View or add comments on this story
Sentimentality makes us weak. That conclusion I arrived at while still a young
boy and I suppose it was a contributing factor in my voluntary moral decline. I
saw sentimentality as leading to a number of society’s problems, including love
between incompatible people, obesity, the decline of our Empire and bad pop
music.
Without sentimentality, everything is permitted - or at least every thought is
permitted. A non-sentimentalist such as myself never reproaches himself for
suddenly deciding that he feels absolutely no respect for one of his closest
friends or relatives. The best we can do is skulk around, wide-eyed and with
gritted teeth, using every last drop of energy we possess to try and keep our
disgusting thoughts internalised and hide the fact that we feel nothing except
resentment, derision and the numerous complexes that accompany a belief in our
own superiority as an organism.
This is fine, most of the time; no-one gets hurt, they attribute our scathing
looks to introversion or social retardation. The problems arise not from
considering other people’s actions as sentimental, but from reproaching your own
thoughts as being sentimental. My own experiences are a useful testament with
which to illustrate my hypothesis; after sixteen years of holding silent
contempt for my parents and my lifestlye I came to believe that my own
toleration was weak nostalgia.
I needed a change. A drastic, exciting change. At my age, this could only stem
from a single action that would propel me from sentimental ennui into a totally
new scenario of freedom and individuality.
To go back to a tabula rasa I needed to completely erase my past history.
Very few other aspects of my upbringing or personality contributed to my
sudden desire to indulge in parricide. Besides, to dwell too much on my motives
implies a certain degree of determinism and, I feel, cheapens things. I guess a
lack of sentimentality on my part made my parents seem like fairly irrelevant
people; which, I suppose, they were anyway in the grand scheme of things,
compared to important absolute truths like cogito ergo sum or the Will to
Power. My father, Frank, was a first-generation Irish-Catholic immigrant who
spent his formative years hurling stones at British Army tanks in Creggan before
being dragged over to the mainland by his earnest mother. Since making the
largest single achievement of his life, an economics O-Level, he casually
drifted between various low-profit business opportunities. His last ever
venture was selling disposable cigarette lighters from a box that hung around
his scrawny neck. I heard his '15 for a pound' offer was the best this deal this
County has seen for over six years, bringing him in over £60 profit, but it may
have been hyperbole. As for my mother, Tracey, she is best described as a
low-grade civil servant with an attitude problem, a predisposition towards
gluttony and a tedious outlook on life, the kind of woman who lacked an opinion
on anything deeper than the fundamentals of her own name and age. However, what
I will say in her credit is that she inherited a very impressive collection of
Penguin Classic books from old uncle John, a lecturer at St. Martin’s, which
provided some source of entertainment and enlightenment throughout my
adolescence.
The only time I ever felt any love for these two strangers was as I stood
above them watching death make its presence felt through their irrational
twitching. The sweet smell of my father’s involuntary bowel release filled my
nostrils. Shame I wouldn’t be around for the grand finale; the odour of
corruption and the danse macabre of rigor mortis. Still, this was a moment of
meditation, a veritable Nirvana of murderous ecstasy where I was the supreme
shaman who had the power over life and death. I was entranced for a couple of
minutes by the process whereby the flowing of blood began to transform the
colour of my mother’s pretty hair from blonde to a dark maroon. Slowly I averted
my gaze to meet my poor father’s startled eyes, wide as lamps. He seemed caught
in an emotional crossfire between fear, anger and remorse; a cold omega point of
transcendence which he could never leave for I had imprinted my existence
indefinitely into his now inactive brain.
The moment of contemplation couldn’t last. I shook my head rapidly, put the
gun down and, coming to my senses, began to laugh nervously. 'The past was
yours, but the future’s mine...' I offered as an explanation to the deceased.
This may all sound slightly exaggerated, but I think I deserve the right to be
poetic considering I had the courage to destroy the two people supposedly
dearest to me and thereby change the entire direction of my life. As you can
see, the actual reasons for committing an act so steeped in significance and
drama are overshadowed by its own immensity; for this reason I will proceed
forwards in due haste and begin to describe how I used the moment to start from
scratch with a blank slate, limited for the time being more by finitude than
facticity.
I was well prepared, having packed a bag and being already dressed in my
emergency fugitive gear, which made me look like a cross between a skinhead
punk, a hobo and an SAS sniper. I won’t go through my inventory in much detail
so as to avoid making this too reminiscent of an Enid Blyton adventure story,
but it included extra bullets for my dad’s illegal pistol (his own refusal to
comply with national gun laws ironically paved the way for his demise; did this
make me some kind of moral vigilante?), some health food, water, a book each by
Nietzsche and Rimbaud, a Discman and some CD’s. Of possibly even more importance
was a tin containing a quarter of hash and a well-packed bag of speed, just in
case any traditional chase scenarios should happen to occur. After planting an
ironic kiss on the forehead of each parent, my final act of sentimentality
before embarking upon a future untainted by emotion, I left, not bothering to
lock the door.
I’m sure the average person my age who found themselves in a predicament
whereby the law would soon be chasing them on account of making themselves a
homeless orphan would probably get on a bus or train to the nearest city,
adopting a new lifestyle of smack addiction and prostitution and winding up
happily deceased with their dirty secrets locked away forever within their own
minds. But no, I was really more the naturalist type, so with a duffel bag on my
back and the sun in my squinting but contented eyes I set off hiking into the
great English countryside, planning to live as a lawless rebel who stole from
farmers to provide for himself while drifting from place to place.
For a while I was satisfied and self-sufficient and lived a kind of
puritanical, monkish existence. Whenever I felt tired, I took a dab of speed.
