Through The Eyes Of A Monster- Gerard's Diary

There are a lot of things that people don’t know about me, the deepest, darkest secrets that I have even kept from Frank. Secrets that were always completely irrelevant to the life I lived with my Frankie, but nonetheless, secrets that shaped the way I was as a person and completely changed my outlook on the world. This is the story of the one girl who changed my life, who opened my eyes to a life of debauchery and murder, who without my desire to give her the life of luxury she deserved, I would have never fallen into the downward spiral that I continued to fall for the rest of my life. Her name was Adalia Roosevelt.

I had been working a part-time job in the ticketing booth at a local museum whilst I was studying at Art College when we met. I remember the day like it was yesterday, as the museum had run a 2-for-1 offer in the local newspaper and there was suddenly a huge influx of people taking an interest in what was one of the city’s most overlooked attractions. We were rushed off our feet and I had been asked to work the full day instead of my normal morning shift.

My colleague, Jason Antonio, had been coming on to me all morning. He was gay and I was his recent love-interest. The ticketing booths were separate, but he had been in and out of mine all day, bringing me cups of coffee and trying to convince me to help set up one of these new video-playing devices called ‘DVD Players’ he had purchased the previous weekend.

‘Yeah, right,’ I had thought. ‘You just want to get me in your bed, you pervert.’

After convincing him to get back to his job for the third time and telling him that I wasn’t interested in men for probably the one-thousandth, I had had enough of work for that day. My lunch break was in fifteen minutes and I knew Jason would find a way of swapping his break around so that we could be together. I was just about to fake an illness and close the booth when she arrived; all long, wavy black hair as dark as night, icy blue eyes and beautifully pale skin.

“One general admission ticket, please,” she said in a thick English accent. She was mesmerising.

“Just the one?” I asked, surprised that there was someone in this city not taking up the 2-for-1 offer. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

“Unfortunately, yes. I’m walking around this place on my own with no one to show-off my extensive American history knowledge to. It’s quite pathetic, isn’t it?” she smiled in a way that made my heart melt. “Unless you want to join me?”

I giggled. Yes, giggled. Everything about this girl amazed me and I had barely known her for ten seconds. She was quite tall, thin, but with curves in all the right places. Her clothes were edgy and gothic and she had a small blue gem in her nose. Exactly the type of girl I was into. She had a professional-looking camera around her neck too- maybe she was a photography or art student like me?

“We have guided tours if you don’t want to walk around the exhibition on your own?” I suggested, brushing off her previous offer as a joke. “They’re a little bit pricier, though. They’re $25 instead of $18.”

She sniggered in a way that made my insides smile, “I don’t have $25, bloody college is costing me a bomb. I’m doing a project though so it would be useful to have the extra information. Is there any way I could sort of listen in on a bit of the info with just a general admission ticket?”

If this were any other person I would be saying “Sorry, you have to pay extra, that’s the way it works”. I hated people who tried to negotiate a deal before they had even got into the museum, but there was something about this girl that made me think twice.

“I’ll get you a coffee if you could show me round a bit on your lunch break?” she offered. My insides began to feel weird. Man, this girl was beautiful and she was basically asking me out on a date.

’It’s not a date, Gerard,’ I had to remind myself.

Accepting her offer would mean an excuse to avoid Jason and his ‘accidental’ brushing against me. My boss would probably have killed me if he found out, but whatever. Carpe diem, as they say. The answer came out of my mouth before I could properly think it through.

“I have an hour break in fifteen minutes,” I said, feeling a blush spread across my cheeks. I couldn’t quite believe what I was doing. “There’s a coffee shop just on the right over there. If you get me a latte, it’s a done deal. Just don’t tell my boss, he’ll go apeshit.”

She sniggered again, making my heart pound once more, “I’ll see you in fifteen then…?”
“Gerard,” I said.

“Adalia,” she introduced herself, handing over a $20 bill. I printed her ticket and handed back her change. In the blink of an eye, she was gone.

‘I’d like to tap that. That girl was fucking HOT. Gerard, you lucky boy.’

“Shut up, Simon,” I said to the man standing over my shoulder. He’d been there for some time now and I had tried to ignore him when I was talking to Adalia.

