Dusse My Inner Child Wants to Murder Mindfully

the latest darkly comic internationally bestselling thriller, now a major Netflix series
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-38408-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 464 Seiten

Reihe: Murder Mindfully

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dusse, Karsten

Weitere Mitwirkende

Duijsens, Florian

Leseproben

There were two things wrong with my childhood: my mum and my dad. But I only realised this forty years later, when, pressured to do so by my wife, I first considered my inner child.

If I hadn’t already been sensitised to psychological issues through my very positive experiences with mindfulness, I probably would’ve thought the very notion of an inner child utter nonsense. Anything a gastroenterologist cannot discover during a thorough check-up simply isn’t inside us. Or so I used to think.

A year ago, I would’ve thought a book about the inner child was targeted at people who were expecting. One of those books that might provide a man with a great deal of information about what was going on inside his partner biologically but was useless when it came to elucidating his own inner life.

By now, I know that the psychological concept of the inner child has nothing whatsoever to do with preparing for childbirth. It only becomes relevant after you’ve exited the birth canal. And that holds true for any sex. According to the notion of the inner child, we are emotionally constructed like a Russian doll. When something’s rattling in the doll that is our adult soul, it’s really the sound of the other, smaller doll inside it: our inner child’s wounded soul.

It’s not us who stand in the way of our own happiness, but our inner child. It’s a part of us, along with all our childhood injuries. If we want the rattling to stop, we need to heal our inner child.

Taking my inner child into consideration turned out to be the ideal way for me to eliminate the causes of the problems whose consequences I had started to mitigate by practising mindfulness.

In my childhood, there was no Siri or Alexa. The people who turned lights on and off, operated the stereo and answered the stupidest questions incorrectly were called Mummy and Daddy. So, if anything got screwed up in my childhood, these two must be the culprits.

This explanation was reassuring in that it enabled me to comfortably blame my parents for my own marital problems, fear of the future and general irritability, as well as several murders.

The fact that I only conceived my inner child at the age of forty-three was partly down to an unprotected argument with my estranged wife. Katharina always had a very effective approach to problems: the person responsible for solving her problems was always the one without whom she wouldn’t have them. This made me the one responsible for providing the protection when it came to conflicts in our dissolving marriage.

And that’s exactly what I’d unfortunately messed up on our last summer holiday together. Against her express wishes, I had gotten into an altercation with a waiter at an alpine hut. That alone was reason enough for her to demand that I seek therapeutic assistance for my constant mood swings. And this without her even knowing that, after a little retaliatory stunt on my part, the waiter had unfortunately died.

While still in the Alps, I made an appointment with my mindfulness coach for the week after we got back, like the good husband and father that I was. The fact that, if I hadn’t, Katharina would’ve taken Emily and left was also fairly significant.

Completely independent of my wife’s sensitivities, however, I had long since realised that I needed to work on myself. Something inside of me kept stopping me from enjoying life. If worries were a liquid, I felt like my mindfulness practice might’ve helped calm the waves inside the barrel of my soul, yet it was still filled to the brim with anxiety. And sometimes, when a new worry came along, something still splashed over the edge, making me freak out about things other people would consider minor.

So far, my freak-outs had been mere trifles:

One night, I threw ice cubes at drunks shouting in the park across the street.

I gave clients who annoyed me bad legal advice.

I brought the prisoner in my cellar his meal two hours late, just because.

Things basically anyone in the same situation would do if they were annoyed. And as long they didn’t get caught.

The fact that I let a waiter plunge into a ravine, however, is of a slightly different order.

I didn’t like this escalation.

And so, one rainy evening in early September, I found myself on Joschka Breitner’s doorstep again. A week after my holiday. Almost half a year after my last mindfulness coaching session.

Before I pressed the doorbell, I stood outside his door and took stock of how I felt. Over the last six months, a great deal had changed.

Back then, it was spring. Summer was around the corner. Now it was autumn. Winter was on its way.

Back then, I had left Breitner’s practice in the daylight, newly energised. With my new insights, I was positively surfing the flow of a mindful lifestyle into the world blossoming outside.

Now, I’d been washed back by the tides of life. It was already dark, and the first yellowed leaves rustled under my feet.

By now, my life should’ve been completely happy. In the last six months, with a lot of love and mindfulness, I had transformed my professional and personal environment the way I’d always dreamed of:

I’d exchanged a crippling permanent position at a large law firm for a financially sound freelance position as a solo practitioner.

Katharina and I had re-routed the dead end of our tired and stressed-out marriage into the parallel life paths of co-parenting individuals.

Our daughter, Emily, enjoyed her hard-won spot at preschool and was a cheerful, confident member of Little Fish’s Nemo group.

I had not only my law office in the same beautiful old building as Little Fish, but my own apartment too. I managed the whole building for my main client – Dragan, the absent boss of a criminal syndicate.

All these changes had a lot to do with the fact that, half a year earlier, I’d killed Dragan. That no one knew about this was not entirely insignificant to my happiness. And to ensure no one would ever find out about it, I had no choice but to let his criminal consortium continue to operate under Dragan’s name. And pretend to his gang that their boss was still alive.

As a lawyer, this shouldn’t have been difficult. After all, I had hand-knitted the legal coverlets for Dragan’s drug, sex and weapons trading, and, as a consultant, been its de facto CEO. This was the exact role I continued to play for everyone. Nothing more.

But a single clanger, one more ill-considered freak-out, a set of critical outside eyes trained too closely on my life – and this whole web of lies I’d woven would collapse.

I had to make sure anything I did stayed under the radar of both the police and any gangsters. This made my accidentally killing a waiter rather counterproductive. Not just for my spiritual life, but for my life full stop.

What was wrong with my life was that I couldn’t put a foot wrong.

My present existence might be nicer than my past, but I was tremendously afraid of the future.

This was stressful. Mindfulness helped keep things under control. But it couldn’t get rid of what was causing the stress. Mindfulness might’ve slowed my hamster wheel, but somehow I still couldn’t get off. That’s why I was here again, waiting outside Breitner’s door. Organising my thoughts had brought a little clarity to the troubled particles of my soul. Still, I hesitated to ring the bell. For one, because I wasn’t quite sure how much I could even tell Breitner about my problems.

I’d certainly be able to tell him about how Katharina’s snippy remarks kept making it clear to me how fragile and unresolved our relationship actually was.

I could also tell him about my feelings of guilt towards Emily because Katharina and I had failed to save our marriage.

I wanted to talk about needing time for myself, outside of my family and my clients.

I could tell him about my little freak-outs, even if they were embarrassing.

I’d bring all those things up – and Breitner would be able to help me deal with all of it.

But I wouldn’t be able to talk about what weighed on me most.

I wouldn’t say a word about the murders I committed the previous spring.

I’d remain silent about the double life I’d led since.

And I certainly wouldn’t talk about Boris.

Boris, the Russian gangster I was holding captive in the preschool’s cellar. Boris, the only person who wanted (and already knew enough) to burst the bubble of my perfect world.

Boris, who I kidnapped six months earlier to save my life, and that of my daughter.

Boris, who I didn’t want to kill because I was tired of killing. Who was my living proof that I could say no to murder. Yet who I could also neither hold captive forever, nor ever release. Boris, for whose future I hadn’t yet been able to find a solution.

My prisoner would burden me as much dead as he...