I still remember her name- the first girl I cheated on Eva with (after Francesca). She was called Dani. I remember where I met her- she was one of the teachers at work- new to me, seeing as she'd arrived at the school while I'd been away for three months. I remember what she looked like- she was of Jewish descent. Long, always straight black hair. A young face, youthful, with ice-white teeth, and a sophisticated and educated look about her, especially whenever she wore her glasses. I remember what she was like- she was shy with me whenever we'd chat......but that night in the club, about 15 minutes after I'd arrived...
"Hey!", she bounced up to me, smiling broadly, with her two other friends Erica and Kaitlyn following reluctantly in-toe. The two who she lived with, ate with, spent her whole waking hours with, from what I could tell...
"Hey... Dani!", I said, touching her shoulder, giving her a broad smile. She smiled back at me, and I remember thinking, as I looking into those enticing coffee-brown eyes of hers, how convenient it would be for me to be single right then...
Erica took me aside a few minutes later. Erica was pretty- a tomboy of sorts, into football, drinking and the wild life that the city offered... like me. She'd spent happy times in Seville, Spain, and reminisced about her year there to anyone who would listen. She was blunt, and to the point, which suited her worldly and well-traveled business style. I remember her telling me about some of the wild stories that she'd had having spent a year in Seville... and the better I got to know her, the more I believed them to be true...
"Dani likes you...", she said, to the point. The music was already deafeningly loud...
"Well...", I thought I chose my words carefully, so as to appear ignorant and therefore slip out of what I sensed was coming... "I like her, too! She's cool...". Apparently, I failed.
"She wants to sleep with you, man". Erica. So blunt.
I blushed, I think. Then I laughed, and hoped that Erica would laugh along with me, therefore proving it was a joke. She didn't laugh. Instead, she gave me a "Whatchyadoin?" look, and over the ever blasting sounds of dance music that filled the club non-stop, she shouted into my ear "Do you want HER?"
"Uh-oh...", I thought, as I looked past Erica's shoulder, at Dani standing with her back to me, talking to Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn was tall, blonde, and the fantasy of many of the locals. She was statuesque and voluptuous- with a smile for everyone, and a confident personality to match her impressive figure. They were both laughing- I could tell from Kaitlyn's face, and from Dani's body language- slightly erratic, but still fully relaxed, as she detailed the comical parts of the story she was yelling into Kaitlyn's ear over the music. Suddenly, she looked over her shoulder, directly at me, watching her... I felt myself blushing again, but I didn't look away. Instead, I smiled back, a full-teeth smile, and raised my drink to her. I was pleased to see her smile grow as she looked back at me, and then she turned back to Kaitlyn, who was grinning down at her, and occasionally glancing my way...
Erica was still waiting for an answer in front of me, as Dani and Kaitlyn began laughing about their shared joke together over her shoulder. Erica hadn't stopped looking at me...
I looked directly into her eyes, and then leaned in to shout into her ear:
"OF COURSE I'd want her!"
---
As Dani and I danced, I remember thinking, hoping, that Eva wouldn't come to the club that night. As she moved her hips in her well-fitted cocktail dress against me, and took my hand seductively, and placed it around her waist, allowing me to lean my chin on her shoulder, I scanned the room, imagining how I would explain it to Eva if she appeared at me from the crowd...
"Or, what if her cousin is here? She could be on the phone right now, texting her and telling her what she'd seen me doing..."...
Dani turned to face me. Staying close to me, she stroked my face looking for the right moment to lean in and kiss me... As she did, I moved my head away slightly, leaning back and inch, so as make it impossible for her lips to reach. "It has", I thought to myself, "the advantage of making me look like I'm hard to please". I defy you to find a more ridiculous man than me.
"I'm not...", she started to say to me...
"What?", I asked into her ear, still keeping an eye on the rest of the ever-more crowded room, increasingly paranoid of being spotted and yet more relaxed at being hidden with the increase of sweating, drinking, squeezing and grinding bodies in the club...
"I'm not going to... annoy anyone... by doing this... am I?"
I didn't panic at that moment, mainly because I'd been drinking. That alcohol-fuelled bravado, that ability to banish all thoughts of morality and its consequences saw me overcome a number of morally ambiguous moments in my life. It should be mentioned though that, when those moments ended, my attempts to restore peace were always pathetically inadequate...