I turned back to the glass front of the booth and a middle-aged man was staring angrily at me, his eyebrows furrowed into one long caterpillar of hair.

“What did you just say to me? Did you just tell me to shut up?”

Sometimes I forget what Doctor Adams tells me about Simon not being real. Well, he is apparently not real because no one apart from me can see him. I think he’s real, just from another dimension. At least, I think he’s from another dimension. Sometimes he tells me that he’s an alien from outer space, or a ghost. Whatever Simon is, Doctor Adams has given me pills and keeps telling me I have schizophrenia. I put them in the bin, though.

Fifteen minutes later and I was walking into the entrance of the ‘Unwind and Refuel’ coffee shop, after experiencing a very hostile stand-off with the man at the ticket booth. He simply could not accept that I hadn’t been talking to him and I was fuming.

The coffee shop was well and truly packed, with every table full. Screaming children ran about the place and the queue nearly stretched to the opposite side of the spacious room. It was decked out with about 150 chairs, but almost every one was occupied. I quickly scanned the room for those shiny black locks, hoping that she hadn’t changed her mind. I spotted her on one of the comfy armchairs in the far corner. I took a deep breath and headed towards her.

“Hi Gerard, I’m so glad you came!” Adalia said, slipping a bookmark into the book she was reading, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. She gestured towards the steaming mug and selection of sugars and sweeteners in front of the seat opposite, “I wasn’t sure if you took sugar, so I got a load for you.”

“Thanks,” I smiled, my insides turning to jelly. Upon closer inspection, she was even more beautiful than I had previously thought. Her bright eyes were framed with black smudges of kohl and her lips had a hint of natural red. She had a warm, welcoming smile which I thought was divine.

In that lunch break, we didn’t get much of the exhibition done. We spent most of the time talking about Adalia’s seaside hometown in England, the music we were into and our courses at Art College. We discovered that we both attended the same campus, except I was in my final year and she was in her first. We had so much in common and we got on like a house on fire.

’I bet you wished you could fuck her right here, right now, here in this café,’ Simon jeered. I hadn’t realised he followed me in and was standing behind the counter, helping himself to a shot of espresso. I wanted to tell him to go away and leave me alone, but I didn’t want Adalia to think I was talking to her.

***

Our encounter at the museum was the first of many happy times spent with Adalia. Soon enough, we were meeting up in the college library, or bumping in to each other on our way to class. I discovered that she lived in an apartment just round the corner from mine and she would invite me in for a coffee or to listen to a new CD on a regular basis.

Soon enough, we had our first kiss. I was very inexperienced with girls and I only had one very embarrassing kiss before, with a girl in my high school class who was also very amateurish, so the outcome wasn’t that great. However, Adalia was kind and understanding and showed me how it was done after a nice relaxing walk through the park on our way home one evening.

“Oh Gerard, you’re so innocent!” she gushed, playfully pinching my cheek as she pulled away from one of our first lip-locks. “It’s part of the reason why I’m falling for you so hard.”

Little did she know, I had already fallen off that cliff and it would be impossible for me to get back up.

Adalia had very eccentric sexual interests which were both tantalising and terrifying. She would enjoy playing perilously with knives, razorblades and fire, wanting to act out hostage situations and stage torture routines. She never hurt me on purpose and I trusted her and loved her enough to sacrifice my body to her unconventional sexual tastes. However, one time, when she was holding a blade close to my neck, her hand slipped and I received a small nick on my shoulder. Adalia apologised profusely, mopping up the blood and patching me up like a gothic Florence Nightingale. She was heavenly.

“I would never deliberately do anything to hurt you, Gerard,” she whispered that night as she lay next to me in bed, an abundance of candles surrounding us and casting shadows that danced across her delicate face.

“I will do anything to protect you from harm,” I promised, taking her face between my hands and kissing her soft red lips.

Oh, how soon that promise was broken, and from my own hand the harm came.

***

The summer after we met, I finished college and graduated with an acceptable mark. I had planned on staying in New York instead of returning home to New Jersey, and Adalia had always wanted to go back home to England for the summer to see her family. I stood at the airport with her, my heart breaking in two. I knew she would come back in a couple of months, but the pain of not having her living around the corner was just too much for me to bear.

