“Interpreter?”
“Please, Mister Deniz just ... sit down. Let me try to explain how we’d like to approach this.”
Who was this WE she just referred to?
“Please.” her knotted-fingered shiny hands waved me back down into the chair, “Hear me out at least.” she showed me her wristwatch, “Just for the last ten minutes of our session today. Ten minutes. That's not too long a time for anyone, is it? A mere ten minutes.”
Again she scanned the face of her wristwatch, “Nine minutes if you want to be pedantic about it.” She smiled. I wished she wouldn’t do that.
Reluctantly, I sat.
“What I think is happening here is some sort of code. Break the code and we've solved the puzzle.”
“But I don't have a problem, What puzzle?”
“Why are you here?” she relaxed into her chair with the self satisfaction of a competent professional who has just got one over on an obvious amateur.
“Okay.” I co-operated, “Cut to the chase”
“Fanny.” I thought she cursed or something. “You may call me by my Christian name if you'd feel more at ease.” she justified her use of such foul language.
Call her Fanny? Call my personal psychologist Fanny? What would Freud have said about the patient/doctor relationship in this situation, I wonder? I think he'd have trouble keeping his face straight.
“Okay, Fanny…” (anything for a laugh) “…Let's hear it.”
“This Mr Whysilage.” she began. “A father figure?” she suggested.
Pitiful.
“That it?” I huffed.
“I have it in my notes here...” she flipped back a few dozen pages, “...has little contact with the father.”
When did I say that?
I struggled out of my chair and tried to leave the consulting room.
FOUR
Carroll Maryland coughed up a large glob of congealed blood. It had been blocking the back of her throat all through her struggle to regain her senses; find her bearings. There was a terrible numbness to her face, as if someone had neatly snicked all the nerves controlling the facial muscles so that the skin now sat on the skull like a pound and a half of cold lard.
She tried to open her eyes… realised they were already open and squinted into the turbulent darkness, inhaling the stench of rot and defecation. Heard the whispered jabberings of those creatures of the void, their warm proximity a fearsome realization. She tried not to move, tried not to flinch at the pain that pummels her face over and over and over again.
“Mummy.” she thought she heard a child speak. She listened wore intently than ever before in her life to once again savour that nugget of human existence, make sure it wasn't the rumbling of the railroad above or the rustling of paper or the hungry scuttling of scavenging rats transformed by her neurosis and pain into a cogent word of love and comfort.
A darkness alive with rat-speak; those hot, black, hairy scampering and squeaking rodent bodies a binary vocabulary spouted childhood memories as a form of surrealistic levity to ease the boredom of night.
She touched her face. Felt eyebrows then eyes tender to anything other than extremely delicate examination and the nose swollen and grotesque-feeling as if someone had thrust a baking potato up the nasal cavity. The line of crustiness from her nostrils. The mouth parched and split-lipped. The chin. All intact if not in the best of shape.
“Mummy, she's alive.” the shadows hissed again. A tiny, soft hand was laid upon hers.
Carroll Maryland cried out startled; her lips tore like crepe paper. She sucked in whimpers; fingers holding the seeping labia together. Another hand was laid upon hers.
Sentences like, “Can you hear us? Don't cry. Don’t cry.” were whispered in her direction. More hands found her and added their warm caresses to the balm of salvation; a sistership of circumstance.
“Where are we?” croaked Carroll Maryland to her innumerable cell-mates.
“Don't know.” a different, more mature, voice sighed wearily.
“How long…?”
“Days.” a third, girl’s, voice anticipated the wrong question.
“I’ve been here Days?” Carroll Maryland quizzed.
“No.” another hand strokes her hair, “My daughter means we've been here..”
“Daughter?”
“Daughters.” the soft voices sang.
“I am Kerry.” one girl squawked.
“Joelle.” the other girl chirped.
“And my name is Vanessa.” their mother sighed, wrapping her arms round Carroll Maryland and the girls between. “We’ve found it helps to snuggle together for warmth. There's no saying how long we'll have to stay in this hovel.”
