He took hold of my shrivelled heart and squeezed life back into it. Right from the start I knew Max was special. He was incredible, like quick silver, burnished and lustrous but never conforming to any one configuration. He was constantly metamorphosing. He was vivacious and brilliant and most of all, he was alive. He was so dynamic and animated that his luminosity spread like a plague into everything he touched, including me. When we were together we had such an electrically charged union of minds that when we consolidated both our energies, it was like a nuclear chemical fusion, mushroom clouds of catastrophic intensity exploding in every direction. We shimmered with efficacy and sparkled simultaneously. Within days we were totally inseparable, totally involved, and totally immersed.
That was many, many years ago. Now and then I'd find myself yearning for him inexplicably but thankfully all that has faded with the time that's passed. I always think it’s strange and extraordinary that you can be somehow connected to a person even though you might be years and miles apart. Even with the knowledge that you had lived only a semblance of a life, or to put it more accurately, a hazardous masquerade, and even if you are armed with the knowledge that they may have tried to destroy you.
In the beginning, I could not find fault, Max was the perfect partner, caring, loving, intelligent and incredibly funny, we fell into a close pattern of communication and we even had our own medium of articulation and rhetoric. I felt we were invincible. But then of course I was completely wrong, it was all completely wrong.
The first few weeks were unreal. It felt like I was floating in an idyllic, glossy bubble, buffered from the rest of the world and all of my previous pains. But as we know, bubbles have an obnoxious penchant for bursting. At first it was small things, so it took me quite a while to realise that for reasons known only to himself, Max had allowed a base, depraved and heinous monster to inhabit his soul. This demon emerged slowly, and with great stealth.
It began with juvenile mind games, which I easily passed off as his clever sense of humour, but these games quickly developed into something more sinister. They were infrequent at first, but as the months wore on, became more and more intense and more and more vicious. Weirdly, it was such a slow steady invasion that it actually became part of our life together, for a while at least.
We never seemed to do anything in half measures; we did everything at a racing velocity. We used to drink and take drugs and party all night long like everyone else we knew, but more and more we managed to make this part abnormal by our ever-increasing overindulgence. Ultimately, our excesses only heightened the level of evil in the games he played.
His first games were disguised as petty arguments, which all couples have, and which usually occurred after an evening of debauched carousing. We’d argue and fall out with one another but when we sobered up we’d always make up again. Somehow Max managed ceaselessly to be two steps ahead of me in these quarrels, he seemed always to lead them, seemed always to be able to pilot a fight any which way he pleased. It was probably the drink or the drugs but I often felt like I had no control at all. I was puppet and pawn, although at the beginning I was quite content to be both as the fights often resulted in passionate and earnest lovemaking, which seemed to outweigh the adversity at the time. I mean, whatever.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before there was a steady shift in the mode by which the arguments manifested, they were soon supplemented with bouts of sparring and fisticuffs intermingled with playful physical skirmishes. But of course, this was simply a prelude and an insight into a much graver disclosure.
As the months went by, as I have said, the altercations, both verbal and physical, became ever more torrid and ever more frequent but then again, the ardour and enthusiasm with which we both endowed our now resplendent sexual assignations increased significantly. He seemed to stir up emotion and we both basked in its release. Sometimes we’d have mammoth multifaceted marathon fights that would last for hours. The fights would start about one thing then get so turned and twisted that by the time we were finished the fights would be divorced entirely from the original arguments.
We both knew that the higher the argument spiralled, and the more out of control it became, the more wild and epoch-making the sexual aftermath would be. The ecstasy of waiting for the exact tempered moment, when we’d suddenly stop and lunge for each other, ripping off clothing and savaging each others bodies as we sought to satiate our lust, was delicious, simply divine, almost like the high of a drug. With this contrivance of abusive foreplay and the sex itself being often so wild and ferocious it was natural that more and more we’d both end up so battered and bruised that it was hard to distinguish which part was to blame for the worst of the wounds inflicted.
