The Moth and the Candle

A small man stood, slouched against the wall of the train station entrance one St. Valentine’s evening. He is dressed unfashionably, not mention slightly untidily. I say untidily event though there are signs of some care being given to his appearance, though it is the clumsy attention of one who does not often gaze into the mirror at length, for fear of what he might see there.
His face is pockmarked by defeat and acne scars yet he holds a measly looking bunch of cheap flowers, the petals on the roses already curling into a dead, black colour. His hair, lank but carefully positioned twirls greasily as his head darts up and down the street, searching for little knows what?
Men and women walk hurriedly by, dashing on their way to dinner dates, meetings in pubs, breathy assignations in the eaves of shop fronts and the more public landmarks of congregation. The occasional glance is shot at him, none out of curiosity but merely to note him as part of the furniture, a transitory element in the streetscape, here one minute, who cares the next? Girls, women with large bundles, not bouquets, of flowers, clutched awkward with triumph, do not pause to compare their trophies with his. What a ludicrous disparity that would be! With each passing demi-second his demeanour wilts, his being growing ever smaller and less noticeable. He shrugs his head into the collar of his jacket and buries his mouth in the grey of his scarf. His gaze forces itself downwards, briefly leaping at each passing footfall but not daring to look up.
I sneer at him.
What a pathetic example of post-post-modern manhood! Out of the frying pan of barbaric misogyny into the fire of trembling mediocrity. Behold! A lay preacher of the contemptible values of uncertainty and self-effacement!
These thoughts and many more run through and through my mind. Each one picked out on banners of red and white and gold and black, the lettering visible to observers from a very long way away. The standard bearers carrying these banners stride past their healthy, shining faces and proud, firm bodies providing a stark contrast to their poorly appointed enemy. Many, many, many thoughts of similar type and virtue, marching past my mind’s eye as before a politburo balcony full of doddering old sociopaths.
They make me strong, these thoughts. strong.
Until I look at him again and see his eyes. I look through the windows and see the terror of his soul. I look again at the bunch of flowers in his grasp. There is a movement of the flowers, the tips of the petals quivering not in occasion with the wind but because his hands tremble. His hands tremble, the tips of his fingers oscillating uncontrollably with apprehension, with excitement, with anticipation but most of al with a kind of dread hope.
He has hopes and dreams and fears and desires like all humans, traits which in and of themselves are human, are humanity. He lives in spaces of hope eked out from the morass of anaesthetised vacuity of everyday life. Where his looks are agin’ him, where his lack of physical strength makes him a target, where his absence of confidence is a sentence of social stigma if not death. Even in the thicket of this dull, clinging misery he found the hope to draw breath after breath and put one foot in front of the other. Why?
I pause, about to enter the station. It’s late, I’m on my way home. My stomach rumbles impatiently, reminding me that I missed dinner and it’s been a long time since lunch. I hesitate. What business, after all, is this of mine? It is also a little uncomfortably close to spying on someone. But I am curious. I stay, hidden behind a pillar and pretend to send text messages to my myriads of friends.
Hope. I can see it now. The arcing, fading hope of the hard-bitten romantic. Who cannot let go his dreams for fear of crashing to the earth in a violent cataclysm of despair and rejection.
Moments tick by. My quarry glances at his wristwatch with increasing frequency. It is the same time only 30, 17, 28, 24 and, on one occasion, 6 seconds later since the previous time he checked in. He pushes himself off the wall, into the clutch of the cold wind which he does not feel. His head twitches back and forth in little jerks, like a small bird. His gaze sweeps the street, scanning pavement and road with greater and greater urgency. She is not there.
She is not there.
Nor is she here. In frustration, he bangs his fist off his thigh, momentarily forgetting he is holding the bouquet of flowers. Several heads are snapped off by the violent blow and fall to the ground, exploding quietly on the asphalt. Cursing under his breath, he bends down and fumbles with the flower heads. His actions are pointless. Even he realises this. His gift now looks even less impressive than before, the cheap plasticky bulbs seemingly misplaced alongside their decapitated sisters. He slowly gets to his feet, the damaged bouquet in one hand, the crushed heads in the other. He deposits the heads in a nearby bin and trudges back to his post.
Now he doesn’t even trouble to look at his watch regularly. The flowers are held by his side, their petals dropping off from time to time, lying at his feet like ash from the cigarette of a giant. His gaze is downcast, the light gone out in the blink of an uncaring eye. What use are those flowers now? They hang forlornly by his side, their petals weeping, silent tears. He hangs his head. Nothing more, more than nothing. More and more, one by one, two by two and four and seven and more, past, past until they all blur in the wet forming beneath his eyelids.
