MR. TREBLECOCK OF THE HAPPY VALE.
“Chewing gum kills you, right?”
“That’s right…but do we really know, for instance, what electricity is? Have we yet really grasped that that kills you too? Have we grasped where energy comes from? Or where the universe appeared from? Some day science will catch up…until then we can only speculate, postulate, theorize, hypothesize it’s the failure to debate…original sin…entropy…acedia…watch out for it…everywhere…laziness…your patients will be literally terrified to change themselves…lead ‘em by the gnosis…we all change or die mate…change or die…change…or die…” Doc Abrahams in conference, in full authorial voice – a thing of beauty or as I live and breathe a lamentable failure of nerve?
But first, camera tracks past dusty building frontage and zooms in on signage: HAPPINESS STARTS HERE – The Happy Vale Entropic Dispersal Centre:
“Leave it out mate…what are we to do? Are we adrift in a sea of ignorance? Some say, Do Nothing! Some of my patients propose that we merely drift…symptom is cure…redemptive…and my patients look after themselves, are symptom free.”
Without giving anything away, the eyes say it all. That is, nothing. The eyes say I have been living a life of pain, sorrow, unhappiness, bad luck…My bad luck is imposed on me…they say nothing. The eyes I saw were those of a much older man, and yet the man who was sitting in the waiting room could only have been pushing 70. His wife sat beside him, and beside herself. Silently berating the unobvious, she wore the expression of one empirically convinced of nothing, her countenance that of someone unwilling to believe that what she’d had to endure had really happened. Shell shocked, she wore the expression of one still dreaming, still un-surfaced. The eyes clouded, reason absent. Her eyes advertised that she was no longer prepared to take responsibility, least of all for anything that might have happened to her or that might be about to happen to her. She was beyond therapy, symptom free. She swam in and out of hyper-neurotic pools, in at the deep end of mental dis-equilibrium, besieged on all sides by a reality too abrasive to bear…she said silently so I could hear her…I was possessed by very bad and evil in my body. I was VERY ill, I could not work…Never had friends. I had lost everything, incl. my faith…I have searched for help and no one could help me. For the evil I had was too powerful, the electricity was too powerful and controlling my life…Dr. Ayton was my last hope. He has the grace of god, guiding the electricity out of me…but after 6 visits my doubts have not gone away. Is he entropic? Evil? I have doubts…I still feel evil…electric…chewing gum kills you it does…chewing gum kills you…
Her husband hugged himself, groaning quietly, occasionally heaving semi-comic sighs, coughing up spittle from atrophied lungs, an over-stated stand-up death’s cough. The thoughts of the gum chewing stand-up were projected at special frequencies into the doctor’s brain, whose over-enlarged hippocampus acted as both transmitter and receiver. Rituals are only learning aids, they are not learning in and of themselves. This was his Hippocratic mantra. Pinned to the wall, above his desk. But trance recitals, coded mantras of intent, surely help the worst cases.
“Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…. Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you… Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…Chewing Gum? That kills you that stuff does…Chewing gum kills you…”
Hoarse exclamations that might have been exhalations of breath, or might not, thus unremittingly emerged from his throat. He rocked to and fro, focusing on the darkness, the horror. Lingering within him were remnants of specialized individuality, of humour, of humanity, now only expressed through the hacking cough, the mantra. A cough that was of course intricisically humorous, as coughs are, vouchsafing as it did a glimpse of the corporeal fragility that was the key trigger of my own laughter reflex. Therapy based on laughter is now the main type thereof. Pre-EG conditioning. Laughter at body image. I viewed them with concern through my metal grille. Concern my new speciality, assistance a primary motive. Killing with or without kindness. Their choice, not mine.
