Seven Year Itch

I found myself feeling sorry for Micky. He’d backed the wrong horse. His were the values of a bygone era. I questioned whether those values had ever seen action. Ceremonial swords made to represent something better than the truth of the barbarity and shame of war. That was the wrong question. We’re trapped in Russian dolls of false paradigms waving our opinions around at whoever will listen, when no one is listening. Why would they listen when we ourselves are deaf to the reality of our situation?

Micky’s problem was that he was fiercely loyal. That was all that seemed to matter to the man. And that loyalty of his had paid dividends. He wasn’t quite the last man standing. And not quite standing as much as reeling. Punch drunk in his splendid isolation. But people like Micky are not made to be alone. They need a locus for their loyalty. A conduit for their energy. A master for them to look up to. To take the responsibility that by rights they should take for their own actions.

Subcontracting his life to Colin had been all too easy for Micky. I doubted there was little consideration as to where this deal of his would lead. Only relief that he’d found someone to call the shots. The control Colin had over his so-called friend appalled me, but somehow Micky made it seem like it was all for the best. Micky always made things seem as though they were for the best. A bear of a man. Disarming you with a deceptive warmth as he drew in close, cornering you prior to crushing you in arms that seemed made only for hugging. A living example that love really does hurt. The way Micky loved. The way we all created our own fast food, convenient version of something that was bad for us but with that false branding gave us something to live for. Something to make us feel better about the pain we inflicted upon ourselves before sharing it with anyone stupid enough to stick around for too long.

In order to be appalled by Colin’s treatment of Micky, I had swallowed down my hypocrisy and made Micky and Colin other worldly. Gently demonised the both of them so that I did not look too closely at my own circumstances. I was real, whereas they were cartoon characters. Their actions a play for my entertainment. A distraction of a puzzle for me to solve. And solve it I would. Because I was better than them. I placed an arbitrary value upon myself that trumped theirs. I was good. They were bad. The good guy always wins. That’s the narrative we are taught from the outset. One of many bitter pills that we swallow.

The day he came to see me, he was defeated. Smaller somehow. He broke my heart as soon as I set eyes upon him. He deserved better than whatever had befallen him. Always had. Micky’s back story was a tear-jerker. His life wasn’t fair.

“Is this a social visit?” I quipped as I met him front of house. My mouth got the better of me. It didn’t like the emotions pouring off the big man.

He shook his head sadly. Everything about him was sad on that day and he dragged me down into that rollercoaster feeling right from the start. My heart felt the pressure of it. Which confused me all the more. I thought I was immune to this sort of thing. The fortress around my heart impregnable.

“You better come with me,” I said this as I nodded at the desk sergeant.

We walked to the interview room. For once, breaking protocol, I led. His presence was a dark weight behind me. I felt an inexplicable burden, and as I ushered him into the sparse and dirtily clinical room, something felt very off. A devil walked over my grave and I shivered with a premonition of a terrible future.

Meekly, Micky sat on one of the two cheap plastic chairs on the far side of the table. He looked like a grown up sitting in a primary school. A lost, incongruous gentle giant. I felt no excitement in this moment, even though I knew what it meant. Micky and Colin had experienced their first and final difference of opinions and the scales had fallen from Micky’s eyes. The world had turned differently and nothing would be the same again.

“Tea?” I asked from the doorway.

I was relieved when he nodded and said yes. Placing a small, plaintive please alongside the affirmation.

I knew how he took his brew. Not that it mattered. The tan liquid the machine provided was a one size fits all hot beverage that hopefully delivered a caffeine hit without causing too much damage along the way.

Returning to the interview room, I was disappointed to discover that Micky really was here. He hadn’t moved. Placed himself on standby. No point in wasting energy. Especially when you were the size of a bull.

He sipped his scalding hot tea and had the grace to seem grateful for it.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” I asked him now I’d run out of excuses to delay the moment of truth.

“It’s Colin,” he said simply.

I could not help but raise an eyebrow, “I’m going to have to record this, you know that?” My meaning clear. He was about to cross the line and there was no coming back from that. This was a one way ticket.

He nodded, “Colin’s a bad man.”

I mirrored the nod as I prepared the tape and provided the necessary preamble, “how so?” I asked him once I was done. I knew Colin to be a very bad man, but he was the devil I knew. A necessary evil. I resented Micky for changing the game like this. Taking the matter out of my hands.