Feeling decidedly uncomfortable cuddling strangers but agreeing with the logic of the theory, Carroll Maryland turned onto her side and curled her arms round the daughters' hot bodies. Inhaled their putrid exhalations gladly rather than freeze to death alone. Without warning, a red-hot poker memory singed her mind, EVANDA!
She sat up in the darkness. The children panicked, turning and snuggling closer to their mummy.
“My baby!!” Carroll Maryland wailed, scrambling to her feet and staggering off into the darkness, her hands out in front of her.
“DON'T!!” Vanessa was shouting.. too late to stop Carroll Maryland from stepping off the piece of cardboard on which she and her daughters had learnt in their short incarceration to stay. It took Carroll Maryland only a couple more infuriated steps to realise the flaw in her plan. She screamed and fell; to the floor. And screamed again. Her gasps of pain stabbed the gloom, hack great gushing lacerations into this sightless Purgatory and the girls were all sobbing now.
“Don’t move, love.” Vanessa instructed.
“God, what is it?” Carroll Maryland’s trembling voice gasped; she couldn’t believe the searing pain.
“Glass. It's everywhere. Like someone planted broken bottles in the wet concrete when they first laid it.”
Suddenly, the very faint line of light along the bottom of the far wall brightened to a blinding engine-rumbling intensity. All four prisoners averted their eyes, groaning pain. A deep, lecherous chuckle issued from the light. At least someone's having fun.
A large male figure took the naked girl, Carroll Maryland, by the arm and dragged her back through the shards of broken bottles embedded into the garage’s concrete floor to where she should have stayed in the first place, the embedded-glass floor ripping through the flesh of her left buttock right foot. Vanessa screaming her denunciation at Carroll Maryland’s ruthless handling,
“Stanley, for pity’s sake, stop it!”
Stanley Washington dropped the girl at the edge of the cardboard island, walked over to his, naked wife and slapped her hard across the face with an open hand. Stanley Washington's malevolent entrance was shadowed by a short highly-neurotic-looking man in a plaid hat and a grey suit, known to almost everyone by the title Mister Rhisland.
Mister Rhisland was holding a small revolver out in both hands, “Back on the cardboard, sweetie.” he calmly told Carroll Maryland, defying his psychotic manner with this debonair, enunciating accent.
“Why are you doing this to us, Stanley Washington?” Vanessa asked. Stanley Washington glared at her, a stone-cold killer.
“We're your family.” Vanessa continued, “Your flesh and blood. How can you do this to us? Treat us like filth? Stanley Washington, can you hear me? your..”
Her protests were cut short an she ducked to avoid another swinging blow from her husband. Incensed by her evasive manoeuvre, he kicked her in the ribs, a crack. And in the face as she folded round the pain; her lip ripped. And in the face again, her right eye ballooned. And ...
“Stanley!” the short man pointed the revolver at Stanley Washington.
“What?” crazyman glared at his ineffectual accomplice.
“Enough is enough, Stanley. Be civil.”
“You know one day, Mister Rhisland, you're going to have to use that puny thing
and I don't honestly think you'll have the balls.”
Mister Rhisland eased back the firing pin.
“Okay, give us the fuckin flask and needles and stop arsing around.” Stanley Washington quelled the stand-off.
“Daddy, no..” the girls protested in unison.
“Shut it, or daddy'll have to kick your fucking whining heads off, okay?”
The girls stared at their alien father, petrified. Kerry wet herself.
“That's okay.” Stanley found the urination most amusing, “You’re going to have to fuckin sleep in that, not me.” and turned to the gunman who was taking a red-tartan hip-flask and two hypodermic needles out of his breast pocket.
Kerry wailed into her older sister's embrace, “I don’t want to die, daddy! I don't want needles in me! I don't want to die!”
“Look, soft twat…” Stanley Washington was gonna tell them how it was.
“Come here, girls.” the battered Vanessa had regained consciousness. She opened her arms to her daughters.
“No!!” Stanley Washington pointed to the girls, “Don’t move.” he said calmly then, for whatever reason, roared, “DON’T YOU DARE FUCKIN MOVE OR SO HELP ME GOD I'LL BREAK YOUR FUCKIN HEADS. BREAK YOUR FUCKIN HEADS WIDE OPEN. I'LL KILL YOU. I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU ALL AND TO HELL WITH ALL THIS FUCKIN AROUND.”
