More Fantasy in the City

Rage - The Director's Cut

You might have seen him on your High Street. 

The silent man with febrile eyes. Pacing between tawdry shop frontages, temples to avarice and vanity, hands thrust into the pockets of a North Face fake, incongruous black dress shoes badly paired with supermarket jeans, he seems little different from the many other irritable middle-aged men who conduct the same walk, rather than admire their wives' clothing choices in those self-same shops, using the time-honoured excuse that it was time for a quick smoke, vape pen replacing the sordid fag.

What stops you from making eye contact as he pauses next to you?  You are tempted to shrug your shoulders and mutter something lightly demeaning about the shopping habits of female relatives.   The look on this man's face stops your indiscretion.  It is not irritation that twists his mouth into a sneer.  It is more unsettling than that.   You stop, puzzled, a word on the tip of your tongue.  What is it that his face reminds you of?  It comes to you as he moves off and you turn, the realization making your heart beat just that little bit faster, as you follow his hunched shoulders with your eyes, hoping that you are wrong but intrigued enough to know more.  For a moment you want to challenge him, perhaps ask him if he is feeling well, but something within, some survival instinct, some psycho radar, tells you no.   Danger is painted on this man's face and deep down in your primeval instincts, you know it.  Again the right description eludes you for a moment but then with a sudden, chilling realisation you know the word you are looking for.

What was that word?

Rage.

***

It fuels him.  It twists him.  It occupies his every waking thought, whether at his work as an actuary, calculating the value of people's property and their lives, or at home, feverishly trolling yet another news service comments section, listening to the radio, or when stapling his neighbour's strangled cat to the inside of their wheelie bin lid at three in the morning.  He lives his life in a state of sustained, repressed fury, hating everyone and everything with a consuming intensity.

What lit the inferno inside him?  His work?   Was it the constant measurement of risk and equating human life to a monetary value that twisted him?  Unlikely, regardless of the soul destroying nature of his labours.

Or was it due to the modern cliché of an unhappy childhood, tormented by a martinet who went by the name of Mother?  Had the beatings Mother given his twelve year old self stoked the forge of hate, whilst he cried the catechism that she carved into his back and legs?

"The First Commandment, you shall have no other gods.  What does this mean, worm?"  she would snarl, cane in hand, as he wept at her feet, face buried in the deep pile of a stinking and filthy carpet. Snot trailed in strings across a sticky surface encrusted with mysterious stains, rat droppings and the diverse detritus of chaotic lives.

"We should fear, love, and trust in Mother above all things, even God," she had taught him to recite, whilst he learned to hate, knowing that he was alone in the world, at the mercy of this succubus who had spawned him.  Alone in the dark flat surrounded by flyblown saints, peeling dreams and the urgent, ominous skittering of vermin within the wainscoting.

"That's right, Worm, fear me. Love me.  Trust no-one but me."

And then she would kiss him.  He knew it was wrong. He knew the kiss the bitch gave him was not the kiss a mother should.  Disgust filled him, not love.  The fires of resentment burnt deep, erasing any capability of empathy.  Why should others have love when he had Mother?  Why should others have anything when he lived in shit?