Knight of the Long Knives

Night of the Long Knives

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"I can remember absolutely everything young man. That's my curse;
that's one of the greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race:
memory."
Jed Leland, 'Citizen Cane'

Each night was the same. He lay there snatching only five minutes of
sleep at any one time, whilst she lay next to him and would sleep the
whole night through. He looked across at the shape under the covers,
even with the heavy duvet over her it was still possible to see the
slimness of her figure, the curve of her hips and the slender length of
her legs. A shock of red hair peeping from the covers edge and fanning
across her pillow completed this picture of his perfect woman, and all
the while she slept.

The clock on the wall across the room told him it was coming up to
three o'clock ... absolutely no time to be lying awake. Nope three
o'clock was a time when you should be miles away living your dreams, or
at least dreaming them. But sitting up-right staring immediately ahead
of himself, following the mummy-like mound the duvet made over his
stretched straight legs, all he could think of was the next boring day
ahead of him. Stuck behind a desk for nine or ten hours. Even when the
work is easy enough to auto-pilot your way through the day you know
it's going to last too long. Creating paperwork to log paperwork that
will generate some more paperwork, well it was a kind of 'creative art'
but quite some distance from where he wanted to be at this stage in his
life. Forty-two and all he could do was regret.
The opportunities of his youth had passed him by and what was he left
with now? The best wife/partner/soul-mate he could ever imagine. Yes,
that much was true but sometimes - even though he didn't like admitting
it (even to himself) - that just didn't make up for some of it. Almost
three now, and his mind was wandering as it usually did when he lay
here waiting for the pull of sleep or the pull of the office whichever
came first. Looking around at the things surrounding him he wasn't sure
if he had made a good go of it, or if he had fallen foul of so many of
the pet hates he'd carried throughout his more ambitious days. His room
was pretty cool he guessed, if indeed a forty-two year was allowed to
sat 'cool' anymore. He had a stereo, a tv set, the books he'd always
wanted, the movies he'd always admired and more music than he could
remember ever listening to. These were the things he'd always been told
to aim for and now he had them. All around him. All around him were:
books, dust laying on their covers were they hadn't been opened since
they arrived from the bookstore. Movies he never watched because he was
sure he'd seen that one recently and really should see something new.
Albums he'd hum all day at work, fetch off the shelf when he got in and
then find that the time to sit down and listen kept getting pushed out
of reach. A house full of the things he loved, things full of life,
full of inspirational power...gathering moss as he lived out his
mundane little days as the life of a zombie.

That wasn't fair not on him. Or her.

