Diary of an Oxygen Thief (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) Read online

  “Let me put it another way. Your vagina is baggy…feels overused.”

  Now we were cooking. Her eyes widened. I saw how she tried to keep her outrage to herself. But it was too late, I was already in there. I could almost see out through her eyes. She couldn’t hide. Not from me. I was the undercover cop. I knew all her moves. I’d helped her create them. This was too easy.

  “Your tits sag.”

  This I delivered like a punch. I leaned back to better view the effect.

  “They’re too big and they hang too low.”

  This just in case there was any doubt. Shock can protect and soften the full velocity. Better to be sure you’ve hit the mark. Mind you, a little confusion is sometimes fun because it makes for wonderful expressions. Often she’ll smile at you after delivery of the despicable package, not yet aware of its contents.

  “To get a hard-on I have to think of some girl I’ve seen on the bus.”

  I waited for this to sink in. Brought my hand up to my chin as if thinking of the next line. Looked as sweet as I could. I’m good-looking when I’m enjoying myself, or so I’ve been told.

  “By the way, I had sex with another girl other than the one I told you about.”

  Now I was winning. So I smiled with sympathy.

  A winner doesn’t want to gloat. Just to win. She looked like someone else, a new person. There was nothing more for me to extract. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what else would come out. No matter how well chosen the words were, the voice couldn’t always be trusted to carry them. Clearing the throat, that was the dilemma. Clearing the throat without letting her know how this affected me.Why was I doing this? Never mind why, the thing is, it was happening.

  “Had enough?”

  No hesitation. Just one nod of her head. Down and up again. She must have sensed mercy in the air. She sensed wrong. All she’d done was let me know that I was having the desired effect. That she was sobbing inside.

  “Yes well even so...I’ve done much worse than just have sex with another girl. It’s very bad... Even by my standards. So bad in fact that I’m going to spare you. I might tell you later. I might not. But you would fall apart if I told you, and I’m not sure I want you doing that just yet.”

  She was so much in shock there was no point in continuing. Did I feel remorse? Not in the least. To further my torture, I inquired about her job and her blouse and her life.

  I was careful to utilize some of the facial expressions I had already immortalized so as to inflame her even more. And I seem to remember scrounging some money from her to buy more drinks.

  But wait, there’s something else. Here’s the weird bit. Because I had now given her good reason to take revenge on me, I offered her some options. The keys, as it were, to me. I think this is where I miscalculated.

  My logic went as follows: If someone hurts you then you automatically want revenge. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, you want revenge. I thought, if I hurt her enough she would want revenge. Therefore, I wouldn’t have to worry about never seeing her again. Because that is what I feared most. The fact that I was losing her. The question was how not to lose her for all time. I gave her some hints on how to successfully hurt me back.

  Love in disguise.

  Never let her know how much you love her or she’ll l you with it. Sadly, though, there is still a little truth in that for me even today. But never mind that, we’re talking, Jesus, was it ten years ago?

  Yes, I believe it was….

  “Call me every night for a few weeks at 8pm. and when I answer, don’t say anything. Make sure there is no music in the background. By the way, I always wanted to fuck your sister…I think she would have gone for it, too. I want you to remember these things I’m asking you to do. I know there’s some guy sniffing around you at work. I want you to go away with him for a weekend. Why not? You deserve it. Just go. Don’t give me any warning. I won’t even remember what I’m saying to you now. I’ll probably have a blackout…I’ll move on to brandy next. That always gives me blackouts. So you’ll do it? Good girl. Also, follow me around in your car. Maybe you’ll even change your car. You can use Paul as a messenger if you like. You want to be free, don’t you? Especially after tonight. Yeah, course you do. Well then, do these things or I’ll badger you forever. I’m serious. Maybe you’ll only do some of them. That’s okay and you may come up with some of your own ideas and that’s fine, too, but I want you to take revenge on me. I want you to hate me…I’m helping you hate me. I’m doing you a favour, setting you free and asking you to do the same for me.

