Ade Grant - The Mariner

The morning mourning would pass (given enough coffee), but the depression would not relent. It would look over every thought that passed through his mind like a conveyor belt before a quality inspector, twisting and morphing. A tabloid stance on every topic. Always the worst. Always the darkest.

Crippling. Even now, in the dead of night when there was no social interaction to be had, his chest hurt from the tightness of a panic attack. Day in and day out he felt as if he were on top of a roller-coaster about to plunge from an enormous height. Except that moment never came. He was left with the expectant feeling and never the release. It made him want to scream, but of course he never did.

Well… almost never.

Sometimes, on nights like this, he stuffed a towel into his mouth so sound couldn’t escape and howled. For a second, as he expelled every cubit of air in his lungs till they shook, he’d believe the pain had escaped, that perhaps he’d birthed the horrible monster inside him, but it was all a cruel trick. It was still there, deep down. It always was.

His psychotherapist had suggested that all the problems stemmed back to childhood. Apparently all the problematic behaviour could be traced to those early days. Not a difficult child, but perhaps one a tad too quiet, too withdrawn, too needy for approval. And perhaps that had been caused by the incident with the pillow?

Well, whatever the cause, be it parental influence, chemical imbalance, or just a sharp knock to the head, what’s done was done. He was stuck with a mind that viewed the world through a tint.

3:47

Time steadily progressed and still sleep eluded him. Once again he tried to fantasise in the hope that an orgasm would release enough endorphins to end this rut. Like any man, he conjured images pornographic in style, lacking setting or plot. Simple, functional and explicit. Fantastically pliable and sluttish women entertained, dragging his mind away from the cycle of anxiety and into lust.

And then, just as things were looking up, an image he spent his waking life trying to avoid popped in. Her, his wife, with him . That arsehole who’d managed to plague his insecurities ever since he’d blundered into their lives five years ago. Martin Marling, his wife’s temporary darling. And the man he wanted to kill.

But kill him he couldn’t, because he’d never met the man. He’d never attended one of his wife’s work socials (perhaps if he had, they never would have begun flirting and the whole horrible situation could have been avoided), and thus had never so much as laid eyes on her supervisor. Martin Marling. World-class shit.

Her indiscretions, three indiscretions, had occurred years ago. A brief trio of secret liaisons at her supervisor’s flat, all occurring over a short period of time and followed up with a tearful confession. It almost tore their marriage apart. Accusations were made, regretful words said, but ultimately he forgave her. What else could he do? He loved her. Love is like that; it’s not the all-or-nothing commodity, as seen in films and teen-dramas, easily gained and just as easily lost. Once love’s worked its way inside you, no amount of pain will tear it loose.

Forgiveness doesn’t bring peace though, and he’d spent many months obsessing after the fact. However, time heals a clean wound, and as far as he was concerned it were disinfected and sewn up tight. That was until fifteen months later, when she’d tearfully confessed what was about to appear in the Metro newspaper.

Martin Marling had been a serial seducer, taking advantage of countless employees over a period of seven years. While this may be little more than an abuse of power, another offence had surfaced that was less forgiveable. Marling had hidden a camera and recorded the trysts. His partner, a poor creature deceived for many years, found the stack of dvds in the dark recesses of the loft, discs containing hours of footage, films and photos starring unwitting co-workers. Fortunately, the horrified woman reported the matter to the police.

Fired, arrested for voyeurism, sentenced and put on the sex offenders register, Marling was sent to prison for fourteen months. This, [the Mariner]’s wife confessed, was about to hit the papers.

He should have been supportive. Outwardly he was, showing compassion, sympathy, even anger when the moment warranted it, but inside all he felt was a raw terror. Because there was no way [the Mariner] could live with this, the damage was too deep and the implications simple. From that day forth, suicide was inevitable.

Later, when he would recount this to his new therapist whilst looking out over the streets of London, [the Mariner] would feel ridiculous, knowing there was no rational connection between cause and conclusion. Yet rationality couldn’t change his programming. Not even medication (and there had been a lot of medication) could do that.

He got up, delicately sliding out the bed so not to wake her and crept beyond their bedroom. Stairs protested, calling out to his sleeping partner, but they’d shared house and mortgage for seven years and he knew just how the sound travelled. His secrecy was safe; she was lost to the world.

The living-room housed their single desktop computer, and he slid into the cold swivel chair, blowing on his hands to warm them up. With a whir, the computer hummed into life, illuminating his face with small green and blue flashing LED’s. They alternated, giving the impression of a tiny police-car, braying its alarm at the midnight offence.

Not much later, he was online, fingers tapping away at the search bar. The phrases were long established, and the first returns were like familiar friends, if unwholesome in their company.

HIDDEN SEX PHOTO

The list of returned sites spiralled, hundreds of web addresses dedicated to housing images and videos, each supplied by their users. He glanced down the list, selecting not the first, second or third, but the fourth link. He’d already explored the others thoroughly, it was time to move onto the next.

Suddenly the screen was packed with images of women in various states of sexual arousal. Some pictures were blurry and remote, taken from some distance away, others had tell-tale signs of being hidden in cupboards or air-vents. Inverse fish eye lenses, distorting the image as if through a crystal ball, betrayed the lengths some had gone in recording their liaisons, installing tiny cameras in light fixtures and lamps. A voyeur’s heaven.

He used the navigation system to browse, ignoring the ‘girl on girl’, ‘gay’ and ‘group’ sections, instead going for the staple ‘straight’ tab. It returned 10,217 results.

60 per page.

171 pages.

This was going to take some time.

With a hollow and floaty feeling in his gut, somewhere between shame and fear, he began to browse, studying each image carefully. Sometimes the evaluation could be instantaneous. Was her hair black? No? Move on. Other pictures, usually the blurred or obscured, would take longer to assess. Bottoms would have to be scrutinised, vaginas compared, breasts studied. Each time the same question was asked. Was that his wife?

Given the few facts he knew of her encounter, he knew to dismiss photos plainly taken anywhere outside of a bedroom. Shots in woods could be skipped. Those in offices offered no interest. This was a search, a quest for answers, and he put his mind to it with the vigour of the obsessed.

When asked what the point of such a search was, as his therapist would later do, he’d answer ‘just so he’d know’. It was a paranoia, lingering in his brain like a foul smelling tumour, a suspicion that Marling had uploaded pictures of his dearest for the whole world to see. In court, the man had sworn he hadn’t, but that struck [the Mariner] as obvious. Who would admit to violating his victims more than he’d already been shown to do?