***
The next morning the postman came around with a large pack of letters for me. I have an arrangement with the Royal Mail and the police these days. Only the most innocuous, most obviously innocent mail – bills, circulars and the like – are delivered to me directly. Everything else - any letters or packages or parcels, anything handwritten – is held and filtered first by the Police before forwarding on to me only when it is deemed safe to do so. It all gathers together in some special unit in Police headquarters, I think, and comes to me in batches every week or so. It seems like a lot of bother to go to, but it’s probably sensible. Back in the early days after the court case - when my story was still in all newspapers, still on every bulletin – I did have a few nasty deliveries come my way. Razorblades in envelopes (lots of those), bags of white powder that popped on opening, even an attempt at a bomb or two (far too amateurish to succeed, to actually explode, I’m relieved to say), not to mention the more unpleasant parcels, the ones whose contents meant to disgust rather than hurt, to sicken my mind rather than my body.
So it is that I receive the bulk of my mail in chunks like this, mostly weekly or fortnightly parcels depending on how large the backlog has grown, how suspicious the items. Mostly it is all legitimate mail - parcels I’ve ordered, correspondence between me and my solicitor – but there’s still a steady stream of what you’d probably call hate mail in there too. The occasional death threat. Even after all this time they still keep coming. It amazes me how much stamina some people have, what capacity for hate they must hold, these strangers I’ve never met, nor seen, to be able to summon up such commitment to carrying this on for so long. The police don’t want me to see these. They want to hold them back, to protect me from them, but I insist. I want to see them. I want to know what people are saying and thinking about me – even the deranged, even the obsessed and the fixated. And besides, they’re my property these letters, no-one has any right to withhold them from me.
I open them all and read them all, then put them away in an old box I have set aside for the purpose. For a certain type of person there might be a strange, dark glamour in the idea of this box full of hate. I can understand that. I can understand someone wanting to open it, to look inside, to see for themselves just how spiteful, how hateful it is possible for one person to be to another. They would be disappointed though. For the most part, though, there’s nothing remarkable or imaginative in the nonsense people send to me. Rarely running to more than one page, scrawled in red, in green, in purple ink, using the most hateful thoughts, the most vicious words the writer can summon. Not normally very inspired, as I say, and not usually very upsetting either – the words themselves, more often than not, proving markedly less distressing than the grammar with which they are deployed. These are sad artefacts from the minds of sad people mostly.
During the court case – those interminable months I spent in the dock listening to the horrors ascribed to me be repeated and repeated, my words twisted, my history misconstrued – there was a flood of them, hundreds and hundreds of letters come in a great, red torrent of all the spite and fury of the nation all concentrated, it seemed, for a short but distressing period, right upon me. They came from all over the country, all parts of the world, even, from every type, every class of person you can think of. Nowadays that flood has thinned to a trickle, no more than one or two per month and those mostly, so far as I can tell from the handwriting and the ink and the repetitive curses they contain, from the same small group of regular writers. Mostly women, I think. Mostly, or so I suspect given the spidery, shaky quality of the handwriting, fairly elderly, lonely old women.
As I say, there is not usually much to these letters nowadays, certainly nothing very upsetting for a hardened campaigner like myself to face up to. It is all pretty humdrum stuff for the most part. Only one of my regular correspondents stands out from the field in any way, only one writer has the capacity to get under my skin and unsettle me. She, I presume it is a she, was one of the first to begin to write to me, just after my arrest, before my name was even in the press as I recall it, and she has continued to write regularly, rarely missing a month ever since. So many letters I have received from her, all of them tucked away in the bottom of my box file. Her letters stand out from the rest in two very particular, very specific ways.
First of all, she writes always in the same ink – a deep reddish brown shade that is, and I feel ridiculous even saying it, far too close to the colour of old, dried blood for my liking. Second, her letters consist always of only one phrase, scribbled neatly in the middle of a single, otherwise blank page of white paper, and written in some language, some collection of symbols that make no sense to anyone who has ever read them. The Police have specialists in this sort of thing, but even they are at a loss to decipher them, even to identify what language it is they are written in. To my uneducated eye there is something Eastern European, gypsy-like even, about these odd symbols, but the experts tell me otherwise. It means nothing, they say. Just the mad, made up scribblings of someone who wants to scare me. They’re probably right. But the truth is they do scare me, these letters, more so than any of the other, more intelligible notes which for all their violence and fury amount to little more than playground taunts. These letters carry a real threat about them. A promise of something to come, something I have no hope of understanding never mind any chance of stopping.
