Multiple Personality: Chapter One Part I

I awoke to the blaring sound of my alarm clock. For a few moments sleep and consciousness interspersed, and I found myself wondering if the clock was actually sounding, or if it was simply an off-hand trick of the mind. The peaceful limbo was, however, broken by the crisp aroma of what I could only assume, and hope, to be my breakfast emanating from the open doorway.
With a sigh I swung my legs out of bed and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. I reached idly for the drawers by my side in search of clothing, however paused as something occurred to me. With the strange feeling that something was wrong, I searched sluggishly round the room with half drawn eyes, and realised the alarm was still blaring from the other side of the bed. A smile spread on my lips as I admired the wonders of the minds lack of proficiency in the first few moments of consciousness, and leaned over to flick it off.
As the room was filled with bliss silence, I winced sharply. My back began to throb with pain, and I felt a hand instantly go to inspect the damage. After awkwardly moving back into a sitting position, I slowly stretched out, arching my back and gritting my teeth as it flared in agony.
Dressing carefully, I made my way downstairs and into the kitchen. My roommate Alice, as usual, had set-to preparing the student equivalent of a banquet for breakfast; fried eggs, bacon, toast, beans, the lot. I came in with more care than needed, subconsciously seeking sympathy from her for my pain.
Alice glanced over her shoulder, and carried on busying herself with the frying pan she stood before.
“Back aches again?” she asked, her light, cheerful voice instantly bringing me around.
“Mmm,” I groaned, taking a sip of the bright orange juice awaiting me on the table.
“It must be the way you sleep,” she said, almost half-consciously as she scooped three rashers onto a plate. I sighed unintentionally at her dismissive response, and frowned as I realised Alice had heard. She topped off the plate with the rest of her cooking and set if before me, leaning in over it and flashing me a grin. “Or not sleeping, if you catch my drift,” she winked and let out a quick giggle.
I shook my head, but couldn’t help suppressing a smile. Alice grabbed her own plate, with a significantly smaller portion than my own due to her incessant ‘diet’ despite her brilliant figure, and sat down opposite.
As I tucked in, she grabbed a day-old newspaper from the top of a neat stack on the side and glanced over the front. She tutted to herself, and presented me with the front cover. Swallowing a mouthful of beans, I held it aloft and frowned at the headline: ‘MOTHER OF FOUR BEATEN TO DEATH BY OLDEST SON’.
“Well that’s grim,” I murmured, handing her back the paper.
“It’s just crazy what some people do to their own family, don’t you think?” she carried on reading, and narrated me another part of the article, “‘Susan Howard, 43, was beaten to death by her own son, after allegedly, ‘binning his games console’” she tossed the paper in disgust.
“They say video games promote violence, apparently the consoles do too,” I quipped, hoping to make light of it. Alice was great when she was happy, but much alike many young women she could almost instantaneously become depressing too.
“Trust you to joke about it,” she moaned, scooping up a bean on her fork and flicking it at my face.
“Hey!” I jumped back, wiping tomato sauce from my brow and readying to block any further assault. She giggled again, and I snatched forward and grabbed a couple of beans form my own plate.
“Uh uh,” she warned, standing up and presenting the white dress she wore, “you’re buying me a new one,”
I laughed, and chased her round the side, “You can say it’s abstract… the sauce represents the stain on purity!” I called as she hid behind the door to her room.
I chuckled to myself as I finished off the meal and called to Alice declaring my truce. She cautiously entered, and gave me a playful slap on the arm as she passed by, “Idiot,” she grunted.
“Coward,” I retorted, and held my hands out to my sides as she loaded another forkful of sauce covered ammunition.
Alice was an amazing roommate. She was obsessively clean by nature, and so kept the apartment tidy and in shape, much to the aggravation of the student stereotype. She was a year older than me, in her third year studying art, as could be seen by the plastic framed pieces hanging at regular intervals about the room. She was extremely good looking, and of course my first thought upon meeting her was to get as close as possible, but she soon washed away all but my fantasies as she introduced her long lasting boyfriend on the first night. He’s a reasonable guy, but I don’t think anyone could be suitable to such a catch as Alice; Not only for her smooth, flawless skin, or wavering hazel hair, but for her uncompromising kindness.