Whenever I felt sentimental or remorseful, I stopped and read for a few minutes.
I was cleared of all thoughts and lived according to my whims.
The countryside of Lancashire is as dirty and soiled as it is splendorous and
refreshing. It’s basic structure is that it is made up of a series of valleys,
each one seeming from a great height like a huge atomic crater in which life-forms
have built small mill-towns right on top of the nuclear fallout. While
outside of the towns there is a substantial amount of natural flora and fauna,
it is hardly utopian in its appearance. The rivers are fast-flowing yet dirtied
by pollution, the trees are tall yet their bark is rotten and their trunks are
bent, and the animals are all either sheep or cows being reared for the sole
purpose of filling a few fat, omnivorous stomachs. Add to this the fact that
everywhere is fenced off as farmland and you begin to feel dismayed with your
fellow-man and eager to kill a few more of them to avenge Mother Earth, the only
womb you never experience leaving unless you work as an astronaut.
It was in this varied landscape that I spent my time as a fugitive. After
spending the first night sleeping in a hedgerow next to a canal, I managed to
find myself a ruined stone house left over from a forgotten age, which had only
a partial roof and walls, no flooring except overgrown grass and which was
decorated only by a disgusting cow skeleton stinking away in the corner. My new
home was situated on the top of a gently sloping grass hill, which gave me a
view of the town where I had spent my life cultivating my misanthropy, as well
as a few other nearby settlements and the circle of surrounding hills. In a
couple of square miles I could see factories, church steeples, rows of houses
and some incongruous mosque minarets.
Before long, the beauty of my new life began to dissipate. I used up all my
food, dope and speed in four days of indulgence and had eventually become too
paranoid to move away from the derelict building. My only company had been the
rotting cow, the familiar books and music that was beginning to make my eardrums
weary. My perception of myself as an embodiment of mental and physical strength
and independence was beginning to appear flawed. I was starting to come down
from the high of the drugs and of the kill and didn’t know what to do next.
My solution to restlessness had always been to walk and so I reluctantly said
goodbye to my deceased bovine friend and starting trekking over the top of the
hill into the next valley.
I stumbled upon a rambler’s path and followed it through the next valley, which
took roughly three hours. It took me through sparse woodlands and across stream
bridges and eventually I came to a large looking farm that reeked of noxious
gases and manure. In my pocket I could feel the iciness of my late father’s
pistol beckoning me to pamper myself with merciless slaughter one more time, to
see if it still gave a buzz. Nothing else was entertaining me anymore,
especially not drugs or the environment. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, what I was
hoping wouldn’t happen was happening; I had been acting according to reasoning
rather than primitive instinct, and I felt this was undermining my success as a
fugitive and general übermensch. I took a deep breath, hoping to suck some kind
of bitter resolve out of the foul air around me, and strode towards the farm
with clenched teeth.
The door opened not long after I rapped upon it, and the bearded old man in
Wellington boots looked startled even before I drew my gun. I don’t think I need
to describe the death process of someone so unimportant to me, let’s just say it
was instantaneous and generally less interesting than I was hoping.
Desensitisation often leads us youngsters to desire more interesting gore from
each kill, whether in films or in reality. In that case, I probably should have
aimed for the groin rather than the forehead, but you can’t change the past,
unfortunately.
After stepping over him and into the delightfully quaint living room I
discovered why he had been surprised to see me. My face was on television, the
BBC 6 O’Clock news to be precise. I couldn’t hear what was being said, the words
of the presenter became blurred as though I was underwater as I fell to my
knees. What I did hear clearly though was ‘Little bastard!’ from behind me and
the thudding sound of a cricket bat slamming against my head as I began
spiralling into a warm black void.
So, a vengeful, insipid farmer’s wife brought my life as a daring, lawless
fugitive to a halt. Some killer I was. Still, when I mentioned my life changing
after the monumental act of killing my parents I was right. Maybe I wasn’t going
to live as a bandit but I had still forged a new existence for myself as a
prisoner of the law. They ran loads of tests on me while I awaited trial and had
some difficulty working out whether I was schizophrenic or sociopathic. This was
the worst thing that could have happened - they were trying to alleviate
responsibility from me and put it down to deterministic causality within my own
psyche! Personally, I don’t believe that either medical science or psychology
are sufficiently verifiable to be able to judge the significance and motives of
a person’s actions in accordance with their ‘mental state’, but I wasn’t really
in a position where I could call the shots. Besides, the more I protested my
sanity the more they became convinced that I had a problem. After a lot of
messing around, instead of prison I was sent here, to a white-walled retreat for
the criminally insane under-21’s, out in the beautiful rolling hills of inland
Devon.
Do I have any regrets? None that haunt me, but to even consider having regrets
I guess must have some subconscious feeling that I didn’t act appropriately. Was
what I did acceptable? It is impossible to say, for morality is not a science.
The only thing I miss about my old life is humour. I used to be able to laugh at
everything for each act was equal to another and therefore absurd, but ever
since I pulled the trigger things changed and my existence became too serious
and urgent. Perhaps it is better to life safely in the knowledge that at any
moment you have the power to totally change your life than to act upon that
knowledge and find yourself in a situation that may be uncomfortable and
restrict your potential for future action. As Nietzsche said, ‘it is the thought
of suicide that gets us through many a dark night’. If I hadn’t gone through
with that one monumental act, I would have been free to spend the rest of my
life acting rather than sitting here contemplating the value of actions.
But to hell with it... sentimentality makes us weak, right?
View or add comments on this story
Back to top
Back to list of stories
Home