Chapter Twelve
So, yeah. Drug article done and posted, not exactly Pulitzer prize stuff but it makes a point and makes it well, I reckon. New product, mostly untested but useful results so far, launched on kids with problems so complex that . . . hey. Nothing to do with this, with us. It’s just . . . gods, sometimes I wish I could show you what I do. Hold up something I’ve done that’s made a difference, changed something. I wish I could tell you how I’ve sweated and hung in for something because I believed in it . . .
Part of the problem, I guess. I want you to know me. I want someone to know me, not to take this outer shell as gospel but to get through, to understand . . . and you can’t. You never will. But now I know, that’s what’s behind so much of what I do, why I drive them away with my behaviour, my bastard act; I want someone to make the effort, to put the work in — I know that now. And it’s because of her, because of Holly, when she started plugging in to some kind of weird psychological shit, me not wanting anyone to get inside my head — that kind of crap. Okay, yeah, like I said before, her asking . . . it threw me for a loop, y’know? Like it was the first time I realised that no one was interested in my hopes, my dreams, and it took this girl with her Merlot hair and the kind of stare that you normally see on something nocturnal, it took her to . . .
And I couldn’t take it. Scary, huh? That thing I want so much from another person, that thing I wanted from you and could never have, that understanding? Because, I guess, so much of what I’ve done has been so shitty that the only way to deal with it is to pretend that it’s how I am. Not a conscious choice made to keep people distant when I judge them unworthy, but something that I can’t help. Something I can blame you for: if you were here I wouldn’t be like that. If you’d . . . nah. I’ve judged you and judged you so many times in my head. Found you guilty, condemned you, I’ve argued with you and pleaded so hard that I’d cry in the night and . . . No more. It is what it is, and I am what I am. And what I am is a coward, a sad, vindictive heap of terror. I don’t deserve understanding. So I cut her loose. Killed it. Who needs someone giving it the full MI5 treatment, trying to drag your background out of you when all you want to do is kill the dark, not illuminate it. I don’t want light, not now. Afraid of what I’ll see perhaps, if someone holds the light up to my face; what might be operating now behind these eyes? Nah. Just prefer the shadows, me, where I can watch and wait and listen, pick up the tail-lines of stories until I can follow the scent back to the origin and then blow it all open for anyone to read about. I’ve got a good life here, things running nicely, all under control. I’m cool, it’s all fine. Yeah. It’s all fine.