by Tanvir Bush
‘Ahoy!’ Louder now and the returning echo is definitely metallic. And close. The doctor suspects that if he sat up he would hit his head on the top of the … the what? The pod? The container? He is suddenly desperately claustrophobic and very, very frightened. He begins to thrash about. ‘Help me!’ he screams. For the first time in over forty years, The Good Doctor Binding’s eyes begin to leak.
‘Are those actual tears, Dr Binding?’ It is a distorted voice, an electronic tenor, but Binding can’t tell where it is coming from.
Sudden brilliant white light blinds him. He blinks rapidly, feeling the hot tears slide down his recently shaved cheeks and into his ears.
Then he sees there is something on his chest. It looks like a torch on a thin pole, and attached to the torch is a little camcorder. A tiny red light is blinking.
‘Nearly time for your close-up, Doctor,’ says the tinny voice. ‘Shame you didn’t trim your nostril hair.’
Arrival
11:45 a.m.
Robin and the other nurses – Nurse Ashley, a smaller, sourer version of Nurse Dyer, and Nurse Pepper, a soft, fish-white, trembling, fat girl from North Wales – are scrubbed and smart and ready to greet the VIPs, press and mayor’s entourage. The two blokes from Shandy Productions who have been left to ensure technical support have faded into the background, and so too, it seems, has Nurse Dyer.
Robin is a bit affronted by her absence. He knows she hates her routines being scuppered and her wards being walked through by strangers, but even so, he expected her to be here for the ‘meet and greet’. Dr Binding hasn’t shown up either, which is even odder, as Robin had seen the Doc’s chauffeur sitting in the Mercedes parked up in the front of the car park, head down, reading a paper.
Well, there is nothing to be done about that now, thinks Robin, mouth opening and shutting as he breathes into his diaphragm using the Bhastrika Pranayama technique.
‘You sound like you’re snoring,’ hisses Nurse Ashley, fidgeting and scratching her eczema.
‘Here they come,’ whimpers Pepper, so pale in her white uniform she could be an enormous marshmallow. She tries to grab Robin’s hand for a squeeze of reassurance, but he pulls away, disgusted.
Robin, Pepper and Ashley are standing with the other on-duty staff in front of the reception desk. Amid a clicking and flashing of cameras, about ten people are walking in through the automatic doors towards them. First in are the two H5 security staff, followed by the great man himself, John Thorpe-Sinclair MP, the stunning Stella Binding MP, and the surly, short Frenchman, Monsieur Rennes, CEO of TOSA. Behind them comes the mayor of Cambright, Bill Pearson, his consort Clarissa, and a flurry of PR and press people. Everyone is smiling and chortling as if they have all just shared the best pub joke ever.
Apart from Stella, thinks Robin. He can see she is trying to be brave and professional, in spite of the anxiety she must be feeling for her husband. Poor, poor woman. His heart goes out to her as she stands there, gleaming hair in a chignon, black sculpted dress. What lovely lean legs she has.
The Grassybanks manager, a lugubrious, grey-suited man called Donald Skinner, greets the VIPs with a huge fake smile plastered across his long face.
‘Welcome to Grassybanks. Without you, our Right Honourable friends, this exceptional establishment would not be operational.’ Robin notices Skinner’s hangdog eyes slide around the room. He too must be looking for Nurse Dyer and the doctor. Oh dear, are they going to get it in the neck!
‘We hope you are OK with the grand tour first?’ Skinner shouts to the crowd. ‘Robin, one of our most experienced nurses, will lead you on the tour. We will then meet back here in a few minutes for the speeches and the unveiling of the plaque.’
Everyone nods, hands are shaken, and Robin is called forward.
‘Don’t mess this up,’ hisses Ashley to his back. She really is a mini-Dyer.
Andre in the Doghouse
What Andre is beginning to realise, as the fog in his brain clears, is that he is lying on his side on a floor smeared with what looks like, smells like and so probably is dog shit.
