Kzine Issue 8

by Graeme Hurry

  “What’s next then, Fra.. er, Mr Moss?”

  “Next, Mr Parkinson? Next? You do the time, sir. You put in the years.” He leaned in close. “You stay out of trouble.”

  “I shouldn’t be in here, Mr Moss. This is all wrong.”

  “You’re guilty, Ronald. You have to answer to society. Your escape attempt - eight years ago, was it? It did not sit well with the court.”

  “It’s a man’s duty to try and escape.”

  “Mr Parkinson, Ronald, where do you think you are, Colditz? You are in for murder. You killed a man.”

  “Self-defence.”

  “You had a knife. He didn’t. He was dining out - a meal with his family. Minding his own business.”

  “He…”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. Martinson.

  “I think you have concluded your business, Ronnie,” he said. I pushed his hand away. I could feel the rage building up inside. The way it did. I knew I was about ready to go off on one. Stupid. But I couldn’t help it. It was always like this. And so what if I did?

  But then that’s when Frank Moss held up a hand. That’s when it started.

  “Wait,” he whispered. He nodded to Martinson. Martinson stepped back a pace.

  I watched Frank Moss as he gathered his thoughts; weighed things up. It was a full minute before he spoke. When he did speak he looked up from his desk for the first time. Looked me in the eye.

  “I hear things. I’m a progressive man, Mr Parkinson. There’s a… programme. Scientific.”

  That’s when it started.

  Two weeks later the cell door bangs open and I’m collected. Martinson again. This time we go to the infirmary.

  She was there. A doctor. I knew she was a doctor –had this white coat on; couple of pens in the top pocket.

  “My name is Doctor Simmonds,” she said. (I guess that was a bit of a clue, too) “You can call me Lisa if it makes you feel more comfortable.

  It didn’t and I said so. I don’t like doctors, and I said that, too. I’d seen doctors when I was a kid, when they was always trying to ‘help’ me. Here was another one - trying to help me.

  But I wanted this. I tried to see past the white coat. She was young - for a doctor. Shoulder length mousy hair, could have done with some styling, I thought. Maybe hacked-off and limp was what counted for styling these days, I don’t know. I’ve been inside a long time, you understand. I don’t follow trends. The only kind of girlies I ever get to see these days come on the inside of contraband magazines, and the girls in there are not normally wearing enough to make a fashion statement, you know? I got to wondering how the Doc would look doin’ one of them poses, wearing leather, and… well, Martinson must have guessed the kind of thoughts I was starting to form because the bastard’s cattle prod came out and turned everything from the waist down into gibbering chilli pepper soup.

  We adjourned for twenty minutes while I regrouped.

  When we restarted Martinson was gone. The doctor insisted on it. Expelled him. He protested. He said I’d be into her pants within twenty seconds without his protection. She just smiled and said, I don’t think so. She said something about martial arts but I wasn’t really listening. I’d just been cattle-prodded in the balls not twenty minutes earlier and my mind was still, you know, elsewhere?

  “Shall we start again,” she said. She smiled. That felt strange. I’m not sure I can remember the last person that smiled at me.

  “So, what happens?” I asked. “You infect me with something then try to cure it?”

  “No, Mr Parkinson. We go straight for the cure. You don’t need to be infected.”

  “But I’m not ill.”

  “Yes, you are. In a manner of speaking.”

  I shrugged. Suit yourself.

  “First I need you to sign something.”

  “Sign? Papers? Okay, well I need my lawyer.”

  “Mr Moss is your lawyer. He pulled a lot of strings to get you onto this trial. I’ve shown him the paperwork and he has already endorsed your application, look.” She pointed to the bottom of a form.

  I shrugged again.

  “I just need to explain it all to you. First we do some tests, wire you up, ask some questions.”

  “Woah, wire me up?”

  “Nothing invasive, Mr Parkinson. We have a portable functional MRI unit in the van. We ask questions, show some videos. We watch and see what happens. We need to be sure that your disorder can be treated.”