"She knows...", I thought to myself... but I didn't panic. "She knows... or at least, she suspects". Thinking back at her, looking up at me with her imploring eyes as she swayed slightly to the pounding music, I can see now that THAT was my opportunity to repent my sins, to hold my hands up, to apologise, to do the right thing...
But, as previously stated- when your nature is evil, and when you're a slave to your nature, doing the right thing is so very difficult.
I kissed her, and she leaned into it, holding the back of my head... and as the music pumped around us, and the crowd jumped and danced and sang, we danced and kissed, and I felt my feet step onto a path that would become so familiar to me...
---
I confessed to Eva the next day. I sat her down on her bed, and I probably scared her quite a lot with my reluctance to get the words out...
"What are you DOING?", a voice inside me said, as we walked together through the hallway of her house, Eva in front of me asking me how my night was, in that bubbly way she was so natural in affecting. "Just DON'T TELL HER. Nobody has to know...!". I didn't answer that voice. While Eva prepared tea, I ignored it.
"Listen, I need to tell you something..."... I said in the kitchen, and took her hand as I led her to the bedroom. She was smiling, but her smile faded as I indicated for her to sit on her bed. We were alone in the house, on that warm Saturday morning. The sun was a brilliant white in a perfect blue sky, and it streamed through her open window, illuminating the whole wooden interior with energetic sunlight...
"What is it?", she asked timidly, sensing more and more that this wasn't a surprise that was going to please her. As the seconds passed, she prepared herself for the worst, sat on her bed, trying to look casual, but her face betraying her internal fear.
All that morning, I had been convincing myself that telling her the truth was the right thing to do. It had to be right. I had always been told that honesty was the best policy- "Tell the truth, and shame the devil". I would confess- I would own up. I would be forgiven, it would be forgotten. She would move on, I would behave better. This was the plan. I believed that that was what had to happen, naturally. I wanted to get the painful bit over with, so that we could get on with the reconciliation part. This was how I thought, when I was 22. This was how I believed human hearts and minds, spirits and souls worked back then...
With a sigh of regret, I looked directly into her chocolaty brown eyes, and I just said it, hoping for the best:
"Last night, at the club, I kissed another girl..."
It's a testament to the type of relationships I'd had previously that I thought I could predict what her reaction would be. One time, Carla had told me fairly casually that she'd made-out with a guy in a club while she was waiting for me to arrive one night. I had been held up by my inability to find a taxi in the rain, and she'd confessed to me later that night that she'd been chatting to this man in the club, that she'd liked him (an emotion which was apparently spurred on by the fact that she missed me...), and they'd kissed. And I honestly hadn't felt betrayed or even disappointed in her. I hadn't been angry or upset. I'd just let it go. And so, when I told Eva about my similar antics, I was conditioned into a naive idea that these things just happened in relationships...
But Eva wasn't reacting like I'd reacted to Carla's confession, and this confused me. She wasn't looking at me. She wasn't coming close to me, and telling me that it was OK, and taking my hand and kissing me, like I had done with Carla. She was just sat on her bed, slouched slightly at the weight of the news, and as those awful moments passed, it slowly dawned on me that my words, the truth, had really hurt her. WAS really hurting her, right then. Come out of nowhere, on that beautiful Saturday morning, as she was planning on how to spend her day... I realized that I had done that. That my thoughts, and then my words, and finally my actions had conspired together selfishly, relentlessly, to execute that pain that she was suffering in that moment. And I reasoned that, the fact that I had to witness it, was a fitting punishment- a more fitting punishment than I deserved...
"You JUST kissed?", she asked, after a long pause of unbearable tension between us with a demanding tone, not to be messed around with or made light of.
I responded with the truth: "Yes". It was the truth... THAT time. I had been too drunk to properly take it any further, and no doubt Dani had sensed this. Although I couldn't recall most of the rest of the night, I knew we hadn't slept together.
Eva sighed, but didn't cry. I waited for her to react.
"I'm sorry..."..., I said- not really pleading, and maybe that was the problem. It didn't sound authentic enough, and she gave a sarcastic and pain-filled laugh, without even looking at me.
I watched her staring mournfully into the middle distance, afraid at what I was witnessing, willing her to just smile and say it didn't matter... wanting her to shrug it off, like I had done a year previously with Carla... expecting her to be fine with it in just a few minutes... I waited, and I wished it to be so.
