Healing (Part Two)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

I was displaying the symptoms of a disabling psychiatric disorder commonly known as 'lying' when I hinted that my killing spree started when I decided to remove from circulation the despicable bastards I believed I had a genuine reason to hate, or rather I was being economical with the truth. If I intend to be really honest during this dissertation (a quality that I admittedly avoid when I have to) I flung my first murder and the horrifying guilt that accompanied it into the deepest, darkest mental dungeon I could find, and I did it so well that I almost completely forgot about the event until I consciously chose to disinter it, ponder it in a flurry of self examination and eventually forgive myself for the iniquity.

That murder occurred when I was just fourteen years old, and I didn't commit it alone. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if most multiple murderers commit their first killing with an accomplice, especially if it happens when the would be killer is very young. Though it's easy to ponder overcoming that awesome hurdle and secretly glorify in the idea of breaking the grand taboo it takes real guts to actually carry it out, to pull the trigger or plunge in
a blade and pass the milestone that every killing virgin fears, but it helps an awful lot if you have a like minded friend, if there's someone there to encourage you and share the burden.

My best friend at the time was a kid called Harry Preece. Harry and I did everything together, and like a lot of teenage kids we were obsessed with graphic comic books and gruesome horror stories. We often talked about what it would feel like to take a life, to do someone in, or to 'goose' someone as we preferred to put it, and one lazy summer afternoon as we sat in the park with nothing interesting to do we decided it was about time we gave it a try.

A little while ago I painted you a picture of a seriously overweight boy with a million pimples, a permanently filthy shirt and a greasy central parting, a whale of a kid with a massive chip on his shoulder (and who could blame him?), an unforgiving sweaty bastard that no one noticed the existence of except when they craved the high that only calling him 'Lardarse' or 'Pigman' or 'Pilsbury doughboy' provided. I'm sure you won't be at all surprised to learn that he actually existed, but his name was Hubert rather than Humphrey - Hubert Bakewell of all things, or the Bakewell tart as most kids called him. It didn't take Harry and I long to come to the conclusion that the Bakewell tart was the chosen one.....

Twenty minutes after we made that decision we knocked on the Bakewell tart's door to see if he wanted to come out to play. He was rarely seen outside school hours, which is understandable. It must have been awful to be humiliated twenty four-seven, and if I was Hubert I guess I would have stayed at home whenever possible, because hiding under the protective wing of one's family is (or should be) one of the few comforts that born victims have. In real life, though, thing's are sometimes horribly different from your ill-considered expectations..... Hubert's mother, a tiny woman who was every bit as grubby as her only child, looked terribly surprised when we asked for him, and as it turned out he wasn't in.

“The fat shit is out doing the shopping,” Mrs. Bakewell snapped, “and it's about time he got his arse back home because he's got to tidy the house and put the dinner on before he does his paper round. The useless bastard's probably dawdling or hiding in an alleyway stuffing his greedy fat face with chips or sweets that he's fiddled out of the shopping money – if I catch him stealing from me I'll fucking kill him, as big as he is, or maybe I'll get his equally useless father to do it for me.” Harry and I walked very slowly back down the hill towards the park, and for a while we didn't say a word.

“The Bakewell tart hasn't got much of a life, has he?” Harry eventually said.

“He's got a far shittier life than I imagined,” I replied. “Look, I don't know about you, but I think we should reconsider our choice. On the basis of what we've just seen I don't believe Hubert is the chosen one. I don't think he's a deserving victim, I think the poor cunt's suffered more than enough already.”

“I agree,” Harry said. “But I didn't want to be the first to say so in case you disagreed and got angry with me for chickening out. I think we should leave the poor kid alone and seek out another victim, someone that the world would be better off without, someone who genuinely deserves to die.”

*************************

After a long, heated discussion Harry and I decided that Stinky Mazinski was to be our victim. He was the perfect choice. Mazinski was an old Polish Jew who lived in a semi-derelict one up, one down house on a piece of land alongside a stagnant, vestigial stretch of canal several hundred yards from the edge of the sprawling council estate where we lived. Apparently the house once belonged to the water board and until some eighty years back it housed the resident lock keeper, but the lock had long since been demolished and the canal that once joined the nationwide network was mostly drained and filled in when the housing estate was built. Mazinski wasn't the old fellow's real name, it was just the bastardised equivalent of a name that no one could pronounce properly because there weren't many Polish folk in the country at the time.

The old man kept chickens and pigs on his half acre of land as well as a several half-starved German shepherds permanently secured on rusty chains. Apparently he ran a coal yard there until some fifteen years ago when he retired. He had little to do with the locals, in fact his only interaction with other human beings was chasing the kids that threw stones at his dogs, unless you believed the stories doing the rounds, that was.

Rumour had it that he had escaped from a concentration camp during the war and slowly made his way across the continent, avoiding German patrols under the cover of darkness until he was picked up in Denmark by British troops. In the camp he developed a penchant for human flesh, it was whispered, a penchant that he wasn't ready to discard even when he was granted British citizenship.....

