The Filing System
Runner Up Fathom Prize
CONTENT WARNING: Murder/violence
The Filing System
When I’m in the filing cupboard I think quietly about murder. Not a solitary murder, not murder with purpose or motive. I think about mass killing, random killing, killing without aim or intention. Killing because I can.
I have the power of death at my disposal and when the weekend comes I go out into the streets and spray it around like an aerosol. Death sings in the air, carols high above the people’s heads and they don’t suspect, they never suspect. Death comes quietly, modestly with no fanfare or warning of her approach. In my hands death is polite, doesn’t speak unless she is spoken to and she is never spoken to because no one knows she is there. No-one hears the singing except me and it is my heart that sings.
Monday to Friday I am quiet among the files. My hands move through papers not poisons. I file alphabetically, surname by surname, taking comfort in the orderly fall of the letters. Here B always follows A, Jones forever preceding Judd. I could kill alphabetically but that would make a kind of sense and there is no sense in death. It is perfectly random. Pattern gives predictability as with my files. My files keep me safe Monday to Friday - buff covers, white papers, shiny gold pins; each page pierced precisely, speared and displayed; every one in its place by date, by doctor, by death. I file as you ask me to as long as there is order.
At the weekend there is no order, no need for a timed awakening, no timetable to be followed. At the weekend I can choose to lie in or get up, eat in or eat out. I can dress or undress and it doesn’t matter. I do not like the choices weekends present.
Choice is overrated. Choice means uncertainty, decisions needing to be made. Choice is my sister choosing one way, my father another. Confrontation. Choice takes away freedom, imposes its own rules. In the supermarket I am dazed by choice. How many loaves of bread can I eat? I want bread to make sandwiches. But should it be brown or white, wholemeal, whole grain, rye, a bloomer, baps, sliced, thinly, thickly, reduced salt, reduced wheat, reducing me. I am overwhelmed by choice, memories of choice. My choice, her choice, his choice, my whole damn family choosing and refusing. The bread becomes greater than I am. I am not in control. So I leave the bread and try for cheese or ham, something simple. I stagger through the hyper bright market; logos and brands scream ‘choose me, choose me.’ And I choose some of them because they are familiar and I cling to a remembered shape and colour in a sea of packaging and promotion. The air hums with shopping, selling, spending. Greed assails me and all I wanted was to eat a piece of bread and cheese. I don’t want the bigger bag, the better taste. I don’t want to choose. I’ll let my sister choose, my Father, my stepbrother. I don’t mind. I want the choice made for me.
And even at the till when I clutch a lump of cheddar because I ate it as a child and a bag of crisps because the packaging was simple, even there I am attacked. Do I want cash back, do I have vouchers, a club card, am I collecting stamps.
‘No I’m fucking not’ and I am out and free. The sky is grey, blessedly grey, monotone, unpackaged as yet unbranded. Rain falls, clear and cold, and I feel clean, washed free from the feeding frenzy of the shop. I don’t choose the weather.
Weekends are like that - the monotony of choice when all I want is to be free to be alive, untrammelled by fads and fashion and all the things I ought to want. I DON’T WANT THEM. Being me is enough.
For a while I fought weekends. I was herded through shopping centres, adrift on a tide of people for whom to live is to shop. I ate in synthetic spaces, choked on other peoples choices. In the evening I drank in bars and never tasted, drank because it was expected. At least there was no choice. Once trapped with a thousand thousand other bodies in an endless procession there was no other choice to make. The starting gun was fired and off we went. From bar to identical bar we followed a trail of repeating music and unchanging faces. Smoke to choke and burn, ash on my shoes, blast of air producing brief clarity before another bottle, more fizzing drinks, now blue, now yellow but always the same. Out in the street, bump into the same girl, get sworn at by the same boyfriend, a kebab for variation, vomiting behind the shop as a change of scene then into the merry go round of smoke and music and blue drinks, pink drinks, other peoples drinks, the back of a taxi and I’m only half way through this mess they call the weekend.
Monday is bliss. The alarm clock trills precisely and I follow my routine, wash face, brush teeth, comb hair, apply make up. Eat yoghurt in my white dressing gown, put the rubbish out and dress. A moment of panic but the bus arrives on time and I walk into the office, serene and keen to run my hands over my appointment book, to open the first of my files, knowing there will be not a single comma out of place.
The only cloud on my horizon is the weekend, looming nearer in all its chaotic dreadfulness. Which is why I decide to kill the weekend. To murder the weekend and all the weekenders who live there. I have the means.
I am an administrative assistant in a doctors’ surgery. I make appointments, I prepare files, I keep records and I have keys. I have keys to the cupboards and the cabinets, to the surgeries and to the safe. I am trusted, a highly trusted employee. It is because I am so organised, so reliable, so utterly predictable.
Every lunchtime I follow the same routine. I am known for it, tolerated for it, never asked out for birthdays or to enjoy the sun. My colleagues know I prefer my office; to eat alone. They don’t know that I could not bear to watch them eat, to see their indecision – one day sandwiches, one day salad, hot meals and cold meals. It is better that they go and I stay.
Alone I unwrap my sandwiches, plain white bread with cheese spread, tidy, pale and bland. I never need to think what to eat, it is prearranged, waiting in my cupboards, snatched from the jaws of the supermarket.
I eat and I read. I digest facts, borrowing from the surgery shelves. Now I read about poisons every day, finding colour and light and hope in the densely printed pages. I search methodically, knowing our drugs by letter and by name. It only remains to select, to eliminate the imperfect until I have my perfect weapon.
