The Dance of the Pheasodile

by Tim Roux

  “And the rest?”

  “The rest ended up in a very ugly and unpleasant body in Hull.”

  “Which bit was worse? The ugly and unpleasant body, or Hull?”

  “There were some lighter moments. This guy had a very nice, if very angry wife, and a lovely child called Tommy, but all-in-all it was pretty grim, as they would describe it up there – hard to find jobs, lots of gangs, hand-to-mouth existence, run-down areas. Hooligan gangs for the children. Criminal gangs for the men. Those are your best job prospects.”

  “Tell me all about it.”

  She doesn’t even confirm that our conversation is confidential, but I tell her all anyway – everything this time. It is strange how you can sometimes trust a stranger far more than someone you have known and loved for years. I suppose that the occupation of being a spouse is not classed as a caring profession, or even as a profession. Poison can leak anywhere. People like Sian are licensed and obliged to mop up that poison as you spill it out.

  Throughout my monologue, Sian nods and smiles and grimaces appropriately, encouraging me that I have a wholly empathetic audience and therefore to continue. When I have finished, back as myself, back in her room, she sits back in wonder and exclaims “That is quite an extraordinary story, Keith. You should write a book about it.”

  “Nobody would believe me.”

  “Some people would, then others would too. I have heard many much stranger stories than yours from clients, about being abducted by aliens, or about being Henry VIII in a previous life, and even I have been tempted to believe them because they have described the situation with such conviction. Your story is much more believable in the first place, and you are a credible story teller, even here.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “Every word.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “So how did it happen given that you said it had never happened before?”

  “It has happened to me once before, although I never admit it outright. It actually happened in reverse. A woman came to me claiming to have been completely taken over by someone, the Harry experience in your case, except that hers was not after any hypnotherapy. It just happened while she was shopping. Suddenly she was smothered by this other soul.”

  “What happened? What was it like?”

  “She said it was like being crowded out into a tiny corner of herself where she could barely breathe. This other person simply took all the decisions for her. It was like the army had taken over, she said. And this other person was not at all like you. She was extremely aggressive, sometimes violent, abusive, foul-mouthed, systematically horrible to the children.

  Of course, everyone believed that she had gone mad, become psychotic. So they put her on various powerful drugs to control her behaviour, which only served to rile this visiting soul even more. She became extremely violent, putting the children’s and the husband’s lives at considerable risk. The husband walked out, then the authorities stepped in and took the children into care. She was at her wits’ end and then, for some reason, picked my name off the Internet because I mentioned that I did exorcisms.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, I have done quite a few of them.”

  “Successfully?”

  “It is mostly somewhat hard to tell, but in this case it certainly seemed to work. I hypnotised her, and it really did feel like I was hypnotising two different people. I started getting responses back in two different voices, the one scared, the other extremely sarcastic. I eventually suggested to the sarcastic one that it imagine living a different way of life, as somebody else, which it seemed more than happy to do, then, when it was fully settled, I slammed the door on it and wouldn’t let it back in. It was furious, but there was nothing it could do. I had locked the door and written on it in gold, so there was no possibility of it getting through, then I recalled my patient from her trance and everything was fine. She was cautious at first, but became increasingly ecstatic as we talked afterwards. The other creature, as she called it, had gone away, she fervently hoped forever, and as far as I know it did. She never came back, anyway.”

  “Did she ever find out who it was?”

  “I didn’t see her again after the session, so she never told me if she did.”

  “That really is extraordinary.”

  “It is exactly as extraordinary as your story, Keith. In fact, it is an identical one. And you believe it.”

  “I lived it.”

  “Exactly. But people have many much stranger experiences than they ever admit. There are many things that happen on this earth that we do not fully understand, or understand at all. There are some obvious ones, like madness for instance. We claim to understand it, we dissect it, we categorise it, we give people drugs for it, but it is quite possible that there are forces at work there that we do not recognise at all, that we have no means of measuring and, as we cannot measure them, they don’t exist as far as we are concerned.”

  “What frightened me was how I did things I would never normally dream of doing. I couldn’t think of kidnapping a child as me, sitting here, and I am certainly beginning to understand the full implications of what I did. Trevor Plant is making sure of that. Do you think he is some kind of avenging angel?”

  “Some people might believe that, but I very much doubt it personally. I suppose two things could have happened with you. Firstly, Harry’s soul may have been cooped up in the corner with you and, in his case, he may have been capable of surreptitiously steering you towards his own ends. The other, if you will forgive me for suggesting it, is that you found yourself liberated to do anything you wanted, devoid of all social and moral restraints. If you fancied a woman, you fucked her, if you will pardon the expression, but I think it is justified in this case. It didn’t matter to you whether it was somebody else’s wife, if you were cheating on your own wife, or even if it was your sister. She was available, she was willing and you did it. That, of course, is straightforward, unconstrained social behaviour. I am sure that many of us would do the same if there were no possible paybacks to our activities. Why wouldn’t we? We are animals after all. We find somebody attractive, we get an urge, we satisfy that urge as often as it arises. Then, with the kidnapping, that was another kind of moral holiday. You have never been obliged to earn your living by criminal means, but you have never had the opportunity either, and maybe you found it fun, a game, a trial of your wits. Maybe you even enjoyed manipulating people. You came up with a clever scam, and you had the satisfaction of experiencing it playing out exactly as you intended, at least initially. And, in the end, you escaped scot-free, and Harry is dumped into the Thames.”

