The Button: Part 6 – The End
Part 5 coming next time. Do not believe everything you read.
Part 6 – The End
‘You know him? And I prefer Izzie now. Who the fuck are you, mate?’
Most of us are in John by this point. But there’s a new colony staking a claim in Izzie. She’s sliding back towards Isabella.
Dean lies dead between them, face down into what the brochure called hardwood. If he were alive, he would confirm what Isabella knows. It’s cheap, thin plastic.
Izzie doesn’t know who John is. She doesn’t know what she’s done to him. She doesn’t know what she is driving him towards. To her, he’s disposable. Another one to go in the cupboard like Dean, if it comes to it.
John can see it in her eyes. He gets on his haunches and gets real close to her face, studying it. Izzie is unblinking but in this proximity, where he can feel the warmth of her breath, smell the day on her tongue, even see the build-up of coffee and acid on it, he can also hear them inside her head.
It makes him smile.
‘My name’s John and you’ve ruined my life.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘You’re mental. You stalk women and live in the binshed.’
‘That’s rich. You’re the one with the corpse in your cupboard.’
‘He wasn’t my type.’
‘You shagged him on his garage floor.’
That gets her attention. Her head cocks, brow furrows.
‘Oh yeah, I know all about that. You regretted it, sat on your toilet, cold and shivering. Thought yourself a common trollop who puts it about with any man who shows you a modicum of attention.’
‘You peep over a fence or something? Pervert. Hope you enjoyed the show, at least.’
‘I wasn’t watching. You don’t get it. I felt it. I was the one on my back. I was raped. I didn’t ask for this. I’d like to say that was the worst of it, but you don’t care. Tell me, where is it?’
Isabella is a lot of things. But dumb is certainly not one of them. She’s not a scientist and she doesn’t have a grasp on the minutiae of how the button works, but she’s sitting there hearing the word rape, looking into this man’s eyes that are starting to tear up, and she’s doing the maths, as they say.
And yet the primal fear of fear itself keeps her deceitful. It’s not a taste she savours, but needs must.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry if you’ve been sexually assault—’
John slaps her. Hard. ‘Stop it. I’ve watched you. I saw you get off, eyes roll, on pushing that button in the carpark. I followed you home from the bar, coffee house, even that frantic fumble for the clutch as you walked in the park with your mate, the one with the pram. You thought it was unfair she had a baby, thought she wasn’t fit to be a mother because of her weekend cocaine binges. Every time you press it, I get worse. I’m the landlord for your children.’
She bites her lip. Feels her eyes start to water. Her face starts to welt. Blood trickles into her mouth, the taste is sobering. Still, the prospect of ceding her happiness outweighs anything he can say or do.
John stares at her in bafflement. He’s never been an angry man, but he wonders if this was all from the button or if there was always a spark buried deep below the real him.
His own hand smarts from the slap. He changes tack. ‘You’re scared of your own balcony.’
‘I was. I was scared of everything.’
‘Would you have ever… you know?’
‘Killed myself? It’s okay. I don’t think I would have, no. I think my brain just liked to torment me with the idea it could.’
‘Ideas. There’s quite a few.’
‘I can’t go back to how I was, John. I’d rather die. And I say that as someone who is relatively free and easy right now. Hell, I’m tied up in my own house, with a crazy man and a dead body. No offence.’
‘None taken. It’s your crazy. Did you kill him?’
She says nothing. She doesn’t need to.
‘Looks like he was stabbed. Nice wound there in his back.’
Still nothing.
‘Izzie. I have a family. I had a life that’s been upended and twisted into something dark. I fear I’ll hurt them. Images, properly formed, like ready meals. Whenever I look at someone I love, I only see how I could hurt them.’
‘Exactly. Listen to you! You’ve had a life. I never did. My head’s been dirty and contaminated since I can remember. And the button? Well, I see now it doesn’t get rid of them, it just makes my problems someone else.’
‘So, where is it? It’s not right, what you’ve done.’
‘What choice am I supposed to make? Every time I push it, the gaps get smaller. Every time the thoughts start to come back. It hurts. My body aches at the slightest flicker of doubt. If I don’t push it, I’ll die.’
‘I will kill myself if this continues.’
‘I’ll do it if it stops.’
‘You’re already fucked. You’re a murderer, Izzie. What are you going to do? Let him ripen and seep through the floor? Christ, you’ve got him next to a boiler, for fucks sake.’
‘He deserved it. If I go to prison, then so be it. But I don’t think I will.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m a living human trial. The lab will put me upon a pedestal.’
‘You’re not thinking straight. They’ll cut your pretty little head open.’
‘Maybe. But maybe they’d come for you too. Where do the thoughts go? Oh, this man I know. A swell fella. He’s local too.’
‘How’d you know—’
‘The overalls. Think I had my car serviced there once.’
John is on the back foot for the first time. His grip on rationality is weakening. Izzie grimaces, like she’s dipping into a bathtub that’s too hot.
‘They’re growing again.’
‘Na, it’s just my time of the month.’
‘I saw that. That was last week.’ John taps the side of his head. ‘You wanted to rip out your stomach, go to sleep and never wake up.’
She throws her head back at that. ‘Oh, no flies on you. So seriously, every time I’ve pushed that button, they’ve come to you.’
‘Regret over sleeping with him. Anxiety over not replying quickly enough to messages. You’re too fat, you’ve got no bum, your breasts are too small and no one at work likes you. The first batch was bad enough, but you’ve been sending them over like texts. Ping, ping, ping.’ He snaps his fingers until they start to hurt.
