I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

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I should probably cross-post this to A Dirty Job but as I haven’t updated there in a couple of months now - for good reason (nothing has fucking happened) - I may as well kick-start my new personal blog with it.

As you probably know, I work in security. After 15 years in international finance, including five as a proprietary trader, and after a particularly bad run when I dropped tens of thousands, I gave it all up at the end of 2006. I’d totally had enough. I knew I wanted a career change, but what?

Becoming a doorman seemed like something I could do. Additionally, the buzz that surrounds the ever-present threat of violence would, I figured, in some similar way compensate for the absence of the up-and-down thrill that trading had made a near-permanent fixture in my life. Plus, as you know, Road House is totally rad.

So, I got my SIA license and started work as a doorman (i.e., bouncer) at a holiday park. (The insanity of that job is documented to quite an exhaustive level at my ADJ blog.)

For six months now I’ve been working night security at a semi-lockdown. This project is a kind of halfway-house, and first step back to some kind of ‘normal’ life, for people who have become homeless through to problems with alcohol, drugs or an extended spell in the correctional system.

Most people stay there for less than a year, and then either ‘prove’ themselves and move on to their own flats and what have you, or get booted out (and made effectively homeless again) for being unable to overcome their problems (drug addiction, violent behaviour, etc), or worse.

As a result, the turnover of the place is reasonably high. The maximum number of tenants that can be housed in the project at any one time is twelve. In the six months I’ve worked there, probably twenty people have come and gone.

This week, our latest tenant is a chap with a major history of self-harm. When being told of his past my immediate reaction was that he seemed way too high-maintenance for the usual motley crew that one will typically find in the project, but obviously it’s not my call about who’s in, and who’s out. I just have to make sure they behave between the hours of 10pm through 9am, 3-4 days per week (depending on the shift pattern). For that period I’m totally on my own, although each night of the week there is a ’sleepover’ member of staff on duty, who basically spends the night (in bed) at the project, on call. This person is a trained social worker and is basically there in case something major happens, or one of the tenants needs to speak to somebody about something that really can’t wait.

So, the new chap arrived Monday but I didn’t see him until Wednesday night. I noted he was short, stocky - probably 14-15 stone - with long-blond hair, and was wearing an Iron Maiden hoodie. He’s probably in his mid-30s, and looks like your typical old-school rocker.

That was it. Nothing much happened. Then, come Thursday, there’s a knock on my door at 11pm. It’s him.

“Hi,” I say, “What’s up?”

“Who’s the staff on duty tonight?”

I told him.

“Yeah, can you get her down here please?” he said.

“Is there a problem?”

“Yes.”

Great. I couldn’t see any signs of blood or anything like that, and all this time his face had been emotion-free. Oddly so.

“Okay,” I replied, “I’ll give her a call.”

We waited outside my office. Five minutes later, she came down.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve cut myself, and I need somebody to bandage it for me.”

All very matter-of-fact.

“Okay,” she said, “Let’s go and have a look.”

We went into the main office across the other side of the building. It’s protocol for the on-duty security guard and the on-duty social worker to always be present in any situation involving a tenant at night for various reasons, most of them involving the legal system. Additionally, while the entire place is pretty much covered by the matrix of CCTV cameras in my office, the staff side of the building is not. So, once the door to the main office is closed, unless I’m in there I have no idea what is happening. (That’s not really relevant to this story, but may well be in the future. So now you know.)

So, we’re inside. Again, it’s good form for me to keep well out of the way, but to have a clean line of sight to both the social worker and the tenant, in case something kicks off. So I’m over the other side of the office while the two of them sit at the desk. I can still see, and hear, everything.

“Let’s have a look then,” she says, and he rolls up his sleeve.

He had a kind of zig-zag fresh wound on his left arm, probably in 3-4 inch lines. It looked pretty bad. Blood was free-flowing but not gushing, and I also noticed lots of other small scars that had long-since finished their healing process.

“It’s very superficial,” he said, “Normally I’d take care of this myself but it’s kind of awkward applying a bandage from one arm to another. That’s why I typically cut my legs, although I haven’t done that in a while.”

I looked down. He was wearing shorts. I couldn’t see any scars on his legs.

“I mean, it’s not like last time, when I cut an artery.”

The social worker opened the first aid box and started looking for the right kind of bandage.

I’m not in any way shaken (or, to be quite frank, all that bothered) about the sight of blood, but this guy’s demeanour was freaking me out a bit. It was, in all honest, the way he described what was going on, what he’d done, and his reaction to it, was a bit like the way Hannibal Lecter talked to Clarice Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs. Detached, indifferent, knowing. Disturbed.

My alarm bells were going off, although I picked up no signs of any physical threat at all. It was a bit like driving past a really serious car accident; you can’t help yourself, and you look.

Suddenly, and casually, he moved two fingers from his right hand down to his left arm, touching the wound, and then raised those same fingers up to his legs.

And tasted the blood.

“This is my biggest problem”, he said, with absolutely no humour or irony, “I can’t get enough of the taste.”

All very calm, all very ‘meh’.

To her credit, the social worker was very calm, even knowingly indifferent, throughout. It takes a lot to rile me up (at least professionally), and I rarely show signs of stress or emotion, but this guy was not somebody I’d encountered before. He was strange, sure, but fascinatingly so.

The bandage was soon in place and the social worker continued her gentle questioning. Why had he done this, what was the trigger, how was he feeling now, and that kind of thing.

The guy answered each query in turn, often in significant detail. At times it was almost like he was reading from a script, and I wasn’t sure if this meant that he’d rehearsed these answers or if this was something that had happened so many times that it was just all so routine and formulaic for him.

At one point, he closed his eyes, and was quiet for a moment.

“Are you okay?” the social worker asked.

“Yes,” he said, and then motioned down to his bandaged arm, “It’s just that this feels so good.”

This was his rub, his hook. The pain was where he got his kicks, his rush. The blood on his lips was his fetish. It was also his problem, as he couldn’t ever have the latter without the former. And if the former felt good as well…

Routinely he brought those bloodied fingers up to his mouth for another taste, and at one point actually sucked a little blood directly from his rolled up sleeve.

And during all of this, at all times, all three of us remained calm, passive, reserved. The illusion of indifference, at least for two of us. That this was okay. Don’t worry about it - we’ve all done it. In his case, however, he had done it (many times, I later discovered, as this had been going on for 19 years), and his indifference was just that.

“The problem is,” he eventually said, “This all happened in the last half an hour. I’ve been feeling good for a while now, but half an hour ago I got really depressed, and I couldn’t stop myself.”

I watched his mouth, speckles of now-drying blood around his lips.

“And now it’s started, this is how I’m going to feel for the next two weeks.”

Wonderful.