The Dance of the Pheasodile

by Tim Roux

  “Has Keith been violent towards you at all, or cruel?”

  “No, not at all. He is no longer all there, but he is not turning into the sort of guy Harry sounds like he might have been from what you say, if that is what you mean.”

  “Yes, that is what I was referring to. So where is Harry, that is what I would like to know? I get the nasty feeling that some of him is still trapped inside here, egging me on to do things I would never do myself.”

  “Like what? What have you been doing?”

  “Nothing dramatic, but I have become far more foul-tempered and mean. That is why Fran kicked me out. I kept shouting at Tommy and physically threatening her.”

  “Have you hit her?” Chrissie exclaimed, shocked.

  “No, not yet, but I have been extremely tempted. She really bugs me. I don’t know why she bugs me that much, but she does. Perhaps it is because she bugs Harry. That is what I fear.”

  “And you haven’t slept with her?”

  “I don’t think Harry has slept with her for years, from the sound of things, not since they conceived Tommy. I think that Harry finds his pleasures elsewhere.”

  “And you?”

  “No, I have not been finding my pleasures elsewhere.”

  Chrissie touched me on the arm again, affectionately. “That’s a relief. Do you promise that you will not sleep with anybody except me? Keep yourself for me, Keith, whatever the temptations. I could not bear to hear that you had been intimate with other women. I don’t think that I could accept you back if you did, even when things sort themselves out again, as I am sure they will. That is the only thing I ask of you. I realise that, as Harry, you might be forced into doing all sorts of terrible things, but please don’t do that. Promise me?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “I promise you, Chrissie. I am absolutely yours, and I always will be.” At that moment I was grateful that Harry was such a fluent liar, although even then I realised that I was storing up problems for the future.

  * * *

  Chapter 13

  The setting where I most feared revealing my secrets was also the one where I had the greatest expectations of salvation – the office of Brenda Starbright, the hypnotherapist. On the one hand, she might return me to the land of Keith McGuire, Wokingham, his career and his familial bliss. On the other hand, the next time I visited her was on the day before we were due to kidnap the boy, whichever boy that might end up being. If I didn’t escape the appointment, I might blab. In theory, anything I said to her was privileged, and she was forbidden, on pain of being struck off, to divulge any aspect of our session to the police. However, if she were to learn that I was about to kidnap a child, she might decide that her moral duty was to prevent me from doing so at almost any risk to herself. Besides, once the police had caught us red-handed, how could I prove that she had told them anything, and who would doubt the appropriateness of her judgment?

  I could not refuse to attend the session as it was a condition of my remand order that I visit her every two weeks and, if nothing else, I didn’t want the police snuffling around trying to find out what I was up to or where I had got to. What I could do, I assumed, was to refuse to co-operate. I had never seen the remand order, but I doubted that it insisted that I should succumb to hypnotic suggestion during each and every visit, without fail, or else.

  I decided to hijack the agenda by firing loads of questions at Ms. Starbright about how I could possibly have switched bodies with Harry Walker last time around. Her immediate response was to attempt to bluster and bully her way through my thorny thicket of defences, asserting that it was her right to be in control of what took place in her office, and that she therefore insisted that we proceed with the session as she envisioned it. I countered this demand by arguing that she might have every right to impose her treatment on Harry Walker, who would be there by order of the court, but not on Keith McGuire, who had never appeared in a criminal court in his life.

  “But you are Harry Walker,” she protested.

  “I am Harry Walker on the outside, but can you prove that I am Harry Walker on the inside?”

  “Harry,” she smiled condescendingly, “I don’t need to.”

  “Brenda,” I replied in kind, “I know who I really am, and who I really am is Keith McGuire. Now I want to know why I am here, and you could help me discover the answer to that. Wouldn’t it be more fun to explore that as an issue? Why don’t you just go with the flow of my conceit, and see where it leads us?”

  It was immediately obvious that Brenda Starbright was not in search of fun, especially at the seasoned hands of a notoriously slippery con-artist.

  “Harry, I may simply have to inform the court that you are impossible to treat.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “It might mean that you will be sent to jail.”

  “For having a multiple personality disorder or a severely dysfunctional personality disorder? I don’t think so. They will merely send me to another therapist.”

  “They might just decide to commit you to Broadmoor, and to throw away the key.”

  She might have said that merely to bully me into compliance, but I decided to risk dragging the discussion out for the full hour, at which point she announced that she had another patient booked.

  I refused to leave, arguing at the top of my voice about my right to be given my due treatment as proposed by a court of justice, even if she didn’t believe that I was worth her valuable time and effort. This so incensed her that she screamed back at me a whole torrent of insults, and I managed to extend the whole shouting match for another half an hour. It served her right. I suspect that in the last few minutes she realised that she had fallen into my trap, which annoyed her all the more as I was now in the position, with a witness to prove it, to claim in front of the court that despite anything she might allege to the contrary, far from refusing treatment, I was actively being deprived of it.

