Fraud
The bank had phoned.
‘Ring us, please, urgently,’
a frail, female voice intoned,
through gritted teeth,
in a message left
at precisely three thirty three.
It was their Fraud Department
- just routine security.
Did I have my debit card to hand?
‘Of course,’ I said, like a prim schoolboy
stretching his arm up to answer.
But when I looked, it had gone
from the pocket in my wallet
into which I normally slip it.
There were some unusual payments pending,
mostly off licences and bars.
Were they mine?
‘Oh, no, no,’ I said,
as if I’d been accused of an offence,
and needed to protest my innocence.
However, when I put down the phone,
even though the bank had assured me
that for every item I hadn’t stolen,
my account would be fully re-credited,
I still felt strangely confused.
I wandered round the house,
trying to remember what
they’d said had been spent.
Then, not finding a calculator,
I totalled it up in my head:
all that blood I had bled.
If only it were true
that my account would be fully re-credited.
Yet the thought of the card
with my name embossed upon it in gold,
no longer being warmed in my wallet,
by my leg and my groin,
but in the filthy hands
of some complete unknown,
gratifying his basest needs,
for booze, fags, sex, perhaps,
made me feel I was draining away.
I just couldn’t get it into my head
that my account would be fully re-credited,
for I couldn’t believe that it would
until it had actually happened.
Meanwhile I had to wait,
exposed, vulnerable, naked,
a vital part of me acting without my consent,
going wild out there in a way that I hadn’t meant.
Then, like Peter, after he’d denied Christ
for the third time, once I had grasped
how frightened I was of being exposed,
I could no longer hold on
to the door I was trying to keep closed.
It wasn’t that I had no memory.
It was just so agonising to recall
that two nights before, home alone,
like a child covering his eyes,
and thinking no one can see him,
I’d been this complete unknown.
Then, half-alive the next day,
I’d gone to the supermarket,
shopping for ordinary things,
to pretend that I was OK.
Now, for the first time I remembered:
the assistant swiping my card,
and then not returning it.
It had hurt me so much to put on a front,
that I’d just wanted to get away
- which was why I hadn’t noticed
exactly what hadn’t happened.
But now that I had, it hit me,
like the glittering bling
the assistant had been wearing:
this loss of my card was the truth coming out
the Fraud Squad detecting me:
my very own
complete unknown.
Online I could look at purchases
that may as well have been mine:
seventy-five pounds in an off licence
sixty-five in a pub.
I must have been more drunk
than ever before,
staggering, cavorting, wildly
drinking glass after glass,
in spite of the sickening taste,
because I just couldn’t face
the fraud that, in fact, I am.
A suit for two hundred and thirty five pounds.
And I had been doing it in style,
trying to pretend I am not
the derelict I really am.
Then an item that I guessed was cashback.
What had I spent this on, I wondered?
Something sexual probably,
something chthonic.
When people become this drunk,
it goes on and on.
As one appetite is sated,
another takes over:
seeking to avoid our demons
is how we become demonic.
Then, just quivering endless guilt,
throbbing in my head
- a stye on my mind’s eye.
The cut worm wriggling in bits
with nowhere else to go.
Certainly not to the shop the next day
just to put on a good show.
All this blood I have bled.
I cross to the other side of the road
and leave me as if for dead.
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