Twelve Mad Men

by Ryan Bracha et al.

  "Ten minutes and that's it."

  He pulls the door closed and locks it. Through the glass he smiles smugly at me and pockets the notes that this obese troll has paid him to allow him to have a small amount of time in my cell. I sit up and turn to receive my visitor. What a revolting specimen. Crew cut, beer gut, tattoos on his hands. The Northern Alpha Male. This man should have worn his finest suit to be in my presence. Still, one must be congenial.

  "Good evening. My name is Vincent Melluish."

  His teeth are already grinding, his eyes somewhere between tears and flames.

  "Are you the one who killed my sister?"

  "Erm, it's entirely possible. What was her name?"

  "Sandra Fletcher."

  "Fletcher.... Fletcher.... Ah, yes, the corpulent girl with the odour. Yes, I did kill her, very much so. But I assure you sir, I was entirely justified in taking her life, and she in no way suffered. She would have felt no more pain than a cow getting a nail shot into its head. Which is a remarkably apt metaphor, I'm sure you'll agree."

  I don't think he quite understands what I said, but he heard confirmation that I terminated his sibling, which indeed I did. He comes flying at me with inked fists and steel toe-capped boots and within seconds he's broken my ribs, well, re-broken my ribs, knocked one of my teeth out and rived a fistful of hair from my scalp. I manage to block out the pain by revelling in the good work that I have done here, and I don't make a sound. Just as I begin to lose consciousness, as blows rain onto my head and gut, I force a peaceful, blissed-out expression onto my face. I am a perfectly serene little Zen garden in the bowels of this terrible place where they send murderers, rapists and psychopaths. I blackout as his sloping ape-like forehead connects powerfully with my cheekbone.

  I'm not sure how much time I've lost. There are no days and nights here. There is no daylight or moonlight. I wake up in what they apparently call the medical bay. My ribs are taped and there are stitches above and below my right eye. My right hand is cuffed to the guard rail of the bed and my ankles are manacled together. How awfully undignified. A young man of south-east Asian origin approaches and politely asks me if I want something to eat. I decline with equal courtesy and ask his name, I've seen him on the ward before. They never tell the ancillary staff what our crimes are.

  "My name is Rolando, Mr Melluish."

  "Nice to meet you Rolando, you may call me Vincent."

  "Thank you sir. I've been asked to tell you that you have an appointment with the psychiatrist in one hour. You'll be moved back to your... room."

  "Thank you, Rolando."

  He nods and walks away. He didn't want to say "cell", though he should have done. I dislike softening of the language intensely. He spoke to me with impeccable manners though, and will be spared when I get out of here. Two of the larger, security guard-type orderlies walk up to my bed and start barking instructions, military-style. I allow myself to be shoved about by these two apes, comfortable in the knowledge that they'll be dead once I escape. As they start unfastening my shackles when I'm back in my cell I look deeply into their eyes as I ask how their wives and/or children are. It has the intended effect and I can see that it puts the fear of God into them as they genuinely believe all the propaganda that they've been fed about me. They honestly think I'm a psychopath, the same as the rest of the social inadequates that they deal with in here. They leave me laid on my cot, my right wrist chained to a heavy steel ring attached to the wall, as it has been since I arrived here.

  After twenty minutes or so, I hear high heels clip-clop their way down the corridor, and a tall, slender and bespectacled woman in a mid-priced suit carrying a briefcase is ushered into my cell. She sits down behind the high school desk that serves as my dining table and arranges papers on the scratched wooden surface. I haven't acknowledged her presence and I remain horizontal on my bunk.

  "Good afternoon Vincent, I'm Dr Emily Lewis, your new psychiatric consultant. How are you today?"

  For crying out loud...

  "Dr Lewis, I neither gave you permission to sit nor address me by my first name. Kindly show some decorum in the future. Now, I was under the impression I was to be under the analysis of Dr Campling."

  She looks completely affronted, which is exactly what I hoped for. She can pay me some respect from now on. She looks at me over the top of her spiky-framed glasses.