Oh my God, gross! Repulsed, he heaves himself up into a sitting position, feeling as if he has drunk a bottle of vodka with a lager beer-barrel chaser. He remembers, although only vaguely, getting instantly sleepy and then possibly falling asleep, just after glugging a cuppa during the new security staff briefing. He is unable to keep a clear thought in his head. How long has he been out for, and why the hell is he feeling so cold? He blinks, and in that second realises he is fucking cold because he is starkers. Fuck and crumble! What has happened to his clothes? Is he still dreaming? Naked and covered in dog shit? What the … ?
‘Awww …’ he whimpers, and there is a low rumbling response from behind him.
He tries to turn around and chokes. He can’t move in that direction. He brings his hands up gingerly to his neck and finds that there is a thick leather collar around his throat, attached to a heavy chain that loops down his body, across the floor, fixed to a metal hoop. The metal hoop is on the floor of the … cage. No, wait … not a cage.
There is another low rumble as Andre yanks at the chain to try, without luck, to loosen it. No, not a cage but a … and now he is very scared. A kennel. Andre freezes. The rumbling behind him dies down. Slowly, slowly, inch by inch, the naked man with the collar around his neck twists around and sees that a few feet from him, also in a collar and chain, lies Hobgoblin, the Grassybanks attack dog, the one who nearly tore the throat out of that blind bitch’s dog.
‘Good boy,’ whispers Andre, trying not to let out the sob he feels pushing against his throat.
Hobgoblin opens one eye, growls again in bored warning, Shut the fuck up, closes the eye and pretends to sleep. Andre is going nowhere.
A Circus of Clowns
Robin feels he has done a really excellent job on the tour. He hasn’t lost his cool, his voice has been loud enough, and they have moved swiftly through the wards, only stopping briefly to look into the newly furbished Ward C, which still smells of wet paint and disinfectant. The photographers tried to stall a couple of times to get some ‘serious’ shots, and there had been an attempt at a question or two from the tall, brassy blonde reporter with the local news team, but Robin has been firm, moving them along and now back to the main reception. His heart is thumping loudly as, on this final leg, the gorgeous Stella Binding is walking right next to him. He can smell her perfume, a heady mix of vanilla and spice. As they turn the corner, she reaches out and grasps his forearm. Surprised, breathless, he turns to her, but she isn’t looking at him. She is staring past him through the open doors.
It is a shocking sight. In front of them, blocking Robin and the small crowd of excited VIPs, is a line of three empty wheelchairs. Standing behind the wheelchairs and grinning and waving are three clowns in nurses’ uniforms. Yes, clowns. Huge red mouths and red noses, white faces and curly yellow wigs. Robin is trying to remember where the clowns appeared in the programme of events Nurse Dyer had given him – but he is drawing a blank. He thought it was just speeches.
The clowns are gesturing theatrically to the chairs.
Behind Robin, John Thorpe-Sinclair, now without jacket and with sleeves rolled up (as directed by Deedee, his PR person – ‘It worked for Blair and Bush’) is smiling affably and sucking in his gut for the clicking cameras. His wide face is a shiny moon with a slight sheen of sweat. He blinks at the clowns and takes stock of the possible press comeback. There is, luckily, minimal press today: three photographers from various papers, and a local news team with the tall woman in those silly spectacles and her smelly roadie-like camera bloke. They, this local team, are apparently feeding footage back to their central website, Cambright Sun Online.
The whirr of cameras and the flashes and clicks make Thorpe- Sinclair feel a little high, almost randy.
‘What’s this, man?’ he asks brusquely of Robin, inclining his head towards the clowns and wheelchairs blocking their entrance to the reception.
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nbsp; ‘Errrmmm …’ Robin is entirely flummoxed. He stretches his neck looking for the manager, Mr Skinner, who doesn’t seem to be in reception at all.
‘I believe they want you to sit in them.’ The voice on Thorpe- Sinclair’s left comes from the tall blonde. The woman pushes her tinted glasses up on her nose and peers very hard at the clowns. The clowns silently applaud her. One pulls out a piece of A4 paper with ‘You are invited to sit!’ printed on it.
Still, Robin baulks. He just can’t imagine Nurse Dyer allowing clowns in reception. Deedee sidles to the front, holding out her PR person’s clipboard. ‘It is in our agenda, sir,’ she whispers, loud enough for Robin to overhear. ‘Tour of wards followed by opening ceremony performance. Then the speeches, and then the unveiling.’