  “Please?”

  I had delivered this monologue with as much sincerity as possible. I was in earnest. I wanted her to want to hurt me back. This would be the new US: She looked at me. Into me. Those beautiful eyes glazed over all shiny like little blue bruises. And yet she looked stronger than I’d ever seen her. Unattached. Single. Out of reach.

  My reach.

  It was done. Four and a half years. I had to make sure she would continue to know me. At the same time, I didn’t care. I needed something, anything to push me forward. Over the edge, if necessary. I wanted to blame her for what might happen. I wanted to mythologize her. She Who Would Avenge The One Who Dared Rebel.

  Romance has killed more people than Cancer. Ok...maybe not killed but dulled more lives. Removed more hope, sold more medication, caused more tears.

  Looking back, that’s what it was: me auditioning for Heathcliff in Hackney. I threw in a few more choice insults like…your father is an idiot, your brother is anal, you’re not clever enough to be my girlfriend because I’m a genius and I’m tired of pretending to be less clever than I actually am just so you can catch up…and headed off to the bar for brandy. As you can see, I did recall most of the details, but there could well have been more.

  For her sake, I hope not.

  That night, whilst trying to eat a kebab, I did fall off my big black bicycle somewhere around Victoria Park. I didn’t care if I got up off the tarmac. I was laughing and singing “Born Free” and somehow cycled back to her place later that same night. As usual, she’d left the door open for me.

  I remember thinking,

  “The bitch…she hasn’t taken me seriously.”

  But when I clawed roughly into bed beside her I could feel the vibrations as she cried herself to sleep. I remember her getting dressed the next morning. Writhing into matching white underwear. She was stunning as she stood in front of the mirror. The expression she wore while deciding if she liked how she looked contrasted sharply with what locked into place when she caught me staring at her. I might have been some homeless guy peeping from under those covers.

  She went away with that guy from her office. I wasn’t prepared for the pain of this. I felt how she must have felt when I hurt her.

  You might as well argue with the mirror as argue with each other. Afterall, aren’t we all really the same person?

  Anyway, I have this to say. After Pen left, someone did call me at one point every night at 8pm for about two weeks. That really freaked me out. I’d answer and…nothing. Whoever it was would then gently hang up. The “gently” scared me more than anything else. Passionless. This intrigue suited my paranoid delusions and my drinking had by now progressed from habit to full-time occupation. It was going to kill me and I welcomed the prospect.

  I attributed my misfortune to the guile and cunning of this mousy girl from Stratford-Upon-Avon called Penelope. And while I flattered myself that she’d seek revenge, I didn’t realize that leaving me to stew in my own paranoid juices was revenge enough. I’d do worse to me than she could ever dream of achieving. When I was nearly sandwiched to death between a car and a motorcyclist I was able to imagine she’d orchestrated the whole event. I suffered a crushed bicycle and a broken wrist. How delighted I was that she should go to such trouble in the name of romantic revenge against me.

  She really must love me afterall.

  I couldn’t piss because my left arm was unusable, and my right wa
s road-rashed. Bladder ablaze, both arms stuck out like I was begging for money from the other would-be patients in the emergency room. And I was smiling, because Penelope loved me enough to mastermind this attempt on what was laughingly referred to as my life. I fantasized that she would turn up in a nurse’s uniform any second and administer a long, slow luxurious hand-job…but only after she’d helped me take a long, slow luxurious piss.

  Later, I convinced myself that she had turned up at my shitty basement flat disguised as a prospective flat-mate. I refused to take this “applicant” seriously. When she asked where the toilet was, for instance, I resisted the urge to applaud. I thought it hilarious that she, having been in the flat hundreds of times, should ask me so convincingly anything about it. She knew more about it than I did since I was very often in blackout. But I wasn’t about to ruin her little sketch. I received each query with a congratulatory smile and answered tongue-in-cheek. Smiling too broadly and nodding knowingly, I showed the young woman out.

  She didn’t take the room.

