I am crouching behind a tree. I grip the wire and wait, trying to crunch my body into an invisible knot. There is a rag wrapped around my fingers to protect my skin when the wire goes taut. The rag reeks of the petrol from yesterday. I used it to wipe the splashback from my shoes once I was over the wall and away from the blazing shed.

 I am relying on my hearing almost entirely. I don’t want to look up until I have to. Even lamplight glancing from my eyes might alert an approaching rollerblader. I listen for the spirited rumble of little wheels. I wait for an age. People pass, their voices careless and open. My envy is furious. They don’t know how divine it is, their freedom to stroll and go nowhere special. And then I hear it: ten minutes before the warden makes his circuit of the gates, sealing the park at the day’s end, just as the sweet, seeded air moves from cool to cold; a rattle that grows, a percussive career towards silent, unexpected me. I wait until the absolute last moment before glancing up. A man on blades. Blonde hair cascades behind him. He swoops with panache. I grip and tug hard with a grunt. The wire springs upwards like a murderous wall.  Across the path, where it is tied to a tree, it bites through bark which chips against the tension. In the scarred wood you will be able to retrace the moment that he hit the wire; the lurch and rip. I let the steel thread fall and scuttle into the long grass. A crowd is collecting where the sacrifice lies. I hope that one of them is a doctor. Apologies fall from me as I run; useless, automatic and unheard. The sound of his head striking the concrete echoes in me. I am ghastly but safe for another week, perhaps two.

I should explain.

My last guiltless sleep faded into waking with a sense of something left behind, something on the lip of saying. Something uncomfortable. Something anticipated. Incipience. 
           
Who remembers mornings, the stumble and scrub before the day’s launch? Not me. I dozed through my last free hour. As I closed my front door and stepped into the street, I noticed something splayed and yellow on the pavement. But then I heard the complaints of a bus stopping, my bus, the 175. I ran. . An old woman was holding up departure. She was having difficulty lifting her wheeled basket onto the lowest step of the entrance to the bus. She strained and heaved, each breath mouthed complaint.  As I stepped forward to help her I felt a stab of complaint in my gut. We lifted the basket together. She didn’t catch my eye, perhaps through embarrassment or a general and unshakeable mistrust. Onboard, upstairs, I looked down over South London’s grubby, swarming streets and realised the bus felt horribly unsafe. Every judder and rumble triggered an interior alarm. Passengers seemed malevolent and suspicious. I was certain that something awful was going to happen. To me.  Exclusively, to me. I gripped the rim of the seat, convinced the bus would tip into a sudden chasm.
            I made it to work convinced that I’d neglected something of supreme significance. I assist the homeless. My working actions resonate with damaged lives, they matter. Perhaps I’d left a  client waiting for my help and they’d given up on promised methadone; or stood a colleague up last night, forced them to venture solo into dereliction, tracking the unhinged, the violent and helpless. I slunk in, expecting justified abuse, formal warnings, regrettable discipline. Smiles instead; the usual morning round of cheerfully harassed faces. I was terrified, ran and hid in my office, expecting a trap. I needlessly shuffled paper, de-alphabetised, read single-page reports a dozen times. Someone brought me a cup of tea. This convinced me I was not safe. I got out fast and headed home on foot.  Everything; every human, animal, vehicle and distortion in the concrete was an impending disaster.  Balancing panic with safety was hard. I fought the instinct to run. Running would have been fatal. Do you know how much scaffolding there is in London?  Have you noticed how many reckless men swing hods and dangle hammers above our heads? Nor had I, until that morning. I reached my street and snapped, sprinted the last few yards. I stepped onto the banana skin outside my gate and crashed like a mortal cartoon.

