Wright Left

by Peter Marks

  ‘Yeah, women are like mice sometimes,’ Alan grinned, ‘you catch them red handed in the pooh, and they deny all knowledge. They’ll just sit there looking innocent.’ Every-one agreed with the summation, all nodding in unison and again grunting a baritone confirmation. (Obviously there were no women present to defend the faith. Or point out that men had similar disturbing habits).

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Wright agreed impatiently before continuing, somewhat annoyed at having temporarily lost the spotlight. ‘Anyway, I finally overcame the guilt and decided to rid myself of the marauding little biscuit bandit. Buggar it, he’d demolished all the Sao biscuits I’d reserved for the coming nuclear holocaust, so the time had come to teach the rat...’

  ‘Mouse,’ Colin corrected one green eye straying from the letter he was trying to calm. The orphan orb settled on the gibbering Nathan who was propped comfortably but awkwardly upon the metal spar seat that tilted at a pronounced angle in compensation for such bad posture. The orb blinked, told Colin nothing interesting was happening so he returned it to the letter.

  ‘Wildebeest,’ the leaning tower corrected stubbornly, ‘..a terminal lesson in dieting. Demonstrate to him and his clan that I wasn’t to be trifled..’

  ‘Saoed..’ Alan suggested.

  ‘Shut up,’ Wright suggested, ‘..trifled with. But what do you do with a mouse? How do you punish or exterminate it? You can’t swat the thing like a fly. Hitting the buggar with a blunt object only exacerbates the problem. Sure as hell it’ll terminate the thieving interloper but you may as well blow it away with field artillery ‘cos the mess’ll be the same. Splat, there’d be fractional bits of body plastered on every wall from here to eternity.... and I hate mess..’

  ‘Only because you’d be forced to clean it up,’ Greg this time. ‘And you’re far too lazy for that.’

  ‘Indubitably,’ Wright agreed, ‘so I had to figure out a viable alternative to splatter. I considered luring it into the vitamiser and serving it to my guests at the next dinner party but they’d only complain.......not about the taste mind you, only about the calories. philistines. Retards behave better than my guests....and they’re more intelligent. Anyway that idea went west. An air strike by five squadrons of B-52’s was out, too messy again and you know how bad their aim is. Christ they’d probably obliterate the entire metropolitan area of Melbourne....’ Wright paused to consider the suggestion. ‘Mind you that’s not such a bad idea come to think of it. Anyway, I didn’t consider that advantage then. I thought about a flame thrower or shoving a fire cracker up its arse but I had to forget that for the same reason. It was too bloody messy. Stabbing, garrotting or getting Rambo in to deal with the fuckin’ thing would be just as hopeless...’

  ‘Ever heard of a mouse trap,’ Colin suggested, looking up from the letter, suggesting the bleeding obvious. Too obvious for Wright’s warped reasoning so he told Colin to shut-up or shoot himself.

  ‘You know what I did?’ Nathan the mouse maimer asked. No-one answered. No-one was the least bit curious so Wright repeated the question. Louder this time.

  ‘You know what I did?’ he repeated, almost screaming, searching for some enthusiasm.

  Greg, wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible, accepted the challenge. ‘Okay, I give up, what did you do you? Chat to it for an hour or two and bore it to death?’ He suggested grim and disinterested in Wright’s orgy of self confession.

  Nathan was undeterred. ‘I sprayed it!’ He proclaimed proudly as if he’d just invented the brassiere.

  ‘You what?’ Alan.

  ‘I sprayed it. The little buggar’s either dead or wandering the rafters with the best set hairdo this side of Hollywood...’

  ‘Hollywood?’ A shrill voice echoed in query from the doorway. It was Mark. Unfortunately he’d arrived back from his ablutions a death sentence too early.

  Having just cleared the shit from his system he was about to be forced to ingest another load of crap that wouldn’t be quite so easily shifted.

  ‘Yeah Hollywood. I zapped the roving wig with some of Kelly’s hair-spray I found in the bathroom cupboard.’

  ‘Closet you mean, you bloody fairy,’ Colin again. Nathan looked hurt and wondered why so many people were calling him that these days. He checked his back for butterfly wings and decided to go buy Penthouse at lunchtime and sit there pawing the tits of the centrefold to prove his proclivities.

  ‘What’d you do, blue rinse it to death...?’ Colin suggested. Wright suggested he catch the underside of a speeding bus. ‘..bet it came to a sticky end,’ Colin added, refusing to be run over. Nathan took a deep breath (as deep as the collapsed lungs of an idiot asthmatic who smoked too much could inhale) then, getting really pissed off with these constant interruptions, he counted to ten, forgetting three and eight and any semblance of accurate arithmetic before calming himself sufficiently to resume the diatribe.

