I think I killed for the first time when I was thirteen years old. It wasn’t a big deal. None of my murders were. It’s not as if any of them were particularly malicious or anything. I mean, I did have my reasons. Of course I did. Everybody has their reasons. Mostly, though, I did it just to fill the time. It’s really not that much of a big deal. Some people get an Xbox or buy a pet or study for exams to fill time. I kill people. It’s as simple as that. If you ask me, the only thing slightly strange thing was that I did it when I was only thirteen years old. And they say that girls mature quicker than boys.
Let me explain what I’m talking about.
I think the first question to get out the way is: how does a thirteen-year-old start thinking about murder? Well, I was always an early developer. The truth is, I was highly intelligent from a very young age, both in a book-ish kind of way and also, as I would find out later, in a serial killer-ish kind of way.
The main reason that I so candidly thought about murder, though, was not my intelligence, but my home life. My mother had died during childbirth, so I guess that I experienced death in my first moments on Earth. I’m not sure how much I was processing having just left the womb, but certainly it seems to have had an effect. I suppose you could say, that was the beginning of it.
A while after my mum passed away, my father turned to alcohol, a hobby he continued up to my thirteenth birthday. The alcoholism bothered my brother, Mike. He was a few years older than me but I was always ahead of him mentally. Mike used to come through to my room at night and find me on my bed, reading a book – Ripley’s Game, or something like that – and say, “Nicholas, are you awake? Dad’s shouting again.”
“I know,” I would snap back, “I have ears too.”
“What should we do?” he would moan.
“Just do something to keep your mind of it,” I’d tell him, “like read or write or something.”
“But I don’t like reading,” Mike would complain, at which point I decided to ignore him.
Seeing my father that way every night – shouting, bawling that he was going to kick our skulls in – it made me tough. Of course I knew that a man so drunk would never have the composure to make it up the stairs, so I was not particularly worried but his threats: I would just read away, happily in another world. Looking back on it, though, it definitely did change me – seeing another human being addicted to the very same thing that was destroying them. I never thought that would happen to me. At the time, though, I really thought very little of it – in the mornings I would step over my father’s sleeping, slobbering body at the bottom of the stairs, collect my school bag and walk straight out the door for school. I even found it amusing to shout, “Bye Dad,” knowing in witty irony that I would never get a response.
Soon, though, Mike began on the drink too. And I wasn’t too fond of that. It was out of principal, you see. By the time I was old enough to understand my Dad’s addiction, he was already beyond rescuing. Mike, on the other hand, I had known when he was a normal person. Mike, I could save. So I thought about it. I had a lot of free time since school didn’t challenge me much and, obviously, there was no strict parent at home. I took a while to get my head around it, but ultimately I realised I had to destroy the thing that was encouraging Mike to drink. My first target, at thirteen years old, became my very own father.
At three am one morning, I snuck out of bed and found my father in his usual position: the bottom of the stairs. I went down to him and tried to drag him up. Being thirteen, this was a strenuous task. After all, my father had a beer belly that weighed the same as the rest of his body put together. So to heave this up each and every stair took a lot out of me. But I managed eventually. I went through to the bathroom, filled a glass with water, brought it back, and splashed it in his face. After a while, the giant awoke.
“Dad! Dad! Get up!” I exclaimed excitably.
As he got to his feet he began shouting slurred speech. He peered around, his eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, a long drip of drool hanging from the edge of his lip. That’s when I gave a little push. It didn’t have to be hard. The alcohol did the rest. He stumbled a bit, and then teetered on the edge of the top stair for what seemed like an eternity. He clawed at the air, like that coyote from the cartoons, before tumbling backwards. I heard his neck make a satisfying crunch with the edge of a stair before his body clambered down to his usual resting point. I went down and felt his pulse, and once I was satisfied that I had been successful, I went back to bed. I woke up with my alarm clock at the usual time, went out my room, slapped my face in pretend shock, and called the police.
It was that simple.