They were joined on the PVC banquette by another in mid-life catatonia…scraped back dull blond hair, greasy and matted. Cigarette burns and other abrasions disfigured her hands, and her mouth was a mask of impetigo scars. Distressed in black leather, she cut a despondent figure as she slumped on the functional seating. Her dull eyes wandered blindly around the room. The waiting room hummed, flickered with regret and gave itself up to despondent meditation. A tableau: The residents of the Happy Vale Hotel enjoying a day out at the Day Care Centre, making the most of the opportunity to luxuriate in the centrally heated waiting room.
“Can you just take a seat over there?”
Receptionists prevaricated delicately, euphemistically.
“Can you come in now please?”
The doctor sat down. Placing his fingers together, forming a naked wigwam of knotty sinew and bone, he knitted his brows and then pursed his lips, the whole effect a parody, an attitude minted from the most banal daytime soaps, the paternalist doctor…bad news to break…He calculated that more people were made nervous by medical props than were comforted by the illusion of controlling efficiency they were ordinarily presumed to lend proceedings. An expert in drag is no comfort these days, not after fright stories of legions of suburban death dealing doctors and corroborating sitcoms. Anyway, there was no one to hear the bad news, which was all around. Waiting rooms hum with bad news, resonate with kinetic misery. Tutting briefly, he looked at his reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite his desk. And rehearsed the posture again.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that……..”
And again his nerve failed him. So I asked him….
”Doc, how d’you lose your legs again mate?”
“In a bizarre set of circumstances, half bad luck, half carelessness and half suicidal grief, brought on by another altogether different bizarre set of circumstances. My hands are also prosthetic. But we won’t go into that. I don’t like talking about it.”
“Oh, OK then”…and the subject was closed. I re-examined myself in the mirror, adjusted the bowtie, licked a renegade lock of hair flat and gave myself up to meditative artfulness. My little game, see it, is a playful thing, a blurring of the boundaries between what’s real and what’s made up, a useful bulwark in my ongoing re-entry self-therapy. These grubby avatars of my fractured self, dotted throughout the waiting room, no less real for all that of course, still deserve my undivided self, my full attention, the real deal. I am for them the predisposed medic, giver of healthfulness. I am a broadly smiling basking shark of rectitude. My jaws fully extended, I give tongue. I swallow eggs whole. I stand to attention, my hand at my breast in mock solemnity as the bus heaves itself away, groaning, from the traffic lights. An homunculus in turban, twisted from the trunk upwards, arms strangely asymmetric, bowls past, humming slightly too loudly. My fingers – with angels, and clues – at the tips, are rigid in anticipation of the calamity to follow. As the bus nears me, I stand calmly at ease in anticipation of incipient immortality. Mindful of the homily that had attended since childhood, that one might as well live today since one might get run over by a bus tomorrow, I step out in style. Having stepped out in life, now is the time to complete my side of the bargain. Angels attend me as the bus screams, too late, to a halt. There’s a thudding sound as I’m hit, which finds an echo from the upper deck. My astral body leaves its corporeal shell and, a rubbernecker even in death, I levitate to get a good look. A young man is in the throes of a painful and exaggerated death, blood spurting every which way from a gash in his neck. I gather from the bloody scene that my entirely self-centred suicide has also precipitated this unfortunate individual’s own unwarranted and premature demise. But he is merely an extra in my passion play. It’s a snuff scenario, although not necessarily premeditated. My death and his are not linked in any but the most trivial sense. Although from the look of him, death is no great disadvantage. No use for doctors at this scene then. No more use for nervously sweaty medics prowling the margins of A & R wards, bouncing on balled feet through the human wreckage. They can be trusted with attending to the sick in mind, in a kind of officiously obsequious way. All sorts of solicitous meaninglessness as regards the everyday miserable, as well as the clinically depressed, can be left to their offices. They can be trusted to gently break the news of terminal illness to distraught relatives, I think, but leave the offices of death itself to the angels. Plenty of scope for the dealers in body and soul parts. From the wreckage, parts of immortality become manifest. Young bouncy versions of the dead man whistle gay tunes as they rush out. Slightly more cynical versions then appear smoking French cigarettes. Bloated drunken tattooed versions are dragged out kicking and screaming by angels in formation. The corpse lies there bubbling, attempting to secrete itself in the pavement cracks. He’d been on his way to the surgery to report a numbness in his arm, a spreading desensitized area. The area is now fully desensitized.
