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By Root 298 0

well liked nor disliked at his place of work – he minded his own business and people pretty much left to him to it. Once a month he would visit an ageing German prostitute called Olga in Shepherd Market. She had cracked skin like an old handbag and the face of an antique doll painted over her features. The crudely drawn lipstick and thick mascaraed lashes were almost a caricature in their clumsy representation of a sexuality long since faded. Miss Haversam as Miss Whiplash. But Tim liked her that way and had been visiting her for over twenty years. He would pay her one hundred pounds in cash for a specialised service that would leave him feeling demeaned but released from the inner demons that consumed him. Released at least for a while. At other times he used the internet to satisfy those desires that tormented him in his dreams and during every waking day. Desires that he kept under control but could not stop. He didn’t act on them as others did. He never had. Except once. And even then he hadn’t taken part.

He was not to blame.

He had never been to blame.

Tim was a victim. He knew that himself best of all. He knew that what was happening to him now was just as unfair as what had happened to him all those years ago. Just as unfair … and he was just as powerless to stop it happening now as he had been then.

As a child he had been one of the first children in the class to get measles, or mumps, or flu. Or whatever sickness was going. At nine years old on his first trip away from home at Scout camp he had not excelled at, nor taken great joy in, the kind of physical exertions that the other kids had revelled in. On the long rope slide, for example, he had fallen off two-thirds of the way down. It hadn’t been a long fall but he had landed in muddy ground and twisted his ankle slightly. In truth, he’d exaggerated the nature of the injury, as he was wont to do, and limped his way tearfully to the others, their taunts and laughter in no way unusual for one of Tim’s mishaps. He exaggerated his limp as an excuse not to have to go down the rope slide again and to provide a good reason not to go on the hill walk that was planned for later on that afternoon. If he had had his choice in the matter he would never have gone on the weekend in the first place. But his mother had insisted and pleas to his father, as ever, had fallen on deaf ears. In all things his mother had the final word and so Tim had gone to Scout camp like every nine-year-old boy should have been delighted to do. ‘And stop your moaning,’ his mother had said.

So he had stayed at the campsite while the other members of his troop had gone trekking in the woods and up the nearby hill.

A responsible adult had had to stay behind, of course, and keep an eye on him.

Except that the adult that stayed behind hadn’t been responsible. Hadn’t been responsible at all.

All these years later Tim still blamed him. And it wasn’t just the humiliation and degradation he had felt. It had hurt. Hurt more than anything he had ever experienced before. And now it was almost as if he had been training for this moment all his adult life.

And had failed.

Tears pricked in his eyes as he felt the cold metal entering him; he felt his flesh tearing and gasped with the relentless thrust of the weapon. His face was suffused with blood now, his eyes wide with the pain of it, with the fear of what was to come. With the injustice of it all. His hands were tied to the bedstead in front of his kneeling form. His mouth sealed with duct tape so the scream that was boiling in his lungs was contained. The tears running down his cheeks now every bit as useless as they’d been all those years ago.

Tears at the injustice of it all. He had never taken part after all. He had just watched and taken photos.

There was a raspy metallic sound, a loud click, and Tim’s heart hung in stasis. And then there was just a rainbow of colour for him. He didn’t see, or feel, or hear, or make excuses any more.

His neck and lower jaw made a pattern on the wall above his bedstead like a Rorschach ink blot painted by Hieronymus