December/January 2004
It
was a court case that seemed to have been raging since the dawn of man.
A case of such stunning abuse and ferocity that several jurors had asked
to be excused from their duty in a cold shiver, their skin like wax,
beads of sweat on upper lips. This case had been the ruin of several high
court judges and a whole army of legal clerks and stenographers. Every
day, the news media spat the acrid testimony of witness after witness
into the screen. Every gruesome detail of the hideous crimes. Each sordid
revelation adding insult to injury for the families concerned.
How could she do this? This ‘poor little girl’ of no more
than thirteen years of age. She must, at one time, have looked so pretty,
so innocent, so vulnerable – now she was a beast gaffer-taped
into her chair with barbed wire across her open eyes and steel spikes
through her thin white thighs. Her parched lips peeled back from pointed
teeth, exposing poisonous gums. At random moments of personal torture,
a sharp shriek escaped her lungs and puss frothed at her mouth. Her
skin shone with slime – soul pollution one of the dailies ended
up calling it. Prosecution psychologists had tried to unpick her on
the stand, under oath, but she was made of stronger stuff than that.
So they had turned on the peers, friends and family of the accused,
to no avail – nobody could work out what had gone wrong with their
‘poor little girl’. Butter wouldn’t melt, and all
that. Finally, the case for the defence called their prime witness to
explain the years of carnage. Such a young girl and already such a list
of atrocities.
“I call to the stand Tabitha Brightshaw,” said the defence
lawyer. Her parents were rich, they expected the best for their poor
little girl. Four burley guards lay their hands over her head, one after
the other in an ascending stack then, using only their first two fingers,
lifted her rickety wooden chair into the air. Tabitha Brightshaw sailed
through the courtroom like royalty, all the time writhing in her sneering
agony.
The defence lawyer, an exceptionally astute young man for his years,
blurted the most ludicrous insult out at her and got this unedited tirade
in response:
“I am not very clever. I don’t do homework. I don’t
learn from my mistakes. You can see can’t you – I got caught,
didn’t I? I am bloated overweight and my skin’s a mess of
acne and grease – I hate everything about my girl-ness. I do know
what I like though. I like blood. The way it moves between the fingers.
The way it smells of rust. The way it dries and crumbles away. The way
it spurts from a severed artery or pours from a hole in the skin. The
way it moves down glass or the pretty patterns it makes on walls as
victim and murderer share their last dance. Two lovers staring into
each other's eyes for the very last time, Stanley knives poised at each
other’s throat. A last kiss before a quick pull to the right seals
their marriage.
“In my world, you lot plead for their life to a stun-gunner with
earmuffs and no sense of chivalry.
“I am the monster who drops boys to the bottom of wells, their
shins shattered in the fall, begging their sister in a weak voice to
'Go get dad!' and all they get by way of response before the end of
the rope that brings up the water bucket hits them in the face is a
long cheerful smile from their nemesis. I’m your sister, boy, and
I fucking hate you for everything you are. I’m a girl with fucking
attitude. You taught me that. I am the moon that rises and falls, creeping
past the hole in the sky offered by the well as the creepy crawlies
make meals of your skin and you start to rot, continually drenched by
inclement weather. The musty smell that won’t go away. The deadness
of limbs. The pain of a hoarse throat. The tears that refuse to dry.
But eventually everything dries, even life.
“One minute I am a pretty little girl with eyes of emerald dreams,
the next I am a black man with an engorged penis hanging from a tree,
Billie Holliday on backing vocals. Burroughs trusty Klu Klux Mugwamp
riding this sorry ass as his black cock spurts gallons of blood-marbled
sperm into a gulping cosmos of virtual photons. I am the tension in
your neck as the cord tightens – I am the bulging look of total
arse-raped lust in your eyes. You bug eyed freak. Spit, dribble on your
own engorged perversion.
“I am the implants under your skin that control you drones to
do my Marxist bidding. Implants in the mind that control the populace.
Implants in society that make you reject/accept arbitrary values, morals,
beliefs. I am the wool pulled over every eye that religion, society
and governments buy by the acre at the market every weekend.
“I am a car-crash depicted in extreme close-up, with multiple
cameras and mile after mile of film streaking through high-speed cameras.
A face crushed by the kiss of the windscreen. A pelvic cavity raped
by the gearstick. Legs caressed by the engine with a swift embrace of
utter need. You never die from a car crash. You wait in your agony as
the car disembowels you and licks at your mess down there on the floor
by the pedals. It’s the smell of petrol fumes from a ruptured
gas tank.
“I am the metamorphosis from boy to bug. From woman to cock-eating
monster. From man to dwarf, skulking around in the shadows with his
evil plans, his whiskers twitching as the moment of revenge approaches,
the appropriate boxes ticked off, the outline fresh as scent of poison
on a proffered wine glass or nibble. It’s the drug in a pint of
Guinness – the memory of all the mental and physical torture those
years in the office at the hands of the serial sycophant and the eventual
dismissal for ‘restructuring’ reasons.
“I am, literally, the eye of the beholder, pulled from the face
by accidental injury malicious intent. Gouged out with a spoon. Pierced
with a ballpoint pen. It’s the way the eye fills with blood covering
the beholder’s view with a scarlet filter. It’s the deflation
of the eye and the distortion of the view. For that’s the beauty
of being a writer to be able to distort without compunction the ripe
virginity of any new reader to your art. They enter into this bargain
with the extreme writer, they offer their ideals of modern day beauty,
their moral standards, their likes and dislikes. They offer all that
up to the word juggler, the mind blender, the soul butcher.
“Everything about my existence on this foul planet describes the
way skin lifts from the back of a screaming victim. You think, if the
victim didn’t scream would this job be this easy? You think, why
do I never consider where all this blood is going? You think nothing
of the consequences. It is outside the expected moral ramparts. I am
the clouds of arrows raining down upon your common understanding. I
should pierce your soul and make you think. I should wake you up to
the fact that you are not what you think. You are not your Name. You
are not your Nationality. You are not your History. But you are your
upbringing by that generation you call your contemporaries, your peers
even. You smell of those who have had a hand in your upbringing –
you physically stink. Your body language is a sewer and your conversation
is a rotting gum receding from the jaw bone.
“Like me.
“I am everything you have made me, and I am here to fuck you up
in all the wrong ways and you’re the sickest fucks of all for
letting me do that to you.”
As if under some subliminal instruction, the prosecution lawyer pulled
a semi-automatic pistol out of his brief case and started to gun everyone
down, starting with the defence lawyer. “I prosecute you,”
he said with each death. He summarily executed every last individual
in the courtroom. Even the judge didn’t escape his justice. Eventually,
his crazed eyes, dripping lines of blood down his cheeks, turned on
the key witness, the poor little girl, up on her altar, ruler of all
that is evil and twisted in the human world.
“Did I do good, my lady?” he panted with his murderous exertions.
The smiling girl didn’t even register his existence.