I have never told anyone just how these letters make me feel. I’m afraid they would find it all too interesting. The Police psychologists, back in the early days, were fascinated by my reaction to the hate poured at me, by how calmly I took it. If I confessed now that this one set of letters had quite the opposite effect, how would that look? They’d say it suggested a feeling of guilt hidden away inside me. And since I was acquitted so clearly of the crimes I was accused of, what could I possibly have to feel so guilty about?
So it was, then, sifting through the parcel of letters that morning that I came across a familiar, though in retrospect not altogether unexpected, shiver of dread pass over me as I pulled out and saw in my hand a small white envelope neatly addressed to me in that very same reddish brown ink. Given the already anxious and agitated state I was in that morning, still suffering from a poor night’s sleep, I hesitated for a time before opening the envelope. When I did, I pulled out, as usual, just one single page of white paper. Rather than the usual single enigmatic phrase, however, this time the page was blank, entirely blank with not a single visible mark on either side of it. I peered closely at it, held it up to the light to see anything would emerge, but nothing did. There was nothing on the page at all.
I placed it down on my kitchen table and walked away from it, trying hard not to imagine what kind of message my correspondent was trying to send this time, returning back to my by now well worn spot in front of the bathroom mirror. I stood and I stared back at myself, delicately feeling out again the shape of the bright red scar that marked my face. Receiving the letter had left me oddly shaken and I calmed myself by methodically pressing and stroking at the edges of my wound. After a time I began to feel more like myself again and decided, in a snap moment of clarity, that I should not leave the wound open to the air like this but should put a dressing on it to keep it clean and avoid infection. I opened the bathroom cabinet and found some clean white gauze which I cut and fixed against my face with four short strips of tape beside my nose and under my eye. This done I decided I would shake off the strangeness of the past few days and settle down to my usual routine.
Saying the words is one thing, however. Actually carrying them out is quite another challenge altogether and when it came down to it I found myself unable to put either the letter or the scar on my face entirely out of my mind. Putting the dressing in place, in fact, had a strange effect on me altogether, that morning. Rather than hide the wound, it seemed to make it almost more conspicuous. Rather than one thin line on my face, now I had seve
ral layers of foreign material to deal with, which tugged awkwardly against my nose and my cheek as I ate and which always, no matter how hard I tried to ignore them, just creeping into the edge of my field of vision. It was as though, too, that covering up the wound made the shape of it even more maddening to me. Hidden as it was under the gauze, I could not see the crescent shape curve of it any more, but I could still imagine it. I could feel out the shape of it with the tip of my finger over the top of the dressing, could sketch it absent mindedly with my pen on the corner of my newspaper as I did the morning crossword, could trace it through the air, even, with the tip of my toe as I sat watching tv. I could even, if you asked me to, sing it for you, if that makes any sense at all, so familiar, so well did I know this shape which grabbed at my mind so strangely.
***
The next two days I spent almost entirely indoors. The storm had risen again after its brief respite and even in the middle of the day the sky was black and the rain whipped constantly against the windows at the front of the house. These days spent indoors were not, in themselves, an entirely unusual event for me. I have no job to go to these days, not many friends to visit, no family, very few commitments to take me out of the house when I don’t feel like it, and it’s not unusual at all for me to go days at a time not venturing any further than the edge of my little garden. Even so, those two days felt different somehow. Even though I had no particular place I could say I would rather be, no particular thing I wanted to do, the fact of the storm and the self consciousness I felt over the state of my face, left me feeling trapped somehow, imprisoned within the four walls of my home in a way that I reacted and struggled against like a teenager confined to his room for bad behaviour. The time weighed heavily on me indeed. I paced the floors all day, unable to settle to do anything, the peculiar state of anxiety and agitation clinging to me no matter what I tried to do to shake it off. My mind wandered as I paced, jumping awkwardly and without logic from one topic to another, one troubling memory to another half forgotten worry to another.