I cannot see the tears tracks which form on his cheeks but I know they are there.
With a slothful dedication that almost speaks of delicacy, he walks over to the bin. He looked down at the sorry bouquet before depositing them in the bin. He wheeled about and walked off down the street, one step after another. He walked with a certain deliberation, with a purpose. Before he left my view he turned back one last time, desperate with masochistic hope. Of course there was no one there who met his stare.
As he turned back to what he had suddenly started, I knew. I knew what was going to come. I knew what he had decided to do. I thought of running across the road to shout accusations and persuasion, to force him to change his mind but my legs would not move.
I remembered a time when I saw someone being struck by a car. In the heart-stopping, surging moments before she was run down I went to shout a warning but the words froze in my throat. I was paralysed by something I could not identify. Fear? Shock? A desire to see pain and drama? Was it cowardice? I didn’t know. But the something stopped me from doing anything once more.
I knew he was going home to wherever home was and he was going to kill himself. I could simply tell. I could see Death as his shoulder hefting a scythe with an edge so sharp it was only a blinding blue sheen. With each defeated step, he walked closer and closer to his doom. As I stood there rooted to the pavement slabs, my face a rictus of horrified knowledge, I felt the self-same helplessness the day I watched that woman’s body being tossed high in a rag doll tangle of arms and legs until she lay, broken and bleeding, in the gutter. I could feel the same hot, salty tears that ran down my face well up. I had badly, oh so badly, wanted to rush over to the lady and tell her how sorry I was but I knew even before the ambulance men pulled a navy blue blanket over her face, that it was too late for apologies. She was gone too far away to hear them.
As I stood and watched a sad, lonely man walk off into oblivion, I knew. I knew he was too far gone away to hear my imprecations, my judicious arguments for life and its preciousness. He had walked around the corner. I could see it, as clearly as blinding neon. He lived with his mother. His father was dead. He didn’t have many friends. He was not good at meeting people, feeling simultaneously awkward and craving contact. He was self-conscious and felt ugly. But he dreamed. Oh yes, he dreamed. He dreamed of love, of happiness, of life lived in laughter and fun, of more than the blank bitterness of vacancy and being alone. This was perhaps his first real date. Blind, probably. Set up by a sympathetic work colleague. Being stood up was the final straw, really. It was not essentially the lack of a date. That was merely the symptom, I mused, of the much more biting and insidious insult of loneliness. He walked off to his house, I knew, and tidied his small bedroom carefully. On the journey home I reconstructed his last minutes with a methodical, macabre precision. There was a little ghoulish thrill in it which I tried to suppress. He would do something like taking his mother’s sleeping tablets, there would be dozens of them, relics of repeat prescriptions assiduously collected but equally assiduously tossed in a drawer and forgotten about. He would crush them up, put them in some soft food or dissolve them in a hot drink. Yes, the hot drink would be easier. The heat of the water would not dissolve them successfully, the liquid would be grainy and bitter, the taste etching its way down his throat in a last toast to the world.
I knew all this. I recited aloud Chesterton’s ‘A ballad of suicide’, more as a prayer really, in a bid to remind myself of how tenuous and close we can all bring ourselves to the end without much effort. But I was wrong. I read in a newspaper a few days later of a young man’s body which was washed up on the coast about a mile or so from the train station. Foul play was not suspected. There was no identification on the body but then, there wouldn’t be would there? So he had drowned himself. Ah well same result even from a different route. The last line of Chesterton’s poem sang inside my head.
A few weeks later I was walking along the street and turned to cross the road I did a double take. A very familiar face walked past. A ghost. I almost shouted ‘but you’re dead!’ at him. The ghost was disturbingly solid-looking and even coughed in my hearing. He was also not alone. A girl held his left hand. She was not particularly pretty nor very well dressed but she had the smile, the smile that was the glittering downfall of devils and the very pride of angels, a smile full of warmth and truth and love. And she smiled it at my suicide. Truth be told, as it has been or so I thought, he smiled the very same smile back. Totally oblivious to my shocked stare they walked happily up the street, hand in hand into an unknown future.
The body on the shore was not that of the lonely swain. I had looked at someone and made them into someone else, a mirror, a reflection of another person. Me. I have never experienced love such as the love I saw in the those two smiles, the smiles of two plain looking, ordinary people in love with one another, soul entwined in soul. I am mostly relieved at that. It is not for me, I think. Too powerful for such as me to bear.
I was wrong. I hate being wrong. It fills me with a hot dread of uncertainty. But in realising that I knew my mistake. And I was glad.