BPM

The average human’s heart will beat three billion times in their lifetime. If it’s left alone, that is.

…

Geo took his time walking back from the train station. He wasn’t in a rush. His back hurt from the hardwood bed he had been forced to sleep on for the past three nights. And his chest hurt from the adjustment. There was a pain in his lower back too, on the right side. It was probably a bruised kidney. He hadn’t resisted arrest. He wasn’t so foolish or sophomoric anymore, but one of the arresting cops had taken a dislike to him nonetheless and had given him a dig for it. It was to be expected. He didn’t complain about it and no one would have listened if he had.

It was early in the morning, not yet eight o’clock, and he moved against the disapproving human traffic, the mass of commuters, heading the other way as he left the station, descending the graffitied, enclosed metal staircase which promised to spill him onto a rain-soaked street — and did.

He didn’t have an umbrella and he wasn’t wearing a rain-proof jacket, but the rain wasn’t too heavy, and his flat wasn’t too far from the station. He didn’t want to run, though, or even jog, so he just slightly quickened his pace and accepted the wetness that heaven was graciously bestowing upon him.

By the time he got to the front of his building the throngs of commuters had thinned out to a small trickle of tardy late risers rushing to make up for the lost time. They knew the punishment if they made a habit of it, or if they even got caught late once, and ran into the wrong HR rep that day. Geo found sympathy a hard emotion to come by these days. He sometimes wished he still had a reserve of it, but it just wasn’t there anymore. The well had dried; the drought had become permanent; his inner climate had changed for good.

The apartment block was cold and there were pools of water in some of the stairwells he passed as he climbed towards the seventh floor. The water was a blessing in disguise as its presence meant junkies wouldn’t sleep and generally make their makeshift homes in the stairwells, bothering passers-by for change and scaring old ladies and women with babies.

719. He found his keys in his wet coat’s pocket and let himself in, loudly knocking and calling out a couple of times as he did so, so as not to scare her. It seemed to work. She cooley popped her head around the kitchen door.

‘Coffee?’ She asked, without any detectable emotion.

‘Yes, please.’ He replied as he took his coat off, shaking it a few times outside before putting it on a hook in the hallway and shutting the door. Coffee did sound very good to him. Even the crap coffee they were only able to afford.

‘Are you hurt?’ Her voice drifted from inside the kitchen, alongside the sound of her filling the kettle from the tap.

‘No. Not really. Just the usual, I guess.’

‘How much did they take?’

‘Not much.’ He lied. ‘Three weeks.’

He heard her turn the kettle on. It was old and started to crack and hiss in mysterious ways.

‘Three weeks?! That doesn’t sound right, Geo. For pamphleteering? I thought you’d get at least a year. Toast?’ Her head had reappeared around the corner. Geo was going through his post that was stacked in a small pile on a table by the door. Mostly bills; a letter confirming his arrest; and a postcard from his cousin in Rome.

‘Yeah. Toast sounds good. Got any jam?’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ She said, sardonically.

‘Hey, did they come?’ He said, his eyes still going through the letters.

‘Yeah. Cursory. I don’t think they expected to find anything. And they didn’t.’

Good news. It was why they kept their house like any other. Nothing incriminating. Nothing that could get them popped or aggravate their sentences.

‘They did take some of your notebooks though, and some biros.’

Petty fucks, he thought. Their pettiness made them more hateable than their brutality and their control — those could at least be respected; at least taken seriously. They wouldn’t find anything in those notebooks, however. The grunt enforcers who first found them ‘hidden’ under his mattress would probably have thought they hit the incriminating jackpot. But they hadn’t. And the detectives back at the station would have picked up on that pretty quickly, much to their great annoyance. Just babble. That’s all he had written. Cryptic-seeming babble. Deliberately misleading, to make it seem like he had something to hide. And he did have a lot of things to hide, but he wouldn’t be leaving it scrawled across cheap paper under his superannuated, uncomfortable mattress.

Despite the well-founded suspicions of the detectives that the journals were filled with bullshit, they still would have had to crawl through page after page of dross and doodle and doggerel: phone numbers that didn’t connect to anything; terribly-written poems with illusions to men and women who didn’t exist, and never had; drawings of blueprints and city centres that had never been built; pussies and cocks and balls, in varying stages of tumescence and arousal, some hairier than others; ideas for flags with generic political symbolism…. He knew they hadn’t found anything in there — not even invented by their hyperactively suspicious and distrustful minds — or they would have confronted him with it during his interrogations, asked him questions about it, added time to his sentence, even though there wasn’t much time left to add.

He joined her in the kitchen taking only the postcard from the pile of post.

‘Coffee smells good, Chloe.’ Chloe smiled at him as she buttered his two slices of toast. A jar of the promised strawberry jam sat on the counter beside her, awaiting its turn.

‘How’s your cousin doing over there?’ She pointed the butter smeared knife at the postcard he had put down on the table as he sat down.