  So there’s me. My baby’d left me for another guy, who had his own flat, a car and a coat. I was entering a world of pain…not all of it mine.

  Cue the country music.

  2

  So now I was ready to pass on my learning to the uninitiated. The unhurt. The innocents. With the girlfriend out of the way I’d be better able to dedicate myself. I was seriously pissed off and all I wanted was for others to feel this too.

  Especially girls. A girl had caused it so a girl would have to pay. I wanted to hurt. It was a whole new world to me. I’d never known it was possible to be hurt so much. I’d been beaten up lots of times and it was nothing like this.

  I hadn’t expected physical pain. A burning sensation in my chest as if a large smoldering boulder had somehow lodged there overnight. A kind of drawn-out slowly unfolding panic. The exact opposite of excitement. Accompanying this were shooting pains running downward along the back of my arms.What was this? Rejection? Was it really this tangible? All I could think about was that if I could be hurt like this then surely I could also cause it in others.This consoled me.

  I studied and stored away each new flinch of discomfort. I recorded what had happened and how it affected me. I called and asked her answering machine to hurt me. To be free, I needed to hate her. It was over but I couldn’t bear the fact that I still needed her. So I begged her to hurt me, which she did by refusing to. Meanwhile, I stumbled into London’s night in search of hearts to stab.

  A teacher from Ireland. Twenty-five-ish. A virgin. No, really. She said I had ”an enviable command of the English language.” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do to her. The answer came to me when I slipped into her bed after cooking my special boned chicken, the preparation of which scared even me because it involved so much tearing of flesh from bone. She was engaged to be married. I hated her for that. It emerged in conversation that being a virgin embarrassed her. She didn’t want her fiancé to find her still intact on their wedding night.

  I didn’t know where to start.

  Teach her some filthy tricks that would sow seeds of doubt in the mind of the groom? For instance, I’ve never thought much of a girl who swallows. Don’t get me wrong it feels fantastic and I’m aglow with gratitude at the time but only a slut would ever actually do something like that. Not the behaviour of a wife-to-be.

  Somehow it was obvious that I should leave her virginity intact. It became about him. How to hurt him through her. Anal sex? That would still leave her a virgin. Did she really want to lose her virginity or was she bluffing? After a huge bottle of wine, most of which I drank from the bottle, I was supposed to sleep on the couch.

  This I did until 4 when I awoke with a stiffy and slipped in beside her, finding only token resistance. She really did want to lose it. But I didn’t like the idea of me as sexual plumber. I wanted to be present on her wedding night. I wanted her body to remember mine the way I remembered Penelope’s. I began to lick her out. For two hours. When she became too sensitive I waited and started lapping again very gently.

  I looked up now and then to tell her how beautiful she was. I blew cool air on her. I stroked the insides of her thighs and tried to imagine I was in love with her, behaving accordingly. I pushed a finger in and could feel the stalactite of her hymen. I was careful not to break it. At one point, I had a finger either side. She raised her hips offering the pelvic cup to me. I sipped and drank noisily, satisfied that her wedding night would be the first of many nights of sexual frustration as she tried to communicate her sexual needs to hubbykins without indicating a lack of sexual prowess on his part. It provided an incentive to develop her very own “enviable command of the English language.”

  Next came Lizzie. She had her own flat. Beautiful hardwood floors and lovely high ceilings. She also had hairs on her arse. That was crime enough but crime number two? She really liked me.

  Soon take care of that.

  She was freshly jilted from a long-term relationship and was very delicate. I had two others on the go when we met for our first date. My nervousness made Lizzie more comfortable. She thought it was because I was unsure of her feelings for me.

  The truth was less endearing.

  I was an alcoholic who needed a drink.

  I ended up having sex with her on the kitchen floor in the middle of her making some bullshit vegetarian meal. On the dirty tiles as the pots boiled symbolically overhead. The windows steamed up. Her face. Looking up at me in disbelief, her chin buried under her pushed-up jumper and bra. Eyes wide. Childlike. After I left her there like that, I never saw her again. Later, she left a message on my machine saying I’d raped her.

