His Own Captive

Lately I’ve been drinking a lot. I’ve been told this by a number of people, as in the people I spend my time with. The fact that it’s gotten serious for them to notice shocks me a little bit, but that fear soon disappears. It’s not like I’m going to stop, after all. More than anything, sleeping while drunk gets rid of the dreams; not entirely, but at least it’s not every single time I fall asleep. Have you ever had the feeling that your own brain’s trying to torture you? I have. Why else would it force me to dream about Lucy every single night, or fantasise about her every single day, or keep thinking I see her in the corner of my eye, only to turn round and bleed from the inside when there’s nothing but empty air. My brain is trying to punish me. I think it’s trying to kill me.

Punishment. It can be cruel how things turn out. I’ve taken to cutting myself, which I never used to do, but it helps me to keep my brain in line. I once broke my arm by hitting it against the wall, full-speed. It snapped like a branch. It hurt so much, I was delirious. It was brilliant. I probably won’t do that again, though. After all, it still didn’t stop me thinking about Lucy. Even through the pain I could still see her orange curls. Once I half-dreamed, while I was in bed with a broken arm, that I slit my wrists and Lucy’s hair began to pour out of the wounds, all over the sheets, all over the floor. That shook me up. It didn’t actually happen, though. Of course not. But it definitely made me wonder; if I sliced up my arm, would Lucy’s hair curl out of it? Maybe someday I’ll find out.

When I go out at the weekends, after work, I can never actually have a good time. It’s an impossibility. Yeah, I smile and joke, but it’s all just for show. Usually I feel like I’m dying. I burst into sweats when we go somewhere where I think there’s a chance that I’ll see Lucy. Or her boyfriend. I’m screaming on the inside if I don’t keep myself drunk enough. Sometimes I get shitty with my friends. I don’t think they mind. They mind an awful lot more when I wander off, though, which I do sometimes when I just can’t keep it together. Most of the time I’m alright, though, like I said. My friends do the best they can, they help me to forget. They’re fun, all of them are. I’ve had the odd decent night. But every time I get back home, I lay on the ground and cry.

I didn’t treat her right, I’ll admit it. Lucy, I mean. I know I can be a seriously mean cunt at times. Not all the time, just sometimes. She saw it more than anyone else. She used to be the best person to deal with the weird parts of me, the bits I don’t show to anyone else. The insides of my head. She can deal with all that. Regret’s a funny thing; sometimes the regret runs so deep inside me that it doesn’t seem like a feeling at all, but it’s like this actual, physical weight, like I’ve filled my stomach full of rocks, or I’ve tied an anvil to my head. It’s vicious. I regret how I treated her, and all the things I did. I regret being the person I was. Memories keep floating in of me and her, when she was still a part of everything. These memories are so vivid, they’re almost happening. I feel like there must be something I can do to change things, act differently. But then I remember how much time has gone by. Things aren’t that simple anymore. Sometimes I stay awake, shaking with hate, and I have to punch myself in the face so that I can calm down.

It’d be easier to forget about her if I didn’t see her every night. In my dreams, I mean. Sometimes I dream that me and her are back together; sometimes I dream that we’re old and living together in the city somewhere and talking about our respective careers. A lot of the time I dream about her and her boyfriend – they’re kissing each other, and I’m there. Once I dreamed they were getting married. And I was there. It’s punishment for all the things I did, I suppose. But I think about her in the day, as well. If I’m not doing anything, my brain just does its own thing. It floats away like it’s weightless, anchored to the floor of my skull. One minute I’m sitting down, making a shopping list, watching the news; the next, I’m thinking about Lucy again, remembering that time we couldn’t get out of the hedge maze of that stately home and she gave me a blowjob down a dead end. Or I’m imagining what she’s doing now; if she ever got that scholarship, if she ever bought herself a three-legged cat.

Sometimes I think about her boyfriend. I saw him down at the greyhounds once and I cried the whole evening. I don’t know much about him. I just know that he’s unemployed and he loves coke. A lot. And he’s in a band. I bet she loves all three of those things about him. She loves him with all her heart. I like to make myself feel better by imagining situations where I get back at him in some way. It’s a petty thing to do, but it works. Sometimes I imagine that I pass him in the street and I manage to beat him to the ground and kick his head in, or that I get a pipe and smash up his car, if he even has a car. I also like to imagine that I burn his house down and listen to him scream for help from inside, or maybe I get to slowly cut his skin off and rub salt onto his red-raw underflesh. I’d never actually do that, though. I just like to think about it sometimes.

