Release Date: Indeterminate

He lowered his body into the bathtub, gripping the sides and allowing the tepid water to lap around his body, taking great care to look straight ahead, not wanting to catch even a glimpse of the abomination that was his own naked body. In much the same way as one wouldn’t want to look at a raw chicken for longer than was entirely necessary. 

Feeling the flab around his thighs and posterior flatten and squish against the ceramic, Leonard couldn’t help but wonder what the sight would be if the ceramic happened to be glass, and some poor soul had the misfortune of being stood on the other side at the time. 

He tried to force himself to think about something else and allowed the day’s events to run through his mind. 

These so-called ‘events’ were hardly worthy of the name. 

It was a Thursday, and the day had been exactly the same as every other Thursday he’d experienced over the last twenty-four years. 

Tea and porridge at 7:00am 

Shit, shower, shave at 7:15am

Leave house at 7:45am

Train commute to work at 8:00am

Every half an hour train journey to the office was indistinguishable from the last. Strangers jostled for seats, and the stench of sweat, cigarette smoke and stale perfume would fill the air, like a noxious gas. 

If misery had a smell, this would be it. 

It was so distinctive, you could bottle it and sell it back to the masses. All you’d have to do is give it a stupid name like Repression by Alvin Kline, Hopelessness by Chamel, or Existential Crisis by Bruno Moss, and then get some vacuous celebrity to promote it. And the really depressing thing is that people would probably buy it. 

The ones that surrounded Leonard on the train didn’t seem human at all. They were like cheap photocopies of real people, faded, blotchy and wrinkled — as if they had intended for their lives to mean something, but the ink had run out. 

Arrive at work at 8:50am 

At 8:55am, he’d take his seat, which had an indent in the exact shape of Leonard’s buttocks, and his workday would commence. 

He’d type numbers into a spreadsheet. And then move some numbers from one column to another. But however he moved the numbers, he could never find any answer or meaning in the page. 

It may as well have been blank. 

The rest of office would spin around him in silent anonymity, filled with people who looked like people, but moved and behaved like robots — sat still at desks or moving mechanically from one side of the office to the other in a sombre and strange automated dance. 

His grey-faced colleagues were completely oblivious to his existence. (Although calling his life an existence might be stretching it a bit. He thought exercise in futility would be a more apt description.)

And then 6pm would come. 

But there was no relief. 

Leonard didn’t look forward to going home. And if any of his colleagues did, they certainly didn’t show it. 

Perhaps, like Leonard, they had signed away their optimism and ability to enjoy things the day they signed their employment contract. 

At 6:20pm he’d take the commute home from work — the stench of misery still thick in the air, standing pressed against shoppers and office workers who glared at Leonard with barely disguised contempt whenever the motion of the train jolted him even further into their personal spaces. 

By the time he reached home, he was always exhausted. 

He’d stand motionless staring at his house, mustering up the strength to step inside, wondering how on earth he would find the strength to do it all again tomorrow. 

Once inside the terraced, pebbled-dashed coffin he called home, he’d tidily fold his clothes and place them at the end of his bed. Then, he’d put on his threadbare railway-green dressing robe, drag his dumbbells from the bedroom and proceed to run himself a bath. 

First, he’d allow the day’s events to tumble though his mind, and then, as if perfectly rehearsed a thousand times before, he’d engage himself in an internal dialogue that followed the same pattern every time, while watching the water gently lap against his swollen torso and clammy, greying skin:

I’m pretty certain that drowning yourself simply by holding yourself under water was physically impossible. 

Logic tells you that. 

It would be like trying to strangle yourself; as soon as you were about to pass out, you’d loosen your grip, just as your head would impulsively reach above the water and gasp for air. 

It’s a reflex action that can’t be controlled, however much one felt the desire to die.

But if I were to weigh myself down with something heavy, like a set of dumbbells perhaps, then the drowning would almost certainly be a success. 

And it would be nice to get some use out of them because you see, I’m not exactly the exercising type. 

However, there’s a very obvious problem — how would I pick them up in the first place? 

I’d need a second person to lower the dumbbells onto me when I was already in the bathtub. 

No, that wouldn’t work at all. 

What about electrocution? 

All I’d have to do is jump into the bathtub with my electric shaver plugged in. 

