Straight to Hell

My name is David Marston. I am a thirty year old male with delusions of grandeur and I am, in all certainty, going to hell. All the lies I’ve told, all the people I’ve played, all the cheats I’ve pulled, all the icons I’ve idolised, all the blasphemies I’ve screamed, all the wrong women I’ve coveted, all the ideas I’ve killed and all the lost midnights when anything probably happened were bad enough but this time, oh, I’ve really done it this time.

For this, I will be hung upside down and lowered deep into the fiery pits with only the morningstar for company.

Heh.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating.

But, you may remember this incident a few weeks ago and it appears I wasn’t looking for anything when strewing my belongings with wanton abandon around the room, but rather I was trying to hide something away. When I got home it fell with a saintly thunk out of my bag onto the fake wooden floor.

It appears I stole the Gideon’s bible from the hotel room.

Either that or the god-damned monkey planted it on me.

Now, clearly theft in itself is a sin (not to mention a crime), but theft of the word of God is, surely, a damnable offence. I can smell the sulphur now.

I mentioned this to someone better versed in these things than I and she replied that God was probably just pleased that scum like I was reading the word in any form.

She’s just trying to make me feel better.

It sits on my desk, in the shadow of my computer monitor and taunts me pious ability to be full of memorable passages. It reminds me of everything I don’t believe in and that the end is going to be nasty.

There was a purpose behind my actions and I flick through its thin, near-transparent pages looking for the words I need. I take the passages required and wonder if, when I am finished, there’s a way I get it back without anyone noticing. At the same time, I’m aware from its unfingered pages and perfectly flat spine that I am probably the first person to spend any time with it.

And then I notice the inside back cover.

The pencil scrawled words with a loop of desperation to them shout out to me in the glow of the desk lamp.

‘Lizzie Sims loves Max Fronnicke.’

Who, I wonder, scrawls a love note in the back of a Gideon’s bible?

This wasn’t the sort of hotel where you’d whisk someone away for a romantic weekend. This was the sort of hotel where you passed through on your way to or from elsewheres. Or possibly hid, for there was nothing around and nobody paid anyone any attention.

So depending on what genre they were living in would depend on what happened.

Perhaps, Max lay in the bath holding his guts in as the white porcelain slowly stained red, his breath gaining that trapped rattle. The smoking gun that finished him was still between the fingers of the corpse out on the runway. Lizzie, meanwhile, sat on the bed, her bare thighs flinching from the sheets still soaked with sweat from the night before. She scribbled down the last words she could think of before finding her own way to the exit.

Perhaps, it was just the start of a stressful journey of discovery. Lizzie sprawled alone in the bed, dreaming of his arms somewhere on the other side of the world. She ached from her toes to her fingers, longing to look into his eyes just once, if only she could find him. So, she took pencil and wrote down the words, like a mantra, a good luck charm and replaces the book back in its drawer on the empty side of the bed.

Perhaps, Max was even watching her whilst she wrote them down. He stood at the mirror, tightened his tie and checked his collar for evidence. He watched her scribble something down, in some old book and he wondered what on Earth it could be. But then the thought was gone, replaced with wonderings of how long it would be before he’d see his wife and kids. All of this, he had already decided, Lizzie, the hotel, the perfume, had been nothing but an extremely satisfying moment of madness.

Or perhaps, Max wrote it down as Lizzie prepared to leave him one last time, after one too many fights, one too many raised voices and thrown objects. Unable to even get on a plane with him, to spend those hours cramped into the sky together she was picking up her bag and walking out the door as he wrote it down because all words can hold some measure of the truth once committed to paper.

I glance back over the four scenes that so readily came to mind and their bleakness distresses me. I rub my eyes and sigh.

I pace around my bedsit a little.

I pour a glass of water and sit back down.

There’s only one way I can redeem myself, I decide. Only one way I can atone for my sin. I need to save them.

I need to give them a happy ending.

Lizzie was exhausted yet buoyant, high on adrenalin pumping around her system. She felt as though every hour of the past six months had been spent in an air-conditioned cell, one hand strapped to a keyboard the other to a telephone, repeatedly given the same instructions day in, day out. But now the holiday was so close she could almost taste the salt in the air, the sangria in the glass, the sheer open freeness of it all.

In the bathroom Max was showering. She could hear him humming old Beach Boys tunes above the sound of cascading water. The door was open and steam slithered out and across the room like a morning mist. A new morning.

Lizzie’s lip hurt slightly from where he’d tugged at it with tongue. But it hurt in a nice way, a way that meant even when he wasn’t there his presence lingered all around her.

The weather played on the television. Cold and grey in London tomorrow. Not where they were going. Where they were going the days were endless, the skies open and wide enough to allow everyone’s hopes and dreams to breathe.

Just in that moment something without physical substance cannonballed into her, sending sparkles across her vision. She’d not realised before quite how much she was in love with Max, even after such a short period of time. Something was snarling up in the chest and threatening to smoother her unless she simply accepted the joy it: He was her everything.

She leant across and opened the drawer on his side of the bed.
There, as expected, was a copy of the bible. Lizzie opened the bible at the first page. The first lines of Genesis, the creation of existence, of love even.
Virtually everyone knew these words. They had lasted for thousands of years, passed on from mouth to mouth.

She flipped to the back and using the little pencil atop the room service leather bound menu wrote: ‘Lizzie Sims loves Max Fronnicke.’ Her words would be in good company, encouraged to last as long as those before.

‘In the beginning…’