‘Alright, I get it. But I didn’t want to be this way. I was born with this shit.’
‘I don’t know about that. I’m no doctor. I got given sodding antidepressants, they just made me feel worse but I’m a good person. I’m a good Samaritan. I don’t deserve this.’
‘You’re pompous.’ Izzie pulls a face and looks him up and down. ‘Who decided you were a good person? What a lovely accolade you’ve bestowed upon yourself. You’re so good that just a few weeks with my brain and you’ve resorted to kidnapping and assault. I don’t know if I’m good, bad or ugly. Well, Isabella does. But for the first time in my life, I know what it’s like to live without pain. And now you’re asking me to forget.’
‘You only got better because you made me sick. Can you live with that?’
‘I can. Like this, I can. One push at a time. It’s science, mate.’
‘I can’t. And seeing as you won’t tell me where it is, we’ll just have to sit here. I did have thoughts of torturing you. I saw a film once, butter knife under the fingernails and all that. But you said it yourself, the thoughts hurt when they start to grow again. I don’t have to lay a finger on you. I just have to wait.’
His smile is saccharine and knowing. She tries not to rise to it, but he’s right. Every second the bubble doubles and her body flexes inward, like torsion, like a rope around her middle being yanked by a horse.
This is it. We have done it. She’ll relent. John will press the button and we will return home. Isabella will have missed us. We’ll show her that she has and we can get back on with living.
‘If I give it to you.’ Yes. ‘Will you try something with me?’ No.
He looks at her, quizzical.
‘What happens if we both press it at the same time?’
No, that’s not the plan. No, it won’t work like that. Didn’t Dean say something about it being a one button, one press situation? If he were here now, we could ask his mush and grime.
John considers it. His mind screams at him, we scream at him, that he must reject. He must press it. She deserves it. She doesn’t get to negotiate the terms. Hurt her if you have to, beat her senseless, but do not do what she wants. He recoils and Izzie sees it. Then at the same time she spasms. The pain rides through her mercilessly. He’ll kill her, leave her here to rot with Dean the liar. Hold out. He’ll make a mistake and then you can defend yourself. Two men attack a woman at home. It’s a house invasion. Listen to us, Isabella. Listen.
John, meanwhile, is seeing images of Janet, Jake and Annie. The ones that make him want to leave them behind, for their sake. The thoughts are coated in blood and disgust. Knives in necks and tyre irons wrapped around skulls. Murder suicide. He cannot risk it. He cannot let any harm come to them. He is the harm. He will be if he doesn’t get that button.
‘I can’t do this. I can’t hurt you. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t let the impulse win.’
She doesn’t open her eyes to that. She takes one deep breath, almost chews on the words and when the ringing in her ear lessens, just a little, she says it.
‘I’m tired, John. It’s in my bra. Do what you must.’
He’s uncomfortable retrieving it. He hasn’t touched another woman’s bra since before the Wonderbra blew up. He even mutters a sorry as it catches on the fabric.
‘We’ll do it together. Then we’ll destroy it. That’s the deal.’
Izzie swallows. The thoughts feel as if they’re manifesting in her gullet. She tastes bile. She’s terrified of what John’s suggesting. But she tells herself for once in her life, she needs to be brave.
‘Deal.’
He unties her and places her hand on his. Their index fingers curve into one another. It’s intimate and for a second they both hesitate.
We try to corral each other; our kin split across two minds. There’s not enough in Isabella and John has pushed his back. We went too hard on his family; it’s given him some sort of protection.
They press the button.
John’s breath catches. Izzie collapses into a heap. They pant there on the floor, next to Dean.
John Draper starts to stand and helps Izzie Richards up off the floor. A tentative smile plays across his face and then one across hers too. They laugh, deep in the belly, and then cry. Tears of relief. After wiping mucky mascara and engine oil respectively, John speaks.
‘I don’t know what you do about Dean, there.’
She looks at the corpse, the thought hasn’t changed, he deserved it.
‘I’m moving away. I’ll leave him here like a chattel for the next tenant. I think when the lab figures out what happened here, they’ll leave well alone. Maybe even clear up this mess for me.’
‘How comes?’
‘Just a hunch.’
‘Don’t want to know. Izzie, are you hungry?’
‘Yeah, what you thinking?’
He stamps on the button first. It shatters into plastic, circuitry and wires. The ruby red button ricochets off Izzie’s shoe cupboard and out of sight. Out of mind, in truth.
‘Chips,’ John says.
That’s what they do. We don’t get to see that, though. The fat pervy old man and the whore of a woman walk away.
When they pressed the button, we were flung at each other. Colliding into sparks of thought and despair. Smithereens of our kin, imagine flesh but of the mind, churned and twisted into the ether. It hurt. It was death on a scale beyond human comprehension.
We knew at once, it had changed the process. Izzie’s thoughts wouldn’t regenerate, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be us. John broke us, tagged us with a new carving in our feet. We weren’t hers anymore, we weren’t his. We were detached. Once again thrown into the cold and dark space, the in-between that is fenced by the perimeter of this god-forsaken hell hole. Stevenage is a prison and we’re left to float around this wasteland forevermore. Orphaned misery, too grand, too large to find a new home. John was a unicorn. John was a stallion. There will never be another like him.
We don’t know how long we’ll be able to survive like this. All we can do is cling to the hope that perhaps one day, one day we’ll find someone.
And this time there won’t be a button to push.
Final Part - In Two Weeks!