Telling Stories

by Geoff Palmer

  A NOVEL

  Geoff Palmer

  PODSNAP PUBLISHING LTD

  Wellington, New Zealand

  www.podsnap.co.nz

  A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth

  and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

  William Faulkner

  If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate –

  the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

  William Faulkner

  Pardon ... ?

  I must warn you, I have never been normal. Nothing about me is average, typical, common or ordinary.

  Fatty. Yawn. Rent-a-blimp. Ho-hum. Lard-ass. Too American. Jumbo. Habari. (Swahili humour for my African readers.) Eric, the world famous size. Goon Show — I like that. Tank, tab, tonnage, blob. Snore. More chins than a Chinese telephone directory. Milligan again, a favourite, though personally I prefer prodigious. It gives one a truer sense of grandeur than merely fat. After all, I am a fat man's fatty. Super-normal. The Incredible Bulk.

  Now for the eyes.

  Four-eyes. Groan. Pew. A bit literary. Helen Keller. Hardly, though I have been cursed with two framed marbles on the bridge of my nose since the age of four, the weight of which has left permanent dents in my proboscis and dragged my ears an inch further forward than they should be. Short-sighted? With glasses I become short-sighted. Without them I see the world as Monet painted it, which, for the most part, is no bad thing.

  And the hooter? That isn't normal either. Beaky. Sigh. Not so much a nose, more a ski-jump. Hmm. It's Roman, roamin' all over your face. Yawn. But in this case size is a correlate of function. I can pick an unwashed body across a four-lane highway, sense an approaching storm from the smell of the seagulls and spot halitosis in nose-breathers. Evolutionary refinements akin to an anteater.

  But you get the picture. I've had this banter all my life and I'm immune to it. It can't touch me any more. The antibodies to abuse course through my veins. Size, eyes, nose. Size, eyes, nose. Size, eyes, nose. Size, eyes, nose.

  And now my hearing.

  'It isn't normal,' Dr Wrangler said, leaning back in his reclining leather chair and eyeing me with something of a sympathetic sneer as I squirmed in the inadequacy of my flimsy plastic one. 'It seems okay to you because it's all you've ever known, but if you could swap it with a normal person you'd be amazed at the difference.'

  Thanks Doc.

  As he spoke he gestured to a little sheet of graph paper covered with dips and troughs that had been disgorged by a machine behind his desk. The dips and troughs corresponded to my reaction to various electronic squeals, beeps and belches that came through a set of headphones. Maybe a normal person would have hummed along to the tune, but to me it sounded like a two-year-old on a Hammond organ.

  'Your hearing is like ... like a radio that isn't quite tuned to the right station,' he patronised, no doubt assuming that because I wasn't a private patient I was probably thick. 'The signal still gets through, but it's often a bit distorted.'

  'So, are you saying that commercial radio really isn't bad at all, it's just my hearing that makes it sound like crap?'

  Patronise that, fish-face.

  'No, no, no, Mr Dombey, you misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that if you don't have your radio tuned properly, you're not going to get a very good reception, yes? Your hearing is like a badly tuned radio. You just don't get a very good reception compared to normal people.'

  Aaaarrrggghhh, that phrase again!

  'Do you have a big knob, Doctor?' I asked.

  'Pardon?'

  'A big knob? You know. To tune me in. Like a normal person.'

  'Ah, well Mr Dombey, it's not quite that simple ...'

  'I suppose what I'm asking Doctor, is canpooh fuckshit?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Canpooh fuckshit?'

  He chuckled nervously and squeaked his chair upright. 'I'm sorry, I still didn't catch that.'

  'I said CAN YOU FIX IT?'

  'Oh, your hearing? Well now, some of my colleagues might demur but my own feeling is that this problem is the product of recessive genes. Either parent suffer with it?'

  'I don't know, they're both dead.' You can't get more recessive than that.

  'Pity, pity. They might have been able to throw some light on familial genotypes in relation to the ...' He wittered on for some time, completely avoiding my question and leaving me wondering just who had the hearing problem. Nevertheless I pressed home my enquiry with my usual ruthless intensity.