Micky proceeded to betray Colin. I never once asked what had caused this change of heart. I could feel his hurt. It radiated from him. I told myself that I did not want to break the spell or interrupt Micky’s flow. Added platitudes of respect for the man. But really it was because I was a coward. I felt the hurt in the room and I could take no more. There was something weaponised about Micky’s sadness and I could not bring myself to open that pandora’s box. So I stood by and I did nothing, just like all the people I despised more and more as I worked this job.

Slowly and methodically, Micky buried Colin. His parting gift to the man was a lifetime stay in a cell. He delivered the betrayal as a lament. His features set grimly in the grudging act of Colin’s confession. Determined to see it through. Taking no pleasure in it.

As the words left him, he deflated. By the time he was finished, we were both exhausted. I was the rebound, as the lovers finally parted. Used to bear witness to the ending of them. I would have cried, if I’d had the energy to do so. A handshake as I saw Micky out had to suffice.

I watched him go and I understood that he had shared his grief with me. It was inside me now. His walking away carried with it a sense of loss. The end of an era. He had created a hole in my life that I’d been intent on for far too long. An eventuality that I had wanted with a passion in the early days, but come to dread as time went on and the cruelties of the path I’d chosen had buckled me out of shape. I was a victim in all this, but I could not accept the accolade. Not now. Not ever.

Colin and Micky were part of the balance of my life. Without them, the force of chaos that had always threatened the fragility of my existence would come crashing in. I’d put plenty of deserving criminals away, as well as a few that arguably deserved better from the sausage machine that justice had become. I was poacher turned gamekeeper and a good gamekeeper did not lay waste to any aspect of the land. Everything had its place and careful management was required. Regular, planned culls were the order of the day.

Micky had disrupted everything, shattering my illusion of control. My place in this world had shifted and I knew this was only the start. Knew it as soon as I saw Micky. I’d expected the fox in the chicken coop, but Micky was no fox. I couldn’t work out what he was or what had just happened in the cloying confines of an interview room made smaller and smaller by the big man. Colin was the fox. Colin had always been in my crosshairs.

Colin Faith was lovingly referred to as The Nutter. This moniker barely touched the sides of his madness. His reputation had all the hallmarks and knife marks of a psychopath. He was ruthless in his dealings and it was a wonder that Micky had survived his residence in the man’s sphere. People were consumables as far as Colin was concerned. Their shelf life was short because he was paranoid in his careful approach to survival. Everyone was a threat. All he saw were enemies. He was as cold as they came.

That was until we brought him in following Micky’s visit to the station.

This Colin was a different animal entirely. A tired old sheep herded to the slaughter. His mask was gone and he was entirely vulnerable. He seemed to me to be a rabbit with myxomatosis. Pending roadkill. Sitting in the middle of the road with no idea as to where he was, let alone that he was about to be run down. I had to remind myself that Colin was as manipulative as they came. There was only artifice when it came to this man. But to see him play victim like this, wrong-footed me and threw me further from the stable ground I’d worked a lifetime to establish myself upon. Yet again, a terrible feeling of foreboding overcame me and several times I lost track of where we were in the interview. I was a character in someone else’s play and I did not know my lines.

A bomb had gone off in our lives and Colin was equally shellshocked. This was not how either of us ever envisaged the final showdown. All our thunder was stolen and we sat in the aftermath of a discharge that had occurred whilst we were sleeping on the job. There was no making sense of this no-man’s-land. This was a moment to be endured. Afterwards we would have to find a way forward. If there was any to be had.

Having shot the fish in the barrel, I made my excuses and finished for the day. I had no plan and no direction. Only the desire to escape. Once in my car I drove through the city. But once I reached its outer limits I could go no farther, turning back on myself and criss-crossing my stomping grounds in an attempt to discern some semblance of meaning, my eyes gone blind with the cataracts of shame.

I could not bring myself to examine the wrongness of the situation. That was not how it was done. Colin was as guilty as Cain. He deserved everything that was coming to him. All the same, the way of it did not feel right. I argued with my gut as I descended upon home in ever decreasing circles. I’d always favoured my gut over my heart. Coupled it with a mind I tempered and honed until it cut through all the detritus of this rotten city and exposed the dirty truth. The true nature of the cancer at its very core.