Robin realises with relief what must be happening, and indeed he recognises the wheelchairs. They are some of the brand-new ones presented to Grassybanks by the Kitty Fox Foundation last week. Dyer must just have forgotten to hand him the agenda, silly cow. Well, all right then! ‘These are the best wheelchairs on the market,’ he says proudly to the tour group. ‘Worth a test drive.’ The clowns clap silently again and hold up the sign.
Thorpe-Sinclair smiles and smiles, but he isn’t happy. He turns and hisses over his shoulder to Deedee, ‘How will this look to the Equality and Diversity people? Is it going to cause a stink?’
Stella Binding winces. Wheelchairs and clowns? Could be a bad move. She looks over at Deedee, who shrugs. ‘If it’s in the pre-approved programme it must have been cleared,’ she mouths.
Stella relaxes. Yes, of course. And anyway Henri Rennes is already waving to the chattering crowd of press and leaping into the first wheelchair like a gymnast. He flicks his dark fringe back from his forehead, winks at Stella and can’t help patting his knee. She blushes very prettily.
Thorpe-Sinclair is not going to be outdone by a bloody Frenchman. He strides over to the second clown and plonks himself down heavily into the wheelchair, grasping the wheels to spin it in a circle. The brakes are on, so he can’t move it, and the chair nearly topples with his thwarted effort. The clown does an oversized double take and curtsies, and everyone bursts out laughing. ‘Very funny,’ smiles Thorpe-Sinclair, feeling the growl of hatred in his gut. No one laughs at John Thorpe-Sinclair and gets away with it.
Stella Binding is next, helped into the last wheelchair by her own gallant clown, who offers her a hand as she sits and then, pretending his heart explodes with love, collapses at her feet. The small crowd roar with laughter again and then quieten, remembering that it is probably inappropriate, given Stella’s recent near-tragedy. Stella smiles gamely, and the clowns push the chairs in a little circle and lead the procession of press and important people towards the stage and the large white screen.
‘But what the hell is going on now?’ asks one of the photographers as they all move to the centre of the spacious reception area, for it is not just clowns now. Lined up on either side of the screen are two dozen or so men and women. They are all wearing black clothes and standing or sitting; several are in wheelchairs or on crutches. Each sports the most disturbing full-head rubber mask.
‘They must be … les résidents, oui?’ Henri whispers to Stella. She nods, looking at the variously shaped bodies under the masks, the motorised chairs, the splints, the canes. The bodies may all be different, but the masks themselves are all the same, a young woman’s face, attractive and serene, long straight dark wig. Her oversized, calm, almost Madonna-like head on all the different bodies – some twisted, some missing limbs, some in wheelchairs – is rather unpleasant to Stella, although she is resigned to this kind of thing. Oh God, she is groaning inwardly, not another ghastly disabled dance project.
She recently opened a new residential home for orphaned teenagers with severe learning impairments and had to endure an hour and a half of what the producer assured her was a ‘vital and inspirational interpretation of Macbeth’. It was a pathetic performance. The ugliness, the clumsiness and the smells – one of the boys had actually pissed himself on stage – had repulsed her, but watching it, she had felt comforted by the thought that the home for teenagers was on her father’s list for CDD. If all went to plan there would not be another production to endure there.
Her PR people had promised they would check that, in future, any ‘entertainment’ was under half an hour. She turns her head to try to catch Deedee’s eye but can’t see the woman over the back of the chair and the damn clown. And there’s another thing: for some reason she can’t move very easily. Her back and bottom seem to be … well, stuck to the chair. She is thinking how odd it is when she notices Henri beside her beginning to jerk a little in his chair, as if he is stuck too. Stella, perturbed, tries to raise her arm, but her jacket sleeves are stuck to the armrests.
‘What the … ?’
