BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER (I.P.)

If I were to ask you to relate your earliest childhood memory, how would you begin?

“I remember taking my first steps….”
“When I was two …..”
“Just after my third birthday….”
“It would have to be my first day at primary school, I was nearly five …”

I once read an article by a Doctor Bauer from the University of Minnesota; that article puts the average age of a child’s first memory at three-and-a-half. Would it surprise you to learn, therefore, that there is some evidence that a child’s short-term memory actually develops prior to birth? A baby living close to a railway line will not be startled the first time it hears a train go by, it will remember having heard the sound while still in the womb! Amazing, but I guess the difference here is between long and short-term memory.

Some among you may wonder why I’m bothering to tell you this, please allow me to explain. My first memory of childhood is of being in the womb; it’s as though the short-term memory of a sound burned itself into a permanent recollection. It was, however, no mere train.

The sound of my memory is of three beating hearts; mine, my mother’s… and that of my twin brother. It is also the memory of leaving the dark security of the womb into a confusing world of light and noise. At that moment I could no longer hear those two heartbeats that had kept me company for so long; I never heard either of them again, taken as I was from the mother who, upon finding out she was carrying twins, had decided that coping with one child was enough for anyone.

I never heard either of them again… until today.

And what of today? It is June 12th 2012, less than seven weeks to the start of the London Olympics, or at least it should be. The Olympics, as with so much in this world, have been cancelled. But then life itself, here in England as well as the rest of the planet, has effectively been cancelled too.

An epidemic of murder has taken over the human race, perpetrated and perpetuated not by the living but by the dead. Billions of people have perished, yet it began with the death of one man, executed for allegedly murdering his wife, a crime he did not commit. He was framed by a corrupt New York detective, the very man who had carried out the brutal slaying for which the husband was convicted.

Admittedly that in itself is a long way from world annihilation, but the wronged man made a pact with the Devil; in return for facilitating his revenge from beyond the grave Satan would extract a terrible price. The murderous detective’s ghost would be forced to kill two people who he believed had wronged him; similarly those two individuals would each have to kill two people who had wronged them, making four new victims. Those four would kill a total of eight people, who would kill a further sixteen, who would kill thirty-two; and so on: sixty-four, one twenty-eight, two fifty-six, five hundred, a thousand, two thousand, four thousand, eight thousand, sixteen thousand, thirty-three thousand, sixty-six thousand, until, through the process of exponential growth, the total number of deaths after just thirty-three cycles would be 8.6 billion. There were only seven billion of us to begin with.

Unfortunately for Satan not everybody in this world has wronged someone; the young, the innocent, that sort of thing. He therefore recruited a living man, Peter Wright, to take charge of what was left, to be King of the World; that’s where I come in.

After my birth I was separated not just from my mother and brother but also from the rest of humanity. Until recently my sole contact with the rest of the human race was a monk who named me, raised me and educated me; I never offended him, I couldn’t offend anyone else. No unquiet spirit would ever come looking for me. I would not fall to Satan’s epidemic and, in the name of God and all innocent people, I, Benedict Cross, would destroy Peter Wright.

In furtherance of my divine task I have tracked my quarry all the way from the east coast of America to a post-apocalyptic London. Blinded by power and unafraid of reprisals I find him wandering unconcerned among the emptiness of Selfridges department store. I am yet to see his face but I know it is him, the way his minions bow and scrape is all the proof I need. Wary of tackling the cronies who guard him I lay in wait at the window of the first floor office opposite the doorway he and his followers had entered by.

I wait in silence, eye to the sight of my sniper’s rifle. My breathing is steady and controlled, my body is held rigid, my finger rests on the trigger. It is the calm before the storm. I can hear the rustle of rats in the shop beneath me, the rattle of an empty coke can blowing down Oxford Street, the rhythmic beating of my heart. The latter comes loudly to my ears, blotting out all other sound, except… suddenly there is an echo, the beat of another’s heart in tune with my own. That first memory leaps into my mind; I have heard this sound before.

Peter Wright’s entourage spills into the street, the man at its centre looks up directly into the sight of my rifle, my own face appears in the cross hairs; he is my twin brother! Before I can react a voice speaks in my mind, accompanied by the all too familiar sound of that third beating heart; it’s the voice of my mother:

“You cannot do this Ben, he is your family. Blood is thicker than water my child.”
Another voice speaks up, a voice I know to be that of God:
“You must do this Benedict, you are part of my family. His death at your hand was preordained before you were born my child.”

As darkness falls the interior light through the open door of my brother’s limousine shines ever brighter, its reflection bejewelling a puddle on the pavement, a lingering reminder of this morning’s heavy rain. Time stands still, the voices continue to persuade and cajole me:

“You cannot do this”;
“You must do this”;
“He is your brother”;
“It is your destiny”.

On a London thoroughfare the subject of their debate stands oblivious; a light brighter than that from the car clicks on in my head, I make my choice.

The limousine does a three point turn then roars off towards Marble Arch; its headlights sweeping across what is now two puddles. The one is quite different to the other, denser, viscous, warm; blood really is thicker than water.

COPYRIGHT DM PAMMENT MARCH 14th 2010