Spilt Milk

I like to people watch. One of the few happy memories I have is people watching with my mother. ‘Rasputin,’ she’d say, pointing out a person from the crowd. ‘What do you think?’ she’d ask with a smirk. Of a man eating alone, I might have said: 

‘I think he is a man who likes his own company. I think he has a family that he loves and loves him back. I think he is a good man who sleeps well.’ And my mother would smile, smile at my innocent optimism. 

Sometimes I think one day I will wake up, turn on the news, and see a story about a missing person or murdered child or anything poignant. I think maybe it will come flooding back to me; that my heart will sink and my eyes will go teary like they used to. That I will burst and explode with twenty-odd years worth of pent up emotion. That l will become that child I once was again.  

 

These days, I still watch people. From my car, I observed a sea of fumbling christmas shoppers. An overweight man barging his way into the entrance of the superstore caught my eye. Sexual deviant, perhaps, or, wife beater, maybe? Definitely not good. But as I have grown, I have learnt. In this world, you do not have to be good to sleep well. 

 I exited my car. There was an electricity in the air today, the way it felt on my skin, something was different. The sky was clear blue but the ground was frosty. Perhaps snow is soon to come, I thought. 

I joined the queue of fumbling idiots, no better than them now.

Now, if there’s one silver lining to my admittedly shallow existence, it is Ludwig. Ludwig brings me joy like nothing else. He and I were spending the next couple days together whilst Muriel was away “glamping” for the weekend. Glamping, from my understanding, is a bourgeois form of the actual activity of camping for people who can’t stand to go one night without being wrapped in Egyptian cotton. It’s not her fault though, bless her. The scissors used to cut her umbilical cord were most likely diamond encrusted. A pompous product of her environment, she never stood a chance.  

Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep an eight year old entertained without the use of electronics these days. I had to think outside the box in order to ensure Ludwig wouldn’t spend the majority of his time mindlessly watching some intolerable internet persona. The sad thing is, he’s a smart kid. Wasted youth is such a dreadful thing. Although, I can indeed understand the hapless necessity of conformity. It’s not poor Ludwig’s fault, it gets drilled into us the moment we utter our first word, and with each new word, the worse it gets. The line between yourself and surviving can become a blurry one after a while.

Anyway, I had some ideas that would at least not result in Ludwig staring at a screen for two days. So I bought him some toys I knew would make him happy. Seeing Ludwig happy might be the closest thing to happiness I can get.    

I had all my items and made my way to the till. I was standing in line going over tonight in my head when a rather rude elderly man squealed ‘Your turn!’ from the sags of skin that could just about pass as his lips. His face, I can only crudely describe to you as looking like a scrotum with a badly drawn face on it. What a terrible thing age is. I turned and gave that hideous mug one of my perfected smiles. 

‘After you, sir.’ He was purchasing milk. God, how I despise milk. 

    As I was leaving the store my phone vibrated. 

‘Hi, Ras. How are you, darling?’ said Muriel, her voice slightly more high pitched than usual. The asking of a favour was imminent. 

‘Fine, thank you. Just picking some things up for Ludwig for this weekend. What’s up?’

‘Aw, that’s sweet. You really didn’t have to, Ras. Well. . . anyway, There’s been a change of plans. The girls and I decided we’re going early. Could you do me a huge favor and look after Ludwig today as well? We’re setting off in about an hour.’ FUCK.

 

Now, I’ve been making money in a more than unconventional way as of lately. I’ve always known I’d never be one of those nine till five, suit and tie, meat and potatoes, dick in vagina, up down wankers; but this. . . it’s fucked up to put it lightly. Well, that’s how most people would describe it anyway. 

Right now there is a girl locked up in my basement. Currently, she keeps trying to scream. They all do for some reason. Bloody waste of time. No one ever hears them, I make sure of that. 

