The Rhythm Section. Mark Burnell

her bed smacks the wall between us when she’s earning. I’m surprised she doesn’t break it since the partition is so thin I can hear nearly everything that is said between her and her clients. Those sad exchanges; the insincere teases and the lies. The whispers and moans of encouragement, the grunts and groans of faked release, I know her vocabulary in all its depressing entirety. I am her.

      As for my shaking frame, who can say? It’s shock, certainly, and it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to it. Frankly, I’m surprised I lasted this long. But is there also something else?

      Every time I close my eyes, I see Proctor, twisted and torn, drained, quite literally, of life. Or I see him as a kind man, someone who didn’t deserve to die, someone quite unlike me. All day, I was ruled by reason and protected from emotion. But now I am too tired to resist. An overwhelming sadness rises up within me and threatens to drown me. I think of his injuries and the sickening process that created them. And the fact that but for a cruel coincidence of timing – a coincidence born of my brutal behaviour – I would have been there when Proctor’s killer called. And either the two of us, as a team, would have survived, which is a jewel to add to my treasure-chest of guilt, or I would have gone the same way as him