He turned to his gun-toting accomplice again, “Pass me the kit.”
The short man handed over a hypo casually filled with the yellow, oily fluid from the hip-flask in the uproar. Carroll Maryland had meanwhile crawled back onto the cardboard and was busy picking shards of glass from her feet and legs with her fingernails, her trembling hands themselves glistened with glass jewels, a scarlet duet singing scintillations amid a cat's chorus of lacerated flesh you might wanna say, if you were blind drunk and didn’t give a fuck what folk thought in private or out loud.
Bastard Stanley Washington took Carroll Maryland’s arm, nearly yanked it out of its adolescent socket. She grunted as his grasp squeezed glass into nerves. He shoved the loaded hypodermic in to the hilt. Carroll Maryland screamed. The girls began to scream.
“Shut up, fucks! You’ll get yours soon enough!” Stanley Washington leered as he unloaded the entire hypo into Carroll Maryland’s arm. A bulb of poison grew under the young flesh accompanied by screams. A manic silence fell over the proceedings as Mister Rhisland cocked his revolver again.
“Hurray that man.” Stanley Washington applauded his accomplice’s act. Actually clapped his hands together, the syringe in his mouth like a rose stem.
And, having also injected his wife and the weeping, jibbering, emotionally fucked up daughters, both he and Mister Rhisland left the girls to lick their wounds. Had a little private chuckle to himself as he once again closed the garage door warning, I’ll be back in one day, girls. Don't go kissing each other’s fannies, now. Both his laugh and the light were cut short as the garage door shut with a resounding clang.
“This had better work.” Stanley Washington addressed the short man as he walked round to the driver's side of the grey Morris Minor.
“It will.” Mister Rhisland insisted. Ducked down into the driver's seat and flipped up the passenger-door lock. As Stanley Washington was bouncing down into his seat, Mister Rhisland added, “Should have worked itself into the genetic material in about 24 hours. The formula I have reached after months of serious…”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, Einstein, just get me to the fuckin pub ... and quick as this shit-heap can go, eh?”
SESSION IV
“This is something we should have done from day one, Mister Deniz!” Dr Fanny Bradburg was spitting in my ear as the gang of male nurses pinned me to the floor of the consultation room.
“GET OFF ME!!” I screamed, struggling helplessly. “GET OFF ME!”
One of the bastards shoved a grey gymsock into my mouth.
“'RRAAARRGHH!!” I raged against the gag.
“It's for your own good, Mister Deniz. You’ll be with us for only twenty-eight days. Until you've stabilised. Just comply with us, Mister Deniz. Please.”
She was crouched down beside me, pawing my buckled bald head as I jerked and squirmed under the combined weight of my captors.
“We are not here to hurt you, Mister Deniz. Only to get to the bottom of all this anguish and distress. To touch the truth. I'm only trying to help you face the truth. The truth. The truth, that's; all any of us wants...”
She continued to paw my head as something sharp was shoved into my left buttock.
There was a terrible draught round my legs. Made me shiver. My teeth chattered like the bones of a hanged man rattling in the wind after the crows had had their feed. The door to my private room was slightly ajar. Sounds. Wet, hungry sounds invaded my semi-conscious glower. Sensations. Delicate, ticklish sensations all about me. Heat. As of a being or beings close by. Body heat. I raised myself onto my elbows. The being, singular, was at the foot of my bed. Her knees embedded into the white starch-crisp sheets. Her finely-haired white arse stuck up in the air. Her slender, white hands caressing, investigating the flesh beneath my cotton blue-and-white striped pyjama top. Fondling; searching; describing with fingertips synthetically conic intricate patterns on my skin as it leapt to great goose-Dimple tracks following the course of her swirling ministrations.
A tiny gasp, more like the sharp yap you'd get when inadvertently stepping on the sleeping dog at your feet as you rise to turn over the TV 'cos you can't for the life of you remember where on Earth you put the fucking remote, popped from me. My pyjama bottoms had gone. And the bedclothes were hanging off the bottom right corner of the bed: a slaughtered virgin on the Altar of Labial Psychosis. The woman's peroxide-blond hairdo was somewhere down there; over my scrotumless unsexed region. Her rough pork tongue lapping at the pad of soft flesh between my cold legs.
