1.

The broken rosary-beads lay fully extended on the bed-room carpet. They had been placed there in exactly the same position in which he’d left them (or found them), on the day the religion ended: fully extended, crucifix face up, the broken ends trailing outwards in opposite directions. Ian Brannen stood looking down at them. Last night - or, rather, the early of hours of today - had come back to him even before sudden consciousness had introduced him to this mornings booze induced head-ache. He had become immediately aware of his arms. He had cut them with a razor-blade whilst drunk, to bleed upon a poem written hours earlier. The cuts were slight, but there were several of them. Another re-enactment of events that had occurred just over one year ago.

He walked quickly into the living room of his small, first floor council flat and checked out the damage: one overturned ash-tray; one empty cider bottle (12% extra - free) and one poem covered in blood. Whilst drunk, he’d decided that the paper was too white for the words written on it.

       Now, in the cold light of day, he felt nothing. He’d known that this, or something like it, had been heading his way for a quite some time, and the only thing he allowed himself to think, as he picked up the paper and attempted to read the words written on it was, ‘Maybe it’s time I bought myself some multi-fuckin’-coloured paper.’ He was aware that he would have to keep his smart ‘work-shirt’ sleeves rolled down for quite some time now, and the thought of it pissed him off.

 

2.

Ian was thinking of Janet Davis, a girl from work, and he was attempting to avoid the issue. He looked out of the window. ‘The big question is,’ he thought, ‘Is sex worth a fuck?’

        He was glad the booze affected him by keeping sexual urges to a minimum; they had been sin during the religious years, and Ian hadn’t reacted to the ending of his beliefs by running gleefully in the opposite direction. Those years had, though, given him access to a world of extremely powerful erotic feelings, and now, whenever he laid off the booze for a couple of days, sexual feelings would hit him so hard and so fast that there was little time to feel guilt, unease, or pretty much anything else until the urge had been satiated. The thought of getting a woman into his life simply to deal with it seemed ridiculous, even though he knew that both religion and society seemed to think it a good idea. He remembered The Bible advising people to get married, just to deal with sexual feelings, and he knew that society encouraged its members to “have a good sex life,” and that it derided those who didn’t. And he sometimes wondered if people like himself were the reason.

       Ian had only ever had sex once, as a fourteen year old drunk on cider. The girl in question had turned up to see him the next day. She had turned up smiling. Ian had rejected her. Before the sexual encounter, she had pretty much been his best friend, although he hadn’t thought of her in those terms at the time. Her family had moved away from the area shortly after the incident, and he hadn’t seen her since.

        The look on her face, the light in her eyes, when she’d turned up that day, along with the look on her face after he’d rejected her, had travelled with him through the years. Ian thought about that light in her eyes more often than he wished to. He thought about it because he’d snuffed it out; and he thought about it because it had guided him through an abyss.

        It played on his mind now. He couldn’t deal with it; and he knew the memory had returned for exactly that reason. His mood was upbeat, but it wasn’t real. He’d thrown it out, automatically, to skim across the unavoidable melancholy, to bounce away from it as many times as it could before sinking. It wasn’t just the guilt that Ian couldn’t handle, it was the helplessness. Hers then and his now.

        The new feelings developing in him - the feelings developing around his idea of Janet Davis - were beyond anything he had previously known; far beyond friendship, although he and Janet had struck up a friendship of sorts, and far beyond sex. Ian was aware of spending years, from the ages of sixteen, to his current age, twenty-three , without any particular kind of human emotion. He had cried a lot, from feelings of acute loneliness, as he’d slipped into the madness proper at the age of sixteen, but since then, nothing.

        The only thing more terrifying to Ian than the past was the present. The silence of it. The voices, which had hissed blasphemies through-out his hours of prayer, now had nothing to say; the ‘negatives’, which had plagued his every attempt to do anything normally, and which had operated within a strict set of rituals, were still with him, but to a much lesser degree; but the abyss of horror, Ian’s ‘downer’ - an all-consuming and bottomless depression, which heightened and combined all of Ian’s other problems - had returned only once since the religion ended. Then there had been nothing; and the silence screamed.

        The stings to his arms as he ‘d cut them with the razor-blade, had made him feel a little better; had brought him back somehow. The little rituals, which he still had to perform, had become so normal to him, as long as he stuck to them, that they did nothing to cut into that sense of nothingness, or that terrible silence.

        He looked out of the window at the rolling hills, the eternal blue above and the white puffs of slowly drifting clouds. It is difficult to describe the effect that such a sight can have on a person who has lost the only belief system he has ever known, especially if that sight constitutes a large part of the problem. Ian had cut himself to stop the feeling that he was melting into it. This was the real reason for his new self mutilation, as with the first time he’d done it, very shortly after the religion ended. The cuts had been made for nothing more than the stings of pain and the sense of release they gave.

        He turned his head away from the window for a few seconds, then turned again and started staring out, into it all. He turned away once more. ‘It’s just the fuckin’ country-side, Ian,’ he told himself.

       Just over one year ago, Ian Brannen would have given a cold, threatening look, to anyone stupid enough to use such language in his presence. But Ian Brannen was going through changes, and he was highly aware of the fact.