The next two days were blissful.  I could tolerate the clattering ward, the cries of the unheeded sick and swaying, lethally caffeinated junior doctors because I, at least, was at peace. Maybe it was the concussion, or the painkillers, but I felt that my dreaded event had passed. I slipped into a pastel reverie, grinned dopily at nurses. I saw the bright side. Soon I was on my way out, stepping into sunshine. I had regained the ability to saunter. I bought a balloon and walked through Greenwich Park, down verdant slopes, exempt from doom of any kind. This lasted almost a week. Until one morning, like a scab that shakes loose in the night exposing what’s not healed, the sense of unkind premonition returned. 
            I called in sick and checked the gas, sniffing the hob. I pressed my ears to the floorboards, listening for trouble. I resolved to stay indoors. I know that’s where most accidents happen, statistically. But only if you put up shelves or climb stairs, or cook or step into a hot bath or attempt one of the many demented gambles that a death-wish can produce. Wiser now, I sat rigid, except for a little shaking. I opened tinned food away from my face, wearing thick winter gloves to protect my hands. I ate with a spoon, the bluntest I could find. 
           
My kitchen had become a potential maelstrom of electricity and blades. I always got out of there fast, but must have left some tins and boxes badly stacked one day. I remember the noise it all made when it fell: An elaborate thread of crashes, the sound of structural collapse, forced entry, subsidence and alien invasion, all evils simultaneously. Convinced of Armageddon, I fired myself through the front door, which slammed shut behind me. I felt safer, not thinking ahead. Wild, I saw a pedestrian heading towards me, an assassin disguised as an elderly man in a charity shop baseball cap and scuffed regimental blazer. I ran into the road from behind a parked van. Bad move, as any road-safety squirrel will tell you. The car swerved to avoid me and slammed into the side of a motorbike parked close in to the pavement. The old man had no time to move. The motorbike serving as a cowcatcher, the car shovelled him up and pinioned him against a garden wall which, after an organic crunch, gave way. Everything tumbled through, smashing shrubs and gnomes. Because my front door was shut and I had stepped out from behind a vehicle, it occurred to me that I could have run from anywhere. I was, now, when it mattered, anonymous. I left the crime scene and it was only when I collapsed onto a park bench, my lungs raw, that I noticed it: like the rattling of heating pipes unnoticed until it’s stopped, like rising mirth in a time of bad news; my fear was gone again. I was in a gentle pastoral scene. The realisation brought revulsion and a kind of peace through understanding. I had unburdened myself accidentally. I had diverted swooping disaster onto the old man. I wandered the streets, hoping I had not been seen. and agonised, knowing only one thing for certain. The fear would creep again, and soon. Now it was better as it was worse. I had a choice. Pain for me, or for someone else: My choice. I was bad, bad karma.

Whatever crooked deity set things up this way did it with uncanny neatness. I first noticed this when I tiptoed back to my front door, hours after the collision. There was police tape around the wrecked wall. The emergency services had been and gone. I telephoned the police to ask what had happened. They told me briefly, thanked me for my time. Sweet Lord, I was free. I asked about the old man. He would live, they said.  On wheels. I had mixed feelings about that. What if he had died?  I would be a killer, true, but would I also have bought myself more time? To distract myself from thoughts like that I tidied up the kitchen and visited the owners of the street’s newest pile of rubble. They were a young couple called Jenny and Peter. I asked if there was anything I could do. They said thanks but no. I had a cup of tea and we talked about council tax. Had I not ploughed an old man into their garden we wouldn’t have met.  Nice people. The point is, I got away with it entirely. The universe unpacked, became a place where there were no repercussions for diving madly into public highways, maiming the elderly and damaging private property. I got away with it as if it was allowed.

I was untroubled for over a week, punctual and efficient at work. Yellowing to-do lists were done, the homeless housed, junkies de-junked and the surface of my desk began to reappear, like flattened grass after a long winter. I helped more people in that week than I had ever helped before and I enjoyed it. I felt no fear touring mattress-strewn hovels with bin-liners for curtains, charred foil and condoms sticking to the carpet. I knew that I was safe.

