Free The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts

betray us in the end. Opportunity presented itself, and I spent the night with a feisty, fat woman called Barbara. And Barbara lay there gasping and hooting and I banged away between her legs, like a lusty young blacksmith forging a magic sword with my weighty hammer, and some part of me thought: I simply can’t be doing with this tentative never-quite fucking I’m getting with Molly any longer . So I sat down with Molly and told her it was over, and she didn’t cry; and I agreed to keep paying half the rent until the end of the lease, but I moved out and slept for a month on the couch of a friend called Leo. Of course, things didn’t work out with Barbara, partly because she was rather unhinged, and prone to hitting me with things, sometimes quite heavy things. But mostly it didn’t work out because she got together with a long-distance lorry driver and I decided I had too much self-respect to share her. And actually the worm in the bud was my memory of Molly. All through that month with Barbara, as the two of us worked out energetic bang-bang-bang fucking in bedrooms and on staircases and in the front of my car – all through that my mind kept reverting to Molly. I dreamed of tenderness. Soon enough I found it occurring to me that I really couldn’t be doing with this one-note hammer-away too-obvious fucking I was getting with Barbara . My fantasies were all slender women and delicacy and the lightest touch of a fairy hand. I went back to Molly, and wept, and begged her, but she was cool and firm and told me that the relationship was over. She reminded me I had been the one to kill it. I could hardly disagree. Then I was single for many years, and the more effort I put in to dating the less success I had. I went through the four phases of sexual bereavement: anticipation; rage; despair (‘I’ll never make love to another human being again’) and finally grudging acceptance.
    Dreams were uncomfortable. I slept badly for so long that I grew accustomed to sleeping badly. I had odd little blackouts, such that I would wake, suddenly, lying on the grass outside my flat, in the dark, in the cold, in my pyjamas, in a state of disorientation and fear. I presumed I had sleep-walked outside, and lain down. Several times the police found me about the town and entertained me with the hospitality of their cells. I was drinking a lot, it’s true. Nowadays counselling and support would be made available to somebody in my situation – the victim of a crime, after all. Attempted murder no less! Not back then.
    And the thing is: the attempted murder didn’t bother me. Roy’s unsuccessful attempt to end my life. That sounds blasé, doesn’t it? It’s true though. Curtius was a nutjob. I knew his attack upon me was nothing personal. What bothered me were the hallucinations. The things that I had seen in Antarctica. The thing that I had seen. Not that I had had hallucinations, in the conventional sense; because (as a friend pointed out), I’d been drugged, and drunk, and sensorily deprived in the Antarctic night. It was hardly surprising that my mind had started playing tricks.
    It was the persistence.
    Looking back, I can see that there was a very long sine wave resonating through my life. One year of misery would be followed by a second, and then would come a glorious third and the nightmares would recede, if never quite vanishing. My concentration and energy levels would improve. I would sleep better, drink less, focus more on my work. Then I would see him – a boy, stringy-framed, simple clothes. A ghost. For a long time I assumed he was me, the ghost of myself as a little boy. I thought this partly because the ghost-boy had a scarred face (although his pattern of scars was different to mine, and although I had not been scarred as a youth). I wondered if perhaps I was dead. Maybe I’d died at the South Pole, and now I was living some ghastly afterlife purgatory. Maybe the ghost of the boy was there to haunt my death with my