a violent incident

Although not by character a violent person he nonetheless felt a necessary and prevalent urge to conduct acts of tremendous violence to the unusually-featured mouse-like female staff member who worked in a different department of the modern office complex in which he was employed, and this despite his own often noted absence of those character traits typically associated with acts of such a violent temperament. To himself he accepted that the profound sense of disturbance her more idiosyncratic mannerisms and gestures instilled in him – mannerisms and gestures that themselves pushed him towards this uncharacteristic act of violence – was entirely void of rationality, and yet this sense of disturbance remained regardless and even worsened with the passing days. In fact the absence of rationality was one of the most notable things about the incident and the driving force behind his later problems, and yet he persisted with his mesmeric fantasies pertaining to the evocation of ruthless retribution for acts at best described as personal eccentricities and that had little or no bearing upon the life of either he himself or any other third party external to the unusually-featured mouse-like female specimen who worked within another department in the same modern office complex at which he was employed. 

The incident he envisioned was one of indescribable violence, violence despite – or because of – which he attempted to describe within the defined parameters of the language at his disposal. Unpleasant as they were these graphic scenes, committed to paper in the privacy of his own meagre home, failed to convey the true intensity and permanence of the conceived incident, their elemental focus on the anatomical and its vivid deconstruction somehow undermining what he considered to be the transcendent or spiritual nature of the violent incident. 

The problem, he would explain as he’d impersonally pound her head down against the available surfaces afforded by the communal kitchenette area of the modern office complex in accurate two-handed thrusts, is that I am an abhorrent male, an unfair one, a jerk, a scumbag, a bitch, a cunter and shithead, bastard, motherfucker, a snob, a yob, a knob, a nobody, a silent seething shell, a bitter loathsome penis, a creep swallowed whole by his own recurring headaches and immersed as though drowning in his own judgement. Or he would hold her little head in his hands and beneath the soapy shallow water that soaked her Tupperware clean. The structure of her head would fail beneath him, the skull a-crumble, her two eyes looking upwards at his concentration and closing and opening and finally glazing as her crushed brain gave and slopped as jelly out of life and into some close alternative.  

While her features bore significant resemblances outside of the human species as described, her body and build were those of a child, a matter to which he took a grave and inexplicable offence. He felt his own body tighten at her methodical removal of stray flecks of yogurt from the food’s interior lid with the fine tip of a teaspoon as though engaged in complex and ancient calligraphical practice, noticed how she carefully washed clean and then placed the empty yogurt pots into a larger plastic bag containing further empty yogurt pots and into the main compartment of her vast backpack, he assumed in order to take the pots in question back to the home in which she resided, although for precisely what illicit or diabolical means she might be collating empty yogurt pot after empty yogurt pot he was unable – unwilling – to imagine. These directed traits were so conspicuously at odds with the generalised listlessness of the modern office complex – which although departmentally distinct nonetheless formed their shared workplace – that he found it almost impossible to believe that no other of the many employees had not only noticed but also been deeply disturbed by their recurring practice, and yet as he ate the sandwiches that he bought for his own lunch, day in, day out, he observed no such apparent disturbance on the perhaps two-score faces that soiled the at best rudimentary staff area of the office complex. Despite the pronounced oddity of her diminutive stature she appeared unnoticed by all but he. 

He peered through crisp bags and stray hairs as she gripped the cutlery – with which she ate dark coloured reheated pasta dishes from plastic food tubs – at the very end of the stainless steel handle parts with the very fingertips of her own two hands, so that the utensils dangled vertically beneath them, her fleshy lips manoeuvring the food apocalyptically around her mouth with spastic convulsions as though every mouthful were a moral dilemma (he had heard her apologising to the food prior to consumption on several separate occasions), as though to pacify it with the caresses of moving cutlery, to apologise for the inevitable but seconds before its occurrence, like a strange or quite shitty prophet. Her arms were elevated and angled at her sides like awkward wings to accommodate the process, shit-sharp elbows piercing the very air that surrounded her isolation. She worked the cutlery and the food beneath it with methodical jabs, pricks really, and short scrapes, engaged in some jittering Parkinsonian struggle with the evasive nature of the oiled penne that dashed around the surface of the Tupperware, moved first one way and then the other in vital if microscopic distances infuriating to watch, for which reason, of course, he couldn’t take his eyes from the dreadful sight; she manipulated it, the food, as though attempting resuscitation, to return the durum wheat (&c.) to some semblance of recognisable life, her rodent features twitching all the while with the anticipation of sustenance. How painful it was to witness the daily spectacle as he ardently did. He couldn’t bear to see anyone without the common decency to eat even a miserable pasta meal in the kind of solemn stillness the gravity of consumption deserved, and which he himself practiced dutifully during the passage of all three of a standard day’s meals; the performance of so unsavoury a mix of precision cutlery work (he was dreadful with a knife, worse with a spoon) and nervous habit were like a slap to the personal sense of ethics that demanded equal parts both speed and quiet woe in his own eating rituals. Silently she screamed of emptiness, of something far more – she stoked in him a long dead and mainly irrational hatred of the kind he had deemed obsolete or now hushed, sunk beneath the placidity of comparatively recent fatherhood; she left him brittle, jagged, her foibles snagging somewhere desperate, and although he knew how unfair this was, how wrong, the hatred swelled through him like explicit trauma.  

