Prismatic

Alistair Jackson stepped back and admired his handiwork. With the limited resources at his disposal, and considering his lack of experience in the field, he’d done a pretty good job, he reckoned. It was the first thing he’d been proud of in a long time. He hadn’t realised how difficult it was to find a decent piece of rope these days, and his flat didn’t have many decent places to fix it. He’d been tempted to give up the whole idea as too difficult, but for once in his life he wasn’t prepared to admit defeat.

He placed the chair slowly, deliberately in the centre of the room, adjusting it slightly to ensure it was on a firm base. In his mind, an infomercial rolled. Over a montage of smiling children and happy couples, a sonorous voice chimed:

“Do you have money worries? Are relationship difficulties getting you down? Maybe you’re lonely, or you have health troubles. These things happen to all of us at times in life.”

The montage shrank to become a backdrop in a studio, and on walked a Colgate-clean American presenter in a chunky knitted sweater.

“Well, all that could be at an end, soon! Hi, I’m Dan McMahon, and I’m here to introduce a great new home remedy that is one hundred percent guaranteed to get rid of all your problems!”

Dan McMahon inserted a dramatic pause, as if he wanted to say “What’s that? I hear you ask.” His smile became even wider and more sincere, and he prepared to let the viewers in on a secret.

“Suicide! The solution to all your problems!”

Alistair didn’t feel particularly suicidal that day, but he’d come to a decision, and a man had to stand by his decisions. When he didn’t think about his situation, he could appear remarkably cheerful, even to himself, and sometimes he would catch himself smiling. He had good days and bad days, just like anybody, but the suspicion kept returning to him that he just wasn’t very good at this whole life business. He’d given it a pretty good shot, he reckoned, but nothing ever quite worked out for him. There were times when he was fairly sure that the fault lay with the world at large, rather than anything within himself. He had always thought that he was going to be different, special, that he was going to cut a swathe through the crapness of the world, shine some kind of beacon of quality, whatever that meant. But things just didn’t click. He felt as if he had chosen the wrong queue in the checkout of life, and now he was stuck behind some old dear who was insisting on trying to pay with halfpenny pieces. He had to do something about it.

It wasn’t unhappiness that swung his decision, although he wasn’t particularly upbeat. It was just the unbearable thought of this non-life stretching out in front of him as far as he could see, a flat desert of emptiness, broken up here and there by the occasional cactus of misery or a mirage oasis of hope. What possible improvement could there be? Even if he did manage to pick himself up out of this slump, there would be another one along in a few months, or a couple of years at most. The trouble was that he’d asked himself if there was more to life than birth, school, work, death, and been unable to come up with an answer more satisfying than a half-hearted ‘Well, not really’.

He thought about leaving a note. It seemed to be the form on these occasions, after all. What would be the point, though? Who would read it? Maybe a policeman who would be more interested in getting home early than in paperwork and the dangling corpse in the centre of the room. Maybe a friend or relative would Well, sooner or later somebody would notice that he hadn’t been around for a while, and send out a search party. Wouldn’t they? Maybe not. He was sick of making no impact on the world, of just chugging through the days as if he was marking out a prison sentence.