Predestination

It’s a funny thing - death. People say that you are fully aware. The brain remains conscious for seven minutes before the oblivion engulfs you. For Angus, just like so many have speculated, his life replayed itself in a thousand different forms before his eyes. 

Suddenly he was a baby again, looking up into the soft eyes of a broken woman. She smiled and sang and rocked him in her arms. Warmth and safety seeped through his body like molten chocolate. Then the woman’s face morphed into the rough hewn, bearded image of his father. Now he was in the garden, behind a house he no longer recognised, taking his first stumbling steps towards his outstretched arms. He was laughing. Angus felt the alien feeling of pure blitheness shiver through him.

He was older now but no more than three. The memories now were all too familiar, he’d seen them all before. Screaming. Shouting. His mother collapsed. His father stood over her. The look in his raging eyes as he turned to him. A dark room. The familiar toss and roll from the back of a van. White lights. The smell of death. 

Then silence. Sadness. The only sounds came from the roaring chatter in the classroom at his schools. So many schools. But at home it was silent. Dark. Dangerous.

His teenage years flashed by just as they had before. Street to street. Door to door. Bus shelter to bus shelter. Thieving, looting, begging. He saw himself now: lying on a sofa, his head hung back, mouth drooling, his bloodshot eyes staring skywards and the needle still hanging from his arm. Images came and went. Sirens blaring and women moaning. A shot of pain reverberating from his knuckles to his core as his fist met the flesh of someone’s cheekbone. 

Then sleeping - cold, wet, bloody. Days of sleeping, tossing and turning, nightmares and flashbacks. Waking finally: sweaty, thirsty, barely alive. These years of torment ran like a film reel in his lack of consciousness. Nothing he could do but to watch himself torture his body and his mind. 

Then suddenly the misery ended. The end of the tunnel came rushing past and he burst out into bright and glorious sunshine. His eyes adjusted, his wilted body slowly lifted itself proudly again - the strength returned to his withered limbs. 

Angus indulged in the moment he first met Lucy. Her bright eyes and soft, black hair. He wished now he could bury his head in the gentle curve of her neck and breath in her delicious scent. It was so good to see her. To feel her warmth.

From then on his life contained her presence in every moment. It was bright and clear as he relived Italy, France, Turkey, Africa and beyond. Lucy by his side, looking up and smiling at him with her hazel eyes. They took each other all over the world exploring, sleeping beneath the stars and stealing from restaurants. His whole life became encompassed by her. Her excitement, her lust for life. She was his saving grace. She dragged him from the depths in the same way he had saved her from the darkness. They thrived and grew together and he fell in love with her more deeply than he had ever loved anyone before. But underneath it all a sadness lingered, an emptiness, an anger at his past. It sat in the shadows of his mind, invisible but tickling his happiness with dark fingertips, just to remind him. To bring back that guilt all over again.

Lucy stayed by his side as he moved into his first legal accommodation, when he got his first job at the appliance factory and his first pay-check. She was there when he came home tired and frazzled and she was there when he got his first big idea. She lay beside him as he worked late into the night, pressing herself against him for support. He stroked her around her ears the way she liked it until she surrendered into peaceful sleep - her beauty in tranquility washing him with love.

As the project got physical it required tools for welding and electrical supplies stolen from work. Burning himself, cutting himself. Cups of tea and half eaten sandwiches. All along Lucy moved about him. Not bothered; not phased. Watching him as he worked with loving interest. 

Angus would never forget the day he finished it. A dark, cold Sunday night. As he watched himself now, lifting it toward the light in his study, he felt that same tingle of excitement tremble down his spine. 

Finally. 

He saw it now in all its rustic glory. It was a tiny, round metal box with a small button in its centre. It was the thing that would change his life forever. He hugged Lucy tight and she gazed at him with pride. Her beautiful, soft face and the gentle sweep of her nose. He kissed her on the forehead. The system was ready. His equipment in place. The timer was set. He pressed the button. 

He was back again: Screaming. Shouting. His mother collapsed. His father stood over her. 

The man turned towards the small boy on the lawn, the glint of metal on his knuckles poised above his shoulder. The blood running down his mothers face. The bruises up and down his tiny arms. So many things unnoticed as a child. But the fury that boiled behind his father’s eyes made Angus shudder even now.

Before this man could touch his younger-self, Angus strode forward and grabbed his punching arm. 

The man cried out in shock. 

His passion dissolved into deep and uncontrollable fear. 

Who was this man but a reflection of himself? His future come to betray him.

Angus wished he could stop now. Wished someone would resuscitate him before he had to experience it all again. The smooth, rounded surface of the syringe. The ease with which it glided through the glossy skin of his neck. The glassiness that appeared in the man’s eyes. Fear. Guilt. Redemption. 

Angus awoke in his dark study. Everything as he had left it. But it was quieter, emptier, smellier. As he turned on the lights Angus realised, as he saw it all over again, that nothing would ever make up for his own mistake in all the calculations. 

Lucy lay on the floor, her legs splayed, he eyes lifeless. 

Numbness… Then everything shattered in his chest all at once. His world came crashing down around him and amongst the rubble he stroked her fur, sweeping his hand across her wasted body from her head to her tail - never to see it wag again. He pushed his face into the cold scruff of her neck and breathed her musty scent deep into his lungs. Then he cried. He sobbed and wailed and now, had he been capable of such a thing, he would have cried all over again. 

He relived every waking hour of heartbreak. Not even the comfort from his own mother could renew his lust for life. None of the millions of pounds he received, the donations he gave, the problems he solved, the parties he drank at could bring back the one thing that had saved him from the brink before. 

He slowly dissolved. His proud frame shrivelled back down into the debris it had come from once before. After everything he had saved. His beautiful mother with blood pumping through her soft features there to hold him on his long nights. But his obsession overthrew him. He felt all the tearing pain flood through him and remembered again and again why it wasn’t worth it. Boney hands almost guided the blade for him as the sickle appeared before his eyes. 

It’s a funny thing: death.