I learned to buy time, learned it through another accident. I was in the office having a good day, better than those around me whom I now perplexed, like a nun singing in a chain-gang. Then, with urgent dismay, I felt the scary zap, the incipience returning. I needed to get away.
            “Anyone want tea?” I asked. How many British lives are made and broken over the rim of a teacup? There were happy nods. I rushed it. I grabbed milk from the fridge and poured it quickly into four mugs which I carefully carried through, one at a time. Lauren, a perky Scot, moaned and spat hot tea across her desktop. 
            “God. What’s in it? What is this?” she gasped. Another, Martin, was caught out too. He heard her, separated cup and mouth in time but kept on tipping. He didn’t burn, but he was soaked and soon stank of the rotten, lumpen milk with which I’d laced their tea. I was embarrassed, apologetic and intrigued. The danger-buzz subsided. Not entirely, but it simmered down to a low-level angst. And there it was, my awful contract. Bad deeds buy time. I called it the Merit System. It was idiot simple. Brutal. Walking home, I trudged beneath crumbling tower blocks and through streets where no car was complete. When no one was looking I dropped a breezeblock through a Micra’s windscreen but the rosy glow lasted less than an hour. I was disappointed. It was too impersonal, perhaps. My inner alarm clanged harder. Sweating, feeling rushed, I ducked into the first small supermarket I could find. There was no one else around. A young man was on a stepladder grappling with a broken striplight. I fought my instincts, my humanity. He was the first vulnerable person I saw, that’s all. I swept past and kicked out at the feet of the stepladder. He buckled, fell forward, scrabbled at the shelves, dragging tins and bags of rice on top of him. The next three days were like floating on candyfloss. 
           
It was the little things that made the difference, along with the personal touch. During my working day I could house a runaway quite happily, help give positive shapes to possible futures. I’d visit a new flat, help set things up before the vulnerable youngster arrived. I’d steal every fuse from every plug in the building and walk out smiling, free for an afternoon and perhaps an evening. Everyone pushes when you get off a bus. I just pushed a little harder. I scrounged up all the foreign coins from every holiday I’d ever had. One of those duds dropped into a rattling tin would get me half an hour, especially if I engaged the volunteer in life-affirming banter. I learned the allergies of everyone I knew, held dinner parties. 
            There was a hidden elegance, a sense of gleaming clockwork within this strange condition, revealed best in the slow-release activities. Ever since the damp squib of the Micra’s window I’d not returned to vandalism. It didn’t seem worth it.  But one day I conducted an experiment, testing this new physics. Prowling a neglected corner of the park I saw a locked bicycle. Out of curiosity I took a screwdriver and loosened the nuts around the rear wheel. Once the bicycle was moving, it would take a little while, but they’d shake loose. Then I went home and waited. The dread was beginning again, but I let it. I sat and hugged myself, carefully.  Three hours later, just as I was certain that lightning was about to strike me in my sitting room, I felt an opiate rush. The wheel was off. After that, when I had nothing better on, I’d haunt the parks and estates, setting little Easter Eggs like that one.  Sudden unexpected gifts of time, to be delivered at some future moment.  Sometimes I’d be lying in bed or sitting at my desk and that lull would come but I’d have no memory of what I’d done to earn it, I’d set so many traps across the city. In winter I’d throw water over pavements in the night, play Jack Frost. I bought books on car maintenance and sat up late, memorising essential cables and wires.
            Seeing a drunk cresting an Underground escalator now summoned images of me-time. I called it Alkie-skittles. They were primed to topple. It was the people they damaged on their way down that brought in the bonus hours, sometimes whole days if bones got broken. I estimated one free day for every extra, bad collision.  Once, a group of lads were so incensed at being battered by a hapless, tumbling drunkard that they chased him to the bottom of the steps and set into him with boots. Their glottal, terrace rage was fearsome. I snuck away, loathing myself and knowing that I’d bought a fortnight of stormless hours. 
 But I craved months and more of freedom. And that required devious acts, cruelties beyond routine and petty harm. That was where the air-miles were. That was how the reward points stacked up fastest.
           