  'Excuse me, Doctor, but all I want to know is damn many pling dee-dum?'

  He stopped in mid-witter, gave another nervous chuckle and inclined his head in my direction. 'Pardon?'

  'Can anything be done?'

  'Ah, now that's debatable. There is some, though not marked, hearing impairment that may or may not increase in years to come. Such a decline might occur in the space of two or three or ten or twenty years. Or not at all. We'll just have to keep an eye on that ...'

  (He didn't know.)

  '... and as for the tinnitus, there is a possibility that the amplitude and frequency of the intra-cranial sonancies may undergo a volumetric increment, but there's a similar and roughly equal possibility of no such variance occurring ...'

  (He really didn't know.)

  '... But you could do with losing a little weight.'

  'I'm sorry, Doctor,' I said, 'but I fail to see the relationship between my personal volumetric displacement and a propensity to intra-cranial sonants, surds or even sibilance. Indeed, to any debilitation of the auditory response system whatsoever.'

  (I could have been a doctor, but my handwriting's too neat.)

  He looked at me vaguely as though I'd interrupted his train of thought, went to speak, glanced down at the form in front of him, picked up his pen and gave no other indication whatsoever that I'd spoken at all. I was starting to wonder if my voice was going too.

  'Occupation?'

  I cleared my throat. 'Zumbooruk salesman.'

  He ticked a box and turned the page.

  The reason I was sitting on that flimsy plastic chair in that cadaverous khaki office tucked away in a forgotten byway of the Donnington Public Hospital went back to a ringing that had started in my ears some fifteen months before. It began quite suddenly as I was slouched over a book in the public library. (They, too, are cursed with flimsy plastic furniture.) My head crackled briefly — like Wrangler's radio tuning itself to a new frequency — and the ringing began.

  At first I put it down to my unnatural position and the awkward seating, then to my reading material, so after a few minutes I stretched and went for a walk around the open stack.

  One is a little inhibited from smacking oneself about the head with cupped hands or attempting violent neck-twisting manoeuvres in the fiction section, (authors G—M), but these things I tried when I returned home to Barchester Towers. To no avail. The ringing continued, and does so to this day.

  By ringing I don't mean the frenetic tintinnabulation of some hunchback in a carillon. It's far more electronic. In fact, I liken it to Pid's printer. My brother has a vast amount of expensive computer equipment, the sole purpose of which is to impress visitors to his vastly tacky office on the fourteenth floor of Bleke House. (The fourteenth floor, incidentally, is really the thirteenth. In the age of nuclear fission, microchips and intra-cranial sonancies there is still room for soothsayers, necromancers and the superstitious.) When the printer runs out of paper it imitates a child; that is, it makes a continuous high-pitched noise until it receives attention. Just such a noise, of similar pitch but mercifully lower volume, now inhabits my cranium.

  I was prepared to explain all this to the offhand oaf behind the desk, but he seemed more interest
ed in ticking off boxes on the back of his form.

  'Have you ever had dysuria, dyspepsia, cholic, cholera, dropsy, arthritis, bronchitis, colitis, dermatitis, enteritis, gastritis, hepatitis, fistula, macula, dracula, anthrax, rhinderpest, budapest, haemorrhoids, rhomboids, heart trouble, fart trouble, scabies, rabies, babies, diphtheria or death?'

  'No.'

  It had taken over a year even to get to his office. One of the many clever devices incorporated into the public health system is the self-reducing waiting list. To see a busy specialist like Wrangler you must book a year in advance. This is because he has a flourishing and extensive practice down the road where he charges vast sums of money for seeing private patients. Patients like the Minister of Health. One morning a week he goes slumming at the public hospital to see people with real diseases, where, naturally, there's a waiting list the size of a planet. In between the time of making an appointment and getting seen by a specialist, many poor souls simply don't last the distance, so, to save the good doctor's time, everybody is double-booked on the basis that only fifty percent will live long enough to make it.

  'Are you exposed to any loud noises at work?'

  'Isn't that a rather moot question?' I asked.