At night I could not sleep. Rather than lie unsettled, tossing and turning in an uncomfortable bed, I continued to pace around the house all night. Maybe it is a sign of just how uneasy I’d become in those few days, how uncertain of myself I had grown but I felt like a small boy again, wandering the halls of my house day and night, listening to the gale rage outside, waiting for the weather to clear. As I wandered, I fingered the dressing on my face, absent-mindedly tracing over and again the crescent shape of the scar that was hidden under it. This repetitive act was somehow soothing to me, yet somehow simultaneously stoking up an anxiety that I could not, no matter what I did, clear myself of.
For two days this pattern repeated itself, like a fever, this agitated, endless pacing. Only this morning did the fever break. Not until this morning did I wake from this strange dream I’ve been wandering through. I can’t explain it, but I feel so much clearer now, stronger in my mind than I have been for some time.
I had a dream last night, during the short period in which I was able to sleep. More than one dream actually, but only one which has stuck with me. I was at home, a small boy again in my parent’s house. There was a meeting going on in the front room. The place was full of people coming and going, buzzing around. Something important was going on, some judgement was being made. I knew it was important and that the decision to be made would effect me in a very direct way, but I could not follow the arguments, could not understand what it was that was under debate. There were raised voices, angry people shouting over one another and, in the middle of it all, my father, still a youngish man at this point, no older than I am now, trying to keep the peace, fighting a hopeless cause. All of the noise was upsetting to me and I was staying as far away from it as I could get. I sat in the kitchen where it was warm, beside the stove with my back to the rest of the room, trying to ignore the goings-on elsewhere in the house.
All of a sudden I was startled by a finger prodding my in my shoulder. I span around quickly and there in front of me was a red haired lady with wild eyes and a wild manner. She was a friend of my father, someone who had been to our house many times before but whom I had always felt uncomfortable around. There was something unpredictable about her, something unruly that was upsetting for me as a small boy to see in an adult. At this moment her cheeks were flushed and her eyes wide, her pupils large and black so that they seemed to dominate her face. Her breathing was heavy and smelled of something strongly spiced and sweet and alcoholic. The smell was overpowering, so much so that I squirmed to get away from her. She stopped me though with two strong, bony hands on my shoulders, pinning me in place.
“I have something to tell you,” she said to me. “I’ve been waiting to tell you this for longer than you can know.” She stared at me so deeply when she said these words that I could not tell whether they were spoken to the young boy in my dream or to the grown man who was dreaming them. “I see you better than you see yourself. I know you better than anyone else ever will,” she said, kneeling in front of me and placing a finger on my cheek just under my right eye. “There is something inside you, you know. You put it there yourself with the things you did. It won’t come out till it’s ready to. It might not come out for a very long time, but when it’s ready you’ll know all about it. When it’s ready you won’t be able to hide it anymore.”
She was smiling as she said this, a strange smile that was part amusement, part nervous twitch and not in the slightest reassuring to look upon. As she spoke she ran her finger along my cheek under my eye, left and right, left and right, sketching out a slow, crescent shaped arc across my face.
I woke in a sweat to a house still shrouded in darkness. I didn’t know what to think. I was still trembling in fright as I walked downstairs to where I saw the blank white page from the other day’s mail still lying where I left it on the kitchen table. Except it wasn’t blank anymore, not quite. There in the middle of the page, where usually there would be a strange phrase written in a strange language, where previously there had be no mark at all to be seen, there was sketched, in a reddish brown ink not dissimilar to the colour of old dried blood, a single line drawing of a smooth crescent shape.
I saw the shape and a change came over me. Just then I understood what was happening to me. I went straight to the bathroom and stood before the mirror. I pulled the gauze and the dressing off my face to reveal the pink shape of the wound underneath. Whether the red haired woman in my dream was giving me a blessing or a curse, I could not tell. All I knew was that it felt real, more real to me than anything that has happened to me these past few years.
I put my fingers to my wound and pressed against it, tearing it apart again so that the skin tore and the blood once more began to drip, warm and bright over my hands. Rather than fear, rather than dread, the sight of that red flow this time washed me with a bright feeling of clarity, the likes of which I cannot remember ever feeling. I looked down at my arms and I could feel them glow from within. Everywhere I looked, all over my body, my legs, my face, my hands, I could see small crescent shapes repeat and repeat. There were hundreds of them all over me, all waiting to come out. I took my fist and crashed it into the mirror in front of me.
Now I have a sharp dagger of glass in my hand and I understand what those letters have been telling me to do all these years. I can see the scars inside me and I’m ready, at last, to bring them out.
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