Adam's Apple Pie

Twenty-Three - Sixth Session

"I heard the news," she said, "a fire broke out at Eden House of Knowledge, they estimate over 200 dead. Although they're still counting the bodies."

She took a breath of fire and exhaled, filling the room with her smoke. "I bet it felt good, didn't it?"

"What?"

Her eyes were firmly locked on me, as if she could read every thought that came into it. "Powerful thing, anger," Dr Eve said. "All those who say that love makes the world go round clearly don't look outside their front door. It's always been anger that has controlled everything, even from the earliest days. And my boy - the anger within you could power an entire country, if only they could harness it."

I didn't much care for this weird philosophical crap. I took another bite of the pie - oh GOD it was so good. This one might have been the best one yet.

"It's always interested me, the anger that your kind has towards women," Dr Eve continued. "From day one, you almost seemed certain to destroy each other. The sheer loathing that you hold towards the female species is unlike anything within the animal kingdom."

"What?" I gasped. "I don't hate women."

"Really?" Dr Eve asked, taking another breath of smoke. "You hated Charlotte Tyler for what she did to you. You wished you could have killed her, isn't that so?"

"That was just..." I should have explained myself, but my voice stopped mid-way, as if my brain was rebelling against me. "I mean, yeah I hated her. But I didn't wish... that on her."

"Are you sure about that?"

Dr Eve's line of questioning was starting to get inside my head. I felt like she was trying to gaslight me - I knew full well that I never wished ill on Charlotte, not like that that.

"What about those in the museum?" Dr Eve asked. "Can you say the same for them?"

This time I couldn't bring myself to argue with her. Maybe it was the succulence of the pie, maybe it was Dr Eve prying into my mind; or maybe it was just the acceptance of it all - but either way I found myself saying what I had dreamed of saying for so long.

"They made me do this!"

"Of course they did." The hint of sarcasm from Dr Eve didn't go unnoticed from me. "It's never your fault is it? It's always easier to blame someone else for your own shortcomings."

"If you're asking me to feel sorry for those fuckers, then forget it," I replied - and I meant every syllable of that. "They had this coming."

"Including Gayle?" Dr Eve asked. "What about Anna? Or Charlie? Does a baby have to be killed to prove your point?"

That gave me pause for thought - but only a moment's pause.

Dr Eve drew in more breath from her cigarette and blew out a long stream of smoke towards me. The room was starting to get very smoky, much like the insides of the museum were probably now. "It's natural for you to hate. It's built into your very makeup, like all men. Of course, it's not something that they can access right away - like anything it has to be taught. Even a wild animal born to hunt has to learn how to do things. Some men are able to supress it, and some avoid it completely; but it's always there."

She was starting to sound like a Protector columnist with all this crap she was spilling, but I decided to humour her. "Let me guess," I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster, "women are better."

"Oh no, no, no," Dr Eve replied, shaking her head. "Despite what they think, women are no more superior than men are. They are just as capable of hate and prejudice. They have, however, had to suffer through laws that you made for them. That's why they made their Movement." She took a huge breath from her cigarette and let it out with a long puff through her red lips, which were shinning now like never before. "You know, it makes me laugh - how two species with so much hate for each other rely on one another for survival. That's the ultimate irony of nature.