She'd moved her head and started to snore, almost as if she was
reminding him that it wasn't all a waste. That she loved him and he
loved her. And he had to admit that although he could list, and often
did so, the things he'd lost when it came down to the relationship he'd
found with her it was a different story. It wasn't that he forgot those
things that he'd let go of, but he knew somewhere deep inside - in the
kind of place that crappy films manage to play with and make us cry
even though we feel guilty that something so clinched can effect us -
he knew that meeting her had been important. In a 'grand scale of
things' kind of way.
He looked across the room at the clock again. Still didn't seem to be
quite three o'clock. It reminded him of a book he had managed to read
once, it had been about the changes in man that the wristwatch had
brought about. A tiny thing that we take so for granted. He had always
fancied himself as Peter Fonda, tossing his watch onto the sand and
driving off, but the sad truth was that even when he proudly boasted
that he wasn't wearing it, he knew his watch was tucked safely at the
bottom of his bag. Before the days of the wristwatch people didn't
catch sight of the time that often so when they saw the face of a clock
they just accepted the time it shouted back at them. Five minutes would
take as long as it would always take, just the same as a day would. But
then all of a sudden people got to know that sometimes five minutes
could last hours...now where was the logic in that. That one person
felt a day had rushed past while another had felt it crawl like a snail
was a new feeling, until eventually everyone in some shape of form had
their own time patterns irregular in ways they would never have thought
possible.
He guessed he got his fixation with time from his mother. Well she was
dead now, and had been for seven years - enough time to forget? People
don't forget stuff like that: they're not meant to so they don't. Even
if they try. This was something else he had learnt from lying awake.
There were things that no matter how hard you tried to never go there,
they would always find you - especially when you lay awake at almost
three in the morning. As he turned over in the bed he brushed against
the warm flesh of her exposed back. This contact brief though it was,
was enough to bring him to guilty state of arousal. Their sex life had
always been healthy, experimental, fun...Christ, how was it that
seconds after thinking about a dead mother there are still parts of the
human body that are somehow listening to totally different tune. There
was as little point feeling repulsed by the link as there was spending
time thinking about Freud's reasons (excuses) behind it. So he shuffled
up against the small of her back. Both lovingly and exploitingly. The
gentle divot that was the small of her back was one of his favourite
places on her; somewhere he thought about when she wasn't around.
Though recently there hadn't been much time when they were apart -
which made it all the harder if he stumbled across painful memories
from his past.
There was much he regretted. Why had he never become any of the things
he'd planned to be? The only aim he'd achieved was that he didn't have
the responsibility of children and that was one hundred percent more to
do with her medical history than any conscious effort on his part. He'd
always had that teen-angst grumble in him that he didn't quite fit,
wasn't quite the same as everyone else, but it hadn't done him any good
holding onto it. It had simply stopped him getting too far gone in the
shape of things, remaining one step back from the rest - a kind of
wallflower except he wasn't just the last one left alone at the school
disco. How he had ended up married was a mystery to him, even now after
thirteen years of life as a husband. Partly because he had never
planned it that way but mainly because he couldn't understand why she'd
said yes. If she had known how he would treat her behind her back she
never would have.

Seven. No nearly eight, and in that time how often had he seen his
father? Five maybe six times in all those eight years. Not even enough
times for the usually thought of as obligatory
'Christmas-get-togethers'. No, now there were real reasons to be
jealous of his father - he was the one getting out and about. Three
round-the-world trips later and he was still visiting places on the
globe that his son had never heard of. Freud may have got it right
about father-son rivalry but he hadn't been spot on.

They'd met at college, but they didn't get together until a few years
later when they met up again. She remembered him from those psychology
classes and he remembered her swaying hips. The hips that he now had
his hands on, hips that didn't look a day older than the first time
he'd rubbed his hands against them. With that thought he began to
circle her hip bone with his index finger, hoping that he was massaging
just enough to gentle wake her from her sleep. They'd been lucky he
knew, they had stayed together when all those other marriages had
broken down, there's was a relationship talked about as being stable.
Almost as though they were a Hollywood couple who had braved it all.
But he knew different, there might have been no Hollywood attention to
hide from but there were secrets he didn't want to think about and he
knew that if didn't fall asleep soon he'd start remembering.
The clock had failed to make any progress, and he started to hope for
the aural invasion of occasional chirps from outside - a sure sign that
morning was on it's way. She hadn't stirred so he turned away laying
with his back to her he repositioned his pillow hoping that any kind of
change might send him off. Insurance. What a dead end. An industry
based almost entirely on people's fears and disappointments. You took
out a policy in case something happened and then when it did you had to
go through every tiny detail of it again, only this time with a pen in
your hand. What a place to be, sat in an office reading about the
horrific reasons behind a cancelled holiday, or the reasons why the
couple were devastated that they had saved up for a honeymoon only to
spend most of it in the hospital. And all the time being paid to look
for ways that the company could avoid have to compensate these sob
stories. It would be easy to say that this had made him cold and
heartless when it came to others but if the truth was known it would
probably be that this was the aspect that had appealed to him. And that
was another regret. That not only had he let himself pass over those
dreams of working in the movies, but that he had laughed all those
times that he had found ways to stop people being paid back for what
they had lost. Newlyweds had gone to Jamaica, and two days into their
honeymoon she had started to bleed. The 'incident' was logged as
profound and heavy vaginal bleeding, and they got nothing. Two people
beginning the rest of their lives together probably shocked into a
state where they were never going to be like other couples and what did
they get? A standard letter of decline, for them to frame. These were
his ghosts, the things that haunted him on nights like this. It was
these stories that hounded and hurt him.
She mumbled something in her sleep, but it was too distant to be
anything recognisable. But nonetheless he sat deadly still in case she
repeated in the next few moments. His paranoid mind had always feared
what he might one night come out with in his sleep. What if his
unconscious mind were to start telling tales on him to anyone who would
listen. Aiding in his own arrest. A party to his own downfall.
The clock had still moved no further.