  “I don’t have any disorder.”

  “Your symptoms are clear, Mr Parkinson. I have examined your files and read the transcripts from various encounters since your conviction. All the responses point to extreme sociopathic or psychopathic behaviour.”

  “You’re saying I might be a psycho?”

  “Oh, I doubt there is any ‘might’ about it. But it is a general term and I would like to pin you down a little. I need to confirm that you are suffering from severe amygdala and ventromedial cortex dysfunction. If the fMRI scan…”

  Words. Just a stream of words. Long words. Made me feel stupid. Like a moron. My instinct was to mash my fist into her smug face and walk out of there. But a little voice chimed in and reminded me I needed this. I needed it. Frank Moss had pulled strings. This was my way out.

  But you can’t back down. Instincts are strong. Can’t always control them. ‘Specially when people is mocking me. So I lurched out of my chair and took a swing right at her. She didn’t seem to move, she just jinked to the left, only an inch or two, but fast, shit she was fast. And then I was on the floor nursing my punished balls for the second time in only twenty minutes.

  “You don’t have a lot of patience, either, Mr Parkinson, but there’s nothing I can do for that. Now, would you like to puke for a moment or can we get on?”

  I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. It was humiliating enough. But then I puked anyway.

  The van was in the yard. We had to go through inner security. You could tell the screws were jumpy about that. They needn’t have worried. I was in no mood for flight.

  In the van she had an assistant, a geeky student-like guy with a ponytail. He looked all nervous as hell being in the company of a convict, a killer. He should have been more scared about spending his time with her – the doctor. Keep your hands over your bollocks, sunshine.

  They put this net cap thing, with wires, on my head and plugged me in. I kept my head up. I kept the wise cracks flowing – ‘you forgot the curlers’, ‘wait, the voices have stopped – my little friends from Venus.’ But I was scared. Shit scared. Doctors. And, you know, there’s something about creepy scientists in lab coats messing about inside your head. With wires.

  “Good signal,” said ponytail. “He’s all yours, Lisa.”

  What did he mean by that? He’s all yours?

  She started asking questions. From off a clipboard.

  “Tell me about the day of the incident at Malmaison.”

  “The restaurant?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a long time ago. Twelve years. Hard to remember.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s in the reports. You said you read them.”

  “I need you to tell me, now. I want to measure your responses.”

  “Is this a lie detector?”

  “No, Mr Parkinson, it is not a lie detector. Please, just tell me about the evening at Malmaison.”

  “Okay, I took a bird. For a meal.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Not especially. Just some girl.”

  “Expensive place for ‘just some girl’.”

  “I could afford it. See, I had… Hey, I don’t have to tell you where I got the money. Listen, maybe Frank should be here while…”

  “No, the money is not important, Mr Parkinson. Let’s just…”

  “Call me Ronnie. Lawyers call me Mr Parkinson. And judges.”

  “Ronnie, then, please. Just tell me about that night. What happened.”

  “I had wine. I don’t
like wine myself, poncey stuff. But it does the business, gets the girls pissed. Anyway, so I’m pouring it in her glass and this tosser pushes past and knocks my arm and the wine ends up in the girl’s lap. Great start to the night, hey? So I’m out of my chair and me head’s pressed up against his and I’m yelling, giving him loads. And he pushes me. Hands on me chest and pushes me. My legs catch against the table and the whole bottle of wine’s down and sloshing everywhere and my nights totally friggin’ wrecked. I mean, can you believe this guy? So I stuck him. He goes down. There’s blood all over the floor. Girl’s screaming abuse at me. People are running out the door. Next thing I know the bill are everywhere and I’m cuffed and face down. Then they drag me out of there. Right old barney. And how is it my fault? Tosser assaulted me. Got what he deserved.”

  “The knife – you had it with you?”