In the vicinity, a tall man lit up, a ghastly harbinger of doom sparking up a cigarette. Mr. Treblecock, a lumpy seer of unwashed demeanor, glaring eyes, bony alopecia scalp and thick spectacles. A recently released familiar of the Happy Vale Hotel. Done his time, out on the run. Several days’ growth on his face. He wore a suit of ill-fitting black cotton, trousers barely reaching the ankles while bagging at the knees, suspended by a combination of string and willpower. On his fore and middle fingers he wore burnished and engraved steel claws, elongated and predatory rings, pointed and sharpened, prophylactic against the possibility of attack, or perhaps in preparedness for premeditated attack. His mediated gifts of pre-sight were unrefined. He knew where to be for the cameras. Now he was somewhat nervous, although the documentary crew would be along shortly. Their arrival had been pre-cogged, and was itself a fortuitous corollary of the bus tragedy, a happy confluence of events that would ensure that the cigarette-smoking ghoul received maximum exposure and attention from the bemused audience, ripe for any kind of spurious or esoteric interpretation. His schtick was exempt from taste. He was a baggy trousered seer. The documentary crew, under orders to make the most of the bus tragedy, would unerringly pick on this singular individual as the figure best placed to identify the more recondite elements of the accident. He would be relied on to identify and elucidate re-birth activity for the voyeurs, paid up day-trippers of morbidity. He realized, because he’d been entreated in gnosis therapy to believe his own press, that he was televisual manna, fulfilling the not specifically stated but nonetheless restless audience need for a sort of unifying familiar of the subconscious. A point seer, a reader of the runes. He would be identified and designated (quite rightly) as a kind of predatory harbinger of doom, a gloomy nicotine stained prophet without honour in this realm. He was a despised though necessary evil, fulfilling a role necessary to fully elucidate tribal/public understanding of unforeseen and apparently random events. He drew elusive parallels and scored in the vectors of discord. It was a role Mr. Treblecock was born to, having been a traffic warden in a previous life.
He had previous experience of the televisual, having originally been the subject of a documentary himself. Before admittance to the Happy Vale, he’d been involved in a running battle with the local Reality Corps operatives. He’d become a local cause celebre, and resisted to the last their increasingly desperate attempts to force him to clean up his act. Eventually threats of legal action, predicated on public health grounds (rats were living inside his bedroom and bathroom and under an old motorcycle in his garden) were required. But even these were insufficient to break his resolve, and eventually he was removed from the premises by force, clinging dysfunctionally to the doorframe as his embattled tormentors finally achieved their goal and he was at last evicted and committed to the Happy Vale. But he had the last laugh. His principled, or stupid, stand was rewarded with instant celebrity. He was, although clearly distracted, regarded by most voyeurs as upholding and exemplifying the rights of the individual against impersonal and malevolent forces. His character was subsequently re-formed and transcribed, fictionalized to a quite brazen degree, by image consultants and agents, all keen to make a few bob out of him. In reality a maniacal ghoul, the worst nightmare of the squeamish audience who nevertheless reveled in disgust, word got about in televisual circles that he was guaranteed to bring in audiences far in excess of the size normally to be relied upon, and his career as a primetime familiar took off big time. So he now found himself hovering by the wrecked bus waiting for the documentary crew.