So, I was picking Ludwig up in an hour and meant to be working in three. As I sat in my car I contemplated my options. First, I had one more work related errand to run. I could go back into the store, but I refuse to buy my work related equipment in the same store I buy Ludwig’s toys. Something about that just makes my stomach turn. 

Right, I had it all planned out now. First stop was to purchase the axe that was much coveted for recently by my sadistic fanbase of freaks. 

If you want the truth, I’ve been murdering women and live streaming it to creeps who get off on it enough to pay for it. Red Room sites they call them. ‘If you’re good at something, never do it for free,’ my father would always tell me. 

 Next, I would stop off at mine, tend to the young woman in my basement, keep her happy for the next few days and enjoy the weekend with Ludwig. Perfect!

 

I walked down the concrete stairs leading to my basement and there she was, placed in the centre of the room, same place I put them all, strapped to my sturdy oak chair, fully naked. She looked at me with wide eyes and muffled screams. I looked back at her. Sometimes I would look them right in the eye. I’d wait to see if I could manage to muster up a feeling of wrongness, guilt or just anything. . . human. Nothing. 

Now, this was probably the most attractive one I’d had so far which is good. The donations were always better when they looked like pornstars. Her hair was bleached white as sin forgiven, her eyes were like a beautiful moss that grew only in some kind of pure parallel universe. Plus, on top of this, she had the body of a swimsuit model. 

‘Hi, hi, hi, there,’ I said as she looked at me as though I were some ugly alien. ‘I’m going to take your gag off now. But I warn you: if you scream I’ll cut your tongue out.’ I proceeded to take her gag off gently. 

‘Anything I can get you?’ I asked as she looked upon me with her gaze unchanged. 

‘M-m,’ she uttered with a wobbly chin before bursting into a fit of tears. I sat on the table in the corner of the room whilst I waited for her to calm down a little. 

I heard the buzzing of a fly that had entered the room. I watched as it flew its way into a cobweb where it joined the fate of several other flies trapped in the web. I shook my head. 

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ I exclaimed from the other side of the room.

‘M-milk.’ she articulated whilst visibly holding back another storm. I walked up close to her.

‘Milk? That’s a first. Unfortunately, I despise milk. I refuse to keep any in the house, I’m sorry. Anything else?’ She didn’t respond, her countenance suggested something of despair. She was staring at the plastic covered floor and looked to be on the verge of bawling again. I crouched down to her eye-line and let out a sigh. ‘Let me tell you something about milk,’ I said solemnly. ‘First, we must start with my lovely mother,’ Then my watch beeped. I had to go.

I caught a whiff of the faint smell of perfume. I felt as though I was going to convulse. I was struck frozen and stared at the girl with enlarged eyes and an open mouth.

The girl lifted her head up slowly, her teary eyes connected with mine. Her eyes had an air of familiarity about them. I felt an inexplicable pending sense of doom that overwhelmed me. Then I blurted out with ‘What’s your name?’ 

‘R. . . Rita.’ she answered without looking at me. 

‘Rita?’ I asked with raised eyebrows. A moment passed and she succumbed to answering.

‘Spun.’ She looked up at me, we locked eyes. 

A minute or an eternity of intense eye contact passed. 

‘I’m not going to kill you,’ I said abruptly. I took a pause and furrowed my brow at myself. She stared at me as though she were a deer and I was the tiger that her pinned to the ground. 

What the fuck? I thought. I heard the girl’s voice and snapped out of my perplexity.

‘W-why. . . why am I here?’ she managed to articulate.

I took a pause and looked at her. ‘Unfortunately, there are some sick people in this world.’ I explained. 

 

Outside, the heavens had opened up. By the time I got to my car, I may as well have just been baptised. Ah well, at least Ludwig could get a good laugh out of me.