  "Dr Campling decided she didn't want to continue with your case."

  "Yes, I expected that would happen; she was a hopeless amateur, broke down and started weeping halfway through our last meeting. I'm amazed that these people who are so clearly out of their depth attain such positions."

  "Well, I've taken over your case now. I hope we can work together. Now, I'd like to ask you a few questions if I may."

  I fancy a fag. I know she's got some, I can smell it on her.

  "Before we go any further, Dr Lewis, I'd like a cigarette."

  "You're not allowed to smoke in here, Mr Melluish."

  She gets a point for addressing me correctly, but I want a fag. With a jab of pain in my ribs, I swing myself into a sitting position and look at her. Her facial expression is one that is controlling her fear, but not concealing it. I smile and drop my gaze to the floor.

  "If I don't get a cigarette, Dr Lewis, then I don't speak a single word to you."

  She takes a packet of Lamberts from the inside pocket of her jacket and throws one into my lap. I put it to my lips and stare at her. A cheap plastic lighter lands on my bunk and I set fire to the carcinogens without ever taking my eyes away from hers. I hold the fag in my left hand because the chain on my right wrist doesn't reach my mouth.

  She scrutinizes my face, obviously regarding the embroidery around my eye.

  "What happened to...?"

  "My face? The man who let you in here; his name is Gary. You should ask him. He'll tell you I fell down some stairs."

  "Is that what happened?"

  "Of course, Dr Lewis."

  She neither believes me or cares what really happened and dismisses this section of our discourse with a petulant raise of the eyebrows. This woman has a clear agenda here.

  "Can we talk about Miss Fletcher?"

  I blow out a huge, luxurious cloud of midnight blue smoke and lay back down on my two inch mattress. I feel serene, and I'm willing to converse with this woman.

  "Yes, by all means."

  "You've admitted that you killed her?"

  "Yes, of course. In a very profound sense."

  I don't turn my head to look at her but I can sense that she's appalled.

  "Why did think you had the right to kill this woman? How, as a human being, can you justify what you did?"

  She's trying to remain professional here, but her own feelings are coming to the fore.

  "Had you ever seen this woman, Dr Lewis?"

  "Well, no. Of course not. Why would I have done?"

  "If you had have done, you'd at least have some inkling of why I terminated her. She was a horrific example of this country's decline. A revolting, obese portrait of ignorance and sloth. She contributed nothing but offense to my senses, and when I first saw her it was all I could do to stop myself from vomiting. Good heavens, it took some effort. I assure you, Dr Lewis, it is better all round that I removed her from this life."

  As she chews on the end of her biro, her face tenses, as if she is struggling to maintain her clinical demeanour. Outrage, whether forced or not, is not far below the surface here. She measures the tone of her voice in her head and replies.

  "Mr Melluish, do you think it's okay to murder people because you object to their appearance?"

  "Oh come now, Dr Lewis, the word "murder" is dreadfully coarse, and her appearance was only a fraction of the reason she had to be taken out."

  "But you did murder her. And since you mentioned it, what was the rest of your motive?"

  "You're trying to make me sound like a common criminal here, Dr Lewis. Kindly stop that."

  "Why did you kill her, M
r Melluish?"

  "I had stopped in the supermarket on my way to work. I was running late due to an imbecile having double-parked on the duel-carriageway and causing a huge traffic jam. I selected a sandwich and a bottle of fruit juice for my lunch and made my way to the self-serve check-out. As I approached it our friend Sandra waddled in front of me and proceeded to put an entire trolley-full of groceries through the self-serve facility! I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There were signs that clearly stated it was for hand-baskets only. Such ignorance, Dr Lewis! Such selfishness! How, and indeed why, Dr Lewis, are people like that allowed to be part of our society? I returned my goods to the shelf and followed her to her car. As she was loading her boot with her junk food I shot her in the back of the head. My gun was silenced and I made sure no children could have seen. She didn't feel a thing. I must stress doctor, that my motive wasn't borne of evil or hatred, I just decided that it would be better all-round if she didn't exist. It was a functional and clinical termination."

