Bug Eyed Peter could walk down the street and sow terrible violence and destruction around him every step of the way. He could roam through at least two worlds at the same moments in time and, while in one, the conversation, the gossip, turned on the changes in the weather or who had begun to do you know what with whom, in the other his meat knife would be carving painfully deep red tattoos in young summer suntanned flesh.
Everything he touched lived in these two, or more, worlds. In one everyone begged for pornography, more beautiful suffering and pain, more death and destruction while, in the other the weather was getting colder and the summer suntanned girl caught the university bus or got out of the lift at the fifth chatting to Debbie about Mark totally unaware of what she had just suffered, what they had all just been through or what they were just about to suffer.
Everything Peter touched decayed, but not out there on the street. It all decayed inside his head, in the death chambers and sweet sewers of his imagination. Out there, on the street it was as beautiful as ever.
Everything he touched shrivelled behind his lonely eyes and life became sordid and, gradually, everything and everyone he reached out to really did appear to decay right there in front of his eyes and the passersby in the street began to give him strange sideways looks and avoid direct eye contact and the weather conversations, always brief, became inaudible whispers and the girls kept it down to a dry, very dry and distant “Hello” or “Bye” and that was that.
So, that which was beautiful, but that which he had soiled, was never enough to satisfy the tastes of his fantasies and everything became a terminal disappointment, for his worlds had intertwined far too intimately and Bug Eyed Peter was hurt.
He was hurt and beautiful and lonely in his suffering, his head turned to face some far distant horizon, some far distant tragedy, though the tragedy was inside and he was abandoned and abused and finally forgotten in his solitude.
Thankfully, Bug Eyed Peter was aware of his predicament and snapped out of it one day when he realised that things had to be kept firmly in their places and nothing was more powerful, or beautiful than what was out there before his eyes, no imaginations, no fantasies, no inventions could compare to the bare beauty before his eyes.
“Hey, Pete! What time’s the next bus?” breathed Alba in his ear.
“Just over an hour. Want a coffee?”
“Yeah, why not? You coming or what?”
Peter checked his watch.
“Hurry up then..............do we really have the time?” asked Alba impatiently as she noticed Peter pull the sleeve of his jacket down over his left wrist.
“In reality, no!” he thought to himself.
