“She unfriended me.”
“What?!?” Kim’s exclamation rang off the walls and bounced around in my aching head. She might well be surprised. Nina was, after all, her friend, too, and there had been no public announcemement yet from Nina’s side.
“So to answer your question, no, I didn’t know she had taken up floorball.”
“Chris, honey.” Kim changed seats so that the small, round cafeteria table no longer separated us and put a comforting arm around me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for you.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “Well, you know. It got a bit, well. Weird.”
“How long were you together?”
“Ten years. And the first two or three were--…”
“A fairy tale,” Kim interrupted me, smiled, and immediately looked like she regretted it.
“Yeah.” I smiled weakly. “A princess and her ogre.”
Kim nudged me in playful reproach and giggled. “Now is ‘ogre’ a nice way to characterise anyone? Even after you fall out of love with them?” When I declined to be baited into banter she subsided. “Sure, I know she’s a bit kooky, but was it really that bad?”
I vented a dark chuckle. “The last years were like a horror story, of the It was a dark and stormy night variety: boring and dreadful at the same time. In the beginning, we used to go out with friends almost every week. We talked about having children. We took trips. All that was gone by Year 7. She hardly ever went out and made me feel bad if I left the house. She said the most horrible things about other people’s children, and I’m so glad we never got around to having our own. And she was always at the computer. First thing in the morning she’d plump her fat arse down in front of the screen and drink coffee that I made, checking her e-mails and updating her Facebook status and being too busy to kiss me goodbye. When I came home from work she was still there in the same nightdress, and if it hadn’t been for the mess in the kitchen, I wouldn’t have known if she had even stirred during the day.
“But that’s not the horrible thing. When she was at the computer, at least she was quiet. When she got up…” I paused, sighed and rubbed my face. I sipped my cooling coffee. “She was mentally unstable, I think. No, I know she was. She ranted against conservatives, against leftists, against greens, against racists, against anyone she could think of, down to our building’s custodian. She said I was a backwoods hick not to be on Facebook, but when I joined, she didn’t even care. She said she thought I was an agent of the devil and made me solve riddles to prove that I wasn’t. Some of them didn’t even make any sense.” I felt in my pocket and withdrew a folded paper—I always carried it these days to remind me why I couldn’t be with Nina any more. “Look at this.”
“Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?” Kim read aloud. “What does that mean?”
“No idea.” I drained the rest of my coffee. “No fucking clue. But she told me to find the message hidden in it to prove that the devil wasn’t controlling me.”
Kim shook her head, wide-eyed, as she handed the paper back to me. “I had no idea.”
“No one did. On Facebook and in chat she acted so normally, and no one ever knew. Well, John and Peter did.” I had told my brothers early on, when things first started to go wrong, figuring that since they had wives, too, they might have a better clue about what was going on. They hadn’t. Instead, they had started to avoid me and Nina even more. Carefully I refolded the paper and restored it to my pocket.
“Anyway, you see why we’re not together anymore. I had to do something.”
“Absolutely. Of course.” She looked thoughtful. “Is that why you missed the New Year’s party last year at Marlene’s and my place?” I nodded.
“And the Valentine’s Day ice-skating, and the May Day picnic, and the midsummer pool party,” I added bitterly. My phone gave a faint bing from inside my pocket and buzzed against my thigh. “I have to go, I’m sorry. Work to do.”
Kim clucked a few more incredulous condolences and we parted ways, she to go home to her children and I… to go home. Talking to Kim had brought back thoughts and memories I would really rather have forgotten, like whispers from beyond some wall in my brain, ghosts scratching at the bricks and the still-wet mortar. No choice. I had no choice, I repeated to myself, like a mantra to banish them.
I had no success. Outside the mall it was raining, and in the darkness, the whispers seemed to grow louder. Autumn was pressing in—maybe it was only the sound of the wind and the leaves weaving a painful waltz on the pavement. I hurried my steps, and by the time I saw the familiar house at the end of the street I was running like mad.
Inside the memory of that last night hit me from inside and outside at once and I almost gagged.
“Prove you’re not one of His!” Nina screeched. “Prove it! I have to trust you, prove it!”
I have, I wanted to say. And, I love you. Instead my legs gave way and I broke down and cried, just sank down on the brown carpet of the entrance hallway and tried to hide my weepy face in my sleeve.
“Prove it!” Nina’s voice dragged across my ears like nails across a chalkboard. I winced and crouched lower and cried louder, ashamed but unable to stop. This was the end. This was just absolutely the end, the last time, the final time, I swore to myself.
And then a hard object hit me in the head. I screamed and fell down in total shock. Looking up, I saw Nina standing above me with a rolled-up newspaper. She swung it at my head again, and it hurt, dammit, hurt not just my heart but my skull, too. She struck again and again, all the time screaming for me to prove that I was not in league with the devil.
Inside me, something changed. I felt my eyes grow cold and my heartbeat slow to a crawl as time, too, slowed around me. Nina moved as though through treacle. I could see every line on her face, every strand of her tousled dark hair. I could read the text of the newspaper she hit me with. An unexpected feeling ballooned up inside me: anger. Hatred. How could she do this to me? Nina had been taking away my life in bits and pieces for years and replacing it with her poison, her madness, her pain. It was my life, dammit! She had no right!
I had never wanted to kill anyone, but now that I finally did, I decided to go for it.
When Nina’s hand next descended, I grabbed it and sprang up. She looked briefly surprised, but then she spat me in the face. I struck her in the jawbone with my right hand and felt it crunch under my knuckles. I hit her again, banged her head against the wall, threw her down on the floor, sat on top of her and hit her and hit her until I wasn’t angry anymore.
I came to myself staring at the dark patch in the hallway carpet. I shuddered and swallowed, and jumped over it to get into the living room.
Afterwards I had driven Nina far away into the forest. I wasn’t much interested in making her comfortable by then, and she was beyond it anyway, so I had just buried her there half-naked in that eternal nightshirt of hers. If I was lucky, no one would find her before she was unrecognisable. I put on some Bryan Adams to banish the whispers of memory and sat down at the computer.
Nina had made fun of me for not being on Facebook. I had never wanted to be there, had only joined to win a smile from her, but to no avail. I had always been lazy and slow about checking in, in any case. That had certainly had to change.
“Nina love, I just heard.” A chat message from Kim popped up. “Just spoke to Chris. U OK?”
“Not really,” I responded and put in a crying emoticon for good measure. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“When U want to, I’ll be here. <hugs>”
“Rightbackatcha.”
I had started it to fudge the trail, to cover up what I had done. I didn’t want to go to prison, I had just been freed from one. So I had logged in as Nina and made a few updates. Then I had realised that I had to keep going until I could find a plausible way to, as it were, kill her on Facebook, and I was still racking my brain for a good way that would not lead to police knocking on my door. And Nina had been on Facebook all the time. All the fucking time. I had to keep up.
I am hereby sentenced to life on Facebook, I thought grimly, and closed Kim’s chat window. Time to take some inane personality test, or maybe play some Bejeweled Blitz, although I couldn’t match Nina’s scores yet.