People keep telling me to move on and find someone else, fucking hell do they love to tell me that, which is why I’ve stopped mentioning Lucy to them anymore. I just pretend that it’s not eating me up inside, when of course it is. That’s something I’ve always been good at. Lucy used to get annoyed because she said she could never tell what I was thinking. She said it was ‘freaky’. I think she was joking, though. She always said overly hysterical things like that. She was a funny girl that way. But as I was saying, I did try my best to find somebody else, but finding somebody else isn’t as easy as people like to think it is. Lucy was a once-in-a-lifetime. All the girlfriends I’d had before her were just big, pale drips of nothing. And I’m not the sort of guy who can tear through girls like I’m rifling through a bookshelf. One time I met this girl who actually managed to pull my thoughts away from missing Lucy. She was fantastic. We even nearly kissed. But we didn’t kiss. I went home by myself. Later I came into work with a black eye, broken nose, and a busted hand, and I had to tell everybody that I got into a fight over the weekend.

Stephie tried to set me up with a girl from work, once. Some temp. It doesn’t matter what her name was, I can barely remember. I didn’t like her much at all. She wasn’t ugly or anything, I just didn’t like her. She was loud and obnoxious and self-assured. I hated that. She was nothing like Lucy; in fact she was the complete opposite. She wasn’t someone I wanted in my life at all. I fucked her anyway, though. I hoped it’d help me get some perspective. All my male friends told me I’d be over Lucy after I managed to get laid. I didn’t, though. I fucked her a few times after that, but one night I just lost it and shouted at her and told her to get lost. I broke my TV. I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Every little thing she did just aggravated me so much. It made me miss Lucy even more than if I’d been on my own. Things are still awkward between us, and Stephie never set me up with anyone again. That was a while ago, now, too. The loneliness stings, though. When I’m drunk it’s okay, but in the mornings, it really, really stings.

I tried to block Lucy on all social media once she’d gotten together with her boyfriend, but a couple of months ago, I eventually caved. I had to find out what she was up to. For so long I’d imagine all the things she was doing, all the fun she was having without me. When I pulled back the curtain and scrolled down her wall, all I could see were smiles. She’d let her boyfriend know about the amazing music that I’d shown her. She’d take a million pictures of the places they went, the things they’d do, the feelings they had for each other. I was always bored. Her friends made half-joking comments on her statuses about how little they saw of her since she and her boyfriend were always together. I was always alone. I spent hours going through her pictures. I’d check for new tweets every day, half-hoping for a passive-aggressive comment on how angry or upset she was feeling, but it never happened. All she could talk about was her boyfriend. I mean, she loved him. I ran a bath that night, probably to bleed myself in, but instead I just sat there. John and my landlord broke into the flat to find me days and days later, after I hadn’t showed up for work and didn’t answer any calls.

I rang up Ami and told her that I wanted to see Lucy. Ami told me how this wasn’t a good idea. I admitted that she was probably right, so instead I asked Ami what she thought I should do, seeing as all I did every minute of every day was think about Lucy. Always. She said I needed to stop thinking about it so much, and I needed to distract myself. She told me to get out of the house. So I took her words at face value, and when I wasn’t at work, I decided to take little trips around town, from afternoon to well into the evening. I tried to spend as little time in my house as possible, so that the walls didn’t shrink in on and me and Lucy wouldn’t keep appearing behind the counter while I watched TV. I walked around every stretch of the town – through the parks, through the woods, along the cobbled streets. It wasn’t riveting, but the walking kept my mind almost in line. I had a drink while I did it, of course. My problems didn’t disappear, but they didn’t feel so bad. Plus, by the time I got home, I was so drunk and stoned and exhausted that I couldn’t dream even if I wanted to.