(It wasn’t strictly just her; point of fact, for reasons he preferred not to address, perhaps childhood suffering, he had a real thing about people – all people – eating, hated it to the point of sadistic reprisal: the chomping, the slurping, tongue to palate, the throbbing or sinking or contorting facial muscles, cheeks flapping like laundered linens with the consumptive effort, mouth hitting stride with a stroke-like sneer as it worked itself around its contents, the clicks of unintended tooth contact, the involuntary groans deep and guttural of satisfaction or pleasure or even urgency that accompanied the process, that moment of abandon that accompanies decent crisps, say, where all self-consciousness is completely surrendered to the food in question, and as the eyes roll and faces sink into retarded stupor and the mouth slackens miserably in receipt some kind of human essence is displayed, in all its grotesquery for however short a time. He hated to watch it and he hated to be watched. When he felt his own mouth off-centre, or large or small, or taking two greedy swallows where one would be sufficient, or felt his head perceptibly vibrating with the effort of a widely stretched load, he loathed himself for all of it, and ate with such speed as to make the whole vile if necessary practice as brief as possible).  

Even on the rare occasions she sat at table with others, a small troupe of departmentally unified geeks visibly, physically gnarled by their own insecurities, conversed with them even, her eyes remained locked in position unfalteringly forwards, glassy and distant and set very far from the interactions and weak comedic efforts of her associates, and though her lips did on occasion move the words were indecipherable, tripping as they did over great teeth and tongue and manner.  

Until relatively recently, which is to say until some few months earlier, he had suffered a long series of terrible nightmares that were all the more memorable because of their near-nightly recurrence. Whilst the main narrative of the nightmares would vary from night to night, the denouement was uniform across their entire breadth, which had lasted for many months in total. In this denouement he would watch in silence as friends and acquaintances were destroyed in an agonizing and painful manner by a severe explosion of what appeared to be the atomic type. He watched beyond vocalization as they pissed themselves in fear in that almost impossible split second of realization that precedes death, their trousers and skirts darkening in the crotch area or in lines down the leg, watched as faces melted from heads and bones and left but skulls in their place, watched skin blister in vast immediate welts, suppurating craters cooked aggressively, flesh boiling into liquid and viscous lipids bubbling in the intense heat of the blast, watched whole living bodies torn apart like decimated houses by the force of the explosion itself, fragments of bone and flesh and gore instead of bricks and mortar raining through the inferno and vaporised just as quickly. Like his thoughts his dreams embraced symbolism in only the most one-dimensional way, and in this sequence of dreams a number of houses or structures stood testament to the variety of significant memories he held dear, houses or structures that were destroyed before his eyes by the ferocity of the detonation, and as he watched them crumble, levelled, to the earth left forever barren around them he felt at once alone and so very empty, bereft of something more valuable than life or medical life, the most abominable sense of cessation. It was a feeling of genuine dread.  

Like the victims of the denouement of his recurring nightmare her face remained fixed in that rictus grin, as though she alone were the vessel of some remarkable new humour, and the mouse-like female afforded him recall of those dreadful dreams in appearance and feeling, and her presence in the staff area brought the horror of sleep into his waking life in such a way as to make both – i.e. sleep and not – unbearable. He felt violated by association, and his frankly poor grip on normalcy frayed with fantastical persecutions.  