But she continued just sitting there, looking melancholy into the corner. How ignorant I was then, as to what a precious and fragile thing a woman's love, her trust, is. How carelessly I handled it, unaware of it's true value. How recklessly I carried it, that priceless cargo of Eva's love. How little thought I gave to its true importance, to its significance. Her love, her trust, her confidence in me, was a heart made of fine, thin and perilously fragile glass. She'd given it to me, selflessly, out of pure affection for me. She'd trusted it in my hands, believing that I'd protect it, look after it, treasure it, put it in pride of place in my life. Instead, I'd put it down in unsafe places. I'd tossed it in my hand as I walked. I'd misplaced it, dropped it, let it get chipped, slung it in my bag with my other things... It's not that I had intentionally gone out of my way to destroy it... but my attitude towards it was hugely inappropriate, disrespectful and cold.
"I'm so sorry..."... I said, and meant. I really was. I was stupid to ever think that it wasn't that big of a deal. It was callous of me to believe that Eva was numb to the effects of her emotions. In that moment, as she couldn't even bring her eyes to look at me, as I watched tears of frustration build up on the lower lid of her eyes, I realised that I'd acted selfishly, and I saw that my expectation for her to react differently to how she was right then, right there in that well-lit bedroom, was an extension of that. It was selfishness. It was ignorance- an inability and unwillingness to imagine that my girlfriend expected me to act in certain ways, to resist temptations... to resist them for her sake."You have to agree never, NEVER, to speak to Dani again..."... Eva placed conditions in front of me, as a means of appeasement. I accepted them, despite the difficulty of having to work every day with Dani...
If only we had both known in that moment that the darkness within me negotiated with nobody. This wasn't the end of the matter. In reality, it had only just begun...
---
"You're better off here", my captor had told me as he left me in my cell the last time. He had been standing in the doorway, his hand on the handle, as he was about to leave.
I'd looked back at him from below my furrowed eyebrows, in the gloom at the other side of my cell. He paused, to see if I had anything to answer... and as soon as I looked away, he took it as a sign of resignation, and slammed the door shut. A few more seconds as the door's locks were clinked shut, and then the familiar sound of his footsteps, which had an undertone of triumph about them, slowly faded from my ears... and there was only silence.
I felt sick. I felt lonelier on that night than I'd ever felt in the years preceding it. Before, there had been hope. There had been a chance of rescue. Now, with my inability to leave this cell even if I were given the chance... hope had gone.
---
"GET IN!", Tom shouted through gritted teeth, grinning. He was holding the homeless man by the hair with his left hand, and had opened the giant blue lid of the wheelie bin with his right hand. The rest of the crowd, still laughing and jostling each other at what they were witnessing, arrived and quickly formed a semi-circle around the two figures. I had to jog to keep up with them, but was still one of the last to arrive... maybe I had wanted to be, I don't know. The rain was light, and the air had grown cold, with the occasional gust of wind exacerbating the chilly feeling. It was the most depressing reason to do any kind of exercise ever. Jogging had always been an activity I'd excelled in and enjoyed. But on that short jog to witness this public humiliation, as I approached that lecherous and blood-seeking gang from behind, I couldn't help but feel like it would be tainted for me forever...
Precious had been just behind me, and as I slowed down, she pushed her way past me, her phone in hand, and started searching and trying to find a large enough gap in the wall of men with their backs to us to be able to squeeze into and film the action in the centre...
I could only make out parts of Tom and the homeless man in the middle of the semi-circle- flashes of their respective anatomy. An arm here... and gone. Two legs there... gone. Occasionally Tom's grinning, sly and laughing face emerged from behind the blockade of heads... at times, I could see the homeless man's buckled legs, his head down, and his hands on Tom's trying to at least relieve the pain of his grip... All the time, I was being jostled and pushed slightly, as the angry and threatening men around me jerked and pushed and fought with their body weight for more room to see, or to punch and kick at their victim in the middle of the semi-circle...
"DO IT, TOM! BATTER HIM!"
Cackling laughing from all around me, and I felt sick.
Suddenly, with a push from his knuckles onto the top of his head, Tom released the homeless man, and for the first time in what seemed forever (but in reality, was only a couple of minutes), the homeless man stumbled back a couple of steps, and then stood up straight, his hands covering his painful skull. His eyes were scrunched closed, a side-effect of the pain he was experiencing... Tom said something loudly to the crowd- I can't remember what it was, but it sent them into jeers, laughing and wild shrieks and howling. Some of the bigger men standing behind the homeless man kicked at the back of his legs, directly behind his knees, to try to make him collapse. He tried to move away from them, but was aware that any further forward would send him straight at Tom... Still holding on to his skull, he looked afraid into the crowd around him, and I looked away so that he wouldn't catch my eye...
