Cat piss corridors. Dank half lit porches. Wallpaper not changed since 1985. Window frames rotting and letting in the rain. You know the place. Bedsit dementia: wanking in front of the one-bar electric fire to thoughts of the fat slut who lives on the next floor. You don’t even fancy her but something in your perverse nature makes you want to have her. You finish your squirt and hit the sack.

Look at the clock. 3.15 am, still awake.

Can’t sleep. Play a little night music: Eno. ‘Another Green World’.

Footsteps coming up the stairs.

Voices loud, hush-hushing each other. Hiccups and dirty laughter. Stumbling on the stairway, probably stilettos – who knows?

It’s that twat who lives in the adjacent room in this loser’s mansion: Derek. How does he do it? How does such an ugly, skint, foul mouthed, artless man manage to get laid every weekend?

Here you are: not exactly Johnny Handsome and yet, you are single and feeling invisible more and more by the day. Your rage is a slow burn. You are talented, oh yes. You write novellas and poetry from a place deep within you. And yet…nobody knows you. Nobody wants to. You feel like a shadow, a flicker, a fleeting image on the cave wall, where ancient men lit their fires and exiled you forever to the outside. This has been going on now for thousands of years and you are tired.

You sigh and mutter. You look at the clock. Tick fucking tock. That’s your life, ebbing away: the days, the aimless too long days just feel like a blur now. It’s time to do something. Something to get noticed.

You get out of bed, pulling on your stale sweat smelling night gown, having not seen a washing machine for about eighteen months. Because you don’t fucking have one. You are a launderette loser, watching the tumble drier going round and bloody round. Nobody sees you. Invisible and not here. That’s you: an actor in a film no-one wants to see, stuck with the shitty script of your life.

You edge open the door. You slink outside into the clammy darkness – the street light outside casts an orangeish glow through the staircase window.

You hear them: fucking and sucking and stinking and twisting and dancing on the bed; the springs creaking like a fuck crazed symphony. You cringe. You seethe. You must do something.

You clutch the knife in your sweaty palm and take a deep breath. You blow out air. You suck in air. Calm now. Perfectly calm.

The knife blade glitters as a passing car headlight catches it. You take it as a sign from a veangeful god. A god of nothing, looking over a paradise of shit topped mountains.

Your heart beats louder and you know exactly why. You are excited; feel alive for the first time in ages.

You can see the headlines. You can imagine the press conferences. You are a scum slaying hero. You get fan mail. You get knighted for cleaning up the vermin that stains the streets, the vermin that breeds like fucking rats in a shit-stinking sewer.

You are nothing.

But now you can be something, someone.

You don’t have to kick the door in: the stupid drunk bastard left it open. They are so pissed and fuck frenzied, they don’t hear you come in.

“Hey….hey…”

They still don’t hear you.

“Hey…”

You stand over them. Still, they don’t notice you.

You take the knife. You raise it high, holding it right above your head.

You slice, you jab, jab, jab.

Some noise. But they were already making a racket. Sexual ecstasy sounds like dying. The thought does occur to you.

It is easy.

You stab harder, deeper, now the frenzy has taken you over. Forty five, then fifty…sixty five, then seventy…you lose count after something like ninety five.

You don’t bother to turn the light on. You can imagine the mess.

They didn’t even notice you. They didn’t even fight. They were so out of their heads, so lost in their lust, they didn’t even know what was happening.

Now it is silent.

You make a phone call. You give your address. You give your name.

You tell them your mission: to eradicate scum from the earth as the bible told you to do God’s duty.

They will realise, they will kneel in awe; they will congratulate you.

That is for sure.

You are the best avenging angel Jesus ever had.

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