A few weeks ago, the inevitable happened. I knew that Lucy and her boyfriend had moved to some house in the estate furthest from mine, but I decided to walk along there anyway, one cloudy day when there wasn’t any wind. I saw them both, leaving the supermarket, shopping in bags, arm in arm. It was like being dropped from a cliff. Part of me wanted to say hello to them, or maybe throw myself into traffic to get their attention. Instead, I ended up just following them. I don’t know why. Really, I don’t. But in three minutes I’d found out where they lived. I knew myself too well, so I noted the address down. Of course I did.

A long time passed before I actually did anything about this. Being miserable for so long makes the time disappear. I stopped going for my walks. Truthfully, before then, I’d almost become used to how much I thought about her. I kept replaying the same memories, the same fantasies, to the point where they nearly lost their power through repetition alone. She’d even stopped flooding her social media and her updates slowed down to a crawl. Things... became a little less intense. Maybe. Then I found out where she lived. One night after that, I dreamed about her again. I dreamed that I was dying, that there was a tumour in my gut or something like that, and I was trapped in this cellar. I screamed for someone to help me, before I died down there. Lucy and her boyfriend were upstairs – I didn’t see this, I just knew this. They were playing videogames and talking about going to Berlin in the summer, like me and her always said we would. I woke up covered in my own vomit. I sat and cried for an hour.

I spent the time I used to walk about the town walking up and down the street that Lucy and her boyfriend lived on. I’m not sure why, I just had to. I watched them come and go a few times, sometimes together, sometimes separately. After two days of watching them, I saw them both leave the tiny house, and my brain quickly took control. I don’t even remember jimmying the back door to let myself in. To me, I felt like I’d just materialised there. The place was a shithole, which tore me apart, since it was everything I wanted if me and Lucy were to ever move out ourselves. There were takeaway boxes, a chess set, stacks of boxset DVDs, perfunctory photos of the two of them together, beaming, Lucy looking radiant and far more beautiful than she appeared in my memories. I thought I was going to be sick again, so I just left. The next day I scoured the old sites I used to visit for a particular piece of software. Then the day after that, I went back. No one was home, so I decided to look around again. The bedroom was filled with tonnes of stuff. It looked like it was seriously ‘lived in’. I opened the wardrobe and checked out Lucy’s new clothes. She was looking so much better these days. Eventually a big wave of fear came over me and I realised that if they came back, things wouldn’t go so well. I hurried to install the software onto her laptop, which still had the same old password, and then I got out of there.

And that night, I switched on my laptop, configured the software, and I just sat and watched. It was a long while before they came back; I didn’t even know if Lucy was going to turn on her laptop, but eventually she did, and luckily her mic wasn’t disabled, and her webcam was functional. I just sat there with my fists clenched and the lights down, and listened to them chat while she checked Facebook and sat on the internet like she always did. I stared at Lucy’s face, bright and pixellated and gorgeous. I hadn’t heard Lucy’s voice in a long, long time. She looked and sounded almost like a different person. Her voice was smokier. She was doing a lot of the talking, which wasn’t like her. Her boyfriend was even quieter than she was. They ordered Chinese food, and watched the TV in their room. Her boyfriend may not have talked all that much, but he kept coming out with so many things that made her laugh. Just the occasional sentence. He was funnier than me. I’d always wondered about that, and now I knew.

At some point, she put the laptop down on the side, and they started having sex. When I realised what was happening as the kissing began to intensify, chills ran through me. Hot, spiteful, agonising chills. My kitchen echoed with the sound of wet, distorted kissing. I thought my organs were about to explode from my chest. I was shaking as I heard Lucy making the same old moans that I’d almost forgotten about, crackling through the laptop speakers. I was frozen. I wanted to watch. I bit into my entwined fingers as their moans got more violent, as a rhythmic pulsation sprung to life. He grunted a lot more than I did. She said a lot more things. My eyes spat tears as I watched Lucy gyrate into orgasm. They giggled afterwards. They glowed. I closed my laptop shortly after. I was split into pieces.

I went up to the hills. I hadn’t gone to work. I hadn’t slept. I was wasted. I was cloaked in something. It felt thick, like a huge coat, but it covered everything. I was wrapped in it. I sat with my hands in the dew and watched the sun come up from between the trees. The seagulls looked down at me with pity. After that was when the drinking really started to dominate me.