Short fiction

Guilt: In Analysis

The room is whispering, a soothing background murmur hushed beneath the oppressive glare of the bright metal lights overhead.  The walls are warm and soft, painted in rich, natural shades – what the advertisers would call ‘Colours of the Earth’.  The walls’ smooth faces are broken-up by a handful of framed photographs.  Tanned, smiling people peer from their dead frames, their final moment of sublime caffeine bliss captured forever in stylish black-and-white photography.  Drifting from a speaker somewhere above and behind my head, a compilation of pop-music loops – for the most part, unnoticed – and it washes over the few people that dot the room.  They sit, huddled together in the corners or against the walls, their words an indecipherable wall of sound.  A large window, carved from the wall to my right, opens out onto a shifting panorama of cold darkness, through which cold, dark bodies dart, seeking shelter from the freezing winter night.

A coffee stands cooling on the table to my left, and I have artistically scattered some important-looking papers across my lap, and over the chair next to me.  From my neck hangs an expired NHS identity card and a small metal key.  I want to look busy, occupied.  The brown jacket, those three white letters, these overdue reports: people see the stereotype first, and I am trying my best to hide behind it.

Almost directly in front of me, an elderly couple are discreetly talking, avoiding everyone’s attention.  Matching wedding-rings encircle their fingers, while my own indented finger stares blankly back at my tear-filling eyes.  I straighten up, watching this quiet pair.  They look… slightly awkward – like teachers on primary-school chairs – facing each other over a miniature, wooden coffee-table and two steaming mugs of ... hot chocolate, I think ... yes, with marshmallows and cream.  There is something… so familiar about the woman: her small, slightly hooked nose.  Her tiny nostrils flare every time she inhales her drink.  I can‘t place it.  Her husband softly mutters … something that I can’t quite hear, and I watch as her face’s tranquil symmetry is broken by a taut, uneven smile, which spreads across her pursed lips.  She slowly lowers her drink, apparently considering her response, her smile ...

To my right, a chorus of laughter catches my attention.  I turn slightly to watch a group of three oriental students, who are seated in front of the window.  There are two young women both of whom are obviously laughing about something the older boy, sitting opposite, has said.  One of the two girls, in black denim jeans, is now talking to someone - I think a family member - on her mobile phone.  The other, wearing a black skirt of a material I don’t recognise, is attempting to talk between fits of giggling to the boy, who is presumably joking about something.  Although they are all speaking English, I cannot really understand what’s being said through their accents.  Despite this, I sit back and relax, allowing the sharp, conflicting melodies of their different conversations blend with the tune of a song I recognise – but can’t quite remember the name of – from the late nineties.

*  *  *

Eyes closed, I allow myself a few moments of peace from the world: I sink beneath the surface of my skin with a sigh.  I can feel my pulse pounding on the back of my eyes and I realise that I am controlling its rhythm with my breathing.  I am exhausted.  New places always take it out of me, and all I want to do is sleep.  The room is warm, and the continuous talking is so soft I can almost touch it.

I am looking through my eyelids into a deep redness, as the bright lights from the ceiling penetrate my blood.  I am thinking about the people in the room on the other side of my flesh, seeing them as though through a layer of glittering water, and worrying whether any of them will recognise me if they see me anywhere after today.  ‘No,’ I tell myself.  ‘No, they will remember a badge, a doctor, even a surgeon, but they won’t remember me’.

I line them up along the back-wall of my imagination, highlight them under the spotlight of memory, and try to picture their ...

… families and friends: a great web of connections – of blood and love – all looking down at me from the shore, asking ... no, shouting at me: “why?” they ask, over and over again, and the word pounds in my ears - a heartbeat - turning my brain in on itself, and I close my eyes, trying to block them out, but their dark, frowning glares are tearing at my broken body through a shimmering ocean of guilt, and even as I swim away, I find them waiting for me at every turn: and I know now that, no matter how far I swim, they will always be with me, clinging to my arms and legs, sprawled across my path and sitting upon my shoulders.  I am gasping for air now, sinking under the weight of my burden, my heart unrestrained, and I am being carried further and further away by the rushing current...

“ ...llo? Excuse me?  D ... do you mind if I ...?”

... into the great, unknown – unknowable – depths of my mind.  I don’t want to find what I search for: my wife, and my job ... but, no.  These things are not down there.  They are clouded: buried under a thousand gallons of water, and a thousand tonnes of earth.  And I am now crying, my tears only adding to the water in which I am drowning ...

“Sorry, are you using this ...?”  A voice, clear as ringing glass.  Crystal.  A tuning fork resonating in the depths.  A shimmering light on the surface of the turbulent sea from which my tired body is being pulled, and I am treading water ... or am I floating upon the dark, depthless waves below?  Hovering in the bright rays of the golden sun, that angel - my Angel - looks down at me from the glorious heights with a look of love infinite ...

*  *  *

But no..., wait... I know that I am still in the café.  Standing before me, with a quizzical look on her beautiful, smiling face is a young brunette, probably in her mid-twenties.  It takes me a second before I realise she has asked me a question, and another to compose myself sufficiently to respond.

“I... no.  I mean... what?  Pardon?” I am straining to stay here, above the great abyss.  The gulf yawns before my feet, and a single false step...  I need to keep control.  I know I’ve slipped-up, not been concentrating, and now she is looking at me.  Directly at me: she hasn’t even noticed the doctor I used to be.  I am trying to present my confusion as a slow emergence from deep concentration, but I am not doing very well.

“I said, are you using this?” she is asking me.  Like a scene from some divine baptism or medieval exorcism, her delicate hands are resting upon an ugly, worn leather armchair that sits on the far side of the small coffee table.

