Anatomy of a walking corpse

Anatomy of a walking corpse.

Bernard's eyes, too tired, too old and disinterested to focus properly,
idled along from
left to right along the strip lit shelves of the late shop's magazine
racks as he waited in
line at the checkout. The thick, black belt chugged and stopped as each
new item of
the elderly lady in front's shopping was picked up and scanned "Boop"
and lazily
placed down again. The old woman, a hard faced, slightly built medusa
of growth-
speckled, yellow, wrinkled skin and lifeless grey hydra hair, picked up
each one and
put it into the blue and white striped woven plastic bag she had
brought with her. She
had sunken orbits with the eyeballs bulging out from them and dotted
over her face
the moles and warts had thick clumps of straight black hairs up to a
quarter of an inch
in length each sticking out of them. The concave mouth fell sloping
thin-lipped
inwards from the septum of her nose and, moving further downwards,
sloped
outwards to her chin. Bernard scanned the top shelf titles with the
compulsion of a
depressed addict; an urge he could not fight but that brought him only
anger and
mental torment. The pretty young girls smiled back at him with
reassuring
comforting smiles; like they liked him to look at the lovely vinyl
finished curves of
their young skin as they posed, eager to offer him the choicest views
of their sensual
tender busts and bottoms. They seemed to call to him. They seemed to
tell him that
they could offer him the salvation that could never now be his. They
seemed to say
"You don't have to be a sad lonely perverted middle-aged man anymore,
envious of
anyone who had ever found pleasure with beautiful, vivacious youth."
But Bernard
had not ever, through repression and shyness; he had never.

