Hilary Bonner - Friends to Die For

Kristos inclined his head slightly. Were his hands trembling? Vogel wasn’t sure of that either. Perhaps he had begun to imagine things.

‘I shall see you later then, Mr Kristos,’ said Vogel as he left the cell.

This time there was no reaction at all.

I will never allow myself to be violated again. The surgeons were as bad, in some ways, as the woman who had destroyed me. I still found it hard to believe that they could not have saved some part of my manhood.

I read, many years later, of transplants and reconstructions, but after what I had been through I would never again put myself at the mercy of the medical profession. They had left me like this. Not even half a man. And as I had grown into what would have been puberty, in a young offenders’ centre, with vandals and rapists and idiots, neither they nor anyone else knew of my inner agony. They did not realize that I too had sexual feelings. That the torture of adolescence was also mine. Testosterone raged inside me, just as it did in the bodies of my fellow inmates who passed for normal.

The last time I saw a doctor was when I was seventeen, the year before I left the young offenders’ centre. The ignorant bitch sat there in her white coat and stethoscope and told me that as I had lost my testicles as well as my penis, I would not suffer from any sexual desires I may be unable to satisfy.

Was she not aware that it is not only the testes which produce male hormones? The adrenal glands also do so. Not enough to deliver any sort of sexual satisfaction — especially in one who lacks the required equipment — but enough to drive me mad with sexual frustration. Particularly in my teens.

I have not been near a doctor since. My knowledge of my condition, and the drugs I have used to manage it, have all come from the Internet.

When they let me out of that dreadful institution, a place where everyone knew what had happened to me, where the staff and the inmates all knew that I was a freak, I vowed that I would reinvent myself. I would learn how to pass for normal. I thought if I could become an actor I could teach myself to perform off stage as well as on.

And, indeed, my whole life since I was eighteen has been a performance.

But first I had to acquire a new identity. As long as I remained Rory Burns I would always be the freak with no balls and no prick. I would never be able to get beyond that.

The whole time I was in the Edinburgh halfway house, I was just awaiting the right opportunity, obeying my licence to the letter, reporting like a good boy to my probation officer, behaving myself perfectly — apart from the small matter of my two visits to King’s Cross.

Although I had no money, I was clean and tidy and well-mannered, so it was easy enough for me to hitch-hike to London. I’d read about King’s Cross and how the prostitutes lurked there, wanton and lustful, worthless in the eyes of the Lord. Unable to find the one who had been responsible for my destruction — the evil bitch Marlena having yet to be revealed unto me — I needed to release the anger within. I needed to vent my wrath, to worship at the altar of retribution. With my sacrificial blade I violated their secret places and ripped out their womanhood. And then I returned to the halfway house.

It was only after I sacrificed my second victim that I found out she was not a prostitute. She was a student nurse from Sweden who had strayed into that place of depravity by accident. I watched the girl’s parents on television, weeping as they told of how she’d wanted only to devote her life to God. She had been pure — a virgin as I was and would always remain.

God showed me His wrath then. I began to have violent headaches. I would wake up in the night in a terrible sweat and quaking with fear. Sometimes pains would course through my whole body. I knew that God was punishing me for causing the death of one of His chosen children. I listened to His voice. I vowed I would never again give in to my base urges. There must be no more wanton killing. Instead I would dedicate my life to becoming someone else.

One day in the local paper I read about a Greek Cypriot couple who ran a kebab shop in Muirhouse. Their seventeen-year-old son, Georgios Kristos, had died suddenly of meningitis. Broken-hearted, they were selling up and returning to Cyprus. It was perfect. The boy was just a year younger than me. I would turn myself into Georgios Kristos. And I knew exactly how I would set about doing so.

I’d read the book, The Day of the Jackal . It had all seemed too simple to be true. Surely it was only in a novel that this method of building an identity could work? But work it did. In 1998 anyway.

The authorities had found me a job in the packing department of a chicken factory. Not exactly appropriate for someone who had committed a violent crime, but nobody seemed to notice. It paid little, but I saved all I earned. Then I realized that I could earn far better money by actually killing the creatures. I applied for overtime whenever possible. It caused me no concern to watch these poor hairless battery hens die. After all, their lives were as full of pain and despair as mine had so far been. And I too had sometimes thought that I would be better off out of my misery.

But suddenly I had a real purpose. I saw my chance to become a new person, somebody who could at least seem to be normal — and I grasped it.

The newspaper report most obligingly supplied the date of Georgios Kristos’s death. I was able to obtain his death certificate. That supplied me with his date of birth, and I was then able to obtain a birth certificate. The report also told me which school Georgios had attended. It seemed he had been a precocious student, and at seventeen had already passed four A-levels, including English and, most fortuitously for me, Drama.

I waited until Georgios would have been an adult. On his eighteenth birthday I left my halfway house one morning and never returned. Neither did I ever see my probation officer again. I was no longer Rory Burns. I was Georgios Kristos. I dyed my reddish blond typically Gaelic hair a Mediterranean black, acquired dark-tinted contact lenses, and took to using sunbeds and fake tan.

I have learned well how to pretend to be something that I am not. Indeed, anything at all that I am not. I was not drawn to acting by a desire to become a star of stage or screen. Though I have found, curiously perhaps, that I enjoy performing before an audience. I chose acting because it seemed the ideal craft for a man who was to live entirely by subterfuge.

The principals of the Willesden Academy for Performing Arts were impressed by my false academic qualifications. And it turned out that I was a natural. While I was there, I learned to drive and acquired a driving licence, I acquired a passport in the name of Georgios Kristos, I opened a bank account, and I was able to join Equity.

I had succeeded in creating a new life for myself. And I wanted to live it. For my God. In order to keep my vow that there would be no more killings, I researched medications and therapies, and overseas suppliers who did not concern themselves with prescriptions and legalities, eventually settling on a cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs that allowed me to keep my anger in check.

Sometimes I almost forgot that I was acting on and off stage. Playing a role. I travelled to London, found myself work, acquired somewhere to live in the heart of the city and nurtured my new life. I kept it up for thirteen years. Thirteen unbelievable years. There was one little lapse. But only one in all that time. And I doubted anyone would ever find out about it, even now, for it took place in another country. Not realizing that it would react with my medication, I decided to sample marijuana. My hard-won control evaporated and I was again overwhelmed by the urge to take revenge. But I did at least make sure that my victim was a prostitute. An evil woman without morality. And God did not seem to mind. The terrible pains in my head and my body did not return. And I never smoked marijuana again.