He flicked the card between his fingers and privately read the message.

Ciao, Geo and Chloe

Just got back from the Spanish Steps. I sat on the second to top step and watched the sun rise over the city, surrounded by the most beautiful young men and women left on this shitty rock. You know Keats had an apartment overlooking the Steps? Must have been nice. There’s a plaque to him there now. I’m sure you did know that — I remember you telling me how he was one of your favourites.

Gotta run.

Tommy xxx

…

Geo ate quickly and hungrily. He had only had one small meal a day in the jail and he could feel his already slight waist thinning even further. His clothes felt baggy and uncomfortable and the hard wood chair bit into his bony behind.

‘Andy is coming this evening. Around five he said. Just the usual.’ Geo knew she was only the messenger, that she was just relaying what she had been told, but he felt a sting of irritation towards her nonetheless. He kept it to himself as best he could, focusing on the warm and chipped mug of coffee clasped in his left hand.

‘Great.’ Was all he could muster between tightly set teeth.

‘Oh, don’t be like that, Geo. You know its protocol. Same for anyone who gets arrested.’

Indeed it was. A second interrogation after the first. Less brutal, but no less intense, no less probing. He felt crammed between two oppressive forces, slowly squeezing the life out of him. He wasn’t quite sure anymore why he had chosen one side over the other. It all seemed quite arbitrary at this stage. Both sides would happily see him dead. Maybe one day they would work together to make it so.

‘Geo…?’

‘I know, Chloe. I know.’ He was trying not to lose his cool. He just kept reminding himself that it wasn’t her fault. She was just in the middle. And he had brought her into the fold, into the movement, years ago, so anything that could be blamed on her, could be blamed on him. ‘I’m just a bit tired. I think I’ll try and get a few hours of sleep before he gets here.’ He might as well be fresh; he would need to have good recall if he wasn’t going to annoy Andy or make him suspicious. Or at least more suspicion than he probably already was.

‘I think that’s a great idea. I’ll wake you for lunch in a couple of hours? I managed to get some ham from the butchers yesterday.’ Ham was a rare luxury these days. ‘I can throw some chips in the oven, too.’

She was so good to him. He felt guilty for his ill feeling towards her moments before, even though he had mostly managed to keep a lid on it. He just didn’t want to feel those things at all. At least not to her. Other people maybe, but not to Chloe.

‘Thanks, Chloe. I mean it. Everything is gonna be fine.’

‘I know. Hey, you sure they just gave you three weeks? It seems light, Geo. You don’t have to protect me, you know? I’m in this as much as you are.’ She held up the back of her right hand, showing him the green screen on the small monitor.

‘Ok. I lied. I didn’t want to upset you. I got a year.’

Her face sank slightly, but she quickly collected it and forced the muscles into a small smile.

‘That’s OK, Geo. Really. I knew three weeks was too short. If you’re gonna lie, you may as well lie better than that. A year is manageable; a year was to be expected.’

She was right, a year was manageable, and a year was to be expected for his crime. And she was also right about lying better — so he had. A year just made more sense. He wouldn’t be able to hide it from Andy, though… Andy would find out. Andy might already know.

He stood up from the table. She did the same, taking his dirty dish and mug and putting them in the sink.

‘You know, I just realised I haven’t hugged you yet, Geo.’ It was true — she hadn’t. She walked over to him and put her hand on his face. Reaching her head up, her moist lips met his, softly at first, but then more forcefully, with a sexual hunger he had missed, had longed for longer than he had realised. Her arms slipped around his waist, delivering the promised hug. The inquiring movements of her fingers told him that she too had noticed how skinny the past few days had made him. She didn’t say anything, and her hands stopped their examination and started to caress and seduce. His arms found her back and moved across its surface with slow brushes while their tongues found each other. Her mouth moved against his face, covering it in small but loving kisses, until it found its way to his exposed neck where it dug its teeth in, not hard enough to break the skin, but ferociously enough to break the vessels beneath it. She still liked giving love bites like that, as though she were still a teenage girl, marking her first crush to warn off all the other libidinous girls at school.

Unconsciously, their feet had carried them out of the kitchen and into the front room, and they crashed onto the beer and cigarette-stained sofa, her on top of him, her teeth still clamped onto his throat, like some unquenchable vampire. He could feel her breasts swelling against his chest and her hips grinding against his. He needed to get himself and her naked as quickly as possible…but then her yell stole the moment from him, forever.

She dismounted and raced back into the kitchen where he could hear her opening a drawer and rummaging through its contents. He knew what she was looking for. He looked at the monitor on the back of his hand. Guess you couldn’t have kept it secret forever, he thought; and really — why bother, either.

She returned with a red notebook open in the middle and an angry look plastered across her otherwise pretty face; the same face that moments ago had screamed pure sex.