Licking me to a frenzy of gasps and body jolts. Her large breasts lolling heavily on my hairless thighs like drunken mammals in latex placentas. Jostling, bobbing back and forth along the leg muscles with each rhythmic bob of her head as she licked my scrotepatch. The vermilion birthmark on her right shoulder blade stretching down her back like Great Britain through Scotland and the Hebrides at her neck down through Central England and on to the Lands End coast, middle back. Some aspect of it was missing. Only later did it dawn on me, Ireland was missing.
She raised her head, licking spit from her glossy, thick whore lips. The pink tongue like an eel protruding from the blanched carcase of a gazelle on the river bed caught in a flash-flood. Those eyes a pink and fiery display of need. I was so terrified. Petrified by her engorging stare.
Stifled by her hot proximity and the pornographic display of her swollen genitalia, I had begun to sweat - a cold, unhealthy perspiration. One of her rubber fingers found my belly button. Her face lit up. She sat back, her entire weight on my ankles.
I thought they'd break any minute. Her most cherished asset, pubic hair fine and white, sat triangular and spongy above the blood red slit. Steadily dripping its haemic monthly discharge. A meaty fuck sacrifice in honour of my sexual renaissance.
She bunny-hopped up the bed, her knees either side of my ribcage. Her hot cunt gaping and shutting with each pelvic shunt. Giggling like a loony in a cornfield. Splattering me with her scarlet benediction; the wet, red slap from the disciplinarian God of Salacity.
“Here at the G.B.I. we have a strict policy of fuck first take notes and publish the results in the public domain later.” my dopey therapist’s gravelly voice captive in her cunt-juiced cage of seduction and I sorta liked her gnarled impersonation flapping against its broken shortcomings.
She took the calloused stumps of my hands and drew them greedily into her mouth. Drawing the spittle slick appendages down her tits big and white like porcelain; the Wedgwood China saucer nipples. Polishing the substantial glass globes – wipe on wipe off. She sat on my stomach, knocking the wind right out of me. Blood splattered. Her head slung back at a momentary orgasm, shooting an arc of sweat beads h
igh into the room. Slow motion like the shampoo adverts they still show on television. Belting out pure orgasmic litany like a little chorister hitting a high C.
I echoed her song with an instinctive hip thrust up at her glowing genitalia, grinding the meat. She caught me with her powerful thighs, squashing blood out the sides. Her burning vulva unravelling. Turning inside out. Spearing my belly button. Penetrating my very being. The wrinkled textures of internal organs. The uniform smoothness of liver. The warm, spherical kidneys. The moist squelchings of indigestion and the slow, regular twenty-five foot intestinal S-wave. Up in search of my racing heart beat by-passing the stomach now chestnut-sized due to lack of sustenance. Hunting out the spasmodic cardiac muscle. Clutching at it. Squashing it. Smothering the fucking life from it. Snuffing me out.
FIVE
The grey Morris Minor rolled out of the underground garage complex exit. A man hunched over a deep depression crossed the road in front of the old banger. Mister Rhisland stamped on the brakes. Stanley Washington hung out of his window and exclaimed in his habitual holler, “Get the fuck out my way, pillock brain!”
The self-immersed pedestrian turned his woeful gaze on the car's abusive occupants and sighed an eternal sigh; the mist in his eyes unnoticeable at their distance. He plodded on his weary way. His shoulders ever so heavy for a man of such light build.
“Didn't die.” the man exhaled.
He turned left at the end of the garage complex and teetered up the incline, taking another left and then a quick right; all, the time bemoaning his plight, “Death ... such an elusive bird. Exotic in its flamboyant plumage. Its feathery display such a ... such a load of bollocks, that's what that is. Exotic in its total bollocks. Flamboyant as bollocks ... well, can't really expect to be singled out. Can't even get myself run over. Tragic.” This realisation actually had a bizarre effect on his spirits, he laughed; just a modest chortle, nothing too showy.
Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 4