Things

An unattractive fat young man with pimples and solitary habits finds a brooch behind some dustbins outside his flat and recognizes it as belonging to an old woman who lives down the road from him. The next day a policeman knocks on his door and tells him that the old woman has been found dead in her flat. Things begin to stir in the fat young man’s mind and that night he has a dream in which she tells him she has been murdered and that the brooch is a clue to the identity of the killer. He is increasingly beset by troubling visions and cryptic dreams as forgotten memories begin to bubble to the surface: a pipe-smoking man who paints toy soldiers; a frightening woman with a tattoo of a snake on her breast; an unearthly storm that sweeps him off to a strange bedroom where a giant of a man with jangling keys stands menacingly over him. The final straw comes when he sees the dead old woman walk past his window wearing the brooch he believes to be in his kitchen drawer. Now, deep in his madness he searches desperately for the missing brooch and his sanity among the dustbins where he first found it.

The story now continues with a child being carried through a dark stormy night by the pipe man. They are running from something terrible that has happened. The bruised and bleeding child clutches his mother’s brooch which the pipe man bought for her from a young lady in a shop called the Pink Paradise. It is early morning when he regretfully abandons the boy outside this young lady’s shop and then flees into the night. The lady takes the child home and cares for him despite the protests of her husband, a brutal prison Warden.

The woman and child fall in love with each other and spend an idyllic few weeks together before the Warden reports the boy to the authorities. The child is put into an orphanage, but only after the lady has given the child a special farewell supper where he presents her with his mother’s brooch as a token of his love.
Meanwhile the boy’s real mother, the woman with the tattoo, is found brutally murdered, stabbed between the eyes of the snake tatoo on her breast. The policeman in charge of the case, a cultured man with a classical-romantic bent, is faced with a multitude of suspects because the woman was a prostitute and any one of her clients could’ve killed her, including her missing boyfriend.
Back in the present moment, some thirty years later, the fat young man is found on his hands and knees, mad and mumbling incoherently beside the garbage bins, by an unassuming cripple girl who takes him in and cares for him.

Despite his crazed condition, the cripple girl learns to communicate with him on a very primal level and their relationship blossoms. Although she knows he needs professional help, looking after him fills an emptiness in her life and she keeps putting off the dreaded moment. Finally fate intervenes and the fat young man is arrested by a sympathetic policeman for the murder of the old lady.
It is while he is awaiting trial that the story unfolds further and reveals that his mother had been raped by the warden while being held for soliciting, and that he had been born as a result.

The pipe man meanwhile returns from exile to look for him but finds he is too late; the fat young man has already been sentenced to death. The prison warden, his unknowing father and husband of his beloved pink lady, cheerfully prepares him for execution and it is only in these final moments as he is being strapped into the electric chair that the last pieces of the puzzle fall into place and the fat young man remembers everything and sees the terrible twist in the tale.