Mr. Composure

Chapter Two

" I saw the flowers running along her leg.  For some reason I’d expected them to have wilted along with the rest of her.  They weren’t.  They were still bright and fresh, in complete contrast to the woman whose skin they decorated."

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Twelve months can fly by.  Twelve months can feel as if Time is running away from you, a huge grin beaming as it looks back over its shoulder and cries: “Catch me if you can!”

You’d try to run after it, grasping arms reaching out, but it would be too fast, too evasive.  In the end you’d have to resign yourself to the simple fact that Time had escaped you and the year was over.

Twelve months can also seem like an eternity.  Instead of sprinting off into the distance, Time decides to play hide and seek, sneaking in the shadows, giggling as you hunt about aimlessly, knowing you’ll eventually give up and accept Time is too slippery and tomorrow may as well be a year away.

And you do.  Either way, you do.  Time waits for no man, my Dad used to say.  Whatever you did, it would go at its own speed and be as fast or as painfully slow as it saw fit.  Time had its own agenda and you could be pretty sure you weren’t even in the ‘Any Other Business’ section.

When you’re waiting for something, twelve months is a very long time.  When you’re waiting for the one chance to seek retribution for your parents’ death, twelve months is an infinite loop of day and night you think will never end.

I saw a film, once.  Groundhog Day.  Twelve months, when you want to kill someone, can feel like that.  Except I couldn’t play the piano or carve ice sculptures.  I did, however, feel as if every waking morning was a replica of the previous day’s.  The same dawn chorus of mocking birdsong.  The same early shiver as the heat of the sunrise struggled to permeate through my clothes and flesh and into my bones to warm me up from the inside out.  The same pangs of hunger as I tried to remember the last time I had eaten.

I wasn’t the only one.  I wasn’t the only person to have been cast aside by the aftershocks of the Purge and be left wandering the streets as the country strained to rebuild all that had been burned out, knocked down and blown up.

It was almost shocking to realise just how many people just wanted to see a big fire or witness an explosion.  Perhaps the spark of delinquency which flickered inside most honest to goodness people, and remained locked away in a cell guarded by Conscience, didn’t need that much to fan it into a roaring inferno.

Insurance companies had collapsed under the weight of a million claims and folk had been left to face the reconstruction of their homes and companies alone.

As such, a great many couldn’t face it.  Over the course of the following year, a great many had to turn their face away and become part of the growing swarm of the homeless.  So called Cardboard Communities sprang up in fields and wastelands, areas left unattended by those who could no longer maintain them.  Communities alike in one, unassuming way.  They had little left apart from the clothes on their backs and each other.

And, still, the Purge was seen to be a success.

In a way, I suppose it was.  People in the communities had nothing left to steal.  Killers had murdered those they wanted to and those they just felt like slaughtering because they could.  Later, a baby boom would come from the number of rapes committed, which would further drain an already exhausted government.  They had, I supposed, got it out of their system.  The number of arrests for anything from petty theft to the Big M had reduced dramatically.