Arriving home, I understood I did not want to be here. Did not want to bring the stench of betrayal here of all places. A betrayal that extended way beyond Micky’s confession of Colin’s sins. A carefully constructed script that never once implicated Micky. My brow wrinkled as too late, I looked Micky’s gift horse in the mouth. This was all too bad to be true. I was being played and the worst of it was I was a fully willing participant in the deception. Always looking at the face value, despite the ever growing sickness in my gut.

And as though I’d summoned him with my thoughts, there he was. Large as life. Leaving my home. Hand in hand with Lisa, my wife. Hands releasing at Micky’s car to be replaced with that promise of a hug that Micky always was. A lover’s embrace. Watching him encircle my wife with arms that possessed far more than the woman. And all the while, he was looking right at me.

Staring into me with the message of truth.

His truth.

Our truth.

I watched him go and I did nothing. I had nothing. I don’t know how long I sat there. It didn’t matter. I had nowhere else to go. Nothing for me in the scene of crime that was once my home.

When my phone rang, I knew. Knew with a certainty that slipped between my ribs with an ice cold precision. Taking my heart and finishing the better part of me.

Colin was dead. Took his life in the holding cell as he faced the reality of his situation. Not wanting that reality. Wanting out. Doing what I could not. I had neither the strength or the appetite. A spent force, if ever I had it in me in the first place.

Poor old, loyal Colin. So loyal, he played the part of Micky’s mask. Colin had trusted the devil himself and had paid the ultimate price. Sold his soul too cheaply. That was what he was staring at in his final moments. The treacherous theft of everything he had and everything he ever was. He’d loved Micky without question, even as Micky asked more and more questions of him. Micky never satisfied with what Colin gave him. Always taking more.

Where did that leave me? My whole existence was to ask questions of the underbelly of society and make the difference that meant people could sleep well in their beds under a delusional blanket of safety.

I’d thought I was the real deal. Maybe I was once something approaching that. Where did I lose my way? How could I have gotten it so badly wrong? All those times I’d been in the presence of a monster and wilfully made of him a harmless teddy bear.

I’d watched as that monster walked my wife of seven years out of my life and into hell. I’d watched and done nothing, just as he knew I would. This was always his play and I was merely a bit actor.

What next for a coward who wouldn’t even consider the exit route Colin had just taken?

“I’ll be there in fifteen,” I said into the expectant mouthpiece of my phone.

Taking the only option I could. Showing up. Going through the motions. Grinding out conspicuous results to keep the brass happy. Meet the targets. Provide the stats. Today was more grist to the mill. Another result. Micky had called Colin a bad man, and that was how it would go on record.

As I started the engine and drove back to the station I had a brief moment of self-indulgent philosophy. Good and bad. Law and justice. Arbitrary value judgements placed upon a chaos none of us have the stomach to address. The order of life masking the chaotic truth of it all. Evil triumphing over the diluted good we think is acceptable.

Smiling a dark smile, I imagined myself a good copper, catching the bad criminals. That’s as far as the bar will go. The truly evil walk amongst us and we don’t bat an eye lid. Occasionally, we might feel that something is not right. Maybe even cross the street without realising that we are avoiding that growing sense of unease, but quickly distracting ourselves with the banal and ordinary.

The Mickys of this life are invisible in their obviousness. They play their part better than the rest of us. It’s not that they’re more intelligent, it’s that we’re dumb sheep with a limited world view. We pretend that the Mickys are harmless, because the truth would blow our minds. There is another race that dwells in our midst. Unencumbered by worry. They do what they want and they take what they want, and we aid and abet them every single step of the way. They take and we give to them freely.

“They’re free,” I mutter to myself as I park up outside the station.

And we’re the slaves.

I discard these thoughts and rejoin the rat race. Haunted by The Colins and The Mickys. By everyone I have put away. Trying not to think of how many have taken the fall for the true villains. Trying not to think of the outcome for Lisa. Glamoured by a monster who has no doubt promised her the world, but will deliver his own unique version of hell. Maybe she’ll be lucky. Maybe she’ll smile sweetly and display a loyalty that served Colin well for all those years.

Because in the end, it’s all about survival. I take a moment. Compose myself and put on my own mask. Swallowing down yet more loss. So much loss it threatens to smother and drown me. The mask still works though and I’m moving again. Ploughing through the filth in an attempt to make sense of this existence of mine.

“Got what he deserved,” says the desk sergeant as I enter the building.

“Too right,” I nod grimly towards him, acknowledging the sentiment.

We all get what we deserve.