‘300 million; Seven years?! Seven fucking years, Geo? How did you think you could hide that from me? Why would you try and hide that from me? I knew you were lying! I just fucking knew it. Three weeks. Ha! Even a year didn’t sound right after that lie. You’re such a shit liar, Geo. No wonder Andy doesn’t trust you.’

The look on her face told him that she regretted that last part. But he didn’t care. He wouldn’t call her out on it; he knew it was true anyway.

‘I knew what I was getting myself into, Chloe. I’ll take the punishment. I always do.’ He did up the belt she had loosened and helped himself up from the sofa with a crack of his knees.

‘And what good are you to us dead, huh? What good are you to me dead?’ Her bottom lip, swollen from the kissing session, was quivering; her eyes were heavy with the promise of tears.

‘I’m not dead yet, Chloe. I’ve still got years.’

‘Oh, really? Cause it says here that that’s all you’ve got now — a couple of years.’ She stabbed at the tear-stained pages to emphasise her point. It didn’t need emphasising. ‘You know, when they took the nine, I thought I wouldn’t be able to cope. I could barely get out of bed, remember?’ He remembered. Vividly. ‘But then I thought, no. He’s doing what he believes in. He’s doing what’s being asked of him. He’s doing this for us, all of us, and me. And he’s still got years and years left on that ticker in his chest. He’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. The time we have together will be ten lifetimes for another couple, dragging their miserable selves through the dreary world they now inhabited, living without picture or purpose, without beauty or hope. But now you’ve taken that hope from me. I’ll be alone soon, without you. What then, Geo? What am I supposed to do then?’

He didn’t have an answer for her. He really didn’t know. So, he said the first thing that came to his tired mind.

‘The movement isn’t everything, Chloe. It never was. My mission and its mission aren’t one and the same.’

‘Now you tell me?! Now you fucking tell me?! Your tune has changed. You didn’t tell me that when you brought me in, introduced me to everyone, got me set up and inducted. It was all business then, Geo, you were a true fucking believer then. What changed?’ It was true, he had been; things had changed. The movement wasn’t the same movement anymore. It had let him down, and he had done the same to it. Everyone knew it. Andy absolutely knew it. Only Chloe couldn’t see it, or refused to, until now, at least. Now she was coming to realise it all. ‘Is that why you went off script? To prove a point? To show what a radical you are? That you’re some hardcore counterrevolutionary who doesn’t need to be a part of something bigger than himself. Like you’re some maverick who can just go it alone?’ He could hear the genuine disgust and bile behind her words. She was falling out of love with him in real time, right in front of his eyes, working it through in her mind and spitting it out. But she wouldn’t become indifferent to him afterwards, that’s not what followed heartbreak and betrayal. She would hate him with as much passion as she had loved him. And that hatred would last her far past the two years he had left. And it would help her cope with his death.

‘That’s the problem, Chloe. The fact that there are scripts at all. That’s not what I signed up for, official narratives and all that crap — just different lies, different propaganda, used in the same way: to control the plebs, the proles, the hoi polloi. That’s not for me, Chloe. And I know you didn’t fall in love with a man who would go in with all that shit, and you wouldn’t have been inspired by him. The time extension is a lie. They can take time, but they can’t give it back. And they know if the people find out, they have nothing to lose, especially those below the five-year mark. I wrote the pamphlet for them, for the people. Not for the movement. The movement can kiss my ass.

Chloe remained silent, she just wiped the remaining tears from her face and tossed the notebook onto the sofa they had nearly made love on. Geo felt bad for her. He knew how betrayed she must feel. He wanted to hug her again. To tell her that everything was going to be OK. That everything was for the best in the long term. But he had the feeling that their hugging days were over…besides, he had no way of knowing that things were in fact for the best in the long term.

‘I still believe in the plan, Geo, even if you don’t.’ She slumped down into the armchair, the only other place to sit in the living room.

‘I know you do…I’m sorry.’ And he was. For everything he and done, and for all the things he would never do. ‘Tell Andy it’s over. I’m out.’

She didn’t respond. She just looked out the window, a look of dejection and defeat on her face.

He left her to it. He closed the front door quietly behind him, making sure not to take his keys. It was still raining when he got to the bottom of the staircase. Not heavily, but enough to soak through after a couple of minutes. He had left his heavy coat drying on its hook. It would offer him no protection now. Nothing would.

He started out of the estate and onto the main road. Slowly at first, counting his steps as he went, but then he quickened, sped-up, until he was jogging. His joints and muscles weren’t used to running anymore, so they made their protest a painful one, but he pushed through it, finding his rhythm and letting the adrenaline counteract the painful assault. As he ran, he passed alleyways choked with cops. They always hung out in dark alleys, between the monstrous housing blocks, waiting to be called upon to suppress whoever needed suppressing. As he ran past them, some sniggered, others whistled, some remained silent. But all of them watched the skinny man running past them in the rain, disregarding the heartbeats he was expending for no reason other than to just expend them. And as he ran, the numbers on the monitor on the back of his right raced downwards, towards zero.