So I read, page by page, drug by drug, mentally testing out ease of administration, side effects, speed of death. And eventually, by being patient, by refusing to hurry, I find my poison.
‘Rapid intravenous injection will cause severe depression of the respiratory system, a drop in blood pressure, collapse of the circulatory system, heart attack and death.’ Fast but not too fast. Death within an hour, two at the most. Time for me to walk away, time for them to know they will die. I need only to ensure the correct dose and death will do my bidding.
On Friday faced with the horrifying blank page of the weekend I stay late at work. I refine my filing system, devising a system for filing the papers waiting to be filed. More order imposed, a tiny piece of chaos overcome. On my way out I call into Doctor Chandra’s surgery and open his wall safe. I look inside and see the sheets of plastic syringes, satisfied with the hygienic wrapping, approving the efficient packaging. I take out two sheets, twenty four in all, then another two. I need to be sure. I add hypodermic needles. Little silver points of death and I am pleased with them. They are as clean and purposeful as I. I sign them all out so the doctor will think he asked for them. At home I place them by my bed.
They give me the idea of control but it isn’t enough. The following weekend I go to the poisons cabinet and find my chosen drug. Only my drug will give me the effect I need. Others might kill but not so surely and there will be side effects. I don’t want sweating, confusion and hallucination. I want sweet, clean, tidy death. I take what I need and amend the records. I must keep them correct. If the records are wrong I control nothing.
Keeping the poison by me is enough for three more weeks. For three more weeks I keep the poison with the syringe and sometimes load it . I draw the clear liquid into the narrow plastic chamber and feel a surge of satisfaction. Here is the source of all perfection. Here is the power to impose perfect order, through the most random act of all. I risk the weekends knowing I have the means to bring them down.
I am safe then - for three weeks I am as safe as you are. And you are as safe as you feel.
By the fourth week I am restless, edgy. There is a series of emergencies in the surgery. Doctors take patients out of appointment order, citing clinical need. A woman collapses and all around her bodies flow and recede, bend and stretch and try to bring aid or satisfy curiosity. I am sick of them all, with their false sympathy, their petty longing to help and to be part of something from which they are clearly excluded. We are all inside our own skin, there is no room for anyone else. There is no point trying to climb inside, it only pushes the owner of the skin further into themselves, they are more lost than ever. Better to keep to our own places, our own spaces.
Enraged with the attack on my separateness I load the syringe as soon as I get home. I sit with it in front of me on the table and take long, deep breaths. It is almost enough. Until there is disturbance, knocking at my door when no-one ever knocks and then my sister is here, in my flat, in my space and I am hiding the syringe and pretending a smile and there is chaos erupting within and without. She sits on the floor and her legs sprawl across the carpet. She drinks from a bottle she has brought, whilst I sip coffee, black in a white mug and try not to think about the syringe loaded in the drawer behind her head.
She spills confusion over me. Her boyfriend has left her. I didn’t know she had another boyfriend. I would leave her too. She says ‘Daddy wants to see you. He wonders why you never call.’ She says ‘Why don’t you visit any more.’ She says ‘We all expected you at Christmas.’ They all expected me. All of them, waiting in the big, old house, sisters and brothers and step brothers and half sisters. Daddy’s happy ‘extended family.’ I feel sick thinking of him, there in the house with my Mother, his third wife and all the messy proof of his infidelities and marital failures standing round because Christmas is for family. Maybe. If my family was a mother and a father and me.
I tell my sister her boyfriend will come back. I tell her I was away for Christmas, to tell Daddy that I’m sorry. I tell her anything to make her go away and when she does I take out the syringe and hold it to the light and say ‘tomorrow.’ I can’t leave it any longer.
On Saturday morning I leave the flat early. I am confident, energetic. The weekend takes on the certainty of week days because I have a cause, a problem to be solved. I am going to file under death.
And it is so easy. I walk the Saturday shopping streets with the crowds and at night haunt the nightclubs and the bars. No more blue bottled drinks for me, I need clarity, to see my prey. Not that I single them out. I trust my intuition and when the voice says here, now, I slip the syringe down my sleeve and as I draw near I stab, jab. They rarely notice. Usually drunk or stoned or else too involved in their little lives to feel. Sometimes I smile at them as I walk away and they smile back, vacantly. I wonder if they sense their end.
They don’t die immediately. I have made sure of that. But they die. Within sixty minutes, maybe much less they begin to feel heavy, lethargic, as the heart slows, beat by imperceptible beat. They fall asleep in a chair, never to wake or they fall like a stone in the street and hope that the surging crowd will stop to lift them. Death is inexorable.
Safe at home I relax in the knowledge that death won’t fail me. Saturdays I walk the streets with death my constant companion. On Thursdays I check the obituary pages searching for the sudden unexpected, unexplained deaths, trying to sense my cleansing hands. I read the coroner’s reports - open verdicts on young drinkers and ageing shoppers dead without a reason. And if they pick up the traces of my draught how are they to know where it was administered? I feel clean, alive, cleansed by the removal of a little bit of chaos.
And yet it all begins to pall. My method is too slow, not tidy enough, chaos still reigns on the weekend streets. The weekenders don’t know enough to fear. I must widen my circle and soon death and I will cut a cleaner, wider swathe through this contaminated town. And I will file it away under finished business, and move onto the next clean page.