The trouble is, I’ve always been something of a physical coward (and mental coward, and emotional coward and every other type of coward you care to name), and I don’t much fancy the idea of convulsing and burning to death. 

And what if for some reason, it didn’t work? 

A failed suicide attempt would result in more embarrassment than I could bear. 

I also remember reading somewhere that electrocution can cause you to die with a post-mortem erection and/or a smile on your face. And knowing my luck, my body would betray me, even in death, and I’d end up with both. 

So no, electrocution is definitely out.

Which leads quite neatly to the next problem — how would I be found, and who would be the one to find me? 

Having already discounted electrocution as a solution to the problem we call life, this poor person would have to bear witness to my naked, shrivelled penis lying flaccid in the by now, stone-cold water. 

Do I really want to inflict that upon someone? 

Do I really want that to be the lasting (and only) impression I make upon the world? 

Because it won’t be my wife who finds me, oh no. It’ll be her next door — the nameless one. 

There’s little point in using her real name because she’s a woman who can be found on every street in England’s green and pleasant land. In fact, she’s a woman who can be found in almost every part of the Westernised world. 

She might disguise herself under different names like Jenny, Jane or Caroline, but it’s the same bloody woman, alright — a nosy, pious, bigoted shrew who’s in very real danger of being swallowed whole by her own sense of self-righteousness. 

Oh yeah, that’d be just her style. 

She’d have no hesitation, she’d see it has her ‘duty’, as her ‘right’ even, to invade my private time. She’d take great pleasure in letting herself into MY house and then into MY bathroom, under the pretence that she was only carrying out her ‘neighbourly’ and ‘Christian’ duty. 

I know it says in the bible to ‘love thy neighbour’, but nowhere does it say let yourself into your neighbour’s home and impose your own toxic version of humanity upon them, at a time when they had needed nothing more than for you to mind your own bloody business. 

Is a little privacy too much to ask for? 

Because whilst I’ve never been a particularly sociable neighbour in the conventional sense, I have always tried in my own way to be affable, and most importantly, I’ve always avoided judging my neighbours (and people in general) as if it were smallpox.

This doesn’t come from having faith in the human species. In my mind, I’ve reached the following conclusion in spite of this. 

My lack of judgement and belief in minding your own business comes, not from having faith in the goodness of others, but through an understanding of myself that I can’t escape — I am, and always will be, a dickhead. 

And what right did a dickhead like me have to go around judging other people? 

I’m pretty sure I would have been lumbered with the same personality and therefore would still have been a dickhead, had I been a cockroach, king, monkey or civil servant. 

And what’s one less cockroach in the world? Or civil servant for that matter.

I suppose I could always wear my swimming trunks, in an attempt to spare embarrassment for the misfortunate soul who finds me, and try to preserve my sense of dignity, as minute as this sense is. 

But would people see it for what it was, me being considerate of others, even in death? 

Or will I just end up looking like some kind of pervert? 

Just imagine a middle-aged flabby man being found crushed to death by his own set of dumbbells, whilst in a bathtub, wearing just a pair of swimming trunks. 

I can’t think exactly how that scenario could be sexualised by the tabloid press, but I have no doubt it would be. 

In fact, it didn’t take long for the headline to form in his mind: 

‘PERVERT FOUND DROWNED AFTER SORDID SEX GAME GOES WRONG’ 

I bet my bloody colleagues would notice me then. They’d have a bloody field day! 

I can just see it now, they’d be sipping at their frothy mocha cappuccinos, casting a disapproving eye over the story, and then helpfully adding that they’d always thought there had been ‘something slightly amiss about him’. 

That would liven up dress-down Fridays, alright.

Bath time was almost over, it was almost 7:30pm, and Leonard had reached the same conclusion as always — this whole killing yourself thing was clearly more trouble than it was worth. 

He pacified himself with the knowledge that if it weren’t for the logistics (how to do it, whether it would work and who would find him), he would have already done it by now. 

The reality was that it all seemed like too much fuss and bother; it’s much better to trudge on, and try to make the best of things. 

After all, that is the British way. 

He lifted himself out of the bathtub and wrapped his green robe around his still wet frame, before dragging his dumbbells back into the bedroom and wandering downstairs to eat a quiet dinner, across a still table with a silent wife, in readiness to do it all again tomorrow.