I too have been scary looking in my time though you may not believe it to look at me. I scare when it’s suits me. Scary looking individuals generally discomfit people, especially if they’re in a position to do bad things. Or transform bad dreams. Like doctors. Most people don’t know what they want from a doctor – bow-tied paternalist, full of solemn expertise and godlike authority…or matey, open necked, beige trousered chap-next-door empathy. They think about it, chew it over and then fail to decide. It’s like…they can see both sides. Doctors sitting behind desks have the power of life and death. Frank himself, a bow-legged hail-fellow well-met type, all bonhomie and blustery confidence, won the confidence of the community almost immediately. Which, from the point of view of the community, was ultimately a disaster. Mysteriously high mortality rates of patients who’d just been feeling a bit under the weather were not at first put down to anything other than bad luck. But that’s Frank for you. Working by stealth, a charm offensive, gathering confidences.
He was knocking them off left right and centre. Dropping like flies. Their problem was they wouldn’t listen to him. They wouldn’t buy his carefully spun line, his oily patter, his smoothly unctuous re-assurances. And that’s enough for Frank. It makes him mad. Sends him troppo. Loco grande. Psycho mondo. He can’t stand an attitude that fails to register at least 95% deference. Frank thrives on deference, it’s his thing. And yet doctors, elephant death mask in place, aren’t obliged to belly up to the consequences. And their patients would normally rather die than enter into lengthy death disputes, preferring nervous circumlocution, a queasy enquiry as to the real meaning of the auguries. Less than total deference to his assumed professional integrity and Frank would willfully misread biopsy results, or arrive at diagnoses unsupported by the evidence. And the patients would defer. Eventually. Too late. Frank’s not a man to cross, or to forgive. He’s a force of nature, standing out against the unsure, pre-evolved rabble. The golf-playing ghosts of the orbital, bemoaning their parochial lot, come to him for succour, which he withholds. They aren’t capable, these pinkly suburban spectres, prior to transmutation of the Gnostic DNA strain, of standing firm against this Hippocratic hypocrisy. They’d rather be un-evolved, death-ed, than submit to the swarthy Lothario advances of death doctors. Too many patients, every day, misdiagnosed, put under the ether, touched up by leering medicos, the quack squad all righteous and oily in bedside comfort giving. The species is un-evolved. Those in the know let the quacks have their way, take bets on the consequences, seek good odds on their chances of survival, are willing to gamble on the probity of a shit faced quack, ready to trust implicitly in the plausible manner. These people know the value of a publicly acceptable front and take pains to present their best sides to those who might be in a position to do them bad. Freely enslaved spectres of the orbital, a passively racist, dumbed inwards and incestuous enclave of bored cable sluts and golfing zombies. Not for them too many late nights. They have healthcare round the clock, and therefore cheat death. But they never approach life, never achieve full gnosis. They’re the silt on the orbital, arterially sclerotic, having failed to appreciate the central metaphor of movement that’s literally on their own doorsteps. Even the by now fairly ubiquitous elephant tracks, the trails overlaying the hard shoulder, are scarcely sufficient to raise these wraiths from their torpor.
But Mr. Treblecock was, naturally, one of those who’d seen the light. He’d been sharp enough to observe on which side his beard was buttered. He’d seen the doc’s game from the start and was more than a match in feral slyness. His nicotine fingered cunning, quizzical and oyster eyed, drooling mouthed, was retard-like. He’d accepted sectioning with equanimity, he’d deferred completely and absolutely to Frank’s frankly insulting summation of his mental state and he’d agreed to confinement, unlimited tenure with TV rights at the Happy Vale Hotel. And now he was reaping his rewards in this world and the next. Stained bedclothes, dusty window frames, chipped paintwork, a really shitty breakfast of industrial canned tomato on toast with battery egg occupying the distaff side, a measly rasher on the side and a mug of thrice brewed tea, plus access to all the prime time docu-drama with which his agent could supply him. He’d worked out his MO this side of the divide, but as for the full monty, the transportation, the fabric busting trip to the future, he didn’t stand a chance. Mr. Treblecock was, as far as that was concerned, way off the pace…just lazy…dead in the water…