The swellings and abrasions soon healed but it wasn’t long before I began to get scars. The permanent kind. The first time he used a blade on me the initial terror scared me half to death. It had numbed me but at the same time, it had been revealed to me that I’d been incredibly aroused by it. The cataclysmic orgasms, which ensued, left me exhausted, mentally and physically. Afterwards, I’d be so high on the surges of adrenaline that I’d find it difficult to compose myself. Max would rock me tenderly and whisper sweetly in my ear till we both succumbed to a deep and satiated slumber. Sometimes, if he’d cut me deeper than he’d intended he would hold me and actually weep while I’d lie and let him cry salty tears in to my stinging and bloody wounds.
Up to this point, I had always made sure to battle just as unmercifully as he did during the fights. I would punch him, slap him, nip his skin, scratch his flesh and bite whatever I could get my teeth into etc. but for one reason or another, Max would never let me cut him. This should have been a portentous omen of considerable importance, giving me an inkling of what was to come but whether by my own foolishness or a wish for blind denial, it went unheeded. In my mind I still had the romantic illusions of a fairytale ending to our relationship, it amazes me and frightens me just how thoroughly naïve I can be, even when the ugly truth is staring me right in the face.
About a year after meeting Max I was watching a wild life documentary on the television and the camera was fully zoomed in on a tiny bug perched haplessly on what seemed like a harmless downy green leaf. The bug, who was blissfully going about it’s business, was completely unaware of the acute danger it was in, as, when the camera pulled back out, it was revealed that it was sitting slap bang in the middle of a Venus fly trap. I knew without seeing the rest of the footage just how the bug would end up. A year heretofore, I’d been the little sightless bug. If I’d only had the foresight and discernment to step back and look at the fuller picture I might have been able to perceive what should have been erstwhile understood.
There was such a divergence in Max’s passion that I could hardly ever predict which way he would turn. He was either evilly caustic or adoringly angelic, what he was most definitely not was indifferent.
Formally, I hadn’t tried at all to calm the heated situations still believing it was all part of the game we played with each other. That is until the incidents with the blades became more and more regular. I began to try to divert his attention away from his lust for my blood and attempted to avert the quarrels from actually starting, neither worked. We both knew he initiated every fight and we both knew that the more I tried to diffuse an argument, the more frantic and rabid he would make it, he baited cerebral traps for me and fed off them like some sick rodent. It was becoming obvious to me at this stage that we were both sick rodents. It never occurred to me to just get out. I never felt in any real danger, not then anyway.
Oddly, although sex with Max was extravagant and unconventional, to say the least, in the beginning it had been peculiar and rather unnerving. In those early days of our relationship he often had a desire just gaze upon me in silence before consummating what I now describe as an eerie love. He would strip me and make me lie before him so that he could simply look at me. He made me painfully aware of my nakedness. I would sometimes want to flinch as his curious fingers touched me and would often cringe at the sometimes disgusted and sickening way his eyes feasted on my flesh. He’d made me feel self conscious, which was a first for me. It was very unsettling but I thought it was another element of the game. Months later he’d confessed that I had been his first lover, in that sense of the word, and that at the time we’d met he’d been a quasi virgin. His only other sexual encounter had been a fumbled one-off episode years earlier with a younger female cousin. It would have horrified me to know this at the time. But finding it out later made my self-consciousness and some of his early sexual inhibitions more understandable.
Besides the numerous and intricate sexual games he played he also had an arsenal of other means of amusement at his disposal. He would lie to me. He would concoct stories of the type that would give me no reason to doubt their credibility, then, later on, he would laugh as he revealed them as untruths. It seemed pointless and inane at the time and still seems that way now. He seemed to gain great happiness from these meaningless and unnecessary schemes. He loved the way I believed him. Though he’d have hated it if I had not.
