What I seek—no, what I demand—is your understanding.
Otherwise my story will never touch your heart. It will remain a two-a-penny thriller that you might pick up at an airport to devour on the beach—only to discard, forgotten, by the time you get home. I will not allow my life to be reduced to pulp. No, sir.
If you are to understand what follows—if any of the incredible events I’m about to relate are to make any sense to you—I must explain some things about myself. Some things I felt I couldn’t reveal to you when we first met. Why not? I wanted you to get to know me a little better, I suppose. I hoped you might then excuse some of my less attractive traits.
But now, it has overtaken me—this desire to unburden myself. I couldn’t stop now, even if I wanted to. Like the Ancient Mariner, I need to get it off my chest.
I must warn you, what follows is, at times, hard to take. It’s certainly hard to write about. If you thought Lana’s murder was the climax of this sordid tale, you were sadly mistaken.
The real horror is yet to come.
* * *
Once again, I must turn back the clock. Not to the Soho street in London, this time—but much, much further.
I will tell you about Lana and me—about our friendship; strange and extraordinary thing that it was. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, to be frank. My relationship with Lana Farrar began a long time before we ever met.
It began when I was someone else.
2
It’s funny, whenever the novelist Christopher Isherwood would write about his younger self, it was always in the third person.
He would write about “him”—a kid named “Christopher.”
Why? Because, I think, it allowed him to access empathy for himself. It’s so much easier to feel empathy for other people, isn’t it? If you see a scared little boy on the street, bullied, shamed, disrespected by an abusive parent, you instantly feel sympathy for him.
But in the case of our own childhoods, it’s hard to see so clearly. Our perception is clouded by the need to comply, justify, and forgive. It takes an impartial outsider sometimes, like a skilled therapist, to help us see the truth—that as kids we were alone and afraid in a frightening place, and no one took any notice of our pain.
We couldn’t admit this to ourselves, back then. It was too scary—so we swept it under an enormous carpet, hoping it would go away. But it didn’t. It remained there, lingering forever, like nuclear waste.
High time, don’t you think, to lift up the rug and take a good look? Although, for safety’s sake, I shall borrow Christopher Isherwood’s technique.
What follows is the kid’s story—not mine.
* * *
The kid’s early years were not happy.
Having a child was no doubt an inconvenience to his parents. A failed experiment, never to be repeated. They provided him with food and shelter, but gave him precious little else—apart from occasional lessons in drunkenness and brutality.
Home was bad. School was worse. The kid wasn’t popular. He wasn’t sporty, or cool, or clever. He was shy and withdrawn, and lonely. The only classmates who spoke to him with any regularity were the bullies—a gang of four mean boys in his class. He nicknamed them the Neanderthals.
The Neanderthals would wait for the kid every morning by the school gates and empty his pockets, taking his lunch money, shoving him, tripping him up, and playing other pranks. They had a fondness for kicking footballs at his head—attempting to knock him over—while hurling insults at him, like weirdo and freak, or worse.
And when he was face down in the dirt, there was always, behind his back, a chorus of laughter. High-pitched children’s laughter. Jeering and malevolent.
I read somewhere that laughter is evil in origin—as it requires an object of ridicule, a butt, a fool. A bully is never the butt of his own jokes, is he?
The leader of the Neanderthals was a real joker, called Paul. He was popular, in that way mean kids can be. He was a wag, a prankster. He sat at the back of the class, mocking teachers and students alike.
Demonstrating a precocious grasp of psychological warfare, Paul decided that none of his classmates were allowed to speak to the kid. He was deemed a leper—too disgusting, too gross, too smelly, and too damn weird to be talked to, acknowledged, or touched. He must be avoided at any cost.
From then on, girls would delight in running off, in fits of excited giggles and screams, if the kid neared them on the playground. Boys would pull faces and make retching noises if they passed him on the stairs. Cruel notes, wishing him harm, were left in his desk for him to find. And always, behind his back, that high-pitched mocking laughter.