Some Thursday or similar he approached her at work on her yogurt lid with the uppermost tip of a teaspoon, scraping remnants of product for even the merest of flavour until only foil was left visible, at work at the table against whose buffed surfaces she appeared minute, and without a word he snatched the lid from her childish very red mottled meatish hand and drew the flat of his tongue along the back of the lid, in effect lapping the remaining foodstuff efficiently with the kind of extended muscular propulsion the tongue afforded and at which it excels, her eyes large and glistening like aspic against her own gaunt bearing, rightly aghast at the invasion such intrusive oral intervention represented. He returned the lid to her now smeared with his own juices and retrieved his items from the far side of the staff area and returned to his department and desk for the afternoon’s work.  

The following day the mouse-like female was absent, her place at the table she ordinarily occupied marked only by a single yogurt lid smeared clean of food. He inspected the yogurt lid closely and considered the meaning of its presence and reached no conclusion. He ate his highly regular lunch in silent anger worsened by the absence of the mouse-like female, by which he felt affronted and – worse – guilty. He began to see her face upon the heads of others, colleagues, commuters, shoppers, in but short intervals the strobic speed of which felt synonymous with the threat of lunacy; the proportions of the face never altered irrespective of host and so appeared tiny, stamped within the gammon heft heads of the kind of large men from whom he instinctively recoiled in moments of forced proximity. When he kissed his little child and then his wife goodnight he saw the face for an instant, imprinted upon the head of his wife, and he pushed her away from him in disgust and they slept sombrely.  As he lay in the darkness he imagined the face on the pillow next to his and felt very queasy. In the morning before the alarm had rung he made love to his wife wordlessly as had become their habit since childbirth, with no reference made to his erratic behaviour of the previous night, forgotten as it was beneath the fundamental desperation of their physical urges. As he looked down at the occurring penetration and the face of his wife contorted slightly from intercourse he saw instead the face of the mouse-like female blinking and grinning back at him. He tried to pull away but his wife had drawn him very far into her and involuntarily he finished as he stared tearily and afraid at the rodent face beneath him. His wife heard him sobbing in the bathroom though he hadn’t realised he was doing so, but he ignored her hurt and her questions and left for work, and all of the faces he saw were the same face of the mouse-like female, and his growing tiredness was like a presence enveloping him and he felt weak and quite alone, and the windows of the bus in the pitiful morning light and the moments of shadow cast by passing structures were themselves as the large blinking eyes that had infected his dreams, crushing around him like an immense ocean of water until he felt as though his head would certainly implode or deflate in the pressure. The face was everywhere. Where once he had sought solace or harmless adulterous fantasy in the movement of human features he now found only her.  

The second day saw her continued absence in the workplace, in contrast to her facial ubiquity outside of it. His performance at work – assessed in the kind of numerical terms that meant little in the context of his output and associated expectation – had already begun to suffer, as he was a man who appreciated unbroken sleep and was lucky enough to acquire it even with a small infant; in his deprivations his hands seemed thicker and immobile as they slumped across the keyboard like meat, and his brain refused to engage in even the most basic motor functioning it required to carry him through his menial duties without comment. In the occasional glimpses he caught of his own reflection in the black screen background of his VDU the rodent face grinned in response, framed by the familiar curling of his own long hair. He was immersed in a sea of she both analogue and digital in form and he found it impossible to concentrate, felt moving sweat crawling his scalp like hungry insects, felt his bowels turning, felt a need for violence – an act real and animate – that only it could quell.  

In the staff area the empty table which he considered hers, despite her comparatively short tenure in the company, was littered in clean yogurt lids and only lids; there was not a pot in sight. He grabbed two fistfuls of the lids and scrunched them between his fingers and threw them to the floor, but still the table was blanketed in lids, so rich was its covering. He picked more and more lids in increasingly frenetic movements and could hear pockets of conversation at the surrounding tables turning to him and his conduct, their whispers amplified by the muted television set, could hear sniggering and condescension elsewhere, and he swept an arm across the table top and left the yogurt lids falling to the floor like the glaring snowflakes of commerce. They fell around his shoes in piles and he felt a hand on his shoulder; the site security personnel had accompanied his manager to the staff area and together they led him away from the yogurt lids and outside to the car park, both of their faces replaced with the face of the mouse-like female. He recalled muttering something about not feeling himself, with the alienation and distance of memory, as though it had been spoken weeks if not months earlier, and his manager agreed that he looked unwell and said she would drive him home, that he should take the rest of the day and perhaps week to allow himself to recover, that it – by which she meant parenthood – took its toll on us all. The car journey was merciful in its haste because he didn’t dare look at his manager; the facial surrogate was too convincing, the dimensions and proportions meticulously realigned in her ordinarily haggard physique. Likewise he didn’t dare enter his home, couldn’t bear to see his wife and daughter’s faces in absentia, replaced by the other. He wandered the quietest streets for many hours, finally sought sleep on a bench by the river in the former industrial district as the sun started to rise. He scooped a handful of tea-brown water from the river and washed his face and made his way to work.  