On the first ‘fresher’s’ week I had gotten into a fight. It wasn’t like me by nature to, but with a good few litres of toxins running through the system the mind can become treacherous. I wondered into the apartment in the early hours, blood running from my nose down my shirt. I crashed down into a chair, knocking a few books from the table, and after a few moments Alice just wandered out and, without a word, helped clean me up. She hadn’t looked more beautiful than then in her dressing gown, hair falling about her as she set to work with a wet cloth.
“What?” she said, eyeing me cautiously as she dropped a final chunk of toast on her plate, so she ‘didn’t feel as though she had eaten too much’, as she had explained on numerous occasions following questioning from me.
“Nothing,” I said after a pause, and then followed up with a quick quip to save myself from her bemused look, “just planning how I’m going to escape your wrath when I pour cold soup over you when you’re asleep later,”
She rolled her eyes and snatched my plate up, stealing away my last rasher of bacon and taking a bite before binning the rest. “Don’t forget who’s cleaning it up and buying new sheets afterwards,” she warned.
“Yes mum,” I stole a quick dig in her ribs as I flitted past into the bathroom to get ready, and closed the door to an exaggerated sigh from Alice.

I studied English Literature at Leicester University. It wasn’t my dream course, I enjoyed reading and at the time it seemed the lighter option from maths, biology and physics. As a second year, I was in the twilight zone between first years and higher, dominant from my limited experience of life at university but still overshadowed by the three-year-plus veterans.
The course was fair enough, I had a choice of three novels and prose to study, and had decided on Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’ and R.L. Stevenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Hyde’. Unfortunately during innumerable readings and analysis my love for the two works had all but been ruined, however I was told by my teacher I was heading my class, and he had even sat me down on one occasion to ask me why it was I had chosen the course.
“You have quite an intelligent mind, Gareth,” he had said, peering at me over his thick, horn rimmed glasses, “You memorised whole paragraphs from the novels in the first few weeks. Of course a good mind-set is needed to think outside the proverbial ’box’ and hold key arguments together in our course, but I have to say I’m surprised, actually, that someone of such mental capacity did not go into a subject where such skills could be tested to their full, such as physics or math?” he left the question hanging, and I remember growing slightly irritated at the remark.
“English has been a passion for me for some time, Mr Philips; I don’t see an issue with following a path you enjoy?” I had replied, turning the pressure away. It was a similar conversation I had held with my mother, who had wanted me to follow in my father’s footsteps and take up some sort of science.
My father, Dr James Reign, had been a world class scientist; however fell from his position of notoriety after an alleged mental breakdown during a key experiment. Of this I have been told only through word of mouth, most namely the internet, as the topic is almost blasphemous around my mother. He had rarely been at home during my first few years of life, and even then only usually to sleep and eat, before heading off to some overseas laboratory to finalise his current experiment with some assessment from another expert. When I was only five years old he had his breakdown, in which some patient suffered severe injuries from one of my father’s prototype experiments, and as I turned six I was informed my father had hung himself in his mental institute with the very straight jacket that confined him.
Although I’d conformed to the consequential behaviour of countless other children who had lost a parent early on, imagining their face, their touch, their job, I never really felt that scarred by the incident. Life just went on, and in a way I was thankful I hadn’t seen him too often before he died. There was little to miss.
My mother had not always been quiet. I knew she had taken an incomprehensible blow when her husband had passed, and I can still remember the brief moments before when she was full of life and joy. Needless to say she too moved on, but only after many years of grieving and a few frightening nights of despair. But I could tell she longed for me to carry on my father’s spirit. She frequently sought likenesses between us; when I first fashioned a suit; my general posture; and most significantly my intelligence.
We had had many arguments about my ‘potential’, in which she insisted I take up the same journey my father had begun in scientific discovery. My argument was all the more flawed to take up English in that I left sixth-form with near full marks in both the sciences I took and maths, and only a B in English. Whether it was out of stereotypical teenage rebellion, or a hunger to differ from my father and become an independent individual in my mother’s eyes, a result she had not anticipated from her actions, I chose my own route.
The conversation with Dr Philips had ended abruptly at this retort. And with a frantic handshake to ‘clear the waters before the voyage’, as he put it, I had carried on to pass my exam with full marks in the summer and carry on into the second year.