  Emotionally speaking maybe I did rape her, but physically she was up for it. No question about it. She was loving it. I could see her already storing away the memories as I fucked her. Her face scanning up and down recording the images like a flesh covered camera, close-up of his face, pan down for a wide-shot of the action below…cut.

  Maybe there is a law after all. Of nature. Like gravity. An unwritten axiom that governs our emotional dealings. What you do comes back to you with twice the force, fuck it, three times the force. We are not punished for our sins we are punished by them.

  From the moment I met Jenny, I knew I was going to hurt her. It was just a matter of where and when. I suppose it was no fault of hers that she even looked a little like Pen. It was that fact that seemed to sanction my actions. After being out all night, I was reluctantly heading in the general direction of what I mockingly referred to as home, when I realized I needed more booze. There was never enough of the stuff. I even dreamt about it. One night I was drinking whiskey and even as it was going down my throat I was thinking, “I want a drink.” Tricky one.

  Anyway, one of the main obstacles to getting more booze was lack of money. And money ran out because I couldn’t always depend on getting more freelance art direction. I had no rent to speak of since I was ripping off the local council who paid my rent and electricity. All I had to do was go and sign on the dole once every two weeks.

  Parties were a good source, especially parties nearing some sort of end. The amateurs were either passed out on the floor or tucked up at home in their little beds.

  The music. The brightly lit window. I didn’t have to be Sherlock to figure out there was going to be a fridge full of booze. Everyone brought something to appear generous. Especially if the area was fairly well-to-do but that was a bit more difficult because I had to have my wits about me for the inevitably intricate verbal exchanges. I had to resist bursting into flames with the fury I felt towards these fuckers. I hated these people most of all. The ones who had their lives given to them, who, in my mind, never had to work, who didn’t appreciate what they had. As a teenager in Kilkenny I’d had to pick sugar beet in freezing cold fields, wearing only old socks as gloves. The beet would freeze in the furrows and we’d have to kick each one out of its frozen hard earthen socket before snagging the stalk with beet knives. The term �
��hard work” is relative.

  So I’d press the buzzer and say,

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  The door would open and I couldn’t help smiling as I took the stairs three at a time. If it wasn’t already open, the door soon would be. I never looked like a drunk, I just was a drunk. In I went. Hit the toilet first and either puked up to make room for new booze or just get the lay of the land. Then the fridge. Oh, happy white oblong. A miniature hospital in a bruised world.

  The clink of music as it opened. The glow from within. There. A full and as yet unopened bottle of cheap wine with some assorted cans of beer, stragglers from six-packs.

  Back to the living room with the wine and got it into a pint glass so that I wasn’t clutching a bottle that might be recognized by its owner.

  And there she was. Sitting on a couch all alone. Alone on a couch at 4am, at a party where only three people were left standing and I was one of them. Long legged and elegant and definitely out of place, she reminded me of a Vogue photo shoot. Beautiful girl in dingy surroundings. The rich well-read daughter of some English MP slumming it in Camberwell.

  Anyway, I vowed to fuck her up as soon as I plunked down beside her. Even in my very comatose state, I knew that asking her to dance, though not being able to get out of the couch, was endearing. Dancing with a pint of wine in one hand and a joint in the other was mischievous. Before either of us knew it, we were kissing.

  Two weeks later she’s throwing beer in my face and three hours after that I notice her car parked outside my shitty basement flat. I was drunk and wavering on my bicycle. She was in a Ford something or other. As soon as I turned the corner, the car started up and jolted ferociously forward.

  The vehicle resembled a mechanized insect that had had its legs plucked and was being poked awake for new tortures. I laughed loud enough for her to hear through the open window, which emitted cigarette smoke.

  I tried to behave like I was on a horse. She started the engine again and steered it angrily away. Angrily because I could hear gears being shoved around. What had caused this futile display of emotion? Mere words.