  “Not exactly scot-free,” I counter. “I am getting nightmares which I am sure are memories of the time I was tortured by Plant and his gang.”

  “Perhaps we should deal with those, Keith, as quickly as we can. I can surface them for you, and condition your mind to at least contain them. I am busy most of this afternoon, but if you would be willing to come back at seven, I would be more than happy to spend an hour or two exorcising your nightmare, in effect.”

  I hesitate for a second. That will mean leaving Chrissie and the children alone at night. “I had better phone Chrissie first.”

  “No problem. If you are here at seven, I will see you. If not, I fully understand.”

  * * *

  I am back at seven, but with many qualms, firstly for Chrissie’s and the children’s safety, secondly for the ordeal I will go through, but I need to rid myself of my ghosts in order to move on. I need an exorcism which, I suppose, is why we came to Sian in the first place.

  “I am glad that you have come back,” Sian greets me. “Are Chrissie and the children all right?”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  “If you lie down on the couch and make yourself comfortable.”

  It is the same routine as before, with Sian counting back from thirty and telling me that I am going deeper and deeper and becoming drowsi
er and drowsier. I take a little longer to disappear this time because there is a lingering fear that I will be off on my travels again, but I am not. I can understand what is happening to me throughout. Sian rapidly moves me back to the scene of my and Harry’s torture by Trevor Plant. It is gruesome, absolutely gruesome, but I am watching it through safety glass. It is not as it was in my nightmare. I am not completely revisiting it. I am erasing it, but I am also stealing myself to deal with Plant once and for all in the future. I am no longer afraid of him; I am murderous towards him. I want to rip his throat out, stamp on his head until his blood and his brains spill all over the floor. I want to rip at his testicles with rusty pliers and smash his body with a crowbar. I want revenge. Sian even takes me to the point where I am falling into the Thames and gives me the experience of drowning. After the initial thrashing panic, it is actually as peaceful as everyone describes it. The waters warm up and become serene. I swim around my body like a mermaid. The world is silent. A light comes to greet me and I am transported away from my earthly existence with delight. It is literally heavenly.

  Then Sian takes me further, back to the residential care home, back to the first moment I fell in love with Chrissie, the first time I became physically excited to be with her and wanted to touch her surreptitiously so that only I would know, our first mutual smiles, our first kiss. I can understand now why they used to describe an orgasm as a death in miniature. They really do have much in common in the realm of the sensations. Then, Sian leads me through the more traumatic moments, the pressure-cooker aspects of my time there – the jealousies, the rivalries, the cruelties, the minor physical tortures and the light, and even slightly pleasurable, sexual abuse, the moods of the staff, the constant corrosion of powerlessness and lack of autonomy, of suffocation. Asphyxiation of the mind, unlike drowning, is a brutalising, rotting experience, and what I need to exorcise its lingering creepers is absolute power, at least that is how it feels, although I recognise intellectually that absolute power is an equal and opposite assault on the soul. However, I crave a few moments of being God, of having everything at my feet, of watching everything happening as I wish it to happen in its every detail and, as an architect, I have an exquisite mind for detail. Perhaps that is it. Perhaps I have to design and supervise the building of my masterwork, a building that to me is perfection, in its execution as in its conception. My experience of construction projects tells me that merely getting the thing to stand is hard enough, and that perfection is quite beyond achievement, but that is what I will aspire to. I will rid our lives of Plant, and then I will devote my life to my family at home, and to my epiphany of a tower. It has to be a tower of sorts, a bricks and mortar penis, I suppose. Maybe it could be a house built as a tower, our own house, where I really could demand that every detail be perfect, but that would be much smaller than I am envisaging here. I want something gigantic, towering over London, a monumental shrine to my virility. I want the full Richard Rogers. Now I know what inspires him, perhaps what inspires us all.

  In short, by the time Sian recalls me from my journey, I am a raving lunatic powered by force-ten megalomania. I think to myself that I must be looking scary but, if I am, Sian is not responding. She smiles. “How do you feel, Keith?”

  “Ready to shake trees.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Not if you are in the tree.” It is a pathetic macho comment which she ignores without, I am sure, overlooking the impulse behind it.

  “Do you feel exorcised?”

  “I cannot really say until I have been to sleep, but I certainly feel like I am ready to float on air.”

  “Are you feeling happy, then?”

  “In a way, although more exultant, determined, ruthless. I am going to pick up my nightmares and turn them into Planty’s nightmares. He is going to wish that he had never heard of me, that he had never believed that Harry Walker was linked to Keith McGuire, that he had never turned up on our doorstep. It’s the only answer, isn’t it? With people like him, might is right.”

  Sian laughed. “You certainly have changed, Keith.”

  “But not for the better?”