His death had been a significant event in his life and one from which
he had never
truly recovered. It had happened fifteen years ago when he was thirty.
Years of quiet
sickly desperation unvoiced and forlorn had torn apart the very soul of
his being,
stripping his offal like concentrated acid from within and scrunching
his psyche into a
raging inferno of self-destructive self-loathing. Bernard had become a
bubbling
autoclave of explosive hate for everything that lived, white hot ablaze
with mad
explosions of outward diatribes: intemperate primal screams of agony.
All of that had
killed him. He had died at thirty because he had ceased to want to live
in this utter
bullshit, fucked up idiot world he was stuck in. He had then killed
himself. He hadn't
stopped moving around yet because there were things he wanted to do.
There were
five things that he wanted to do, but it was at this point that he
declared to himself that
after he had achieved these, he no longer had any further interest in
living and would
commit suicide. He thought now of how he had sat in the lemon strip
glade of the
urban early evening light on his bedspread and dispassionately studied
the veins in his
wrist. He would slit lengthways up this one, this one, this one and
this one. He
wondered whether he would get thirsty as his blood pressure dropped. He
wondered
about this again now- the time being close and all. His next fifteen
years had been
empty but focused. The five goals he had set himself were to act on the
lifelong
dreams he'd had in what had been his life. He was trying to make a
success of the life
he didn't now have. He'd wanted to write novels and have them published
and read.
We all know that such goals are only pipe dreams, as did he. At thirty,
Bernard did
not now care whether success was forthcoming or not- he would not
benefit from it or
feel pride in it since he did not feel anything any longer, but for
small incursions into
the numbed, dull melancholy of his destroyed soul. A ghost, he had
quietly got on
with it in reclusive catalepsy and he had written all five novels. He
had mail-bombed
agents and publishing houses with the manuscripts, expecting, awaiting
and receiving
rejections with neither hope nor surprise nor discouragement. The
rejections had
rained back by the bucketload and he had read each with equal
disinterest and
forwarded the rejects onwards... ever onwards. There was a time limit
though. He
would write his five novels and have them published by the age of
forty-five and then
he would bleed himself dry on a mattress. If the five were published by
forty-five he
would finish-up there and then, if not then forty-five; it was which
ever came first.
There was to be no sentimentality for his dreams- they could die and
rot into the same
soil he would. He reflected now that they did. Oh well.
The final boop. The cashier (grey streaked blond pony tail, tubby
though not
fat) was wearing a plain white polo shirt under her dark green
shop-uniform vest (like
those used in netball). She had a lazy, bored attitude to till-tending
and she gave the
old woman a friendly but forced, world weary smile that wrinkled two
half moon
outlines to her cheekbones as she rested her chin on the backs of her
two open hands.
'Eleven pounds, forty nine please.'
The old lady shuddered her purse open two-handed and with Herculean
effort her
right hand lifted and hovered jerkily (Parkinsonism- or whatever) over
the opening
and then dropped in. Bernard felt as though he was watching somebody
attempting to
win a soft toy in a sea-front amusement arcade as the hand pivoted
about the wrist and
the fingers tried to clamp the selected coins. She handed the carefully
counted money
to the cashier and received her penny change and receipt. Painfully
slowly she placed
the penny inside her purse and gathered up her bag with the shopping
and tottered out
through the red-framed, glass swing doors to the uneven pavement.
'Hello' the cashier smiled. He nodded. She rattled his shopping
through, booping
each item or trying and failing: frailly scanning, rescanning, tapping
in the barcode
number and standing up and shouting 'Gary, have we got code for these?
Do you
know?'
A boop a click a rattle a four nineteen please.
'Sure.'
'You haven't got a twenty have you?'
'Keep the change. What's the use of it?'
'I can't do that, I'm afraid.'
'No, sorry. I only have a five.'
'Gary. Gary, can you open that till please.'
Bernard's sad saggy pale blue eyes studied a beautiful blonde cover
girl, smiling back
at him over her shoulder as she sat back naked on her stiletto heels.
He saw the warm,
bright, confident smile of a girl just discovering the full power of
her sexuality.
She seemed to call out to him: 'I'll make it better for you. This time
it will be
different, you can have it. No more games. I'll give it to you.'
More deceit, he thought, what can you give to a dead man? What could a
cadaver
ever possibly want?
Gary had opened the till and the lady gave him the eighty-one pence,
together with a
sorry to keep you waiting. Sorry to keep you waiting fifteen years.
Sorry to keep you
waiting fifteen bloody years. Fifteen years feeling worthless, useless,
unnecessary
and unwanted. Yes he could wait that two more minutes for his change.
His change.
The change from what he had worked for and given freely in exchange for
the where-
withal to self-mutilate and destroy this thin-shelled egg of hate that
he now was- he
could wait two more bleeding minutes for that.
'Thank you.'
Bernard breathed a heavy sigh, one which implied 'I know that it's
over, I just wish it
had been good.'