  ‘Anyway,’ Wright said, staring blankly at the water stained leather wrapped about snug feet, then, just in case mouse murdering angered the Almighty, he clasped his hands together in prayer and held them aloft toward a God who was apparently loitering in the rafters. ‘..now I feel rotten,’ Wright purged. ‘I’ve probably given the rodent cancer and he’ll die a slow lungless death coughing bloody bits of his small self up on the more law abiding members of the meese community. Honest, I hadn’t planned on chemical warfare, it just sort of happened. I plead temporary insanity. I couldn’t help myself, the dark side overwhelmed and I turned vicious hairdresser.’

  Wright gazed at God in the rafters still begging forgiveness.

  ‘I couldn’t find anything else,’ he cried to the heavens, his pleas pointless as the Almighty was in Monaco gambling and womanising and not at all interested in Wright’s sordid salvation.

  .’....there was no Mr. Sheen to polish him off with, no Draino to melt his innards. There was only Kelly’s hair-spray. God, he could have been my grandfather reincarnated. Hell, the next seance is going to be full of vaporous recriminations!’ Nathan cringed, worried that the spirits would exact a harsh toll when next they met over a crystal ball and dubious belief. Pausing, he took another shallow, wheezing breath.

  ‘Maybe he’s not carcinogenic. Maybe I just slowed him down a touch ...or at worst blinded him a mite. I guess now maybe he’s one of those famous blind mice, the Stevie Wonder of cat dinner’s with a white cane and guide flea. Shit, I should’ve hit it the fucker with a tennis racket and strained it to death but oh no, I had to play Agent Orange.....now the poor little buggar’s doomed to bump into walls for the rest of his defurred days...’

  Alan got up and walked out the door. Colin snuck under his desk pretending he’d dropped something. Mark went to the toilet again. Greg was asleep in the corner.

  Wright’s public exorcism had been better received than usual. At least no-one threw tomatoes.

  ________________

  In truth Nathan was sorry. Today, the day after the event, he really did feel guilty about such a murderous effort for he did his best to live without forcing death upon anything that wasn’t deserving of it. In Wright’s book only people deserved extermination.

  And Wright’s book was full of people who deserved death.

  ________________

  The phone rang and much to every-one’s relief Wright was forced to stop prattling and start lying. It was back to business.

  ‘Of course it’s nearly finished,’ he said knowing IT wasn’t even started, IT being a two page brochure on some mindless product his client thought important and Wright thought was shit.

  From under the desk, crawling crab like out, Colin reappeared. Between two fingers, he was proudly holding aloft a twenty cent piece. It was part of the pay off he’d dropped last week when Wright had paid up after having bet Colin that he couldn’t shut up for three hours. Wright had lost the bet but considered the ten dollars well spent.

  Wright, breathing wearily down the phone, decided he had the flu.

/>   ‘It would have been finished yesterday Nik but I think I’m coming down with a virus,’ he said groaning, voice trailing off to a whimper as he tried to sound ill wondering just how gullible his audience was. ‘So I’ve had to take it easy...’ he fibbed, pinching his nostrils to imitate nasal congestion. ‘Real easy...,’ Wright snorted suddenly realising the truth of his excuse for in reality Nathan had been taking it easy since the crib. ‘My doctor warned me to take a couple of days off but I’m too busy,’ he added in a truly pathetic moan trying to illicit some sympathy.

  ‘Rubbish,’ Nicola confirmed.

  Not exactly the response he’d angled for but the one he’d expected so he was neither surprised nor shocked by her appalling lack of compassion. Unfazed, he continued plotting his demise.

  ‘Honest Nic, every-one in here’s had it and now I’ve got it...’ he whined knowing his chances of catching the flu were about as good as his catching the clap (both were excellent). Coughing a few times for effect, he awaited a response to this one. The person at the other end of the phone remained stubbornly unmoved by the fine performance so Wright tried to impress her with some truly majestic untruths. Next he said he had nervous exhaustion from overworking, claiming he was on the verge of collapse.

  ‘No, collapse not cancer!’ He said gruffly when she suggested an illness for his approval (though even he suspected he was probably lying for he had no way of knowing what was being manufactured in the black mines of his tar chest).

  ‘I’m ill from over work and I’ve caught a bug.....no, no ..not crabs, B..U...G!,’ Wright spelled it out exasperated, pissed off at the insinuation and giving some thought to changing his story, thinking about admitting to tertiary syphilis but buried the impulse for by the rules of the game no excuse was to be too outrageous (or too believable) so he was stuck with the flu which, like the common cold, he never actually got. Nicola remained sceptical so Wright blew his nose to reinforce the imagined illness, trying to talk at the same time (a difficulty rating of 5.9. The judge at the other end of the phone was harder to please and scored it a poor lie).

  She asked him what he was doing. ‘What are you doing, talking through your bum again. For god’s sake Nathan, your peculiar dialect is hard enough to decipher when it’s emanating from your mouth. If you must speak to me from between the hemispheres of your bum then at least do me the courtesy of standing up,’ she demanded. Wright frowned knowing that his greatest problem was that familiarity bred contempt - that for some implausible reason most of his clients had been around for years. God must know why Wright thought because Nathan himself couldn’t fathom why.

