CHAPTER ONE

Sitting in my dingy little bedsit, I forced my own head at gunpoint to think happy, normal thoughts, but it was no good. Trying to ignore the impulse to stick people’s heads onto poles like lollipops gave me a horrible headache. For years now my mind has been filled with gruesome, evil thoughts and ideas – and I love it; they are the only things that have kept me alive, kept me going about my malignantly benign day-to-day business. Contemplating murder has always put a smile on my face and filled me with a warm glow. The only pain they cause me is in having to resist them, my restraint a one-ton weight on a fraying thread. Do you know what it is like not being able to put my heavenly fantasies of murder and mayhem into reality? It’s like masturbating for eternity and never, ever allowing yourself to come. It’s absolute torture, comparable to pulling teeth out of a toothless head. How can I be cheerful and positive when my soul is stuffed with the rotting meat of people I have not yet killed?
I have spent a long time fighting this compulsion to kill, which has made me feel like I am sharing one straitjacket skin ten sizes too small with the gargantuan gargoyles of agony and rage. I even tried to ask for help. I went to my GP. “I feel like killing someone.” I told him. “Don’t be silly,” he said. He put me on anti-depressants, and that was that.
I devoured true-crime books as a vicarious substitute to actually committing the beautifully atrocious deed. They served the same function as pornography, I guess – satisfying immediate need, but still unable to eliminate the underlying compulsion I knew would revive in the near future. And like porn, the fed and nurtured more dubious urges.
I don’t know why I spent so long fighting the urge, like anybody would really give a shit. Take today: this morning was another pointless, putrid addition to my useless stock of preceding days. I woke up to a stack of bills I couldn’t pay, and a toilet that wouldn’t flush. I wanted to die. Then I realised no one would give a flying fuck whether I died, or lived and carried on paying my final demands. They would only make a noise if I stopped paying my bills. It made me feel sick to my stomach.
So you see it wasn’t anything much that was responsible or my transition from stupid useless cunt to serial killer.

But let’s go back a week. I was a law-abiding nonentity with an interview at my local dole office to go to. As per usual the DSS clerk behind the desk was a beautiful human specimen of sarcasm and vapid arrogance. I decided to engage in some self-righteous derision too.
He had that curious sense of useless superiority most wage-slaves have about benefit scroungers, which I freely admitted I was.
“You’ve been signing on for a year, and you still haven’t found a job, you haven’t even applied for a single post at the job centre.”
“There wasn’t anything in my field.”
“And what is your field?”
“Quantum physics.”
“Don’t be funny. Why should hard-working taxpayers fund lazy scum like you?”
“Because they are stupid enough to be hard-working taxpayers, that’s why. And of course what is the world lacking? Bureaucrats. The world always needs more bureaucrats like you. You know what I think?”
“No, what do you think?” he sneered dismissively.
“I think bureaucracy is the cancer of society’s testicles, but now the tumours are bigger than the balls. So let us be eunuchs with credit card debts, and 1% of our dreams fulfilled, and say we have lived well.”
“You what?! What are you saying?”
“Balls to you.”
His sneer turned into a turgid smile. He picked up the card in front of him. “I have the perfect job for you. For someone with your interpersonal talents.” He slid it over to me. I picked it up.
“Supermarket shelf stacker! Fuck off!”
“Let me put it this way: if you don’t take the job, we stop your money. Simple as that.”
So what could I do? Restraining from scooping out his face with a spoon took all my energy. I sat there, nursing a seething, caustic impotent rage, with no way to ventilate. Hate blew up its spiked balloon inside my skull. My mind screamed profanities at itself. So what did I do? Did I kill the bastard? No, I took the fucking job and went home. The afternoon TV offering of talk shows could not make me a better person.