  I left there a much relieved man, but I knew it was only a temporary reprieve. The next session was due in another two weeks, and who knew what she might discover poking around my brain if she managed to hypnotise me? Yes, I was desperate to return to being Keith McGuire, but on the balance of risks, remaining a hypno-resistant Harry Walker was definitely safer. Fortunately, when I turned up at her office for the next appointment, the week after we planted Jeremy Wilkinson on Planty, and a couple of days after I had returned from seeing Chrissie, my knock was not answered. Either she was ill, or she was cowering behind the door. Even better, she then went off on her holidays, which meant that I missed the subsequent sessions as well. I cannot believe that she was that afraid of me, but it was very convenient whatever lay at the bottom of it.

  * * *

  Actually, I would have liked to have consulted somebody immediately after I had seen Chrissie because the experience had been so disturbing. It was bad enough talking to her with this weird sub-text going on as we spoke, each knowing that I was partly Keith McGuire and partly not, and neither of us knowing how to handle the fact. We wanted to be as physically close to each other as we always were, but my appearance precluded that. Eventually, after an hour of deeply frustrating conversation in Ha!Has!s Victoria, we both agreed that I must be brought face-to-face with Keith as Chrissie knew him still, the pale shadow of his former self. It seemed the only logical conclusion.

  I doubt either of us had any idea of what would happen. We were only hoping that something would, and that it would be for the better. We caught the train out to Wokingham. I had to buy a ticket, which was weird, because I normally had a season ticket. It felt a waste of money somehow, which should have been a tiny matter, but it disconcerted me considerably, and threw me into a foul temper, the like of which Chrissie had never experienced, especially as the victim of it. By the time we had climbed into Chrissie’s Lexus RX, we were no longer talking to each other. I was in full sulk about the life that had been seized from me – Chrissie, the children, the house, the cars, the job, and even Agnes. I am sure that Chriss
ie understood my frustration, but it only served to trigger her own.

  “I am not sure that you are in a fit state to see Keith, and especially not the children,” she announced sharply as we pulled up outside the door of the house in Barkham Road. “I’m going to drop you back at the station.” She started to turn the car round.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Chrissie,” I exploded. “I am not exactly going to hurt the children, and Keith is me, remember. If I hurt him, I hurt myself, and I am not as daft as that.” The word ‘daft’ slipped out with the northern flat ‘a’.

  Chrissie stamped on the brake. “Okay, then. Let’s get it over with.”

  The first one I saw was Mark, running screaming round the house, chased by Luke, a friend from school. Then, there was Ella, emerging to greet her mum. “Oh,” she reacted when she saw me.

  Chrissie introduced us. “Ella, this is Mr. Walker.”

  Ella didn’t say anything, which was rather strange for her. She is usually exceptionally polite. I held my hand out. “Nice to meet you, Ella,” I said, desperate to touch her hand, but she declined to offer it. “Dad’s home,” she volunteered to Chrissie, escaping into the sitting room.

  As indeed he was. He emerged into the hallway, and I froze. Watching myself was very much more frightening than I had anticipated. I had expected it to be intriguing; instead, it was creepy. The other Keith clearly felt the same, without the benefit of knowing why, because he stepped back as if I had hit him. I could feel his shock, as perhaps he was experiencing mine. I nevertheless wanted to touch his hand, to see what would happen. It could have been that my exiled soul would leap across at the first opportunity to return home.

  Chrissie rushed forward towards him. “What’s wrong, Keith?”

  Keith collapsed to the ground. “I feel like I am having a heart attack.” The children who had sensed change, had rushed into the hallway to investigate the commotion. They stood there horrified as they watched Keith.

  “What is happening, Mum?” asked Ella, in her smallest of voices. Mark was transfixed, silent. Luke shuffled, realising that he should not have been witnessing this, but not sure as to how to absent himself politely.

  I felt like I was having a heart attack too. My heart was pounding, my chest was ripped through with shock and panic, my body was impossibly heavy. Keith and I were compounding each other’s reactions. I crawled over to Keith and touched his arm.

  There was a cataclysmic explosion. Ella jumped forward screaming “No! No! Get away from him! What have you done to him? Who are you?” hysterically.

  Mark looked at me with traumatised calm. “Who are you?”

  I was not sure that I wanted to answer that question or how to do so, or whether I could even physically respond at all. It was as if Keith and I were electro-magnets repelling each other, with all the intense power and vibration that electro-magnets emit.

  Keith stared at me with a wounded look on his face, and I would guess that my expression was much the same. Ella was hopping up and down screeching and caterwauling. Mark repeated “Who are you?”

  I held out my hand. “Come here, Mark,” I beckoned him fondly.

  Mark stepped back. “No way. You are bad. I am not going anywhere near you.”

  “Go away!” Ella screamed. “Get out of here! Get out of here! Leave us alone! You are evil. You are evil. You are evil.”

  “No, I’m not,” I protested. “I am not at all evil.”