His colleagues were all surprised to see him and his arrival prompted equal measures of mirth and fear, as though involuntary phone calls to unrecognised numbers were inevitable, a heady mix that gave the office a strangely libertarian ambience. He felt the heft of their glares and their telephone receivers. He looked at no one and spoke little and trained himself to not see. Normalcy was a prerequisite until change might be instigated.  

Although the domestic limitations of his previous evening meant he had brought no lunch with him, when the lunch hour arrived he walked alone through the modern office complex to the staff area as he did every other day and saw her, the table populated not by myriad yogurt lids but by she herself, and by the single yogurt lid she had removed from the day’s single pot. With the spoon in the tips of her tiny fingers she took the food to her mouth and he felt both relief and disgust once more. There were numerous eyes upon him as he watched her eating but hers were not amongst them. He looked around the room at the mouse-like faces of the other staff, at their working jaws, their masticating lips, their pleasured blinks, at the falling strings of processed meat and salad bits and grated cheddar and dabbed pickles and mustards and stray crumbs on jumper fronts and dripping fruits, and he placed his bag onto one of the empty tables and approached the mouse-like female. He stood above her and she did not, would not look up. She stirred and spooned her yogurt and she would not look up. He drew his open hand back very far and swung it forwards and into the side of her face, and the crack of skin on skin was loud and hideous, and the yogurt spattered her face and his and his hand and hers like blood binding them, and she dropped the pot and finally looked at him, and the unbroken grin and the unfocussed eyes that had haunted him in their permanence were at once broken and focussed, and she stared with such confusion and hatred that he took a step back, and she was very small and seemed so very young and he thought of his daughter, and before him in her seat with her cheek reddened in long finger smears and dotted with dairy she began slowly to weep, then sobbed, and her great teeth chattered with it, her eyes rippled beneath themselves. The violence was not as he intended, was quick and ugly. The room altered about him, and as a physical presence he felt disdain materialised into the individual persons who formed the staff, united as they were in defence of the mouse-like innocent. Chair legs scraped along flooring in loud screams, their mutual standing urgent and final and somehow reflexive. The mouse-like female dropped her spoon from between her fingertips and placed her face into the palms of her two hands, which only served to worsen the spilt yogurt. He was sick and wanted to reach to her and hold her and apologise and clean the yogurt carefully from her features and make her see that things were or would be okay, but he moved not a muscle. He felt the breath of the geeks before their presence; they encircled him like snarling animals, their fear transformed into rage by the power of circumstance, some five, six, seven geeks unrecognisably alive, the Spaniard with the fat back, good tits, weird gait, slightly spastic face, inhuman laugh, the wizened but kid-young dork whom he’d heard speaking at length in defence of British culinary heritage and the significance of flavour, all of them. At once they began to push him, fourteen moist hands, and he made no attempt to resist and fell to the floor at their feet. One eye peered from the between the clasped fingers of the mouse-like female. The geeks set quickly to work on him, each with a stainless steel spoon gripped in the very tips of their fingers. Their lips moved but he heard no words. Their faces were hers. The curved ends of the spoons dug at his flesh. Two geeks delightedly sank their cutlery into the curve of his eyeballs and scooped them out easily, the pain incredible but also necessary. A second before the eyes went he saw the mouse-female; she smiled and had wiped the yogurt from her face. That smile. He felt his eyes like decorative appendages dangling from their orbits, caressing his cheeks, such a peculiar feeling, saw nothing at all but still he saw the face. The eyes but trifles, the face was within.  

Blind to all but it the spoons sank further, the geeks consumed.