He had nowhere to go.
"Put him in, Tom!", I heard Precious's squeaky voice from the other side of the semi-circle, slightly drowned by the jeers of the crowd. The crowd didn't react, but kept its jeering, shouting, joking, mocking at a steady pace, as the homeless man stood afraid in the circle, aware that he was trapped.
Tom was now stood at the far end of the small semi-circle, with his arms folded. Two or three of his friends were stood behind him, whispering into his ears excitedly, as to what torture he should inflict on the homeless man, there, helpless to resist... Tom stood, grinning with joy at the ideas, his eyes never moving from the homeless man. After less than 5 seconds of deliberation, I could see from his face that he'd made his mind up... As he stepped forwards, back into the circle, his friends behind him shouted after him...
"GET HIM, MAN! JUST GET HIM!"
...and watched, grinning and excited at about what they were about to witness...
Tom walked quickly, aggressively- a pace set by his adrenaline- towards the homeless man, who backed away from him...
"This is going to be bad...", I remember thinking, as I watched Tom's fists clench into those tight, muscular and bony balls that he was so used to forming. I looked at his face, and watched it transform more and more into the teeth-gritted, nose contracting snarl that he always adopted when he was about to hit someone...
...The homeless man cowered back into the crowd, who pushed and kicked him, forcing him back into the path of the approaching Tom. Looking up at him, he could see Tom's left hand placed near his face, his fingertips merely grazing his face to take aim. Suddenly, his whole left hand retracted, along with his whole left arm and shoulder, and his right hand came flying forwards from right behind his shoulder. A smooth, straight, calculated line- not the punch of a brawler, the punch of a professional. Before the homeless man could react to the retraction of the left hand, Tom's right knuckles had firmly struck his left cheekbone, and were now pushing his head back with the follow through...
I winced as I watched, and looked down as I heard a great cheer from the crowd all around me...
The homeless man stumbled back slightly, and covered his face with his vertical forearms. He naturally stepped backwards, clearly dazed and hurt by the impact of the punch... towards the crowd behind him, but was pushed forwards, back towards Tom, who was preparing to punch him a second time...
This time, he performed the same punch- calculated with the left hand, and executed with the right- slightly above the homeless man's left ear, a part which was unprotected for just a second. The crowd cheered and laughed again, and the homeless man somehow remained on his feet. He let out a cry of pain from under his forearms, and continued to try desperately to move away from Tom, his attacker... Tom, spurred on and shaking with the adrenaline, took on a boxers stance, to give the crowd more of a show, and as the homeless man stumbled away from him, he followed him. Left, left, RIGHT- the right landed on the lower part of the homeless man's jaw, almost on his windpipe. The crowd jumped and cheered. It shouted and kicked out, punched out, at the homeless man who was constantly forced into their proximity. Disorientated, the homeless man stumbled back, blocking his view slightly with the forearms that he had raised to protect him... towards Tom. Tom actually had to take a step back quickly, in order to have the correct range for the next powerful shot he had lined up. Seeing Tom's shoes on the floor directly in front of him, catching them with his eye on his desperate search for escape, the homeless man stopped. Slowly, shaking, quivering... he raised his eyes to look up... and received a left to the centre of his nose, and a right to the left of his nose, as he moved to try to escape the second punch...
I had moved round the outside of the crowd. Having been constantly blocked by mountainous bodies, and spotting bigger gaps on the other side of the crowd, I would go over to them hurriedly, round the outside of the shouting semi-circle... only to find that the gaps had disappeared by the time I got there. It was a strange sensation. After all, I didn't want to watch. I looked away often as it was happening... so why did I care that my view was often blocked?
... The homeless man was sprawled on his back by the time I found a decent enough size gap to observe from, his hands open and his palms facing up. Tom stood over him confidently, before he knelt down on one knee. His eyes wide with delight, anger and hatred all at once, his teeth still clenched and his breathing quick from the excitement, he grabbed the collar of the homeless man's shirt, just below his beard... raised his right fist, and slammed his knuckles into the man's mouth. The homeless man's head was forced, jolted back, and he whacked it on the pavement behind him. Before he could even shout out, Tom had raised his fist again, and, keeping his collar under control with his left hand, slammed it into his eye-socket. The homeless man's nose was bleeding, and his mouth was bleeding too... The crowd screamed its support at each hit. 4 hits. 5...