“I don’t think I can leave you, beautiful,” Adalia said, tears running down her cheeks and creating spider-like patterns with her jet black mascara. On her flawless pale skin, the trails looked like cracks appearing on the face of a china doll.

“Then please stay,” I begged. Man, I had fallen. I had fallen really hard.

Amazingly, she rummaged in her hand luggage, took out her flight ticket and ripped it into shreds. She dropped the pieces on the floor, watching them fall gracefully to the ground like confetti, before leaping into my arms and kissing me passionately. It was the best moment of my life… before Frank, that is.

We moved out of student accommodation and got a flat ourselves. I continued working at the museum for the summer before I started doing some freelance artwork, selling it at local fayres and trying to get it displayed in galleries. Adalia continued on with her studies.

Before long, money began to become an issue. I still wonder to this day why I jacked in my job at the museum. Maybe had I stayed, Adalia would still be with us and the terrible mess would have never occurred.

***

“Gerard, we have $9.50,” Adalia announced one morning, after coming back from the supermarket. “I had to put everything back because Mr Jones will be coming round for the rent this week. How are we supposed to eat?”

Things had quickly turned bitter. I loved her so much, but boy, did she whinge about money.

‘A swift punch in the mouth will sort out that issue,’ Simon smirked. It was the sixth time this week she had mentioned rent, so I nearly took him up on the offer.

“I dunno, sell some of your CDs?” I suggested, bitterly. I knew what she was saying- she was trying to get me to go out and get a ‘real’ job. At least I did something to make a living, unlike her. The only money she got was a little bit of cash from her parents every month. She never contributed to the cost of the rent.

“I’m sure they’ll give you your job back at the museum if you asked,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

“And I’m sure if you fucking got off your ass and earned some money, then we wouldn’t have this problem!” I shouted, repeating Simon’s words precisely. She looked dumbstruck.

She stormed out of the house, giving me a look of sheer disgust on the way out and slamming the door behind her, rattling the whole building. I was fuming. She spent so much money on CDs, clothes, drinks out with her girlfriends, but she rarely contributed a penny to the upkeep of our humble abode. She thought that just because I left college, I should be out earning all of the money.

Adalia was a terrible drinker. In one evening, she would finish off a bottle of vodka- straight. Then she would come to bed, the pungent aroma of the spirit stinging her breath and make love to me, making me fall deeper under her spell. I had picked up this drinking habit since I had finished college, as some days the lack of steady income and the stress of having to spend our last pennies on bills, rent and food just became too much. I childishly stomped my foot and headed into the kitchen to find a much-needed drink. In twenty seconds, I managed to down a glass of straight gin. The feeling of alcohol running through my veins and calming my senses was heavenly- it was a feeling my body had grown accustomed to over the last few months.

Angry, tipsy and feeling slightly off-kilter with Simon yelling contradicting suggestions in my ear, I marched over to the kitchen table and began rummaging through the handbag she had left behind. I was convinced she had more than $9.50 in her purse, since I knew she had received a cheque from her parents a few days beforehand. However, when my hand met a small plastic bag, I knew that I was going to find something more sinister than smuggled money.

It was a bag of cocaine. My blood immediately began to boil. I knew she had taken drugs in the past, at gigs and nightclubs, but she had assured me that all of that was behind her. I was fuming. How long had she been lying to me and spending money for our essential living necessities on paraphernalia, just so she could get high with her mates?

Seething, I picked up the bottle of gin sitting on the kitchen countertop and flung it at the wall, watching the glass shatter all around the room and feeling the strong, pungent aroma of alcohol fill my nostrils. Simon stood behind me and laughed, encouraging me to break more items in the kitchen. I pulled myself together and ignored his vicious shouting.

From my little brother’s rebellious escapades, I knew that the cocaine Adalia had was worth a lot of money. I estimated about $80 worth. Desperate for some cash, and fast, I had an idea.
And that’s where the problems began to escalate. I left the pokey flat and drove ninety miles to see my little brother, Mikey. He was living a life of luxury in our parent’s old place. He was a little shit at times, but he wouldn’t like to see his older brother suffer.

