These Delicate Creatures

Michael stands as he heard the charges laid against him.

​

After hearing the head juror repeat guilty a number of times, he listens with only a mild interest as the judge describes how Michael pretended to leave the hotel that day but had in fact booked a room at a nearby hotel with a view of the entrance to the Hard Rock Hotel and had laid in wait for Anna’s departure. The judge calls his decision to follow her to the airport and book the same flight as them “exceedingly calculated and devious” given Anna’s “remarkable empathy to someone who was essentially stalking her”. The judge describes how Michael had followed her from Heathrow airport in a rented car, and the jury averted their eyes as the judge described his murder of Anna’s girlfriend Clara as “gratuitous and entirely evil” and rooted in a “firm belief that the influencer known as Anna Mayhew was in fact his own property”.

​

He goes into detail describing the extent of Michael’s delusion; how he so utterly believed Anna was his partner, he spent the vast majority of his meagre income on a full wardrobe for her, and regularly bought her presents which he kept in his basement as though they were “offerings”. How he regularly bought lingerie for her which is would use for his own sexual gratification, fully believing Anna was entering his room and wearing them for him.

​

Michael can’t really hear any of it. He gazes vacantly up to the balcony where Anna is sitting. She has a facemask on and her hair-tied back. He wonders if she is trying to pretend like she isn’t really there. But Michael can see her. She’s come to see him after all. Her eyes are red raw from old tears. He smiles.

​

He spends the first few weeks of his prison sentence waiting for Anna to arrange to visit, but every time he enquires with the guard, he would shake his head in disbelief and leave tutting to himself. Michael didn’t give up hope though. However long she needed was what Michael would give her.

​

His cell mate is at least a familiar face. Ian Daley is quiet in his own way, but a good listener. They had bonded when Michael had explained that he was a journalist working on Ian’s trial. Ian had smiled a kind of weak smile, and they had talked a little bit about their experiences of the court process, and about women. Recently, though, it had seemed to Michael that Ian had become more and more reluctant to engage with him.

​

“Seems like she isn’t coming,” Michael says one afternoon, as he throws a tennis ball overarm to Ian’s waiting arm. Ian catches it backhanded, his attention gazing out at the steadily setting sun beyond their enclosure. It glints a pale, wintery orange.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Michael continues, “I totally get it. I killed her friend, I’m not denying -.”

“Girlfriend,” Ian corrects him, still looking at the horizon, “You killed her girlfriend.”

Michael shrugs, as though trying to divert the comment away from him. “Whatever she was. I get it, they were close. But, when you’re in a relationship, you have to make certain sacrifices. You gonna throw?”

​

Ian looks at him, his face seems somehow defeated. He throws the ball back.

​

“How are we supposed to put any trust in what women give us if it comes with so many attachments? You know? They wanna experiment with girls, they want guys to like them in that tight dress they wear, they want every guy from Bournemouth to Inverness to bash one out to their Instagram feed, and yet they also want a relationship? What are we supposed to think?”

​

Michael throws the ball. Ian catches it with two hands and sighs. “She wasn’t experimenting, Michael. We’ve talked about this before. She was gay. She’d been with that girl for four years before you killed her.”

Ian throws the ball again, but it arcs wide and hits the wire fence. Michael sighs and chases it down, when he returns Ian has moved over to the far wall and taken a seat on one of the benches. He picks at the crumbling cement in between the brickwork behind him with some interest. Michael doesn’t sit down.

​

“What’s eating you?” Michael says, tossing the ball between his hands and shivering slightly. The evenings were getting colder again. “All that stuff with your wife? I mean, she drove you mad with all that porn work she did.”

Ian sighed and kicked some dried gum on the tarmac. “She did.”

“No way to start a marriage, if you’re constantly trying to fight for possession.” Michael mimed throwing the ball between his hands and laughed. Ian looked at him and made a noise that was half a snort and half a laugh. “What?” Michael said.

“Oh, that we might call these delicate creatures ours, and not their appetites,” he mutters, under his breath.

Michael frowned. “Romeo and Juliet?”

Ian shook is head. “Othello. Studied it for A Level. It’s weird what sticks with you.”

Michael sits next to him. “Well, the bard said it right. How can you, with any confidence at all, claim that any woman is your wife, when half of what she has could belong to anyone, at any moment? No point in being married, if you ask me.”

​

Ian sighs loudly, and in one swift moment, he snatches the ball from Michael.

“Can you not look around for a second? At where you are? At what you’ve done?”

Michael blinks, bemused. “Yes, of course. I’ve admitted I shouldn’t have killed that girl, but-.”

“And yet, you continue to wax lyrical about how so much could have been different, if only Anna had realised your devotion to her sooner.” Ian shifted closer to him on the stool. “I was driven mad with jealousy you know. Because my wife spent her time talking to men like you online. Subscribers. And I locked her in that basement and beat her senseless because I thought that every single man she spoke to and flirted with had taken a tiny piece of her with them. I was so possessed by that idea, that I would have killed each and every one of those men to take her back.”

​

Ian stands. “I’m glad I met you, Michael. It’s helped me realise something. None of those men owned even a piece of my wife. And neither did I.”

With a jerk of his wrist, the ball sails through the air and connects with the wire fence on the other side of the yard.

“And neither did you.”

​

Ian strides off towards the inner courtyard, and Michael watches him go. He glances out to the setting sun, and wonders, with a sting of something that might be regret, if Anna’s watching it too.

​

Somewhere far away from here.

​

END