  “Streets are hard round where I come from, love’. You don’t go out without some kind of protection: blade or a bat, something. Never carried a gun, though. No way. Never got into that kind of shit.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “When?”

  “When you stabbed the man.”

  “Huh. Aggrieved. Mightily pissed off. I mean. I was out eating with a girl, and this joker… How d’you think I felt?”

  And then the doctor looked over at Ponytail and he gives a thumbs up, like.

  “Okay, Ronnie, now I’d like you to watch something on the screen. A video.”

  It was a funeral.

  Not very exciting. Not much of a plot.

  “This is Peter Thorpe’s funeral. The man you murdered. That’s his family. Tell me what you’re thinking when you watch it.”

  “What am I meant to be thinking?”

  “I’d rather you told me.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m thinking, funerals don’t seem like much fun.”

  One eyebrow went up at this. Was she disappointed? I thought so.

  “How so?” she said.

  “Well, bit short on action scenes, like. When does something happen?”

  “You don’t find it moving at all?”

  “Moving? Nobody’s moving. They’re all just standing around. And all that crying, bloody hell, it’s really tedious. What do we do next?”

  And she seemed to brighten. Ponytail was looking at his screen, smiling and nodding and doing air punches.

  “Nothing for now. Oh, just this.”

  And that’s when she produced the syringe.

  “Hey, wait. What’s this?”

  “It won’t hurt.”

  “The hell it won’t. What it is?”

  “I don’t have to explain, Ronnie. You signed the papers.”

  “So, would it hurt you To explain?”

  She smiled again. I never get that warm fluffy feeling that other people say they get from people’s smiles. But I can still use the knowledge. Smiles show when I’ve done good or said something right, yeah? Then again, sometimes people have smiled when they’ve been hurting me. But this didn’t look like that sort of a smile. Doctor Simmonds seemed pleased with me.

  “There’s a part of your brain called the amygdala,” she said. “It controls your emotions and your conscience, the part of a person’s brain that can tell right from wrong.”

  “And I haven’t got one?”

  “Yes, of course you have, everyone has an amygdala. It’s like a little walnut and it is deep within the medial temporal lobe, just in front of your brain stem. It’s a busy little part of your brain and without it you couldn’t function at all. One thing it controls is fear conditioning. There are some with your dysfunction who have no fear, but from the expression on your face when I showed you this…” she waved the syringe at me, “…I’m guessing that you are not one of them.”

  “So what does it do,” I said, nodding towards the syringe.

  “It’s a myelinization catalyst. The neurons in your brain, or rather, the axions that carry the signals, are sheathed in an insulating material called myelin. It’s like the plastic insulation around electrical cable. Without it the axion cannot pass a signal and your neurons don’t fire. Oh, you can manage without myelin. In fact its growth is quite gradual. The natural process of myelinization continues well into puberty. In some cases, like yours, we’ve found that myelinization fails completely in certain key areas. We’ve identified a specific part of the amygdala where the myelinization process has repeatedly failed. So we’re going to try to fix it.”

  I could see a flaw in the plan and I didn’t much like the thought of the obvious solution.

  “How do you get the… catalyst stuff..?”

  She nodded.

  “…to the right part of my brain? The amygdala? Do you stick that needle..?”

  “No, God, no. We won’t be sticking needles into your brain, Ronnie.” She laughed. I didn’t see a lot to laugh about.

  “And it is a very good question. It’s one that has caused us some difficulties. It is all very well booting up a few more brain cells. But if you don’t use them they die off. There’s a process called apoptosis, a kind of programmed death squad for cells. It keeps everything up there all neat and tidy by pruning the bits you don’t use. So once we have myelinized the dormant parts of your brain, we have to activate the parts we want you to start using. And we do that tomorrow. With magnets. But first…”

  She reached out and rubbed something cold on my neck.

  “This won’t hurt. I promise.”