Mazinski was canny, it was said - my dad reckoned that he harvested his victims miles away from home where they were unlikely to be linked to him. During the late nineteen sixties a five year old girl went missing from a village almost twenty five miles away. One night Mazinsky got really rat-arsed in the local pub and bragged that he had taken the child, he said he had gorged himself silly on the tenderest cuts of her flesh and fed the minced remains to his livestock. The killing happened long before the advent of DNA technology, and though the police were pretty sure that the Pole was guilty they were unable to prove it in court so he got off scot-free.

There were other stories too. It was said that the old man liked little boys that he lured in with sweets and chocolate. Though there had been a number of accusations against him over the years the families of the kids involved couldn't face the stigma, and as no one was prepared to testify he was never convicted. That was enough evidence for Harry and I; Mazinski was a monster, and it was our duty to snuff him out.

We were shitting ourselves as we climbed over the battered gate at the entrance to his property and gingerly sneaked across the debris strewn yard while the dogs barked furiously at the end of their chains, but despite the racket when we crept into the ramshackle house the old geezer was fast asleep in a ragged armchair by the fire, a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka on the table beside him and a cigarette still burning between his lips, his beard and moustache stained a sickly brownish yellow by the nicotine.

Harry whispered something that I didn't quite catch because of the rumpus that the dogs were kicking up, so he pointed at a clutter of tools in a box by the hearth and we nodded in silent agreement. He picked up a hammer and I closed my trembling fingers around a crowbar, and we set to work.

There was little cruelty involved, because dishing out judgement and getting a feel for killing interested us much more than torture. Though Mazinski woke after the first strike and muttered something about Hitler he wasn't awake for long, and we soon put him out of his misery. When we were sure that he was dead we dragged in a few ancient tyres from an ungainly pile outside the door and arranged them around his still seated body, poured vodka all over them and set them alight with a half burned log from the hearth. We stood for a moment watching the rapidly spreading conflagration and then we were gone – we ran like the frigging wind.

Mazinsky's murder was all over the papers for the following couple of weeks, but eventually the story fizzled out. We were surprised that the police recognised it as murder because we were convinced that the body would be burned to ashes and little evidence would remain, but they were cleverer than we anticipated and somehow they did know. Though we continued shitting ourselves for some time we weren't interviewed and no one was ever brought to justice.

Apart from when we were fleeing the scene of the crime and we were still full of the undeniable bliss of slaughter Harry and I never spoke about our adventure even when the news was hot off the presses – we whispered about our joint fear of discovery and retribution and our creeping sense of guilt, but we never mentioned the act itself. I suppose the killing deeply disturbed us, though neither of us was prepared to admit it for fear of being labelled a pussy. Anyway, we never discussed selecting a second victim.

A couple of years later Harry and I left school and lost touch. Until very recently (more about that later, I can't tell you just yet) I stumbled across him just once after we left school, about ten years back when I saw him in a sprawling shopping centre in a nearby town with his wife and kids, and he seemed a picture of happiness. As far as I could determine time had made him ordinary, banal, normal even, but sadly the joy of slaughter still smouldered in my soul though I did my utmost to exorcise it. I didn't know it at the time, but Harry's soul was smouldering too.....

*************************

I did fairly well at school and when I left I did a series of business studies courses, but despite trying really hard I couldn't land a suitable job. After nearly three years on the dole I accepted a lowly position at a local meat packing plant where my cousin worked, and I stayed there for five years before moving on to a plastic moulding factory that paid a lot more money. I remained there for fifteen years, the last eight years of which I was shift manager, and then the recession hit the company hard and I was made redundant. Again I tried desperately to find employment, and though I filled in literally hundreds of application forms for almost every job under the sun it seemed that nobody wanted to know me, and I guess the humiliation and stress of that period marked the first stage of my depression.

I married several years before I was made redundant and my wife Kay and I bought a house, but the mortgage was rather a hefty one and we foolishly amassed a substantial amount of debt. Though my other half was working there was no way that we could make ends meet after I lost my job, and the building society gloatingly repossessed the house. Our marriage was pretty solid until then, but not solid enough; I guess neither of us could stand the stress of losing our home, and we eventually split up. Thankfully we didn't have any kids.....

While I was unemployed I did and NVQ in Health and Social Care and a course in British sign language, and almost two years after I was made redundant I found a job as a support worker in a residential home for deaf people with learning difficulties and additional needs. Though the role didn't pay much money it was rewarding in a number of other ways - I was a lot happier than I was in the factory, but sadly it wasn't meant to last. Believe it or not, my downfall wasn't my fault. I was the innocent victim of two scheming women. Well, one scheming woman and her compliant, utterly devoted puppy dog (lick lick, fawn fawn). I never took much notice of the old adage claiming that the female of the species is deadlier than the male, but I was to learn that bitter lesson the hard way.