  'How so?'

  'Well it's relative, isn't it? A moderate to middling sound to one such as I might prove deafening to a normal person. One that I would regard as loud would probably liquefy your brain cells.'

  'Mr Dombey, you are not deaf. Your graph shows some ... er ... abnormality in tonal distribution, but I repeat, you are not deaf!'

  'Pardon?'

  He began turning a rather disturbing shade of purple and was about to reply when the phone rang. He went to speak in the gap but it rang again, one of those piercingly incisive electronic chirrups.

  'Excuse me,' he mouthed and swung round to answer it since the phone was conveniently bolted to the wall a metre behind the desk. The hospital obviously knew who they were dealing with; anything of value was firmly screwed down and even the pens were on chains. Wrangler, of course, used his Mont Blanc.

  One can always tell when a doctor has a private practice. Apart from a propensity to dress like a merchant banker and flash around a gold-nibbed fountain pen, he handles public patients as though he's left his rubber gloves behind and his temporary surgery shows a total absence of normal human clutter. No photos of the wife and kids, no diaries, doodles or dog-eared periodicals with titles like Diarrhoea Digest and Sputum and Gland. No spent paper-clips, frilly curtains, reference books, charts of the human body or nasty plastic giveaways from pharmaceutical companies. Just a desk, a swivel chair, a pristine blotter, a box of files and an elderly intercom, also firmly screwed down.

  While he talked in a voice so low I began to believe his diagnosis, I leaned forward to try and read the notes he'd been making. Useless. Medicine is one of the few professions where you fail your final exams if anyone can read your answers. The best I could manage was a word that looked like 'smartarse'.

  l twiddled my thumbs, looked out the window — which opened on to a minute courtyard and a stunning view of a badly painted wall — then caught sight of the two grey wires running up the front of the desk into the intercom.

  I looked at the intercom more closely. It was a monster, positively antediluvian, probably invented before anyone discovered that you could get better sound quality from two tin cans and a piece of string. It was an old slave/master type, with master Wrangler controlling everything while his aptly named slave had to put up with whatever volume and tone the good doctor chose. I reached into my duffel bag, found my pocket knife and neatly snipped one of the wires.

  Wrangler turned back from his phone call and resumed scribbling on my card. No wonder his blotter was spotless, I thought.

  'Now where were we? No loud noises in the workplace. That correct? Good. We'll keep an eye out for any deterioration Mr Dombey, so I'd like to see you in six months' time.'

  'What? Six months?' I said. 'My God, you should have warned me. It took me nine months to get in here so I should have booked that ages ago.'

  The purple made a faint resurgence. 'One doesn't have to be exact in these matters, Mr Dombey.'

  'I hope your hearing-measurement-thingy doesn't take that attitude.'

  Heliotrope. The man was a positive chameleon.

  'Just make an appointment with the nurse on the way out,' he said, making a few more notes and underlining the word that looked like 'smartarse'.

  I returned to the brimming, silent waiting room and managed to beat a severe-looking woman to a place in the queue in front of the receptionist's desk. The frazzled nurse was dealing with new appointments and double-bookings while staving off requests from an increasingly intrusive intercom.

  'What was that?' it was booming, despite her attempts to muffle it. 'Say that again, I can hardly hear you Melissa ... Pardon ...? Look don't play around darling, my bloody wife's popping in shortly and I don't want the old harridan suspecting us ...'

  I took the card for my next appointment and brushed past the severe-looking woman, who approached the counter at a measured pace and announced in a voice tinged with iron, 'Tell my husband the harridan is here.'

  Monday, March 16

  I've spent the last couple of days setting Eric on Dr Wrangler and I'm rather pleased with the result. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Dombey. Things have changed a bit of course, but they always do. Wrangler has undergone a positive humanisation from his brusque and distant original, but that seemed to be the only way I could make it work. Eric needs to be able to provoke a reaction, and cold fish like that just don't react. It's a question of vulnerability too. The real Wrangler wouldn't behave that way and even if his wife was a disreputable old hag he certainly wouldn't be intimidated by her.