“Urrmm... no, no,” I manage, and she retreats back into a remote corner of the room, the scruffy armchair in tow.  A small sigh slips from between my tired lips, and I reach over to sate my thirst with my - now cold - coffee.  It’s horrible, so I have put the mug back on the table.  I am flicking through the reports arranged in front of me, drawing more from my bag, overcome by a powerful urge to be in motion, to be doing, like everyone else in the room: to be normal.

The room has suddenly become unbearably hot and stuffy, the air almost moist against my skin as I move through it, and the water is beginning to cling to my neck and back.  I am trying to have a presence in the room, but I can still feel myself folding into the void - the black hole at the centre of my chest.  After a quick glance about the room, I am steadily working my way towards the open door on the other side: weaving through the abandoned no-man’s land, a graveyard of discarded chairs, tables and litter.  Cruel faces are peering from their safe corners as I move, exposed, across the expanse.  Finally, however, I have found my way to the exit.  I am free.

The air outside is like ice, sharp and painful against my skin, cutting through the jacket that I am now wrapping about my freezing form.  Yet it is also refreshing, and I call to mind the plunge-baths of the Ancient Romans: the reward after the trial of scalding water and steam.  I begin to walk – a ghost – passing like a dark shadow across the darker glass of the shop-windows on either side of the road.  Tiny flakes of snow, spiralling from the darkened heavens, fall on and about me, some getting caught in the great cloud of my breath and being chased away into the urban night.  It’s approaching Christmas, but the outside world is quiet, almost silent: no-one shops here.  I am alone, trapped in a sprawling realm of shadows.

A small park welcomes my tired form where nothing else will, enveloping me as just another dark piece of nature, oblivious to my hardened human heart.  The trees tower above, and I quail before their Life: true, original and pure.  I am nothing but an imitation of this great, real life.  Not made of, but made in the image of, this powerful first-nature.  A travesty of regretted creation.  Curled over, hugging my knees, I weep.  I wonder: what I am doing here?  What I have been doing for the past three years?  I know I am only fooling myself: no-one else cares about the brown jacket, those three white letters, these overdue reports.  It’s only me, trying to convince myself that the old ‘me’ still exists somewhere within this tired shell.  But deep down, I know that self - the doctor, the husband - has gone.  I lost all of that when I lost Him: that pale, sleeping figure.

It is snowing more heavily, and the flakes have begun to form small ridge along my spine.  I shake Nature off and I flee, taking my hard, metal heart with me, as the park closes itself behind me.

Oddly, after touring the city streets, I find myself outside the café again, though I had not noticed where my legs had been carrying me.  Inside, nothing has changed since I left: I can hear the soft rhythm of the music seeping through the window and the lights blaze overhead.  The world continues, unchecked.  The pressure is too great, so I am making my way back home through the abandoned wilderness.

*  *  *

I am filthy, crawling through cold showers of clean, white light.  The sun falls like a waterfall on my dark and bloodied body.  Through wide windows – bright, empty squares against the front of my skull – I can see boundless fields of daisies ... no, tulips ... although I can't see outside, because my eyes are blinded by the angry, frowning sun.  This place - a room - is airy, cold and clean, like the light that illuminates it, and everything is made of a pure and silvery metal: beautiful, shimmering metal.  All over the walls, reflecting the light - like prisms - into a thousand beams of fragmented day, are posters, pictures and charts, imprisoned behind panes of glass.  A whiteboard, covered in a strange, unintelligible scrawling, tells me I'm in room #L5.15 again.

I squint vainly into the concentrated power of the sun, testing my strength against Apollo’s radiant might, but I am defeated: a hard, burning white pervades my vision, and wipes my mind.  I am blinking – my eyelids are my only operating muscles.  Yet, I notice now that the fearsome God has released his grip of me, and I can feel clarity returning to my sight, dark shapes appearing from the glare, my sight returning like a developing negative.  Although the room is still bright, it is no longer unbearably so, and I manage to see once again.

The floor is a pristine canvas of glittering white tiles: a sea of light, on which my sullied body is floating, expelled from its cool embrace.  A large steel table – an island rising from the shining ocean –stands in the middle of the room, illuminated by the bright light from the window.  The ceiling opens to the bright, blue heavens, populated by small clusters of white clouds, frozen, suspended in the summer air.  Through the roof, the sun beats relentlessly down, and I am sprawled under it, crumbling under its wrath.

I am standing now, and take a hesitant step into the dazzling room.  My white coat is red, and it drips onto the shining floor.  Small drops of blood line my path, both before and behind me: I have already been here, already seen this.  The room is too bright to discern completely, but a few metres before me, I see Him.  He is lying, face-up, on the metal table, His beautiful blue eyes staring at the sky through the roof.  One of His cold, white hands is now hanging from the side of the bed, and just as I begin wonder who had moved Him ... I realise I am dreaming.

*  *  *

The dark ceiling, hidden in the shadow above my bed, greets my waking eyes, and I am waiting for them to adjust to the darkness.  Time is on my side: it always is.  Gradually advancing into sight, the light from the edge of the curtain is the only thing I can see, and from that faint light, the rest of the room begins to shift into a grainy focus.  A slightly shallower absence indicates the wardrobe, tall and threatening, shrouded in mystery; my body is nothing but a darker patch of night; the radiant outline of the door is the only point of reference in this midnight world.  I roll over and check the time on my watch.  There are still three-and-a-half hours before dawn, so I climb out of bed and dress in the dark, worn clothing I prepared last night.

Outside, the night-morning is freezing.  The moon is still hanging in the sky over the city, a guiding light and point-of-reference for the nocturnal and the drunken.  This early in the morning, there is no-one out on the streets.  With my bag in-hand and my NHS lanyard about my neck, I set-out across the sleeping city, wondering if I will ever be free.

Samuel Anthony Cooke