By the time Tom got up maybe 20 seconds later, panting slightly, his eyes fixed on the figure on the floor, and the crowd was exchanging stories with eachother, laughing...
"Did you SEE THAT?!"
"I got it on film! Look at this...!"
... the homeless man's blood was covering the paving stones behind his head. He was panting steadily, his face lightly painted in blood, his nose still pouring, his eyes bruised and closed.
"Put him IN, TOM!!!", I heard Precious scream to my horror, knowing that it was more than likely that Tom would obey whatever cruel request she made, and those around her joined in...
"IN THE BIN! IN THE BIN!"
Tom smiled, cruelly, and obeying the crowd's demands, bent down and picked up the homeless man by his collar. Leaving the splats of blood on those cold, grey paving stones to be disturbed by the raindrops, he walked over to the open bin with his cargo, and about 4 people from the crowd came forwards to assist. The homeless man was weak, limp, completely at their mercy. He followed Tom out of compulsion- he was led like a prisoner who has resigned himself to the mercy of his captors...
The bin's lid was already open, and I could imagine the now damp rubbish that lay within that container...
"PUT HIM IN! I'LL FILM IT!", laughed Precious, her pretty face looking at her phone camera screen, a little way off to my left...
The four of them lifted him up, and before I could clearly see how they did it, they were empty handed, their hands almost above their heads, as the homeless man presumably lay completely defeated on his back in the stinking trash within the container. If he was conscious, then he'd see the silhouetted faces, some wearing baseball caps and hoods, of his tormentors- the men outside of the bin, shouting down at him in the darkness...
"TAKE THAT, YOU MUG!"
"YOU GOT BATTERED, MATE!"
...some of them spitting on him... one of them running up from behind the others, and pouring half a bottle of coke onto him, inside that giant bin, to wild and slightly outraged laughs, cackles and hoots from the others...
I hadn't done anything... and now, it was all over. And I'd watched it all. I'd been a witness. I'd been part of the story of this incident. As I stood there, feeling a sense of filthiness all over me, like just being here with these people was making me dirty, I felt it appropriate that the rain from above would drip down my hair, down my forehead onto my eyebrows, in front of my eyes, down my nose, off the edge... onto my clothes, to be soaked up by the ever darkening material... but no amount of rain could wash away the guilt I was feeling in a place deep inside myself, where rain couldn't touch it.
As the crowd dispersed, their cackling and zealous recollection of what they'd seen enraged me. The rain on all of us was merciless now, pouring down in sheaths, causing people to run for cover. Precious, still smiling, screamed and covered her head as she ran, her phone still in her hand... I, on the other hand, just let the rain fall on me. I wanted to be rained on. I wanted the discomfort of being soaked. Maybe it would alleviate some of my burning guilt and self hatred at my cowardice. I looked around at the small groups of the crowd, sheltered in little packs under darkened shop doorways and trees, still laughing and joking with each other.
I looked back at the bin, not really knowing what I would do next. Would I go and help him? "Unlikely", I thought to myself, "that a coward like you would show valour and honour now, under these circumstances"... Would I find shelter? "No. Stay where you are. It's what you deserve..."...
At that moment, I saw the homeless man emerge from behind the blue plastic wall, the rain beating down on him just like it was beating down on me. His hair was already wet, and was causing the blood on his face to trickle onto his chin, and drip off. I could see, through the heavy raindrops and the disturbance they were making to the air between us, that he was humiliated, amazed at the cruelty that he'd been subjected to by the world. He stood there, too weak to lift himself out, and so let the drips from his nose slide down his lips and into his beard. He stood there, in that giant bin, exhausted, probably in a lot of pain, but still too filled with anxiety and at the humiliation he'd just suffered to acknowledge it. The rain continued to fall on him, and his hair dripped...
One of the men in the doorway shouted something at him, and it was immediately followed by wild laughter, over-exaggerated laughs which were aimed to further the man's embarrassment. A half-empty can was thrown from behind me and, although it fell short of the homeless man, it hit the side of the wheelie bin with an almighty thud, spraying a large splash of lemonade upwards, and causing the homeless man to wince back in fear from the noise it had made on impact. The group behind me laughed and cackled maniacally...
I eventually decided that I should find shelter, too... And as I turned to walk away, stunned and numb, I could have sworn the homeless man was watching me leave...
