Out of Bounds by Mike Seabrook

Author:Mike Seabrook [Seabrook, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-09T13:00:00+00:00

* * *

Andrew Tyldesley was drowning in the grip of a profound personal crisis.

Unknowingly, Graham had diagnosed his state of mind quite correctly when he had spoken of him with Reggie Westwood. Revenge was indeed the mainspring driving Tyldesley since Graham’s utterly unexpected and not very principled disappearance from his life. Tyldesley was a man who needed not so much a life-partner as a life-support system: without such a partner it was highly likely that his lifestyle and his own volatile temperament would destroy him.

If this had been the only facet of Tyldesley’s personality that was about to play a part in Graham Curtis’s life, Graham might well have been safe. Unfortunately, there were two other aspects of Tyldesley that also came into the equation. First he was a man with a highly developed need for drama. Like many neurotics, he lived a secret life utterly different from the ordinary routine of his real everyday existence. This life was lived out within the unlimited world of his own imagination, and it was infinitely the more real to him of the two lives. And it constantly needed fuelling with dramas, real or imagined. Everything that happened had to be probed, tested and assessed for its dramatic properties, its potential as material for the stories which he recounted obsessively and interminably to his cronies in the endless circuit of gay bars in which he circulated in his “real” life. The cronies put up with him and the stories partly because he was open-handed with his plentiful money, partly because superficially he was amiable and amusing company, and partly because he was very good-looking indeed, not in any flashy way to match his character, but with real beauty of face and body, and many of the cronies lusted after him insatiably — though if they had known what kind of a personality lay beneath the beautiful exterior, most of them would have opted rather to go to bed with a well-dressed corpse.

One man who had seen through all the elaborate window-dressing without any difficulty was Reggie Westwood, who had demolished his character in Graham’s interest, and done a thorough job. But even Westwood failed to understand the other aspect of Tyldesley, and the one which turned him from an averagely pathetic specimen of life’s losers into a very dangerous adversary indeed.

Put simply, Tyldesley was a sociopath. Once activated by some grievance, real or imagined—there would be no difference in Tyldesley: it would simply be a matter of which of his twin lives it took place in — he would choose his course of action, and then pursue it. The whole affair might lie dormant. It might never emerge from that state. Or it might come out instantly, or after any kind of interval. But once he had made up his mind to pursue it, he would do so rigorously and with an utter disregard for any other lives on the periphery, however innocent, that he might damage. Provided he could strike at his intended target, he would be completely fulfilled and content.

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