What Kind Of Fool?

“I want to kill all your friends. All those bands that you like. I want to kill every last one of them.”

He doesn’t, of course. It’s me he wants to kill. That fine line, that double-edged passion. He wants to kill me and everything I stand for because I’m not the thing he expected.

He wants everything. That’s all.

I stand and look at him. I do not speak. He could reduce the whole world to rubble and I still would not speak. He knows that it is only me and him already. Everything else is pretence. It took one moment for that to be true. One moment of silence, decreed by him; his decree ignored by me. The silence was already in place; it needed no decreeing. The silence fell with those first few notes, and the river that followed them.

He wants to kill me, in killing those bands, those friends, everything with which I surround myself to convince the world that I am normal. He wants to kill me, but he won’t. He can’t.

They are dead already.

We adopt our battle positions. Mine is the head half-turned, arms folded, one hip cocked position. The position we learn in our teens. Create a good line, an elegant silhouette. If you’re going to have to stand in a battle position, you might as well do it with style. His is bullish. Legs braced, hands in pockets. I imagine he’s clenching his fists.

I want to laugh at the stupidity of it all, but I enjoy it too much. I enjoy the bristle his words create at the back of my neck. I enjoy the clench of my jaw, and the narrowing of my eyes. I even like the waspish buzz of all the words I will not say flying through my mind.

I want to laugh. To make him laugh. I want to hug him to me and whisper, “Let’s fuck...” Because all of this is just fucking in mid-air, with our clothes on, and people in attendance.

High above the trees, two Chinese warriors fly, mid battle. One a young girl, the other a grown man. They fly and outwit and their power is jealousy, their power is rage. Their power is that fine line of passion.

This is what it’s all about. In every age, in every mythology. From the crouching tiger and the hidden dragon, to Rapunzel in her tower. From the crackles of electricity in the air, to the desire to die rather than live alone.

The double-edged passion that brings him to hate, that leaves me in love; incapable of hating, because this brings me to life after all the years of deadness, and all the thinking that there was nothing inside.

You can tell your life as a story. You can weave truths into fiction, that creep among the lies and burrow into the subconscious of your reader, setting off lights, creating synapses, making the connections real. You can tell your life to a point, and then comes the question. Why?

Why this hole? Why this falsehood? Why this thing that isn’t quite right?

And the story teller, the bard answers, “Because.”

Fit the piece to the hole, tell the truth, make the edges of the story and its centre align; what have you then?

Nothing.

And that is why he wants to kill my friends, all the bands that I like. That is why he wants to bring the world to rubble.

Because. He can’t bear the thought of being cheated. That my smoke and mirrors hid the truth.

He wanted everything and was disappointed. And now he must rip to shreds the mynah bird who did not speak, because she wasn’t a mynah bird at all. Her glossy black feathers and her yellow beak make her as common as the blackbird, and as speechless.

So let him kill, until there is only me and him still standing. Let him do that. It makes no odds. It will just be me and him, as it always was, right from the start. The mute and the fighter. The everything and nothing.

The two Chinese warriors resting on the bending boughs of separate trees. The young woman and the grown man, breathless with exertion, unwilling to submit. The wire of steel that runs through each and connects them both like electricity.

I do not speak. Only, let him kill me now.


© J R Hargreaves 2006