I want to kill people

‘There’s only one kind of work I want to do, and no-one will pay you for doing it,’ Mark said. Rather grandly, he said it. The water in the docks chopped and changed colour. The wind caused the first and seemed to cause the second. Gulls lifted endlessly upwards through the air. I could smell the chip van, and could sense the approach of one of Mark’s infrequent fits of being really fucking annoying.
‘What is it you want to do?’ I asked.
‘I want to kill people.’
How do you respond to that?
We weren’t far from the driving test centre. Driving teachers brought their driving students down around here to practice their driving. I watched a learner in a boxy silver car almost ram a cyclist into the roadside railings. The cyclist was this slight Asian woman on a red bike, and her eyes went huge when the car veered towards her – I could see them going huge from across the road.
We went to the job centre. We’ve got a joint claim because we live together and we let slip that we’re partners. Our job seekers’ booklets are half empty and all the other half is made up. We both got first class honours at university. I have a nice red hat that we found in a charity shop.
We’re living with Mark’s parents. They’re a nice couple. We stay out their way whenever they aren’t staying out of ours.
When Mark tells the surprisingly beautiful woman at the job centre, she dithers for a bit and then asks him about how his fortnight of job-seeking has gone.
‘I’ve still been applying for shit jobs though,’ he says, ‘but I’ve changed my mind about what I want to do. I was being wildly aspirational before, wasn’t I? Wanting a job doing X, for amount Y, in location Z?’
‘I’m going to have to ask you to raise your voice,’ she says. He’s whispering very deliberately, so they can’t throw him out for shouting. Every word is audible but he sounds like a child imitating a cartoon frog. He is a twat, sometimes, but I do love him.
Right now he’s being a twat though.
‘All I want to do,’ he tells her, ‘is kill people. I don’t mind which people. There are too many people; people need to start killing other people. I’ll do it. Can you sort it out?’
He doesn’t even think it’s funny and it’s his own joke.
‘Mark,’ I say, ‘this poor woman probably sees genuinely mentally ill people every day. You might not be embarrassing yourself, but you are embarrassing me.’
We’re the ones who chose to go to university, I want to say. We could get a couple of those jobs if we really wanted to, I want to say. Cleaning or something like that. We’d get told how to clean and then we’d clean things.
I have to apologise for ages to get her to stamp our booklets. There was almost, I think, a very real possibility of us getting a proper talking to.
‘Mark,’ I say, as we’re walking back up the road – as the learner drivers crawl and judder past – as we travel back to his parents’ house, ‘you can’t mess about in there like that. If they cut our JSA we’re fucked aren’t we?’
‘Except we wouldn’t be properly fucked, would we?’
There are generations of angry men visible in his face.
‘All I want to do is kill people.’