The dead man left the shop. The bell at the top of the door tolled it's
sickening jingle
for the last time that he would hear it. The light died somehow. The
buzzing,
strobing fluorescent striplights of the closed-in shop gave way to the
brighter though
more miserable light of a dark, close, overcast day. The heavy weather
entranced
Bernard into a head-throbbing reverie as he left the shop and,
momentarily, he found
himself the most aimless he had ever been: standing watching in slow
motion while
the living streaked past him trailing ghostly, temporal, still images
of themselves
behind their cars; echoes of fractions of seconds passed. Bernard
daydreamed a past
as he stood here now. It was not a past of his own, it was a past of
Norman knights
and peasants traipsing through and a pastoral small rural township's
muddy streets in
view of where he stood and paupers carrying their stick bundles upon
their backs. He
dreamt it over the modern urban reality of the place; the centuries of
civilisation
holding no sway. Onlookers would have seen a middle aged man with short
black
hair, a black donkey jacket and thick, bushy, black eyebrows, standing
staring off in
front of the late shop, with it's red and yellow stickers covering all
of the windows
and much of the door. They would have seen a dead man for whom life had
ended
and who was shortly to leave, never to stand there again. Onlookers
would not have
taken a good close look at him because they would have had their own
lives to live,
but here is how he looked. The jowls and chin were blue-white, clothed
in stubble
shadow and his cold red cheeks were pitted with scars- ashen ghosts of
teenage acne.
Bernard's mouth (the smoke of condensing breath emanating from it) was
thin and
bright red against the whiteness of his cold face. A thickset man, he
had dozing eyes
lost in misery whilst his mouth smiled or grimaced, one of the two. He
dragged
himself out of the sluggish wakeful sleep, turned his back on the
high-rise beige
concrete blocks of flats with their garish red and ugly brown front
doors, it's washing
line walkways and it's awful lives, and he began his funereal
procession home with a
sigh. The low-walled small gardens of the dark bricked semi-detached
houses offered
him no pleasure as he passed them, trudging wearily to his home and to
his final
demise. The licensee's nameplate off-white with black gravestone
lettering at the
Horseshoe had a chalkboard above it with the gaelic: 'C?ad m?le failte'
(a hundred
thousand welcomes) written on it in neon pink. It was here that he
paused to clear his
head and draw breath. Bernard sadly and carefully removed his glasses
to the strains
of the fiddle music from within. He neatly folded the thick black arms
of the
spectacles over the lenses and placed them in their case, which he
neatly patted into
the outside chest pocket of his coat. Slowly he raised a clean white
handkerchief to
his lips, wetted it and dabbed his eyes before folding the handkerchief
and neatly
returning it to his left hand trouser pocket. The dead man blinked hard
twice, slowly.
He raised a hand to his chest pocket, removed the case, opened it,
opened up the
spectacles from inside and then slowly put them on. After closing the
case and
tidying it away into his breast pocket he slowly trudged onwards, the
following music
dying away in his wake.

The fiddler struck a flurrying jig, whisking the bow backwards and
forwards apace.
Up and down, while the bodhr?n smacked and bellowed a fast rhythm.
Glasses
clinked and cultures of ages swooned from the wild spinning ride of the
melody. All
vigour and life was here, encapsulated in the excitement of the early
evening
atmosphere. Laughter and magic filled the smoky air and feet tapped the
bare boards,
hands smacked the tabletops.

His afterlife, the existence he had led since that day at thirty years
of age, had been
ghostlike. Outside of his reclusive, obsessive writing, he would
communicate only
the bare minimum required to interact with the characters and get that
which was
unfinished done. Since his death, he had steadfastly refused to
experience pleasure,
since thoughts of pleasure and pleasures-missed-out-on exacerbated his
sense of
alienation, despair and loneliness. It made him feel human. Suicide is
common in
young men of around thirty, the age Bernard died at; the statistics
show it. But for
Bernard, death had not meant that he was simply going to lie down
underground and
rot into the soil right then. The statistics did not show that death.
Apart from the
occasional overspill of anger he would focus and drive out any feelings
of happiness
that threatened to encroach upon his nothingness existence. He would
meditate in the
hours not spent typing or sending off manuscripts, he would meditate on
empty. He
would meditate a hollow shell unaffected by stimuli, internal or out.
Whenever he felt
the bite of the self-pity that had driven him to this, he would
meditate on dead. I am
dead, because death is what I work towards. I have no further interest
in life now. I
serve no function after I have ended my tasks. The successful
completion of my tasks
will give me no pleasure if it happens. I have no interest in the
successful completion
of my tasks- that only interested me when I was alive and now I am no
more. There is
no "I" in me.

He had turned off the main road now and was walking slowly home past
three dirty
white pebbledash fronted semi-detached houses. The pebble-dash formed a
band
across the upper storey of the houses broken up by two double glazed
windows per
house leaded in some, plain in others; white u-PVC in one, brown in
two, green
painted wood in another. Below the pebbledash were one large window
facing its
counterpart on the other side of the street and one door with mezzanine
portico. The
large windows on all but one of houses had lead flashings and stained
glass depictions
of red roses. The houses were all nineteen-fifties built and, like
everything that day,
looked miserable standing in the cold damp air of that dark overcast
early evening.
One of the clouds in the sky had a large fissure running through it.
The upper crack
surface of the fissure shone bright intense white like a seam of silver
while the upper
was the gold orange colour of a sodium lamp fading to salmon pink and
finally to the
pale grey uniformity of the cloud base. The band of sky that formed the
fissure was
the palest hint of pale blue. At the fourth house, Bernard stopped and
stood.
Carefully he took out his red-brown leather key fold and unbuttoned the
press-stud.
He looked at the keys, and slowly turned his head to stare vacantly at
the thin expanse
of blue sky amidst the grey; an evocative image. That day at thirty,
Bernard had
decided that nothing could ever again persuade him that he wanted to
stay. The
darting shadow of a blackbird awakened him from his reverie and he
sighed heavily,
raising his shoulders on the intake of breath. He laboured over
choosing he Yale key
unlocking the front door and entering the dark hallway.

