I’d just completed a triple-phase Task, that had lasted a
marathon 68-hours, where I’d hacked into five different people to complete it
all. Complex, twisting case and nothing like the initial briefing, and at the end
of it my mind was almost broken.
I awoke, or at least regained my composure, sitting in a
straight-backed chair in a bedroom in daylight, an upended suitcase next to me
with clothes strewn around the floor. I wasn’t too sure at first so I had to
check, and asked Angel to state my location.
+ Current
Location: Home: Registered address: Electoral Register 2014: 21 West...+
Stop, Angel, that’s enough, just knowing I’m home is
fine. Thank you.
I looked down at myself, slumped there, and rotated my
right hand, thumb moving away and little finger coming into view, and noted I
still had the standard issue Browning automatic pistol clenched in my right
hand. I wasn’t bothered about that, although there was a nagging doubt I should
have been. No, I was looking for something else and it was there, the faint
scar line on the edge of my right hand, my tell-tale first check that I’m back in
my own body, returned into my own carcass.
So – home and really home.
I then looked up and saw myself, my reflection in the
bedroom mirror. I wasn’t that surprised – 68 hours straight, no sleep and no
mental rest, and even if your physical form is fresh meat, you can still see
it, the drawn exhausted state is given away by the staring eyes. Well, I think
so – and that’s what I saw. Dishevelled clothes and unshaven, but the red eyes
looking like a long-haul airline traveller – that made me grimace at myself.
I caught sight of a flutter of movement at the right hand
edge of my vision and glanced over to see the slow billowing flow of the net curtain
caught in the breeze. I was fixated with its gracefulness, as if watching its
gentle folds would bring me some degree of inner peace. Instead my eyes were
summoned left, towards the doorway into the room. Half a face and a clenched
hand on the doorframe meant I was being watched. I could see one eye, streaming
tears, and a downturned mouth, a nightdress and a frail feminine figure,
part-hiding from me, very scared.
I didn’t say a word, just stood up, and stepped over the
debris on the floor, pocketing the pistol into it’s hidden place inside my long
coat with a well-practiced familiar ease. The young woman shied away from me,
stepping backwards across the landing as I approached the door frame.
Am I supposed to know you? Why didn’t Angel prompt me?
We stood facing each other on the landing, she crying and
shaking, I slightly bemused and very detached. She moved her right hand away
from her mouth and pawed at the air in front of me. Was I meant to take her
hand and comfort her? Or to hold her close to me, grasp her shoulders and hug
her? I had no idea – I just felt pity for her, but at the same time, a faint
creep of revulsion too.
She asked me what were we going to do. We? I’d just spent
three days preserving her lifestyle and her simple existence. We? I didn’t
recall her being there when I’d finally put a bullet in that madman’s forehead.
I suddenly felt tired, overwhelmed, unable to tell her – whoever she was – what
I wanted too. She whimpered at me again, what was I planning to do?
“Going out”, I said in one exhalation.
I turned and slowly descended the stairs, hearing her
slump to the carpet sobbing loudly. I went out through the front door, only
then putting the cigarette to my lips to light it. ‘Never smoke in the home’. I
don’t recollect where that come from, it was just a rule from someone.
Outside in the road, there were car-washers, promising
footballers, juvenile cyclists and idle gossips strewn throughout the
neighbourhood, who all stopped to watch me depart. That was my last time in
that neighbourhood, the last time any of them ever saw me. And I never saw that
lovely but vulnerable woman again.
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