Ex Chapter 7 - She killed Batman

On the night that Jonah married Bernice, Daniel’s grandmother, after the reception had ended but before the light switch of reality was flicked on again, they agreed to make lists of “what if names” - names of people who burned so brightly that if you met them, your world would be shaken like a snow globe and for ever more disturbed. For Jonah, these people were intangible and magnificently obtrusive, glimpsed on a cinema screen as a child and thereafter craved like an addict yearning to recreate their first high. For Bernice the list was like the contents of a tidal pool, perfect until touched and then glacial and distorted.

Bernice’s list was forgotten in a fold of her wedding dress, to be rediscovered a dozen years later when the fighting became so intense that a squall blew it from its hangar in the wardrobe where such sacred artefacts resided. They read it together sitting on the bedroom floor and it was restorative, so much so that they glimpsed the love that had entwined them on their wedding day. But they could not touch it.

There was a restaurant in London, a spectacularly exclusive restaurant, where people went to be seen and heard but not to eat. As a consequence, the owners of the restaurant had decided that there was no need to actually serve food. Food would be ordered, glorious food of unimaginable complexity and ingenuity and empty plates would arrive and leave. This was a secret of the rich. It was impossible to book a table in such a restaurant but Jonah had called in a favor that had been bequeathed to him in his father’s will. He was making an effort for their anniversary, in order prove that he was the kind of man that he and Bernice knew he could never be (had never been).

In the restaurant, seated, they stared at each other in silence across an acre of pristine tableware, whilst the empty platitudes that filled the room to bursting point, circled around Bernice’s head and burrowed behind her eyes where they shrivelled and died. She rose from the table wordlessly in a quest for the toilet and almost immediately collided with a man of athletic build and an abundance of complicated facial features, redolent with celebrity iconography. He nodded a head adorned with a mantel of perfect greying curls in ingenuous apology and followed her.

When Bernice returned she was unable to catch her breath. Jonah stared for a minute, something about her had changed inextricably. “That man who collided with you, wasn’t he...”Jonah left his words twisting in the conceptual breeze.

"Adam West" Bernice replied. Her eyes scouted the room but there was no-where to take cover in any direction.

“Your dress is inside out” said Jonah, mainly with his hands. He was becoming animated. That was the way it always began.

“I saw you follow him into the men’s toilet and he’s on your list.” He was shaking now, his eyes blinking in the glare of her betrayal. “Did you fuck him? On our anniversary?”

"It isn't that kind of list." Bernice was playing with her cutlery, trying to
disengage from the evening.

Jonah pushed his chair back from the table. This was escalating. He had no reverse gear.

"If you didn't fuck him, then what did you do with him Bernice? What did you do that meant you had to get out of your dress and back into your dress in a men's toilet, I'm all ears?"

“I killed him” muttered Bernice. “I killed him and because of all the blood and there really was a great deal of blood, more than you could imagine, I washed my dress and turned it inside out so you wouldn’t notice, but you did notice so that didn’t work. Can we get the bill please?”

"You killed Batman."

"I killed Batman."

"Where is he now? hissed Jonah.

"In one of the toilet stalls, well that's not quite true, his torso is in one of
the toilet stalls, his head is in one of the cisterns. I suppose I panicked a
little."

Jonah sat back in his chair. The sheer enormity of scale of their current
situation was one which life up to that point had left him somewhat ill equipped to cope with.

"You decapitated Batman." Jonah whispered, shooting a glance at the direction of the last resting place of the caped crusader. "Why?"

"Well, it's like you said." replied Bernice calmly, smoothing down her dress.

"He was on my list."