Once he tired of a game he would formulate anew and showed a remarkable talent for play-acting. He would fake illnesses, some insignificant, some more serious. He would research thoroughly, the symptoms and treatments of varying diseases and then act them out for me. And of course, he always took great satisfaction in his confessions. He loved to playact and he loved to play me. Slowly I began to suspect every thing he said and did.
Our relationship spiralled uncontrollably at breakneck speed into the black abyss of dark doubt and paranoia. Although I still felt love for him, I began to loathe him and his toying ways. No longer did I take any amusement out of his escapades at all, but there seemed to me to be no way out, I was hooked on him, he was a drug and I was addicted.
He was pushing the games too far. Max was clever but he neglected to account for my own intelligence, which thankfully came crashing through my consciousness when he started to really scare me, what I had thought was merely a game between us gradually became a matter of survival.
I’ll never really know for sure, too many grey shadowy areas, but I think Max tried to rape me and kill me. The doubts that filled me terrified me for years afterwards. I imagine that the effect on someone who, unbeknownst to them, has been spiked with half a dozen tabs of acid is the nearest I can get to describe it. One minute everything is normal and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, you’re plunged head first into the mortal grips of paranoia and have lost all sense of what is real and what is imagined.
It was a warm spring evening and we drove my car up to a pretty but isolated reservoir on the moors seven or so miles from town. The setting sun and April clouds splashed golden swathes and orange ribbons of colour across the water and over the hilltops. We left the car and walked and talked and gambolled in the dusk. We walked hand in hand up the slopes of the valley, we skimmed rocks on the calm black water and raced each other across the dam wall. We stood holding each other close, taking in the heady vista until the sun’s orb dipped out of sight.
Through the twilight we headed blissfully back to the car. Halfway back I delved into my pocket to check the presence of my car keys. They weren’t there. Somehow, during the evening, I had lost them. I suddenly felt the dampness and cold of the night. I couldn’t believe it. It had been such a sylvan evening. Now it was growing dark and we were alone and miles from home. There were a whole bunch of things on the key ring not least a big gold sun-like disc. I hoped that maybe we could still find them in this semi-light.
Optimistically we retraced our steps. The night closed in on us and a ghostly mist fell over the moor. They were gone. Mentally I kicked myself for my stupidity in landing us in this predicament. It began to rain softly and it felt like the drizzle was mocking me. We abandoned the search and I reluctantly left the car and we began a miserable long walk home.
We trudged through the dark and rain in silence. I was angry and forlorn, I was wet and cold and I didn’t even have a spare set of keys which I knew would mean I’d have to pay to get the car towed back into town and pay for new lock barrels to be fitted, doors, ignition, the works. Damn it.
As I stumbled over the heath to get to the road Max followed behind me. I was sure this would be a perfect opportunity for him to release another torturous episode of his wrath on me. But Max seemed to be in remarkably good spirits. He even tried to comfort me by pretending to trip and fall over the uneven ground that led us home ward. Ever the slapstick comedian.
When we reached the road I was suddenly overcome by despair at the thought of the long trek ahead, we were miles from town, no bus routes, no taxis. I began to sob pathetically. Max, trotted up to my side and squeezed me and fleetingly I felt the warmth of his body through our damp clothes. I sobbed harder and I turned around to embrace him but as I turned, I looked up into his face, which was momentarily lit by a street lamp by the side of the road. Suddenly a shiver ran down my spine. I saw the look. It could have just been the fleeting lamp-light or the tears blurring my sight but paranoia followed anyway.
I was almost certain Max either had the keys or knew where they were. I’ll never know for sure and I’ll never be able to prove anything, but this was the final straw for me. I was so upset and angry and sick of being his trivial trinket. All the weeks and months of abuse seemed to come together in my mind like pieces of a puzzle that had been abandoned and I now had the desire to complete. I’d thought he loved me but I realised now that he didn’t, and probably never would. What he loved was amusing his sick self at my expense. As I trudged through the dark and mist and drizzle I decided it was over. I was finished with this charade. Needless to say, it all ended badly.