He'd regret for as long as he lived. He knew that. Whether it was a
purchase never made, a goodbye never spoken or a deed never done. These
things played in his mind, dancing a merry dance for him to think upon
night after night as he lay there awake. And even now when all of a
sudden able to doze they were still there: quieter yes but there all
the same. A restless micro-nap. His eyes open again, he felt no better
and still the clock had made no progress.

Progress...Something he guessed you were supposed to make from the
moment you were born. So how come he had spent so much of his life
looking back. He'd never travelled, never more than a holiday here or
there in the sun taken purely to escape working life. Never really in
the kind of place he'd have liked to go. She always chose, did she even
like where they had ended up. People travel the world now in a matter
of days. Unable to grab too much time off work they touch down
somewhere on all the continents. Just long enough to see that they
breathe the same dirty air wherever you are, and then off back to
'civilisation' and safety. None rocks around the world, it's all rush;
has the world really got that small? Philius Fogg found eighty days a
push, and still saw less of this planet than you'll see on the ten
o'clock news in one half hour sitting.

Had it been progress when he'd had an affair to help get over the death
of his mother? It had helped, and he had learnt from it, but was it
really progress? Looking down at her slender body, her shoulders now
exposed, he hated the fact that she'd never found out, hated the fact
that she'd been too stupid to see that he wasn't the one for her. Hated
and loved her all at once. He loved her and couldn't handle that she
loved him, not even after all these years - he didn't see what it was
she loved, or who she loved. Perhaps it was not him, but the thing she
saw in his place every time that she looked. Someone that only existed
in her time and her space.

He gently moved himself off of the bed and walked over to clock that
had been tormenting him. It seemed to say exactly the same as it had
done 'hours' ago...Nonetheless the second hand was making its way
around the face, as he had known from the perpetual ticking that no
matter how hard he tried he could never escape. The mechanism must be
shot.
There was still no bird-song but the room was bathed in the kind of
twilight that would let his eyes get used to the layout of things only
to dissolve away and leave him blind if he dared to try moving
anywhere. Finding the door he slowly twisted the handle only to find
that once again the bolt inside had slipped and they were trapped in
the room, not that the fact would worry her all that much at this
moment in time, snoring in her content. Another job to fit in during
the rush of the morning. Screwdriver and hammer on the chest of drawers
as per usual. He could have fixed it now but what was the point in
waking her up. Not when all he need really do was lay back down and
watch her. Watch the rise and fall of the covers over her chest, the
zigzag shimmers across her closed eyelids as she chased what ever
thoughts were keeping her in her deep slumber.
Laying back down next to her he tried to keep his mind from the fact
that he was trapped in the room. And tried to forget that she could
start her incessant snoring at any moment. It was almost as though he
was going through the feelings of those early days of their marriage
where he was never too sure if they should have done it, but he was
always sure that he loved her. Guilt at every corner no matter what
decisions you make. We will never be happy. It was probably just his
imagination but it was starting to feel a bit warmer in the room; just
some induced claustrophobia phase no doubt....but there enough for the
hairs on the back of his neck to be doing strange things. But then we
all do strange things at times. Like set out to hurt those ones that we
love. Two months fun with a run of the mill, tv-typical affair-material
girl. Nothing special with no-one special: and then it was gone, a
splash of rain on the windscreen. But it wasn't because the number of
times he'd had to bite his tongue to stop blurting it out in the middle
of some heated debate (read argument)....
Oh let's not go there, not now when it's bound to be nearly time for
work. The clock begged to differ, as we knew it would.

