If The Devil Was Real, I Was It And So Was He.

There was nothing that stone-arse couldn't get hold of. 

And faster than Amazon on speed. His descriptions of things were about as lucid as a Tory promise and you knew never to ask how he came by his stock.

You'd order the pink one's and you'd get black ones. You'd ask for half a bag and it would be just short. But somehow people just trusted him.

I shouldn't have fallen in love with him, but I did. 

He seemed to accidentally slip into these less than desirable situations and flip them round to work for him with a mixture of charm, intelligence and a refusal to come off worse. I imagine he'd been doing that his whole life. 

When he looked at you, you felt like he was staring deep into your soul from a warm place of love and compassion. While screwing you over with his eyes. 

I always wondered how things would have turned out if he had accidentally slipped into the world of business, or politics. He was certainly smart enough to. But this was his world. He had created every single aspect of it and he was never going to give that up. 

He trusted me. I was playing a game. I had done my job. But I didn't want to take him down. 

If death is when your soul leaves your physical body, I had died years ago. 

Sexism doesn't exist when you're trained to kill. You can wear the prettiest dress, play the most fragrant of roles and the only thing people say to you is "yes, ma'am".

I can't remember how I got that job. I wanted to help, I think. 

There was always something in me that could take a lot more pressure than others. I could hold a silent space in my mind. I saw everything and said nothing. I knew how things would end up playing out, who the good guys were and who the bad guys were too. Knowing the characters that slid in-between, teetering around waiting to be pushed from one side to the other because they loved pantomime and lacked self-control became instinctual. This middle ground was where the real work was done.

"Don't kill him", I was instructed.

I didn't. He killed me. 

We had both slipped into a new world. A delicate dance between lies and truth. If the devil was real, I was it, and so was he. I remember our first date. We went out shooting tin cans in an old lock up. We were both too good to be doing that. It was child's play.

We kissed. I shouldn't have kissed him. He lent me his jacket and of course, when he went to the bathroom I pulled out the hand scrawled notes with addresses and names and numbers and committed them to my photographic memory. The best in my division, apparently. It wasn't his writing. My mind went into that deep space of silence where I computed what was really going on. Then we danced in the darkness and kissed some more. 

"How do you know where I live?" I asked him as he pulled up early for our next date outside my house. We were supposed to meet down the road where snooker lights hang above the bar and they have white label gin specials every Tuesday. I've chased terrorists down into cut-off alleys and felt less jumpy. I was to become well-acquainted with this feeling.

"I know everything", he said. This was both softly romantic, and deeply disturbing. What did he actually know? Surely I had more on him? He didn't know I was renting the apartment under a false name, for now at least. But I trusted he knew it all on some soul level and on some soul level that was OK with him.  

Was this surveillance or did I set this up? As time went on the lines had become indistinguishable and it seemed to be more of an experiment into his character than catching him out for some pre-determined crime. As he moved gently and sweetly around the room masking his intent I realised that he was as much like me as I was like him. This was a bigger game now. The people had changed, the risks were higher and the ending of the story, whatever that was going to be was likely to be fatal. Constantly reminding myself that we were on different sides was how I got through it. But my heart was telling me otherwise.

Some people's lives are divinely entwined. They criss and the cross and they twirl. They dance ad infinitum. We had a gravitational pull between us that could hold planets and stars in perfect balance. And yet, we both knew that we would never really reach out and touch one another's hand. Questioning this all had become tiresome, so I just accepted it. The biggest secret I ever hid was heartbreaking and at the same time sweetly ironic. We kept on running. It would always be that way. But I loved him.

As the gun went off, time seemed to stop. I plunged into an alternate reality where my mind was playing out all of the possible endings at hyper speed. But I knew it was too late. Fate had this planned all along. 

I'll never forget the way he looked at me as he died. There was a sadness in his eyes that this game had come to an end. He knew what I had done. I could have stopped it. But stopping it would have created something much worse. The sadness in his eyes touched me so deep in my soul that I knew it would become forever part of me. And that was OK. I was to bury this deep where no-one could find it. I was to move on. I was to once more get back to work. But I had changed. 

I run those events through my mind every second of every day. Sitting on this rock, all alone I feel both empty and full. My life was a desolate void before I met him. And now I am both nothing and everything. 

If the devil was real, I was it, and so was he.