‘Hey … ?’ she hears Thorpe-Sinclair say with equal confusion. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’
And then the music starts. Circus music, of course. Stella knows it as ‘Entrance of the Gladiators’ by the Czech composer Julian Fučít. ‘Fučít’, damned appropriate. Stella hates the circus, and was it a clown joke to have glue on the chairs? If they have ruined her Chanel shift she will fucking sue them. Da da dalalala da da dala …
This way, this way! More clowns appear from behind the lines of rubber-masked people, dancing and gesturing silently, squeaking their noses and flapping their outsize shoes. These clowns gather up and wave the bamboozled mayor and his entourage, guests and PR people towards the wide-open doors of the family room. The family room is slightly off to the left of the stage and screen, with large windows looking in on the reception like an aquarium, and as each person enters, a clown-nurse sweetly holds up a sign that requests they drop their phones and bleepers, pagers and cameras … cameras? Yes, cameras please! into a large plastic children’s storage box.
Don’t worry, don’t worry, you will have them all back soon, soothe the terrible clowns, signing with their gloved hands and smiling with their great red mouths and shaking their silly yellow wigs.
And into the family room are also ushered the press photographers. Just for a little while, sign the nurse-clowns and blink their eyes and wave their hands.
Da da dalala dada dala!
‘Oh look,’ says the mayor, frankly delighted by the clown show. ‘There is another screen in here, too.’ And there is. In the bright, colourful, cushioned family room there is another large monitor placed high up on the wall so that everyone can see it. On the monitor they can see themselves being ushered into the family room. The mayor, a jovial ex-academic, now alcoholic, waves to himself. His little TV self waves back.
‘Who is filming? Who has this live stream?’ hisses one of the photojournalists who had to give up his camera. He points up at the monitor. His colleague gestures through the family-room glass. There are only two other people from the tour (apart from Thorpe-Sinclair, Binding and Rennes) left outside. It is they who are, in fact, filming the action – the tall blonde with the specs and the smelly roadie from Cambright Sun Online.
There is a minor kerfuffle in the doorway. Deedee and the other PR people are unsure about leaving their charges in a separate area. ‘It’s just,’ they are saying to the clowns, ‘that we feel we should be on hand to advise them, especially if you are going to actually use them as part of a performance piece.’
‘I can’t actually believe this was ever sanctioned,’ says Deedee. She has a very bad feeling that she is going to get the sack for this screw-up. ‘I think we’ll just need to check with our security team.’
Only now, when Deedee turns to look for the H5 security backup, there are none to be found. How long have they all been without security?
Beginning to panic, Deedee reaches for her phone, and a clown plucks it from her fingers and drops it into the plastic box.
‘Hey!’ She tries to grab it back and the clown pushes her hard. She falls backwards into another clown who whirls her around in a frenetic waltz.
Too shocked and out of breath to say another word, Deedee and the other PR people find themselves danced backwards into the aquarium-like family room.
The clowns close the door, waving and smiling to the crowd now safely inside. Some of the crowd, pressed happily up against the glass to watch the show, wave back. A few others, Deedee included, are beginning to feel something is very wrong. They rush forward to open the door and the clowns mime shock and sadness. No no, they wag their fingers. The door is locked.
Luckily for the clowns, the family room is soundproofed.
The Box Speaks
Jenny is spooning organic strawberry yoghurt into Serena’s mouth. As Serena is yelling between gulps, a lot of the yoghurt is finding its way onto the floor where Chris is lying. He is being as helpful as possible, and – although as An Excellently Trained Guide Dog, the whole hoovering-up-under-dining-room-tables is frowned on – in this instance he feels surreptitiously licking it up will stop Mosh from slipping over in it later. He is only doing this as a favour, he explains to himself happily, as the strawberry smell makes his nostrils sing.
There is a lot of noise in the house. Downstairs, the television is on in the living room, and upstairs Mosh is drilling holes in the bathroom, attempting to put up a new shelf. Jenny is beginning to wonder if it is too early to have a glass of wine.
‘Mumma, nooooo!’ Serena’s beautiful face rumples and crumples as she screams. She is hungry for the yoghurt, demands immediate yoghurt, but when she gets it she hates the yoghurt, and it is torture. Baby brains are confusing, thinks Chris, licking another dollop from the leg of the high chair. He likes the baby very much, and she is still young enough to be mostly vibration and instinct, but he still can’t talk to her directly. He is aware she is teething right now, and he has tried to comfort her, but she is absolutely sure it is the fault of the yoghurt. Her screams in translation say I want it but it hurts my mouth.