  That was one brave promise. I am a psychopath. She’d just proved it. Now she was about to stick a needle in my neck on a promise that it would not hurt. If it had hurt I would have had no worries about taking hold of her neck and snapping it like a twig.

  But then - I could still feel the heavy lump of pain throbbing away in my groin from the last time I tried it on with her. Martial arts – sod that. So I let her stick the needle in my neck.

  And it didn’t hurt. Lucky her.

  “How’d you sleep?”

  I shrugged.

  “Dreamt some weird shit. Really weird. Feeling kind of strange, too. In here.” I tapped the side of my head.

  We were back in the van. There was some new equipment that ponytail was working on.

  “Like being drunk?” she asked.

  “It’s been twelve years, I can barely remember how that feels, but no, I don’t think so. It’s more like… it’s like the exact opposite of bein’ drunk. Is that possible?”

  “Nobody’s ever described it like that before but it’s a good way of putting it. The feeling will fade, but there are other feelings in there that will be enhanced and they will seem uncomfortable for a while. But don’t worry, they are normal. I have them, sometimes. Virtually everyone does. They are feelings that you will just have to get used to. That’s why you’ll be tagged.”

  “Tagged?”

  “After today you’ll get to walk through those gates.”

  “So you tag me in case I run?”

  “You won’t run. The tag’s for your own protection.”

  I didn’t understand that.

  I do now.

  She explained how we’d be just a few moments while Ponytail calibrated the equipment.

  “So why do you do this?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Why do spend all your time trying to get villains like me out of jail?”

  I’d started a conversation. I don’t think I’d ever done that before. I wanted to know, though.

  “Hmm. Do you think it right that you are locked away here while your life slips past?”

  “I don’t enjoy it, if that’s what you mean. But right? I killed a man. I suppose I knew what to expect.”

  “It’s not what I asked,” she said. She leaned forward so that the mousy mop of her hair fell in her eyes and she brushed it away, hardly noticing.

  “Yes, you’d expect to be locked away,” she said. “But do you think it is right? You won’t get any of those years back, you know.”

  “The
y asked me if I was guilty – in court, like. I said no. I mean I did it, I can’t deny that. But guilty? No. I got into a disagreement and a man ended up with a knife in him. It wasn’t as if…” And there I kind of faltered. I’d never felt guilty about what I did. But right then I remembered the look on the guy’s face when I stuck him. I felt something inside and, you know, what I did to him, it felt wrong.

  “Don’t talk about it, not yet,” she said. “We’re not ready for that. Just… let’s talk about this later. What did you have for breakfast?”

  This was a strange change of direction. I didn’t want to go there. I had things to say. Things that had to be said.

  “You haven’t answered me,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

  “My father was in prison. He never came out. It was all a mistake. Circumstantial.”

  “Lisa! No.” It was Ponytail.

  “My father died in prison.”

  “Bloody hell, Lisa!”

  “Well are we ready yet?” she shouted back to him.

  “Couple of minutes, okay?” he said. “Change the subject or we’ll lose it.” They both looked flustered.

  “Robbie, tell me about breakfast.”

  “Porridge,” I said, irritated. “Same shit as yesterday. Now tell me about your father.”

  “If we let your mind process anything like this now we could spoil the treatment,” she said. “The moment doesn’t last. We need to fix these thoughts, but not yet, we’re not ready for you. Please. Er… sport. Do you watch football?”

  “Some.”

  “What team do you follow? How are they doing?”

  “Tranmere Rovers – Super Whites. They’re mid-table. The Premiership’s tough, though. They’re hanging in there. Why do you want me out of jail? I’m a killer.”

  “Stay with this. What colour do… Tranmere Rovers? What colour shirts do they play in? Visualise it for me.” She was nearly hopping out of her chair, her attention flitting from me to Ponytail and his equipment then back to me.

  “Slide guitar,” I said.

  And I stopped. Why had I said that? Because it was true. Tranmere Rovers played in shirts that sounded exactly like blues slide guitar.