Inevitably my thoughts blackened. I was mortal, had perhaps fifty years left on Earth. Leaving aside recent, rather urgent thoughts regarding the nature and possibility of an afterlife, how did I see the rest of my days playing out? Could I stomach decades of secret carnage? It wasn’t my health I was thinking of. Whatever I did, however public and brazen my mischief, I escaped unharmed. Always. Never got so much as a splinter climbing a garden fence or singed my eyebrows when I launched fireworks through the window of a hospice. Sometimes I wondered if those I harmed didn’t deserve me. Whatever, I could carry on for years if each act didn’t curdle me a little more. To think of killing was simple, humane mathematics: ten minor injuries inflicted equals perhaps one severe, life-altering physical trauma in terms of time purchased. But if I killed, how many lesser miseries could be avoided? How many deaths would buy a year of safety? How many for fifty? I considered servicing the terminally ill and unhappily alive, setting up a kind of Samaritans of Death. These thoughts were savage, tearing like harpies, like proper demons. It was a blood-red, gut temptation: how to do the least possible damage and yet liberate myself from pain and fear.

 Whatever I did, it would have to be huge, certain. I imagined a lifetime spent at peace following some modest act of horror, suddenly cut short. Say I caused a packed-up coach to fly from some Hellenic mountain corkscrew road, only for my purchased days to run thin years later, when I was too old to resume my harvest. I considered going into politics. But you have to get quite far before they’ll let you start a war, even a little one. You’ll conclude that I’d let slip the ballast of humanity completely, yet these questions paralysed me. I risked ever longer periods without committing harm. My duvet was a womb, the outside world an ursine growl. But it was too much to live with, and although I was no longer sure I feared death as an end, I feared the methods of its process more than I feared remorse. I knew I had to plan things very carefully, but not what to plan.   

Then Justin Cupit came along. That story in the papers, on the television, being debated by panels of crusading curmudgeons and edgy, haunted liberals. Murder happens all the time but Cupit’s trial coincided with a national mood, tipped some collective balance. 
            Justin Cupit, so his psychiatrist said, had a mental age of twelve. The photograph of him that ruled our screens showed pure monstrosity. But search through any photo album and you’ll find a snap that nails your subject as a killer in waiting. There’s Grandma slicing the turkey, caught off guard. See the glint in her eye, her sure grip on the knife?  Lock her up and fast. Six years old and already little Susie’s podgy arm around her teddy’s neck looks worryingly tight. But here was Cupit who had indeed killed six or seven children, staring like a baleful, skinny reaper from some wedding party in a shingled community centre. The police tracked him down to his mother’s home where Airfix Spitfires hung from his bedroom ceiling. He kept the top bunk, his younger brother having matured, moved out and married. Cupit was a man with murder as a private sickness but his story had public tendrils.

A lobby had been growing to bring back the death penalty. You heard it in the increasingly unguarded opinions of politicians, in the unfettered Why-oh-Why?  rhetoric of more and more front pages. There was a tension building, a resurgent blood requirement. Cupit arrived at the moment that this impulse sprouted legs and teeth and marched on London. They turned up on the television and the streets: puce cab drivers; clouds of high-rise, pram pushing Furies; Surrey common-sensers with bloodless lips; the tribes of Us-and-Them, of Enough’s-Enough converged. MPs, sniffing votes and rowdy cheers on Question Time funnelled the toxins. 

There were a number of things that persuaded me to get involved.  The Hangers’ total lack of inwardness; the way they spat their eye-for-eye opinions into gleeful cameras, speaking from positions of granite moral certitude, judging all. That irritated me. The randomness of it was frustrating, too. Eighteen months previously a man called Steven Mortimer had been sent to prison for killing his wife and two children. He’d been administering her Friday night beating when she’d slipped and cracked her head open. Steven panicked, running from the house and knocking over candles that his wife had set upon the table for a placatory supper. Whilst Steven circled the M25 planning his alibi, his children burned to death. He didn’t even get a front page. Why not? World Cup. England lasted until the semis, beat the Argies 4-2 in the quarters. A fantastic summer. Maybe Cupit should have died for what he did.  But those howlers weren’t the ones to judge it. That’s not what anyone was really in it for. It was the adrenal kick, the chance to act out in public. Mean, domestic fury masked as outrage: Inrage. I wanted to stop them.    