I pulled up to Muriel’s house, strolled to the front door and knocked. Muriel rushed outside, hands on Ludwig and her suitcases. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek, and as she came close to me I realised something unsettling. The perfume she was wearing, it was the same one I recognised from the girl in the basement. I looked at Ludwig’s face, his developing set of teeth that showed when the sight of me made him smile, and I looked at his scruffy brown hair. For perhaps the first time, the sight of Ludwig reduced me to one of my faked smiles instead of my actual Ludwig smile. It was a smile painful to feign. 

Me and Ludwig were on the way to mine. He was playing around with my glove compartment when the note fell out. A creature of habit, I take this note with me everywhere. Scrawled in red crayon, it was an apology I wrote to my mother the night she died. Unfortunately, she never got to see it. Ludwig started to unfold the note. ‘What’s this?’ he asked with wondrous eyes.

‘It’s. . . it’s a note that was meant for my mum. She never got to see it though.’ Examining the note, Ludwig turned his head to me and paused for a second.

‘Why didn’t she get to see it?’ he inquired, his head slightly tilted.

‘She. . . she had an accident. And- well, I never saw her again,’ Ludwig nodded his head. There was a lull in the conversation until Ludwig asked:

‘What were you sorry for?’

‘Spilt milk.’ 

‘Spilt milk?’

‘Spilt milk.’

I wanted to change the subject so I asked Ludwig about school. 

‘I love Miss Spun!’ he exclaimed with a grin. ‘She’s the bestest teacher I’ve ever had,’

Miss Spun. What are the chances of that, I thought. 

We entered my abode, I told Ludwig to go take a look at the toys I got him. A gasp of joy came over him when he laid eyes upon them. It was music to my ears, or the closest thing a deaf person can get to music anyway. Go crazy, I told him. ‘I just have to check something in the basement,’  

I walked down the concrete stairs that led to the basement. And there she was. This time her eyes looked different to me. Her tears made me wonder who this girl really was. Again, I crouched down in front of her. She looked at me with plump, pouty lips and wet eyes. Her soft, pale face was covered in mascara. 

‘I’m going to tell you about milk now,’ I said softly. 

And so I told her. I told her about my dad, the pimp. About my mother, the saint. Told her about the one bedroom flat, told her about the beatings and all the other cliches. Told her about me waking up from a nightmare about my father. Told her about how I dropped a glass of milk, told her how I ran away scared to bed and wrote my mother a note. Told her about how my dad came home drunk, I told her about the argument that he started with my mother over spilt milk. Told her about the screaming, my crying. I told her about seeing my mother’s bloody corpse. And while I was still speaking, still admitting and confessing, I felt more and more as though it was no mere human being that was listening. That this motionless listener was absorbing my words into herself like a tree the rain. 

And then it hit me! Until this moment I had never felt spiritual or religious in all my life, but at that moment, I knew that this woman I was talking to was the reincarnation of my mother. 

Immediately, I got my mother’s clothes from the plastic bag I had them stored in, dressed her and untied her from the chair. I got down on my knees and started to cry at her feet. I looked up at her, the tears now in my eyes. I apologised and begged and apologised and begged until I felt as though my heart was going to explode. 

Then she kneed me in the head and the blood on the plastic was mine. 

    I awoke from unconsciousness with a bloody nose to the bloodcurdling scream of my mother who was banging at the basement door.

    SHIT! LUDWIG!

    My heart was beating like a fist from the inside the skin of a tight drum as I sprinted up the stairs. I grabbed my mother and put my hand over her mouth. I heard Ludwig bawling outside the door and watched helplessly as the handle turned slowly. 

    ‘Miss Spun?!’ he exclaimed with tears falling down his cheeks and a pale look of terror covering his face.

Ludwig looked at me and all I could do was stare back at him with a wide mouth to the muffled screams of my mother. 

I felt her elbow connect with my groin. I threw her to the left of me. She toppled and tumbled to the bottom of the concrete stairs, there was a CRACK and her body went limp and lifeless.         

Ludwig stared at the body at the bottom of the stairs, then at me. I recognised that face. I recognised it because it had once been mine.