When we got back to his flat I turned on him. Now it was my turn to wield the abuse. This time I was sober and this fight was mine. I initiated it. I controlled it. I spat out recriminations and refused to let him even begin to fill my head with his oh-so plausible excuses for his behaviour. I cornered his every escape route and chased away his every endeavour to calm me. I railed at him, accusing him and denying his explanations. My ears were tightly shut to any attempt on his part to deviate the course I was on. I felt like I was swept up on a tide of revenge and resentment, unable to swim to any shore. I just soared swiftly along on the surf of my rage. I kept up a diatribe of abuse that seemed to last an eternity. This was our last conflict and I pursued it to the end.
Afterwards, with my fury, sadness, disappointment and pain finally out of my system, I collapsed on the floor and wept with my head in my hands and my heart in my mouth.
When he wanted to be, Max could be so utterly charming, it would be glorious to see him exercising this phenomenal side to his persona. And then, of course, he could also be just as damnably poisonous too. On one of the worst nights of my life, to date, I got both charming and nasty and a shit load of each. But, as always, Jeckel lost the battle to Hyde.
As I lay sprawled on the floor Max, who’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, came over to me. He gently stroked my hair and, for a foolish second, I thought maybe I had reached something human in him, touched a part of him that actually cared. But, like I said, I was wrong, very wrong. I soon felt his tender touch turn to agony as he grasped a handful of my hair in a vice-like grip. He yanked my head towards him and ground out 8 words through locked teeth.
“Honey, don't ever think you can leave me.”
But that is exactly what I was going to do, alive or dead, I never wanted to see him again. I was resolute. I tried to push him away from me but he still had a tight hold on my hair. I screamed at him to let go of me, which he did, surprisingly. I looked into his face, which was only inches from mine but what I saw there chilled me to the bone. He had a look of pure malevolence on his face, the like of which I’ve never seen before or since. It was as if the whole relationship had been building to this moment, this person before me was no longer Max, this was the devil personified. I had to get the hell out of there.
I had only managed to half stand up to run before he felled me with a sharp blow to my temple with his balled fist. I again lay sprawled on the floor, not in tears this time, but in a daze. Before I could try again to stand he was on me. He had me on my back with his knees on my chest crushing my breath and with it all my strength, what little there was, out of me. I struggled to breathe and struggled to get free of him. It was all I could do to keep precious air going into my lungs.
As he held me down he seemed to explode with new-found vigour and power. This was a fight like no other before it. What followed was a barrage of physical and verbal abuse. He spat obscenities at me and pummelled my upper body with his fists. I managed to flail my legs up at his back and dislodge him from my chest and with my hands now free I scratched and clawed at his face while avoiding some of the blows. He stopped punching me long enough to grapple with both my wrists and once he had them in his hand he pinned his weight down on them above my head. I was powerless again, but at least I could breathe.
With his free hand he began to hit my face with broad sweeping open-handed slaps, backhand and forehand, while rapping off a long list of unspeakable things he was planning to do with my body and his fists. I tried to focus on the immediate pain, I didin't want to hear what he had in store for me. His torture list. I tried to count the slaps, ..6..7..8... I don’t remember how many times he hit me before I passed out but when I came round he had stripped me and was pushing open my legs, still barking filth at me through frothy spittle, like a rabid dog.
The rest is a blocked-out blur. I don't want to remember it. If I don't remember it then I'm normal right? Just like everyone else? If I have no memory of it, then it's not real. No one needs to know about the nightmares I have sometimes do they, right?
I remember the end though. I still have a clear vision of Max, gasping for breath, bent over, holding his stomach, while I was being handed a blanket by one of his neighbours. His neighbour had heard the fight and had broken down the door to find me naked and semi-conscious and Max trying to fasten a belt around my neck. The neighbour, a much bigger man physically, had pulled Max up by his collar and had punched him squarely in the gut.