  “I am not here to judge, only to observe. You came in here a victim now, forty minutes later, you are a victor, your head is crowned with laurel leaves, and you are ready to put the quarrelsome barbarians to the sword. You are certainly in a more positive state of mind, positively violent that is. It is for you to decide whether that is the place where you should be at this moment. I am not your conscience.”

  It must be a difficult position to be in nonetheless. Here is a guy who walked in quaking with fears and anxieties, only wanting to run away from them, and she has turned him round into an avenger and a tormentor. How do you square that with your conscience as a healer? How do I square it with my conscience? Well, let’s face it, I have done it before.

  * * *

  Nadya has taken some background shots of the area immediately around the children’s school. Now she needs photos of Planty and members of his gang.

  I phone Mike up to see if he can arrange it. “Yeah, no problem,” he says. “Fingers’ll have some. ‘e’s always taking snaps of ‘em for their photo albums. Well, they used to be photo albums. They probably keep ‘em all on computer disks nowadays.”

  “How will you get Fingers to give them to you? What will you tell him?”

  “I’ll tell ‘im the truth,” Mike replies, “that we need as many recent photos of the boys as ‘e can find so that we can stitch Planty up all over again.”

  “Why on earth would you tell him that?”

  “Because it’s the truth, and nothing is simpler than the truth.”

  “But he’ll go off and tell Planty ten seconds later, and he’ll be around looking for all of us.”

  “No, ‘e won’t. Fingers knows ‘ow to keep a secret.”

  “I thought he told Planty everything.”

  “Only when we want ‘im to. ‘e’s our man on the inside. You certainly can’t knock Fingers for pluck. ‘e ‘as it in ‘andfuls. You wouldn’t catch me spying on that lot for five minutes, never mind ten years. Not that I would ever ‘ave told ‘arry that. You couldn’t trust ‘arry as far as you could throw ‘im. ‘e’d ‘ave ratted on Fingers the minute things got ‘ot.”

  “I hope you are right.”

  “I’m right. You’ll have your photos in no time.”

  As indeed I do. Two days later, there they all are in a dropbox for me to collect. I transfer them to a stick and hand them over to Nadya. She scans them through on her PDA, quizzing me as to who each person is and taking notes. “We may need more,” she comments. “I will let you know. I will see what Karl thinks. There must no lines. I think it will be okay. Karl is the best - that is why he charges so much.”

  “How much?” I ask, expecting her to quote £2,000 at the most.

  “£5,000.”

  “£5,000? Isn’t there anybody almost as good and cheaper?”

  Nadya shrugs, which is not a gesture of resignation, more one of fending off my objection.

  “For this kind of work you need the best. They have to stand up to many forensic experts examining them with all the modern techniques available to them. They must be perfect. If they are anything less, they will be recognised as fakes immediately. If they cannot detect anything wrong after they have put them through many, many tests, then they will be convinced and therefore convincing. That is what we want, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I had to concede.

  “So, it will be at least £5,000, and maybe as much as £10,000.”

  She undoubtedly knows how to shoot us through the wallet. If Planty’s boys ever venture anywhere near the school, they are in mortal danger. That is what we are paying for, after all, but how long can we afford it?

  * * *

  Jerry phones Chrissie to say that the Chief Constable of the Humberside Police will see us next Tuesday.

  We have a discussion as to who should go to the meeting. Chrissie is definite t
hat she is not leaving the children down here, however rock solid Nadya appears to be.

  “Let’s take them with us,” I suggest.

  “But that will put them in even more danger. They will be on the man’s doorstep.”

  “Let’s take Nadya too.”

  “Where do we stay?”

  “Outside the jurisdiction - well outside it. It can’t be too close to Hull, and it can’t be too close to Manchester, otherwise Kenny Bender might pitch in. How about Derby? That must be about an hour and a half away, maybe two hours. I am not too sure of my geography up there, but Via Michelin will no doubt tell us.”

  We look it up – one hour, thirty six minutes. That seems about right. Nadya and Agnes will take care of the children. We will dash over to Hull. The meeting won’t last more than an hour. We will then come back down to Wokingham in the afternoon. We should be back for five.

  “What do we tell the school?”

  “This is a time when I wish we had family,” I joke ruefully. “Something medical? A competition win? How about if we say that we think we may have tracked down somebody in my family, and we are going to investigate en famille? They must realise how important it would be to us to discover possible family. We had better say that they are in Bristol, though. It is better to take no chances.”

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  The problem is Agnes. How did we manage to find a Scotswoman who will get on a plane and fly anywhere south with us, but who refuses to travel north? She is absolutely adamant about it. She will not take one step towards Scotland, so she will not be going to Derby either. She has her cosy flat in Finchampstead, her cat, her routine, and she is not about to enter the barbarian wastes. I have never known ‘barbarian’ be pronounced with so many ‘r’s in it, or with such contempt. Agnes despises and detests the north.

  “Look what it did to you, Mr. McGuire. It nearly ruined your life. The north is like that, a barren, desolate place, full of scrunched up faces and blunt remarks. I was brought up there. I know exactly what it is like, and I’ll not be going back, not even for an afternoon.”