  Her lips remain taut and silent, and her eyes take on the look of a child that is watching a cheetah kill a baby gazelle on a wildlife documentary as her parents explain that it's awful to watch, but simply the way of nature. She haphazardly thrusts her hand into her suit for a cigarette of her own, and as she irritably wrestles the pack from her pocket, a slip of paper flies out with it. In her haste she doesn't notice it fall to the floor. She lights her cigarette with a shaking hand and after the initial drag she seems to relax ever-so-slightly. She takes a deep second suck and blows it out through her nostrils. She looks at me and it almost seems like she grits her teeth before she speaks.

  "What about the bin man? Why did you kill him?"

  She's really cheapening my project here with her vulgar choice of words. She's also letting her profession down terribly. I doubt whether she is a psychiatrist at all.

  "Dr Lewis, would you please stop using words like 'kill' and 'murder'? Such derogatory terms are not befitting of my work."

  "You see taking people's lives as your work?"

  "Absolutely. Now, let me tell you about the bin man, as you called him."

  "Please do."

  "Yes, well, as we are encouraged to do these days, I diligently recycle, or at least I did before my incarceration. I try to do my bit for the environment, as we all should. And one morning I was leaving for work, having put my blue bin outside, only to find that the luminously-clad primate who was supposed to empty my bin was refusing to do so. I politely queried his decision, and he said, and I quote 'Can't take polystyrene.' Now, I wasn't aware of this and I offered to remove the offending packaging from the bin but he said, and again I quote 'Too late, I've seen it now.' This brazenly deliberate attempt to be uncooperative astounded me, Dr Lewis, and although I engaged this Neanderthal in an utterly banal discourse for some time he still pointedly spurned my requests, and eventually, my demands to take my recyclable waste. This personage had the most miniscule amount of power, the slightest authority, and he was going to use it. What a dreadful situation. I had spent my own time dividing my refuse for the good of mankind, and this silly little man felt the need to make himself feel bigger by refusing to do his job on the basis of a tiny triviality. What a waste of a human body."

  She hasn't noticed the slip that fell out of her pocket. I discreetly glance at it where it has landed under her chair as she looks for somewhere to dot her fag and eventually just rests it on the edge of the desk.

  "So you murdered him because he wouldn't take your blue bin?"

  "Once again you have made my work seem frivolous Dr Lewis. But yes, I called in absent and spent the day tracing his wagon to the depot he worked at. Once again I shot him in his car with a silencer. Clean, quick, painless. I simply removed someone who was too unpleasant to live."

  "He had children, Mr Melluish, and a wife. Do you think it's okay to rob a family of its father?"

  I take a second to articulate my response, whilst my analyst struggles with the realisation that she is woefully out of her depth here.

  "I have two answers for you Dr Lewis. Either he and his wife were of similar personality, and had already foisted their horrific world views on their children, in which case they are beyond redemption; or the rest of his family hated him and will be better off without him. Either way, the termination will not affect the family."

  I look around at my cell. The walls are slathered in thick, cheap, sickly grey emulsion and the floor is bare concrete. There is a wired glass window in the heavy steel door through which can be seen the main security point for this section of the asylum. I'm pretty certain I'm below ground level. I haven't breathed fresh air since the day I was incarcerated. It's always one of the same two men on that desk. They swap shifts at eight in the evening. I've been studying their routines and movements obsessively. Not only theirs, but those of the catering staff, the medical staff and the clinical professionals, such as our Dr Lewis here, all cross-referenced with my own exercise time and visits to the showers and such.

  Dr Lewis is chewing at her lips. I suspect when she leaves me today she will ask to be taken off my case. A request that I would personally support, given the opportunity. She has been disrespectful and is clearly not up to interviewing me. She is scribbling in a note pad which I actually quite admire; the previous two had brought laptops in here with them.

  She addresses me without looking up from her notes.

  "Tell me about your neighbour."

  I raise my eyebrows and look at her patronisingly whilst making a gesture with my unchained hand which signifies that there is a word missing from her sentence. She takes a controlled and measured breath, takes her glasses off and rubs her eyes.