Mikey was shady. I showed him the drugs and he gave me the name and number of a guy who would give me more. The next weekend, I was armed with $500 worth of cocaine and was weaving in and out of the sweaty, writhing bodies in the downtown nightclubs. Within an hour, my gear was gone and I had made enough to cover the rent.

And the rest was history. Gone were the days I relied on selling artwork to bring in an income and pay for Adalia’s lifestyle. Within a few weeks, I became one of the city’s most notorious, go-to drug dealers for the city scumbags and junkies.

***

“Where the fuck have you been?!” I yelled as Adalia came through the front door at 1am on Christmas Eve. She had been shopping with a girlfriend earlier that day and had said that she would be back home to make me dinner.

Adalia looked guilty, I could see it in her eyes that she had done something she shouldn’t have. Her pupils were larger than usual and I had a rising suspicion that she had been getting high.

“Well aren’t you going to answer me then, you fucking bitch?!” I shouted again, swinging the whiskey bottle around above my head like a feral animal.

Her absence had escalated my already foul mood when I returned home at 7pm, expecting to find dinner on the table. A homeless man, Jeremiah, had not paid me for his heroin after I had given him multiple chances. He knew what would happen if he failed to pay up, so I acted on my word and slit his throat, dumping his body in the dumpster he slept in. I was still reeling from Jeremiah’s cheek and Adalia’s disobedience made me irate.

She shrank away in the corner, and I leapt from my position on the sofa, wielding the whiskey bottle over my head like a weapon.

“Gerard, please!” she cried, tears forming in the corners of her drugged-up eyes. “It’s not what you think! I was just watching movies at Jessica’s and we lost track of time!”

‘Kill her,’Simon had appeared in the doorway, a mischievous smile plastered across his face. ’Show her some Christmas spirit and slice her throat like you did to that homeless guy.’

For the first time since I had known her, I could see fear in her eyes. It made me feel strong, powerful in my intoxicated state.

Her back hit the wall and I held her bicep in a vice-like grip. I could definitely smell weed on her breath and clothes when she had promised me a few weeks ago that she would never take drugs again, after she had found my stash under the loose bathroom floorboard and smoked a load. Tears were spilling down her face as she begged me to let go of her.

“I’m not going to let go of what is mine!” I growled, increasing the force of my grip on her arm and eliciting a small cry from her mouth. “You promised me you wouldn’t take drugs. You told me that you would be back home this evening. All you do is whine and whine, disobey me and cause problems around here, Adalia!”

Her entire body was wracking with sobs, but where once the thought of her crying would bring me to tears, I was now blinded by the haze of alcohol, anger and the dark road my life had become.

“I love you, Gerard,” she tried a pathetic attempt to calm me down and bring my clouded brain back to reality, but I was too far gone. The cocktail of drunkenness, Simon’s two cents and whatever other madness my brain possessed had sent me to a place I would never return from.

On Simon’s request, I smashed the empty whiskey bottle over her head, sending her falling to the ground. The smash along with the blood in her hair immediately brought me back to my senses, dragging me from my far-away state.

“Oh no! Baby… honey I’m so sorry! Please be okay, please tell me you’re okay!” I cried, looking down at the slumped women at my feet, sitting amongst a pile of glittering shards of glass.

There was a sob from below me and a wave of relief washed over me. She was alive.
“Here, let me get you up and into the kitchen and I’ll patch you up,” I said, reaching down to pick her up. “I’m so sorry, Ada. I love you so much.”

There was a yelp and immediately my right hand was soaked with red blood. The realisation of what I had done hit me like the hardest and heaviest of buses.

In my panic and haste to help her up from the floor, I had stabbed her with the end of the bottle still in my hand. It had pierced her chest and now the essence of her life was dripping from her, one drop at a time. After wanting to hurt her in a moment of madness, I had actually killed her in my desire to help her.

I fell to the ground as her laboured breathing came to an end, feeling the hot sting of tears cascade over my face. I buried my face in her blood soaked hair as her body grew limp, giving up on life.

And that, my friends, is how I killed my first love.