RENAISSANCE

RENAISSANCE

But for the rain riveting against the glass, the view from the first floor bedsit window would have been magnificent. Tonight, great drifts of spume hurtled across the road, leaving shallow lakes to creep across the promenade and pour back into the ocean.

Richard turned away from the bluster outside and sat morosely on the thread-bare chair beside the bed. With trembling hands he drew a flask of whisky from his drawer and tossed the contents of the flask-top down his throat in one fiery movement, barely gasping at the raw warmth which rasped at his stomach. It didn’t make the prospect any better. The wallpaper was still faded and marked. The fly-specked light bulb still oscillated gently in the draught from the ill-fitting windows, which rattled with each gust of wind howling in from the English Channel. The room still looked the third-rate dosser that it was.

He checked his watch. Five o’clock. A long time yet before dark.

Footsteps echoed on the bare wooden staircase outside, moving slowly, wearily, as if each tread climbed was a mountain. Pausing heavily at the top, they dragged down the hallway past his room; then, the rattle of a key, a dry cough, and a door shut hollowly, leaving behind an empty silence. As empty as his life. He took another pull at the flask and stole a nervous glance at his watch again. Not yet three minutes had elapsed! Time was moving more slowly.

More, quicker footsteps clattered downstairs and the outer door banged solidly as pittering Wednesday footsteps splashed down the entrance steps and onto the footpath. Richard craned his neck and saw the familiar rain-coated figure, collar turned up against the weather, and umbrella turned into the wind, hurry along the street, red high-heeled shoes dancing amongst the puddles in an intricate pattern. He watched the figure until it rounded the corner in the gathering dusk. Once it had gone, it was as if it had never existed, expunged from the microcosmic universe that the room and the view from Richard’s window had become. Ephemeral. Like life itself.

The heavy overcast drew the fading light into full darkness sooner that it might have, but too soon for what must be done. All that could be done was to watch the street lamps down the length of the promenade floating in their own pools of shifting light, like so many illuminated masts in harbour. Their reflected light sent golden streamers of rain runnelling almost horizontal on the outside of the windows and Richard switched on his own, gently swinging, light bulb. Instantly, in the window’s reflective depths, the ghost of his sallow face stared blankly back with haunted eyes, but to draw the curtains on it would be to limit his horizons to the four, blank, walls that surrounded him, to imprison himself… yet leave the hidden ghosts free to haunt.

He turned off the light and his ephemeral self blinked out. Another ghost laid to rest.

Dark.

He closed his eyes. Without light, the harsh demarcation of the four corners became at once fathomless depths in which, it seemed to Richard, the confines of the tiny room expanded to infinity. He let his mind go with it, floating in its comforting, amniotic embrace, attached to the present only by an umbilical whipcord of anxiety. In the end, the pull proved too much and he was drawn back to harsh reality like the sudden deliverance of a breech-birth hacked into being by the surgeon’s knife.

He strode across to the window to ease his cramping muscles, the fight already lost as he had known it would be from the very start.

Reborn, his night-eyes saw the darkness bleeding rivers, shedding blood-thick tears down the outside of the window pane, reflected from a passing car’s tail lights and the wildly tossing promenade lights, to pool gelatinous on the window-sill. He imagined he felt a wetness on his hands. A warm and glutinous wetness. A congealing wetness. He followed the raindrops across the window with his finger and left on the inside an imaginary, sanguine tracery.

He looked at his hands as if for the first time, seemingly wondering at their unfamiliarity, their symmetry, their grossness, recognising their disguised strength beneath the tremor. Recognising also that the unsteadiness was an excitement taken beyond control, barely rational, that shivered its way down the length of his body. A thirst that demanded to be slaked. The night was full dark, now, the time approaching fast. He opened the door and left, softly.

The outer door swung shut behind him: a sepulchral sound, entombing the stillness of the musty hallway. He paused on the top step, head hooded against the needling rain and peered through the sheeting curtains that obscured the view one moment then swept on the next. The promenade swam with colour, a surrealist nightmare of spiralling light and plunging shadow. By comparison he felt himself a monochrome shade, an empty vessel, drifting powerless in a roaring ocean of colour that had no other purpose than to toss him to and fro until his destiny had been fulfilled, and then return him spent to his harbour, bereft, befouled – bedizened red…blood, blood-red!

Red! The pavement orgasmed with the colour: pools of liquid carmine shimmered at his feet, as fitful as a broken promise, pigmented only by the festooning lights. Once around the corner, away from the promenade’s glitter, the pooling rain became dark and wet and cold again, and Richard’s head cleared. The madness was at his back now. His way lay forward. Into the dark.

The street in front was empty, houses on each side isolated cocoons of brick and light and love, the only sound that of Richard’s footsteps measuring their length through the puddles, and the gurgle of rain cascading down the gutters. The tide had turned, the wind had dropped, and the rain fell vertical now, a womb of water gestating its hooded incubus.

