LITMIR.BIZ

       Ten

       Hmmmmn

      Dewi chewed solemnly on a heavily-salted tomato sandwich as he peered through his living room window, his dust-iced skin zebraed by the sharp stripes of winter light which gushed, unapologetically –like hordes of white-frocked debutantes flashing their foaming silk petticoats in eager curtsies –between the regimented slats of his hand-built shutters.

      He chewed methodically, his muscular jowls working –deliberately, repetitively –his dark eyes staring out, unblinking. He was waiting for Katherine. But he was thinking about Wesley. Wesley.

      Wesley ‘the joker’. Isn’t that what they called him? Or Wesley ‘the wild card’. Or Wesley… Wesley ‘the maverick’ (that was a popular one, just currently). But there were others, too, and plenty of them: ‘The Scholarly Beadle’ (a pretty pitiful soubriquet, all things considered), ‘The Post-Millennial Prankster’ (and people actually got paid to write this crap?).

       Wesley.

      Dewi stopped chewing. He swallowed, slightly prematurely, experiencing some difficulty; gulping. He sniffed. He swallowed again, then picked a tomato pip from his molar with his finger. The pip was dislodged. He bit down hard upon it. He crushed it.

      But weren’t these people –these mild-mannered commentators, these hacks, these pen-pushers, these thoroughly indulgent, head-shaking, lip-biting, gently tutting people, these mollycoddlers to a man –weren’t they all forgetting something? Something important?

      Weren’t they forgetting –I mean he didn’t want to piss on their fucking chips or anything –but weren’t they forgetting the damage? Yes. As blunt as that. Plain as that. Boring as that: The damage –The devastation –The pain –The destruction.

      (Tedious truths, Dewi was the first to acknowledge –truths invariably were, weren’t they? –but truths just the same. Indubitably.)

      Caught up –as they obviously were –in all the fun of it (the waggishness, the roguery), couldn’t they at least show a pretence of concern over the possibility that they might, in some small way, be in serious danger of overlooking the crucial, the more salient, the rather less salubrious issues?

      Wesley the Heartless. That was more like it. Just the kind of monicker he was really crying out for (didn’t it at least mean something?), or Wesley the Careless. Wesley the Killer (so much more fitting than the Beadle thing). Or Wesley the Bastard (Hell yes. Even better).

      Good Gracious. Dewi’s hands were suddenly shaking. He tried to relax them, forming tight fists one moment, flexing them the next. He glanced down, anxiously. As his head dipped he was momentarily blinded by a gush of light. He flinched. He blinked. He straightened up, immediately. His eyes scanned the road again. To the left of him. To the right.

      Could it really have been Wesley? He frowned. But seriously… Could it really? Back in Canvey again? The actual Wesley? Here? Large as life? In the flesh?

      But how was that possible? More to the point, how would he dare? And what on earth might his reasons be? (To gloat? To crow? To strut? To swagger?)

      Wesley back? No. Never. The more he thought about it the more… the more crazy it seemed, the more… well, ridiculous. Ludicrous. Inconceivable.

      Dewi’s frantic eyes briefly desisted from their anxious scanning of the roadway, relaxed, refocussed, then suddenly –quite unintentionally –caught an oddly disquieting glimpse of their own violent expression in the window’s clear reflection. He flinched, then looked sideways, almost shiftily.

      This was not like him.

      This is not… This is not like me, he told himself, This is… this is…

      Inconceivable? But was it? Was it really? His right shoulder jerked upwards, in a tiny spasm, towards his dust-slicked ear-lobe. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. It had to be. Because over the past two years Wesley –or the idea, the concept, the very notion of Wesley –had somehow acquired a marvellous, a fabulous, an almost… yes, an almost mythological significance for him.

      The way he saw it, Wesley was an absolute one-off. He was the genuine article. He was out there, on a limb (teetering, maybe, but clinging on, determinedly). He was unique. He was unparalleled. He was completely and totally and utterly unprecedented.

      Even so, this phenomenal –no –this extraordinary singularity as Dewi (perhaps somewhat naively) perceived it, was patently not apprehended by him as any kind of virtue. Quite the contrary. For when Dewi actually imagined Wesley –when he conjured up an image of him, inside his mind –Wesley was not configurated, not defined, not delineated quite as your average, ordinary, every-day mortal should be.

      Within the deliciously wholesome confines of Dewi’s imaginings, Wesley took on the form of something infinitely less, and yet –quite paradoxically –something immeasurably more than your average, commonplace, rough-hewn homosapien. Because for Dewi, Wesley was actually an absolute, undisputed, honest-to-goodness monster. A monster in all the traditional senses: small-brained, big-jawed, heaving, sweating, baying, howling, gesticulating, clawing, gnashing…

      The vilest, the cruellest, the most unapologetically lawless, coarse, despicable and licentious creature. A horned demon. Fork-tailed. Fanged. Cloven.

      But that wasn’t… that couldn’t… even that didn’t encompass… it didn’t…

      Because when Dewi tried to visualise Wesley, the initial image he generated rarely remained constant. It switched. It varied. It altered. It disintegrated. It morphed (morphed? Was that the proper, modern word for it?).

      Inside Dewi’s agitated imaginings,

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