OLD MR. BITTERMAN: CRIMINALLY INSANE
By Max Frick
Copyright 2012 Maximilian Frick
A fortuitous change for the worse in the weather seemed to have cleared the street – in the one direction, and in the other – of potentially meddlesome pedestrians. Old Mister Bitterman wipe-wiped his feet on the welcome mat and, bidding a bogus 'bye, then' over his shoulder, lest there were anyone watching, stepped outside into the drab twilight, closing the door behind him. Purporting to better brave the elements, he pulled low the brim of the trilby, upturned the collar of the overcoat and, keeping his head down, made briskly for the shelter of the underground.
He sidled onto the thoroughfare and merged seamlessly with the throng funneling into the station's main entrance: the bag-laden late shoppers (buy buy happiness, hello emptiness), the briefcase brigade (dull grey suits, dull grey minds) and sundry others, of every which rank and persuasion. He steadfastly refused, mind you, to emulate the few among them who dropped a coin or two into the outstretched cap of an ever-so-humble young beggar stationed on the threshold. He, Bitterman, had been forced to accept many a soul-sapping, pointless occupation over the years, just to make ends meet, and he'd be damned if he'd encourage the dissolute lifestyles of bone-idle ne'er-do-wells.
Bitterman. A name – like his victims – not chosen entirely at random. A name that gave those victims a more than sporting chance, he felt, to determine the true and terrible nature within the benign everyman he presented to the world at large. He was hiding in plain sight, and if people nowadays were too wrapped up in themselves to spot the danger, he could offer them little sympathy. Bitterman. Harold Bitterman. The Harold was of no particular significance, chosen simply because it had a nice ring to it. No more, no less. But the lord alone knows that this nice ring he percieved it to have was at least partly attributable to its being an amalgamation of the words harmless and old which, when succeeded by the surname Bitterman, had a wry incongruity to it: harmless old bitter man. And had this occurred to him on any but a subconscious level it just might have brought a genuine smile to his careworn lips, a very rare thing indeed.
A flight of stairs lead down to the area of the station where tickets must be procured, before a parallel pair of steep, narrow escalators conveyed valid ticket holders to and from the train platform further below. As he neared the middle of these stairs Bitterman beheld, with no inconsiderable ire, that two of the station's three ticket machines had been declared out of order, and at the last remaining machine a very long and disorderly queue was continually growing longer and ever more disorderly.
Even the most astute detective, utilising CCTV images to piece together the last movements of this or that missing person, say, would be hard pressed to see anything untoward in the footage of an elderly gentleman clutching the handrail to steady himself as, more slowly than most, he made his weary way down the stairs. But were that detective to freeze that frame and zoom in closer, and perhaps closer still, his professional curiosity may well be piqued by the white of that gentleman's knuckles and the burning fury in his eyes. For with every step that Bitterman took - lower and lower, nearer and nearer to the bedlam below - his grip on that handrail grew tighter and tighter and the temperature of his blood rose proportionately higher and higher. If there was one thing he truly hated - and Bitterman truly hated a great many things - it was a disorderly queue.
He scrutinized his reflection in the mirror. The dab of brylcreem had darkened somewhat the silver of his hair; the neatly trimmed moustache, cultivated especially for this particular execution, had (ahem) grown on him; the navy blue blazer with its three brass buttons on the front and two on either cuff fitted him more or less perfectly, while the white handkerchief peeping urbanely from its breast pocket was a particularly nice touch; and the hems of his perfectly pressed grey trousers sat just right atop his polished black shoes. The over all effect, he flattered himself to think, was that of ex-serviceman or, better yet, war veteran, though quite which war he was old enough or young enough to have fought in he never troubled to calculate. But the crowning achievement of the outfit - of any of his outfits, come to that - was the tie. Not the tie itself, mind you - in this case a plain navy polyester one to match his jacket - but the drop or two of egg yolk he had deliberately dripped thereon: an invaluable little trick he had picked up from the movie star Dustin Hoffman, no less, in some half read magazine article in some far flung train or bus station somewhere. He, Hoffman, had felt that it lent him the common touch and made people feel less intimidated in his presence. He, Bitterman, had found that it engendered something akin to pity in his intended victims, causing them to lower their guard, and bringing to the fore their motherly instincts, God bless their unsuspecting little hearts.
He slid the knot of the tie up between the points of his shirt collar and was put in mind briefly of that one he'd tried to hang that time from a wooden beam in her country-style kitchen. Her fondness for food, shall we say, and her fight for survival had nearly been his undoing. He had heaved and hoisted to beat the band and she still couldn't have been more than three or four feet off the ground when her kickings and writhings brought the entire beam crashing from its fixings. She fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut and her already battered head cracked like an egg on the faux terracotta flooring. The beam itself had only narrowly missed him and didn't half make short work of the breakfast bar. He could laugh about it now, all right, but he'd had the devil's own job trying to clean up the mess.
He took his place in the queue and battened down the hatches. Up and down its length people were muttering and mumbling and tisking and tutting and gesturing and shouting impatiently. Bitterman shared their impatience but he would never allow it to manifest itself in such a petty, undignified fashion. Come what may he would remain stoical, staring straight ahead with his hands clasped firmly behind his back. Immediately in front of him stood a stout-ish woman with damp, medium length wavy hair, fading at the roots and splitting at the ends. On the ground at her feet, resting against her sturdy legs and each other, were no less than ten bulging shopping bags, five on either side. Ten bags, each full to bursting, not with things she needed but with things she had managed to convince herself that she needed, just so she could go out and buy those things and stave off for a while the crushing nullity of her middle-aged, middle-brow, middle-of-the-road existence. The queue would move forward. She, at first, would not. She would instead - bending heavily at the knees - carefully gather up these bags by all twenty of their handles and - unbending heavily at the knees now, like a weightlifter might - only then waddle forward with the rest of the queue, setting all ten bags back down again that foot or two further on.This allowed a more than man-sized gap to grow time and again between her and the person in front of her, which - lest some opportunistic queue jumper, feigning all innocence, should come along and unjustly plug it - caused Bitterman no end of inner turmoil.
He remained stoical, staring straight ahead, with his hands clasped firmly behind his back.
Any progress now ground to a standstill and the shouts increased accordingly in volume and in venom. Bitterman cocked his head to cast an investigative glance from beneath the brim of that trilby over a long row of angry right shoulders. At the very front of the queue a group of obvious out-of-towners was peering at puzzledly and poring over with its fingertips the simple instructions on the ticket machine. Bitterman deplored their ignorance, and it tempered his hatred not a jot that he was forever an out-of-towner himself. But he hated still more the haters, the narrow-minded xenophobes, blind to their own shortcomings, whose knowledge of life's workings extended little further than their own doorsteps.
That cock-headed glance had also revealed an ill-bred child, loosed from its ill-bred parents, zig-zagging blithely from front to back through the queue, swinging unchastised, save for a sideways glance or two, round leg after leg after leg. Bitterman knew only too well that the child should not be punished for the iniquities of its parents, but woe betide it if it came too close: decorum be damned, he'd swat the little bastard like a fly.
Finally, the out-of-towners dispersed with their hard-won tickets and the queue moved forward once more. The weighty wench weightlifted her shopping and waddled forward that foot or two before setting it all back down again. The child swung closer and closer. The queue went down another man and the child swung closer still. Bitterman remained stoical, staring straight ahead, with his hands clasped firmly behind his back. Another man departed and another and another and, mercifully, in the nick of time, the child was called to heel. The weighty wench lifted and set, and lifted and set, until, at long last, she alone was all that remained