Notebook 058

John was seventeen.
His mornings were filled with school-ties, side partings and Underground Northern Lines to a peeling paint of walls.
Hands up please, you know the rules.
He was a meek little scrawny chest cavity slung in the corner with a scratchy fountain pen and fingernails.
His bag was too high and cigarettes too expensive.
"Ninety-six percent average. I just don't know how you do it John."
"Smack, sir. My father raped me until I was ten and my mother was rotting in the spare room from ages fourteen to sixteen. My grandmother always made me sunday tea though so it wasn't too bad. Two sugars. I have no brothers or sisters because they were all drowned in a bath when infants. All seven of them. I suppose it all must of helped someway."
"Get out."

Grime and gristle were his incestuous best friends except for fridays and saturdays when he was a christian.
His shoes were always clean and his genitals cleaner.
He slept with everyone.
His conscience expired, so the only stains he left were spattered patches of dried blood and semen upon the eyes and mouths of the children he stole.
He was kind.
He gave to charities twice weekly and worked at a dog shelter on wednesdays.
He was only free from the etched scratches of peripherality when he had Sainsburys' bags on his feet, mud in his hair and a stone in hand ready to be cracked against the next skeletal frame he saw.

He was such a pleasant child.