He knew that tomorrow, or today really, would be just another crappy
day where, mainly, things would go smoothly but it would only take one
spanner in the works to ruin it all. The nice tv set, stereo, dvd
player, dishwasher, et. al. meant very little compared to the brain
ache involved in getting them. Why hadn't he just travelled, gone off
to India to find himself whatever that was supposed to mean. Still
mustn't grumble he guessed. He had no legitimate reason to. His
upbringing had been pretty average. His family was pretty much two
point four (minus the two and the point four), whilst all his friends'
were anything but. He should have been the o.k one, and to those people
in his past he quite possible was. Not that he actually ever saw any of
them anymore, didn't really see anyone. Funny how people fall away as
easily as old newspapers. Hanging around while there's still stories to
tell and then gone. Disappeared. Used up. In that respect he had become
his parents. There had come a time where he no longer had people around
for dinner, no longer went out to meet people. He couldn't remember the
last time he'd met someone new, other than at work where that kind of
thing didn't mean a great deal...perhaps that was where it had gone
wrong: classing work as separate to life when really there is no way to
keep them poles apart. Not when you're an adult. And a forty two year
old adult with lessons aplenty behind him.

The room was getting hotter. He was certain. But the birds still
weren't out and the sun still wasn't making it's daily appearance. He
stared at the clock for so long that it disappeared. I t was a trick he
used to pull all the time as a kid. In the dark you'd let your eyes get
used to the lack of light, find an object in the room and watch it.
Watch it until it disappeared. The tiny spot of light or whatever it
had been that meant you could see the object kind of got consumed by
itself and it vanished, a black blur against the black background. As
soon as you shift your focus it pops back. Right where it had been all
along. Back from hiding.

He shook her as she lay next to him. It had been so long with no
changes on that evil smirking clock face, no changes in the outside
world - no sun popping into view, no birds merrily chirping along to
the tune of the new day. Shy of climbing out of the window his options
were limited. Although she rocked from side to side, she showed no
signs of waking. He was sure she was breathing, her chest still rose
and fell with that slow formality of the sleeping. He gently pushed up
her eyelid - which sharply snapped back into position after he'd seen
the healthy eye stare right through him. Not that he would really have
known what looking at her eye could tell him anyway. If anything. In
desperation he shouted at her, as though by bawling out his concern
she'd take notice. A cold sweat of guilt and fear crept over his naked
chest. It had been his wandering mind with it's tendency to wash back
the present, to continually plough up the muck of the past - mixing the
good parts and the bad until they were indistinguishable from one
another - it must have been his useless, romantic, melancholic memories
that effected the room somehow. Stopped time and trapped his concerns
when she had been falling into some kind of comatose state. As he had
pondered on his love, and hate, for her she'd been slipping away from
him. A punishment for them both. And she'd got the sharp end. He kissed
her face all over. Was it all over? Was this the last night they were
every intended to spend together? A perverse procession along the paths
of his guild riddled maze of a conscious. With this scene as the climax
to the situation: him bowed over the lifeless form of beauty and
strength. His lips tracing slug-like trails across the face of the only
one he'd ever done anything for. As we, the third person narration of
his ever distracted and distanced mind watch and tear apart in analysis
every move he makes.

The rising temperature, the apparent lack of progress in the birth of
the day, the inactivity of his wife. The racing of his mind. He felt
lost. The only option was to climb out of the window and sort out this
mess, whatever this mess actually was. Stay calm.
The window is jammed. On what, he was not too sure. But just like the
door it was letting him go nowhere. And his wife was lying there
potentially vegetating away to nothing as he stood and shook at the
metal framework. What was left? Trapped in the room with his thoughts,
the ticking clock that never pushed on. And the body of her, of his
focus...

_____________________________________________

When she woke at the usual time the next morning, seven a.m. She let
him lay there for a few extra moments. Knowing he didn't like his job
she never liked to wake him, fearing that he would accuse her of
pushing him to the office. She pulled on her bathrobe, looked at him
peacefully lying there on the bad and went to shower. He was still
there when she came back. Still unmoved despite the noise of the
hairdryer. As her knee pushed into the mattress she sensed something
was wrong but still leaned over to plant a fairy-tale kiss on his
lips.

The piece in the newspaper had been short. How he would be missed by
many and that he had passed away peacefully in his sleep, how he was in
a better place. Everybody had been sure of that.