Richard slipped a hand inside his coat pocket and caressed the slivered blade that nestled there. The ice-keen touch upon his skin raised the hackles of his neck. Waves of anticipation raced down his spine and through his fingers, which spasmed. The stiletto point pricked, and he withdrew his hand to savour the sensation. Blood globuled on his finger tip like a black polyp and Richard raised it to his eyes in fascination. Then, it was dashed away by the rain which carried it in thin streamers across his hand. He put it to his mouth and sucked, refreshed by the cool wetness of the rain seasoned with the heavy tang of his own blood. He suckled a moment, then moved on.

Like a fading echo he kept to the shadows, flitting from doorway to doorway, avoiding the ubiquitous questing cameras with the ease of long familiarity, Narrow alleys drifted by to his left, dark, anonymous canals choked with the jetsam of urban life. He passed these by. An island of brilliance signalled further on, neon lights searing holes in the dark, caking the road with an impasto of colour so thick…so scarlet …that it was almost palpable … and yet as insubstantial as breath itself.

Richard’s own breath came with slow, measured control, resting so low and soft in his throat that it could have been a purr. He took shelter in a deep shop doorway, transfixed by the neon flicker, eyes burnished within the concealing hood.

And waited.

Cars planed by, streaming rubied skeins beneath their wheels, the ‘suuuuuushh;’ of tyres louder than their engines. In the glow of the neon lights, car doors opened, clunked shut, voices cried, footsteps splashed, running, pattering up the steps of the cinema and halted while hands flapped, shook at sodden raincoats, then hurried on into the foyer, to be swallowed up, lost to a world as transient as their own, brief, lives.

Richard watched and waited, measuring the passing time by the measure of his breath. It beat in time with his pumping heart …RED red red, RED red red, RED red red, red blood red, RED blood red …

Incoming patrons gathered in the foyer, jostling to maintain a queue whilst outgoing picture-goers from the early programme trickled out, raising umbrellas against the rain, in pairs, in groups …singly. Richard left the shelter of the doorway.

The car park of the cinema was small, and full from the early show, emptying quickly now as the patrons swept homewards to their fires and their families. Richard mingled briefly with the slowing trickle of incoming patrons as he made his way to the rear of the building, with the occasional patron leaving by the rear fire exit. He edged into a gap between the bulk refuse containers and the boiler housing, and melded into the dark.

His position commanded a sweep of the car park entrance on the one hand and, on the other, a view of the few remaining cars. One by one, they cleared, as their passengers scampered by his hiding place, family groups squealing against the lashing rain, closely spaced individuals going their separate ways. Richard’s heart pounded with the effort of holding still, of awaiting the moment. And the moment came!

A lone figure scampered down the short flight of steps down from the rear fire exit, as he had known it would, coat drawn over its head, red shoes pittering their regular Wednesday footsteps, as they had pittered earlier in the evening.

Silent as shadow, Richard stepped out, staying a startled gasp with a hand cupped across the figure’s mouth and drew it to the shelter of the bins. His fingers clamped hard across its face, terrified eyes staring wildly into his own snake-pit pupils. Arms and legs flailed …then stiffened in shock as Richard drew his knife and stilled the working mouth with a single thrust, skewering the blade into the palate through the base of the jaw.

Lips grimaced in pain. Eyes squeezed tight shut against the nightmare, chest heaving with the locked-in scream, blood welled in the mouth, down the nose, trickled, flowed, torrented. The slick, sensuous feel caressed Richard’s fingers as it channelled down the blade. At its touch, he jerked the blade free, the jaw gagging slack, and drove it between the breasts and up, working it inward, twisting, grating. Rich, dark blood bubbled, gouted, from the gaping mouth, spouted with air expelled from the riven lungs. He withdrew the blade and stared at questing eyes that glazed over as he watched, supporting the body that slumped in his grasp and, as the head lolled, let the woman drop like a discarded rag.

Richard stood over the huddled heap, supporting himself on the wall, watching with lack-lustre eyes the dark pool spreading from the placental evisceration of the torn body. The rain lapped at the edges, washing it away in rivulets. Richard stepped out into the car park and walked quietly away. As though in expiation, the rain lashed down even harder, drumming against the rubbish bins, washing the body clean, rinsing the blood into the gutters.

Richard pulled his hood down across his tormented eyes and hunched his shoulders against the torrent. Behind him, the faint sound of laughter mocked from within the cinema, lapping against the hissing, cleansing rain. Richard let the laughter wash over him dully, and raised his face to the sky, mingling its tears with his own.

The glistening street stretched gently in front of him arrowing back to the sea front, a dark, lonely fairway to a hopeless harbour. Leaving death behind, leaching into the rain, he drew a shuddering breath and took a first, hesitant step home, reborn once more to hopeless life.

Until the next, red, dead, rain-time.