The righteous set a day to fall on Parliament and I decided to march with them.  I had already, entirely separate to this opportunity and in the purest speculation done all the research that I needed to prepare.  

It is a cold morning and I’m thinned out by all the hours I haven’t slept. I’m muffled in a bulky sweater and Barbour jacket, county clobber. I stare upwards at familiar buildings like a stranger to the city, gripping my placard like a weapon of justice. It reads Kill the Killers, Save the Kids. It’s already making me friends. I get an uncomplicated thrill from walking down the centre of roads normally choked with traffic. We trickle along Millbank but the crush soon begins and the chanting turns us nasty. Horizontal morning light gives everything a brazen wash. We’re like an army. A group of sturdy young men are chanting something about Cupit’s balls. I hear a woman complaining that they’re being vulgar. She has a sign, distributed by a popular newspaper, saying Let Him Swing. Her hypocrisy reassures me. Not that I am about to do anything approaching the right thing, that would be impossible, but that the grounds for my assumptions and my prejudice are solid. 

The rucksack on my back feels very heavy. I walk extremely carefully. Indignant voices knit into an angry cloud although these are not people familiar with unity. They shove together. I cannot risk closeness until the right moment. I’m too delicate, too finely wired. We snake through a channel banked by ambivalent police. My vest is soaked in sweat that freezes. There must be icicles in my armpits. We’re getting close, now. Everything’s a glassy haze. I want to hide and run away but it’s too late. We flow like sewage into Parliament Square. Tories hector from a rostrum. There is a contingent of mothers with prams. A little boy wears a t-shirt saying Can We Fix Him?  Yes We Can! I resolve to stay away from them, I don’t want children getting hurt when things are triggered. My teeth are chattering. I can barely hold my placard up. Oh, God: there are stars, pretty flashes no one else can see. I want to cry. I’ve made it in safety, walked all the way from home in a frozen nightmare crawl. I lower my placard and press forwards. At the front the lads are baiting the police. An empty can of Stella is kicked backwards through the crowd. It’s only nine a.m. I’m terrified and close to where I need to be. Up tight with the hard core. The shouts are coarse and hateful. How would you like it, copper? What if it was your fucking kids…Cut his bollocks…come on, then…up his arse…
It’s too close to think. A white cloud. I can’t believe I’m here.

It’s been three weeks since I committed any act of harm. I’ve let the fear and imminence collect and build. I’ve sat silent and naked, risking nothing but the simplest, safest movements. Foreboding grew to terror, terror shifted upwards to a gibbering hysteria but I kept quiet and sat it out. I’m on an accumulator.

I wait until I’m in the clammy, shoving centre of the mob. I’m unstable, nuclear. One push and I’ll go off. I spot cameramen nearby, across the barricade. I want to be seen. I tear the top layer from my placard. Beneath, it reads: Stop the Hate, Murderers are People Too! I don’t care about the sentiment but the effect it has on those around me. I turn the placard to the cameras and they move in, astonished. I give the cry I’ve planned.
            “Please stop this. Don’t give in to hate. Cupit is a human being. He needs understanding and help. Who are you to judge? Are you so very different from him?”  My voice is feeble, vicar-like, perfect, the quintessential whine of the bleeding heart.  A circle forms around me, but only briefly. Brains fizzing like lager bombs struggle to absorb what’s happened. Someone calls me a queer. The dam busts. A wave of fists and boots rises and breaks against me. I feel a blade. The long postponement ends. It’s primal now, and righteously correct to them. But soon they’ll all be murderers and that’ll shut them up. It’ll be a long shuffle home. Or perhaps they’ll call it a fair cop and set up voluntary gibbets on the Thames although I doubt it. I feel my doom and obscure burden dissolve like the life that I’ve elected to disown. I’ve found the perfect count of deaths to bring down stillness.