As the neighbour helped me out of Max’s life forever, I paused at the door, for a moment, to look at Max. He looked so sad and pathetic that any fear I had suddenly evaporated. He was still bent over slightly, unable to look me in the eye. I felt nothing but an abhorrence so complete that it possessed me. I took a deep breath, pulled my right arm back for the wind-up, swung and followed through with an open-handed slap so hard and with so much force from my whole upper body that my wrist snapped like a stick of candy. Neither Max nor I made a sound. The sound of the cracking bone seemed to punctuate the end of the affair as it echoed emptily around the hallway of the landing.
I had been saved. I was battered and bruised and shaken, but saved nonetheless. I’ll never know for sure if Max would have killed me or whether it was just another aspect of his stinking stench ridden game, but I’ll be eternally grateful for the neighbour’s intervention. Max had stripped me of my clothes and my dignity and self-respect and even my self worth but I knew those things would return to me sooner or later. I’ll never understand why Max had a need to go that far with me, and I’ll never even try to.
I never heard from or saw Max again. He went on the run from the cops. They soon caught up with him. I didn't even have to go to court. He was so deranged and suicidal by the time the cops found him that he ended up committed to a psychiatric institution where he remains to this day.
Before he left, horrifyingly, Max told a friend of mine that he had no memory of that night.
What I had thought of as a simple case of sadism gone awry, was, in retrospect, a psychosis. The more I’d known him the more I had realised there was something fundamentally cruel and malignant about Max, but it had never occurred to me that he was actually medically ill.
Having this knowledge still didn’t stop me hating him for a long time afterward and it didn’t stop me hating myself for a long while too. I hated the fact that I’d allowed myself to be dragged down to his dank and depraved pit of hell. I could have left, anytime, just walked away. There was nothing about Max that was normal, yet I’d stayed with him. It was as if I’d needed to have his abuse. Needed to feel the pain in order to feel alive. What is it about our existence that we have to push it to breaking point before we can be happy and be sure that we exist at all?
All I can say in my defence is that I lived through that time, lived being the operative word.
Even though a lot of what happened was bad, especially towards the end, and the fact remains that Max was irredeemably delinquent, after a time I recognised that there were compensations.
He gave me a life so alien from that which I had previously experienced that I realised I had not even begun to live at all. It was like waking from the dead or dying from the waking? Anyway, I know it might seem strange to say this but he gave me something vivid, albeit brief, like a sparkling, flashing, multicoloured firework, which fleetingly lights up a black night sky.
In retrospect, I sometimes feel that although he may have tried to take everything away from me, in reality it was I who took from him. He ended up with nothing yet I gained an inner strength that has remained with me throughout the years.
Somehow I stole his evanescence from him, like a ray of sun absorbed into dark cloth, the light is no longer visible but the cloth is warmed. Over the months I think perhaps I greedily drained his verve and zest for life, like someone who drinks the last mouthful of orange juice then replaces the empty carton back in the refrigerator. At first glance it appears that there is orange available for the next person to drink but on closer inspection it is discovered that there are only a few miserly drops left, not enough to quench anyone’s thirst. He left an empty carcass behind in his own wake.
He offered me all of himself, he held nothing back, all there was, was there for me to take and I took it. He gave me his heart, his hurt, his hunger, his anger, and his evil. He gave me something of himself that I could almost touch and almost taste, something ephemeral that no one is ever supposed to come close to. He gave me the sight to see myself. He gave me voice to speak of some of my pain. He gave me light in an otherwise dark world. And as my darling Nietzsche said, “That which doth not kill me, maketh me stronger.” Max may never ever know it but he did just that.
Extracts Main Menu
Written by LA VADE aka Rapsodomy © 1997 (Remastered May 2000)