are faint, nausea rises in your throat, but you swallow it. This is your challenge. It wouldn't be easy.

I starred at the wall and thought about its whiteness. How could you live so closely for so long and leave nothing? Whiteness without context, without shadow, my eyes went out of focus. I saw my Father's butterfly collection. He used to take me to see it in the attic as a child. It was awful. I used to love those creatures, those breaths on wings, I used to follow them in the garden. Sometimes one alighted on one of Mum's azaleas, and I could get so close to it, lean in so near that I could see its tongue, its eyes. But even at that proximity I never had the sense that they were something I could touch.

He had their corpses in his cases. It was awful. How could they be what I had seen, how was there a correlation? My eyes ran across them for huge expanses of minutes, time seeming turned to eternity. I didn't know what else to do. They had been stripped of what made them beautiful, life, and even the specimens of which he was most proud, with every leg intact, were unrecognisable without it. I still can't escape the horror of that. And how often he took me to the attic, forced me to look at them, in spite of my horror. Why didn't anyone ever notice?

Now this man lay at my feet. It was finished. Good. What you can't comprehend is the weight of a dead human body. We carry that weight about with us everyday. It must be glorious, when that moment comes, giving up. Releasing the tension and letting gravity take hold. Sinking away from all the things keeping you upright. I envied him, then, as I looked at what was left of him. That was what was holding him down. He had shed his skin like a chrysalis, and now he spiralled in the sky somewhere beyond time and space, more fragile, more delicate, more beautiful.

I left the body. It didn't concern me. I would let his life bleed onto my walls, into my carpets, so there would be some legacy of me, after all, of my actions, and there was no detergent strong enough to bleach that out.

The day was breaking. Perhaps I had bloodstains on my hands and my dress, perhaps that was why people shot sidelong glances my way, but it didn't concern me. I walked without direction, direction struck me now as an absurd idea, one of mankind's weird inventions, and I laughed out loud. It felt good, so I laughed some more. I kept walking and laughing, fast and hard.

Reports of time failed. The London Eye starred, unblinkingly, at Big Ben's face, and perhaps some of those fluttering little lives it contained saw it, heeded its restless tick tock towards their demise. I looked straight ahead. Time seemed a contract which my very birth had rendered binding. But I had ripped life in half. When I did cast my eyes northwards, the hands began to spin violently, until they launched themselves into the welkin, like a rotor blade twirling one another around until they became invisible.

The sun was the only thing that could continue to have power over me. Light and Dark chased each other through the sky as they always had done. They were bigger than Life and Death, they would last longer. I kept walking through them, night and day, night and day, until, when I had ceased to see anything else, when I'd lost my grasp, lost my footing, it was the stars that guided me, the sun that told me I was moving forward.