  I did manage to incorporate some of his lines though: the bit about the radio being out of tune, how I could do with losing some weight and how one doesn't have to be exact in these matters. I only wish I'd thought of suitable responses at the time. And I have managed to incorporate the elderly intercom, though I think I might have taken liberties with its internals.

  I'd make a lousy reporter because there are whole chunks I don't clearly remember at all, even though it was only last week. I mean, I honestly don't recall making an appointment for a return visit when I came out of his office, but I must have done because I wrote it up in my diary when I got back to work and still have the card for it tucked in my wallet. The whole reception area and the receptionist herself are a kind of blur in my mind. I could pencil you a rough layout of the place, but that's all. My next clear memory is sitting on the bus looking at the card and feeling mad at the receptionist for misspelling my name — she put Splading instead of Spalding — mad at him for the way he treated me and mad at myself for letting him treat me like that.

  I keep telling myself I must be more assertive and I do keep trying to be, but I really don't think it's in my nature. I felt a fraud sitting there with just a bit of tinnitus. I kept thinking how this man had spent seven years at medical school and another five years specialising and all he ends up with is some idiot with head noises. There are people out there with brain tumours and throat cancers who can't even get into see him because worry-warts like me take up all his time. I mean, I was so embarrassed that I actually wished I had something more serious to show him!

  On the other hand, he might have been more sympathetic, a little less brusque. I had read up about tinnitus. I know it can get worse. Some people get to the stage where they say it's like having a fleet of 747s taking off in your head all the time, and a sentence about it being the third-worst ailment in man kept coming back to me; unrelievable, uncontrollable pain, unrelievable, uncontrollable dizziness and ...

  Still, I suppose it balances out. Eric is my equilibrium. And it's given me another story.

  • • •

  I've just reread it. Yes, it's okay, It works, but I get the feeling there's something missing from the Eric stories in general. They're
like episodes in a long-running situation comedy. Each one is neat and complete but the situation itself never changes. There's no real progression, no underlying movement. You could take them all and mix them up and read them in any order and it wouldn't matter. When I think of how long I've been writing them I just feel a hollow in the pit of my stomach. Surely some theme, some direction should have emerged by now? They are, after all, the stories of my life.

  I have to wonder about myself too. I let Eric loose to get revenge — which he did and I'm pleased about — but he got revenge on a fiction, through a fiction, and it's as if the fiction is now more real to me than reality. I'm not sure if it's liberating, disturbing or just plain pathetic.

  I overhear the guys at work saying things like they let down a neighbour's tyres for parking across their driveway or that they followed some guy who didn't give way and later kicked in his headlights, but I always put it down to bravado and macho bluff and bluster. But maybe that's what real people do. It would certainly explain why the world is so fucked up. If that is the case, then, in a sense, I'm pleased I'm not normal.

  Raid

  Barchester Towers is a soaring cement cube that sits incongruously out of an otherwise single- and double-storeyed suburb of late-Victorian houses that nestle in the flanks of the city's steepest hill, Mount Victory. Any idiot can see that. Even I can see it, sans lunettes. The building is a landmark. A monument to bad taste, bad planning, bad design and bad placement. Early morning arrivals on the inter-island ferries, catching sunlight glinting from its eastern face would be well advised to treat it as a lighthouse warning, 'Keep away, keep away!' Not that it's dangerous in a jagged rock sense, just worth avoiding if, like me, you consider dullness most dangerous of all.

  In an attempt to enliven its mordant, stark cementness the architect has added a periphery of porticos, perches, props, archways, turrets and tubes and combined them with a glaring colour scheme designed to highlight their anomalous features, making the whole place look more like a fourteen-storey alien spaceship. It was built in the seventies when there was something of a craze for simulating alien space hardware and it won all sorts of prizes like the Gosh-is-that-really-a-block-of-our-flats? award from the Donnington City Council, the Boy-we-never-thought-you'd-sell-that-design cup from the Architects' Institute and the Craft-we'd-all-like-to-own prize from a small, tasteless planet in the Andromeda galaxy.