I did it without a thought, but there was mercy in it, because I had planned to humiliate her, and to beat her senseless, just to make my point, but when it came to it I let her down easy, like the tyre on a bike, and there was little satisfaction to it.

I felt I had to redeem the situation somehow. I sat on the stair and I gazed at the front door. I gave myself up to the lap of the gods. If I’m going to be your executioner, I says to God and Christ Jayzus and all of his fucking angels, lined up, then show me the way. I’m going to sit here, I says to them, till her man comes home. And whichever one of us is meant to go, fucking go ahead and go. You make the call, I says to the angels. I’m abdicating responsibility. That’s what I says. Then I lit a fag and I sat there in the gloom. I must have been there two hour at least. Sitting on the stair. Every so often I would hear a sound from the bedroom. Arlene expiring, again, I says to myself. Hopefully she’s descending through every level of hell, I think to myself, even though I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been able to drag her through every last one of them myself. And then that poem comes into my head, that fucking poem of Tommy’s about the one-eyed yellow god, raining down, and I start reciting it under my breath.

A shadow appears in the glass of the front door. I stand up and get ready for the angels. Her man opens the door and walks in with his head down. He walks through to the kitchen without seeing me. I follow quickly behind him. I pick up a bottle of vodka from the drinks trolley and fuck him over the head with it. Then I kneel on his chest and I saw through his windpipe with what’s left. He never made a sound. I didn’t give him the chance to.

You’ve never seen so much blood. I went round the room like an artist, smearing bright-red blood all over the walls like your man what does the chaos paintings. Don’t ask me why I did that. Then I sat down and cracked open that bottle of Bushmills that had my name on it. The angels had made their call. They were on my side. For now.

*

Next day it was everywhere all over the papers. It gives you a hell of a strange feeling when you’re the only witness to something that everybody else is speculating about. You hold in your hands a great secret. You have the privilege of stepping behind the scenes and seeing how history is made. The great bloodied cogs, revealed, in their turning. And plus you get to add your own wee twist, your own gratuitous deformity, which is the closest a man can get to calling himself Christ Jayzus on this earth. Because you’re the answer to the question on everybody’s lips. Yet you dare not reveal yourself. Because you know you will be crucified for it.