As a ghostly recluse, he habitually undertook a Spartan existence. The
hall floor was
covered in a thick, nastily patterned carpet, mostly dark blue tiled
with diamonds of
busy, deep-red floral motifs surrounding the inevitable mid-beige
rhombi of old
woman d?cor. The walls were stripy light blue and frosted green on
cream wallpaper,
a drab dark hallway that looked smaller than it really was. Bernard
took one last look
around the house, tidying up as he did so, before retiring upstairs to
destroy his mortal
remains. He disliked untidiness, or he had done so, in the days when he
"felt" dislike.
Entering the bedroom, he walked across the faded pale-grey carpet to
the dark beech
dressing table and picked the two plain pewter framed photographs,
which he carried
with him over to the double divan bed. As always, he had made the bed
very smartly
that morning, meticulous attention had been paid to the hospital
corners and the pale
orange bedspread showed not so much as a wrinkle save for the handmade
crease
across the base of the pillows. Bernard sat down at the foot of the bed
in front of the
dressing table mirror. He held the framed photograph of his father and
mother in both
hands at stared at it with slowly moistening eyes. A smiling,
middle-aged couple,
both with dark hair and wearing white: she the shoulders of her strappy
dress and he a
shirt with a dark blue tie. Bernard was gradually beginning to feel and
experience
emotion so he quickly covered the frame over with the second photo. The
second
photograph was of a small boy of eight in his school uniform, smiling
to the camera.
He wore glasses and had an engaging smile that you could not but smile
back at.
Bernard raised his head and looked at the unsmiling adult in the
dressing table mirror,
and placed the photographs face down neatly on the bed beside him, his
goodbyes
said. Staring all the while at his reflection, he removed the packet of
razor blades
from his pocket and slowly fumbled it open. Only now did he look down.
He saw the
blades and he saw his wrists and pumping his hands open and closed he
watched the
fat arteries and blue veins slowly rise proud of the bone. Calmly he
watched and
waited, before holding up the blade and lowering it to his wrist.
Pressing it gently to
his wrist he began to feel nauseas. He breathed in deeply, lowered his
head and
removed the blade from his wrist. He knew then that he could not go
through with it.
Calmly he stood up and left the room. A minute later when he returned,
he had a
pistol with him- he had known all along that this was not something to
rush into
without attention to detail. Many a lonely hour he had spent practicing
at the gun
club, to obtain his license. It had cost him, but now it was worth it.
You can't take
that money with you when you die, and since he was dead he was happy to
invest
time and money in obtaining the best possible demise for himself. Until
this day, he
had carefully and methodically cleaned the chamber each day, and this
ritual he
performed now before loading up. Bernard removed his spectacles and
placed them
neatly into their case, which he then placed next to the downturned
photographs on
the bed. With a weary nasal exhalation he raised his clean white
handkerchief to his
mouth and wet it. He dabbed his tired eyes. Bernard gently reclined his
heavy frame
backwards onto the bed, resting his head between the two pillows. He
opened his
mouth, ingested the barrel of the gun the back of his throat and tilted
the handle
downwards toward his chin. And fired. The trick is to pretend to
yourself that it is
not loaded. Centuries, millennia, millions of years of evolution to
achieve something
beautiful, something misunderstood- and then it was no more.