  "Tell me about your neighbour, please."

  Comfortable in the knowledge that I have broken this woman, I proceed to tell her about the termination of Shelton Hatfield, 27, unemployed.

  "Ah yes, a moron of the highest order. A drain on the state. All he ever seemed to do was lay on his couch and smoke cannabis."

  "You're anti-drugs, Mr Melluish?"

  "No not at all, I don't object to people taking drugs in any way. What I do object to is people talking to me when they're on drugs, particularly cannabis. For example this chap, Mr Hatfield, enjoyed a most charmed upbringing, by all accounts. He grew up in Harrogate, and his father, a consultant gynaecologist, paid his way through university, where he laboured to a second class degree in something completely worthless like Latin or fine art. Yet for as long as I've known him he would wander out into his front yard whenever he saw me having a cigarette and start extolling the virtues of Jamaican reggae music. He used to tell me how he identified with it. In his words it "spoke to him". Isn't that amazing? This man, who had never known hardship in his whole life, who had been raised in relative luxury and never sought out employment because he had never needed to, found a spiritual connection with a music borne from abject poverty, gang warfare, gun crime and political oppression. What a deluded fool, Dr Lewis. What a disingenuous parasite of a man."

  My analyst says nothing. She just looks at me with what I assume she thinks is a cold stare. I continue.

  "He always used to play his music at the most obscene volume, and at the most anti-social of hours. He had a constant flow of similarly idiotic visitors coming and going at all hours of the night, clattering and banging about, utterly oblivious to the fact that they were causing an ungodly cacophony and stopping me from sleeping."

  I notice the tiniest pinprick of empathy in Dr Lewis's facial expression. The mauve circles under her eyes that she's attempted to cover with her make-up suggest that she too suffers from lack of sleep.

  "He had a positively ghastly taste in music, too. As well as the reggae he frequently blasted through my wall there was also stuff like The Grateful Dead and The Eagles and also a lot of what I believe was termed stoner-rock, atrocious music that shouldn't be permitted. I used to be able to tolerate it though, Dr Lewis, because if I banged on the wall he generally turned it off. On th
e night I terminated him, though, he piqued my ire in the most reprehensible manner possible."

  Dr Lewis forces an indifferent pout to her lips, unsuccessfully trying to mask the apprehension she's feeling.

  "And how did he do that, Mr Melluish?"

  "It was about midnight and I'd got in from my shift about an hour previously, I had my evening meal and sat down to read for a little while before retiring for the night. As ever, the music was coming through the wall but I didn't mind so much as I had donned my earplugs as I always do when I read. When it got to about quarter past, I noticed the volume of the music increased, and our man Shelton, without the slightest consideration for the good of civilisation, had decided to listen to the band "Queen".

  Dr Lewis's brow furrows so intensely that it looks like you could fall into the grooves on her forehead and her mouth has dropped open long before she starts talking. I stick my tongue through the gap where my left incisor used to be.

  "Are you seriously about to tell me you murdered this man because he liked listening to Queen?"

  "Yes, absolutely. Well, not only that severe aberration in taste, but the fact he felt the need to foist it on his neighbours. I tried banging on the wall several times to no avail, so after I got to the point where I simply could not abide that ludicrous row anymore I went and knocked on his front door. There was no reply and the music continued. After a few more minutes of knocking I tried the door and entered his house. He was there on his couch, a take away spilled all over himself, empty beer bottles and over-flowing ash-trays everywhere, so narcotized he could barely move. It was a scene of the most wanton self-indulgence, an outrageous way to live, especially at the expense of the tax-payer. He noticed me even though he could barely open his eyes, and a pathetic, helpless smile formed across his lips. He raised his hand a few inches and tried to wave but it seemed to exhaust him. If I'm honest, Dr Lewis, I started to feel a bit sorry for him and I was about to call an ambulance, but then..."

  I sigh and roll my eyes for dramatic effect. Dr Lewis sits forward in her chair and actually seems caught up in the story rather than trying to evaluate me.