I can’t. I want to be juvenile. I want to do something for children.
I pick up an empty wine bottle and hold it above my head.
There is the sound of loud machine-gun fire from the stage. I wait for it to finish.
They are murdering them.
I don’t lob the wine bottle at the ladder where it would shatter and reverberate to the back rows. I don’t smash the wine bottle against the sink and then dig the cut glass into my spare wrist.
Instead, I run out the fire door, and I follow the arrows for the car park’s one-way system, and I keep running until I’m halfway across the car park before throwing the bottle – it is Liebfraumilch, made in the city of Worms – dropping it really, on to the damp tarmac.
Indoctrination
On the way home through Singleton Park, I get involved in some crying.
I am still carrying the battered white flowers; the tips of the petals are ripped. I decide to walk along the path that me and Jordana used to walk with Fred, the martyred dog. But I walk the route in reverse – anti-clockwise – and as I pass each landmark I lay down one of the tatty white flowers. When I am very sad, I tend towards symbolism.
I imagine that she will be walking the same route – but clockwise – and also putting flowers down and our hands will meet as we both go to weave a flower into the railings by the entrance to the botanical gardens.
It’s bright and the park is busy: there are dog-walkers, a hexagon of people playing Frisbee in direct sunlight, a youngster on a bike looking pleased with himself although his stabilizers are doing the hard work.
I climb up into the rock garden and place a flower in the uncomfortable alcove where me and Jordana used to snog.
I lay a flower at the fork in the path where we once argued about which way was the more direct route. A golden retriever appears from around the bend and bumbles dumbly towards me. I wonder if the owner of the dog will be Jordana or, at the very least, a beautiful woman. I wait. Appearing from behind the wide, veined leaves of some tropical plant, the owner turns out to be a man. He is about fifty, with no hair. I have never seen him before. I feel strange to be standing still at the fork of a path, holding a handful of flowers.
The dog jogs towards me, sniffs at my penis, then at the flowers.
‘Tim, leave the gentleman be.’
I stay still. I am a gentleman. The dog is called Tim.
*
The gates to the botanical gardens are locked. The old man has gone home for a snooze. I thread a flower through one of the links in the chain-lock.
I put one flower on the doorstep of the Swiss cottage. It is a red wooden house with hanging baskets, two chimneys and a white picket fence.
Another dog appears – a Scottie – sniffing along the fence, checking for piss-scent. I think of how much easier it would be to accidentally-on-purpose bump into Jordana if, firstly, I could detect the smell of her piss and, secondly, she was prone to marking out territory. The Scottie’s owner is a woman – short, blonde hair, a light suntan.
I reach the dense umbrella-shaped tree with the tiny white flowers that we used to agree would be the ideal place to take cyanide capsules. I lay a flower to rest against the trunk. There is a bench that is positioned under the tree’s canopy. The plaque says:
DEDICATED TO THE LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP OF ARTHUR MOREY AND MAL BRACE.
We used to sit on this bench and joke about Arthur and Mal being homosexuals. And then we’d touch each other.
There was one time when we were hiding in the rock garden, setting fire to things, and we watched two men go behind a bush. At first, we thought it was cool because we were about to witness a real live drug deal. But then they didn’t come out for minutes and the sound they made was of men playing squash.
The only exit from our hiding place would have led us right past them, so we stayed in total silence until they finished. It took four minutes and thirty seconds. The first man came out from the bush and he had his hands in his pockets. The second man waited for about twenty seconds, then he walked out and he