  “Come on,” Chrissie encouraged me gently. “This is not working. Come outside for a minute, and we’ll discuss what to do.” She held out her hand and helped me rise to my feet, leading me out of the front door where I collapsed over the roof of the Lexus.

  “That was worse than I could ever have imagined,” I observed.

  “Yes,” Chrissie responded. “That was really bad. Poor Keith. Poor both Keiths.” She rubbed my back consolingly as Mark and Ella watched from the doorway.

  Ella marched up to Chrissie determinedly. “Is he your lover, Mum?” she demanded.

  Chrissie smiled wanly. “It is a lot more complicated than that,” she said.

  “So he is?”

  “Not in the sense that you mean, no.”

  “Who is he then?”

  “He is your father.”

  Shock slapped Ella across her face and then turned and swiped Mark too.

  “You mean that he is our real father? Him?” She was not relishing the discovery.

  “They are both your real father,” Chrissie explained enigmatically.

  “You made love to both of them? At the same time?” gasped Ella incredulously.

  Chrissie shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, darling. I am not a cat.”

  Ella started to cry. She stood there all alone, shaking, utterly abandoned by her comforting assumptions. She looked at the same time very small and very big, a child and an adult, a victim about to turn vengeful. “Explain yourself!” she shrieked. “Explain yourself!”

  Keith appeared behind her. He placed his arm around her chest. She stood stock still. “Mum believes that this man has a bit of me inside him,” he ventured.

  “A bit of you?”

  “She believes that my personality has split, and some of it has become lodged in this man.”

  Ella did not react. Mark squinted at Keith and said “Really, Dad? Is that true?”

  “Really,” Keith confirmed.

  Mark transferred his gaze to me. “Is that true?”

  “I think it may be,” I replied. “Something really strange and rather terrible has happened, but don’t worry, Mark, we will find a way of putting things back to normal.”

  “How?”

  “I really don’t know. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know how to get back, but I know, watching your Dad, that what I suspected is true. I am here, and I am there, and I don’t know how to get from here to there.”

  “How did you get there in the first place?” Ella asked.

  “I went to see a hypnotherapist, and when I woke up, I looked like this.”

  Ella laughed, not unkindly, but certainly sardonically. “Poor you.”

  “That is what I felt, Ella. Believe me.”

  “So why don’t you go back to the hypnotist?”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “Go. Go now.” She stepped up to me and pushed me away. “Don’t waste any more time. It is killing all of us. Look at Dad.”

  She was right. Keith was statue grey and folding slowly back to the floor. I could feel everything he was feeling although, for some reason, I was able to remain a lot stronger, both physically and mentally. I pushed myself off the Lexus and started to walk towards the road.

  “Wait,” said Chrissie. “I’ll take you to the station.”

  I climbed into the car. Chrissie got in beside me. She fired up the engine and slowly pulled out of the driveway. We stopped outside the front of Wokingham station. Chrissie took out her mobile phone. “I am phoning Sian,” she explained. “Sian, this is Chrissie McGuire. I need you to see a friend of mine desperately. It is really urgent. He is called Harry Walker, and he is on his way to see you now. Please see him. We are desperate.” She turned to me. “Answerphone.” She rummaged in her bag and took out her note pad. She copied Sian’s phone number onto the next page, ripped it out and handed it to me. “Sian’s number. Call her. Do you want her address?”

  “No, I can remember where she was.” I leant over to kiss her on the cheek. She let me. Indeed, she even kissed me back. “Good luck, Keith. We really need you. Do everything you can, won’t you.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we will pull through. We always do.”

  I got out of the car and entered the station. I didn’t see Chrissie drive off.

  * * *

  Chapter 14

  Needless to say, I couldn’t risk visiting any hynotherapist, not even Sian, so I overshot Sian in Egham and when I reached Waterloo I retrieved the van, paid the £50 parking fee, and headed out
to Slough, where I abandoned it in the first side street I could find that didn’t have parking metres. I quadruple-checked that I was not infringing any parking laws so as to ensure that the police did not come searching for me, wondering why a white van in such good condition had apparently been abandoned. I jettisoned the ladder on the top of the van en route because I didn’t want locals to notice that it had been stolen and that we hadn’t done anything about it.

  Satisfied that the status of the van would not be investigated at least for another few weeks (at which point we planned to sell it once there was no possibility of its being linked to the kidnapping), I took the train from Slough into Paddington, and booked a room in the Royal Lancaster Hotel in Bayswater. I spent the rest of the night on the town, reliving my love affair with London. Returning to the hotel across Hyde Park, I had to climb the railings on the northern side because the gates were locked. Fortunately, two park benches had been conveniently placed one on either side of the fence, so I managed to straddle the railings without getting caught up in the spikes.

  The next morning I crossed London in the rush hour (more nostalgia) to stand outside Longley, Bairns & Woodward, my employers. I saw several of my colleagues, including Adam, but failed to catch sight of Keith. Eventually, I went inside to Reception to ask if Keith was there. I explained that I didn’t want to see him, but I wanted to check that he still worked there.