the gutter is something you and your mum can only aspire to. the court case was convenient 'cause she could draw an imaginary line between past and present and assuage her own responsibility in raising a fucking monster. "oh it's an illness," she would say, time and time again, "oh it's just an illness, he can't help it," but when on the forth, or fifth, or even sixteenth time you stamp someone's head into the floor, does it stop being an illness and become some sick, sinister, fucking gleeful act of perverse violence? i've never seen you show an ounce of remorse for what you did to that poor alby boy, whose face, i hear, is still mangled by the way. the callousness you possess is born straight out of your mother's heart so yeah i hate her. i hate everything about her. i hate how she let you get away with near murder but if i did anything minor, she was on me like a rash, turning my mother against me, squeezing the life out of me because i was her second-chance child, seeing as how she so royally fucked up the first. but i mean i don't expect her to be anything less than blinded by you. i mean, you hit her enough times to forget didn't you? and the worst part about all of this you are totally right. i would face forty years in prison to walk in your shoes for a day. an hour even. to feel like it must be like to be you. to look the way you look. to fuck the way you fuck. to talk the way you talk. hell, they can lock the door and throw away the key for all i care. because i would be happy to lie back on the bed and feel what it must feel like to be at the center of the universe for a change rather than some cunt standing in the queue outside. i hate everything about you and the giant shadow you cast which seems to turn with the sun whichever way i'm walking but that doesn't stop me wanting every bit of it. so yeah i'm bitter. i'm bitter that i'm alone. i'm bitter that i have no money. bitter than no matter how hard i try, how hard i work, sweat, and toil, i just can't find the click that's gonna make me happy. and i'm bitter that you went around apologizing to people and you didn't think about apologizing to me. and i'm bitter that i'm being blackmailed by some cunt. i'm bitter that i can't pay him off 'cause i'm broke or threaten him because i'm too pussy. and i'm bitter that i had the whole world at my fingertips. scholarship, oxford education, all of it. and i squandered it all thinking about you. i couldn't breathe. i couldn't do fuckall 'cause my mind was still reeling from that bastard court case. i couldn't get it out of my mind, your words, your screaming as you left, that you would make me ugly. i've seen you make people ugly, ruben, i know what it means! i lived in fear of you from that point on, just imagining al the things that you would do to me, that you might tell one of your prison mates about me and they would come looking for me when they got out. i woke up in the night once convinced that you'd bugged the flat, that you were monitoring my every move. i started to sleep in the garden. i wandered the streets pulling up phone wires. i went through about thirty pen lids, swallowing them down whole because i would chew on them when i wrote and throwing them away wasn't safe enough because you might fint them and use my dna to pin a murder on me. i ended up in a madhouse. i had to have an operation on my gut. why? because i was telling the truth! and then you appear out of nowhere with a six-figure salary, and a house, and a girl and a car. how dare you appear out of nowhere with a six-figure salary, and a house, and a girl and a car.