  ________________

  And God did know why but he/she was too busy shooting craps in Las Vegas to tell Wright who certainly didn’t; didn’t know why his clients had hung about. Why they’d stayed loyal if not terribly discerning.

  ________________

  Loyalty was a problem. His clients had kept the faith long enough to have heard it all before. This lot, the reason for him being able to buy food or entertain women, had listened to him dispense for himself, at one time or another, every medical complaint known to science (plus a few no other hypochondriac, or doctor for that matter, had even heard of). Over the years Wright had tried them all, wearing each and every sickness like some resplendent party costume until some other, more exotic bacteria, virus, mutant strain or renegade debilitator came to his attention and he’d change outfits. Discard one for another even more outrageous. He’d had malaria, small pox, gross malingering, yellow fever, violet fantasies, pink elephants and had even managed to acquire AIDS before the world woke to it. (Got First Aids. A germ genius, he was a hypochondriac test tubes ahead of his time).

  Wright was, and remained, the sickest man in the Universe (according to Wright anyway who was too ill to be honest). His clients weren’t fooled though. Just intrigued. They showed scant respect and minimal sympathy for the various ailments he claimed to be stricken by. Unyielding, they were a hard lot not easily impressed by the multitude of ills which supposedly attacked him with all the regularity of tinea (which in fact did attack him. Regularly).

  On reflection, Wright had begun to believe that the only reason his clients paid for his services was to see what new ailment he could contract during the coming week. They seemed pleased that he was so constantly ill, fascinated by his excuses so Wright played along, happy that such rampant hypochondria was such a wealth creating exercise (an ill-gotten gain so to speak).

  ________________

  Nathan had turned to illness through sheer boredom. And positive necessity after his mother had died four times, his father had passed away more times than the Messiah and he’d killed off every other relative more often than banks changed interest rates.

  Early in his career his excuses had lacked vision. Now they simply lacked a suitable vaccine. Lately things had become difficult for new and deadly strains were scarce. Due to the constancy of his complaints and the sheer volume he’d embraced, the list of anything original was dangerously diminished. He’d run out of the more exotics; the paw paw poisoning’s, the deadly nightshades, the curvatures of the spineless, the bronchial strangulations and swine fevers he’d once favoured. Now he was stuck. Suddenly he was a normal healthy human being. Now he was lumbered with illnesses of the common or garden variety. And stricken with flu.

  ________________

  Slowly typing a letter requesting she be granted a pay rise, Nikkie listened to Nathan babble on, then, with problems of her own, she interrupted his illness to tell him how badly underpaid she was, how she couldn’t afford to take her boyfriend to Sydney for a holiday and explained that the boyfriend was too poor to take her.

  Wright suggested the poor buggar take her to a galaxy far, far away so Nikkie suggested Wright find The Starship Suppository and launch it toward the black hole of his backside. Nathan laughed and told her insults were improving then advised her that renting a caravan in Brunswick was cheap; that tents were cheaper; that a holiday at home seemed her best bet.

  ‘You’re a great help,’ Nikkie groaned, sifting through the papers on her desk hunting for her bank statement.

  Wright tried again. He advised her how to solve her insolvent quandary by saying she and the boy sexcouplet could certainly afford to leap to their collective deaths from the Swanston Street Bridge in a pact of pauper passion. Nikkie told Nathan to go jump instead then grabbed the photo of the much loved boyfriend to search his face for the smile she was so fond of but his face remain implacable; a stone carving set in the gold frame that took pride of place at the edge of her small cramped desk.

  Despairingly, having located the bank balance, which was as sick Wright was, she tore the letter from the typewriter. Looking worried, she realised there was a foreboding grain of truth in some of Nathan’s advice. The boyfriend was a great fuck but a cheap bastard and she hated Brunswick, loathed caravans and didn’t want to be fired for demanding she be paid what she was worth so she chucked the request in the bin and decided to ring the boyfriend and demand that he ask for the pay rise. Sighing, staring out the window, she suddenly wished she’d chosen wealth over love like most of her girlfriends had. Nathan meanwhile was busy counting bricks again. Between rows he asked her what she was whining about and, reaching into the bottom drawer of the brown wood desk, she told him to mind his own business. With her nose on the typewriter, she dived down to rummage in there to pull out a massive paged medical dictionary then, relaxing back in the chair, began flipping through the pages hunting for some new disease Wright could try on, suddenly beginning to laugh loudly when the pages dropped open at the H’s. Nathan, losing count at 56 bricks, asked her what was so funny.

  She enlightened him. ‘Christ Nikkie you’re never going to let me forget that one are you?’ Wright smiled smugly, listening smirking as his client reminded him of his greatest blunder.

  Of the time he’d claimed to be recovering from a hysterectomy.

  ________________
>
  The Story:

  (As told by Nathan Wright to Nicola Penfold one Wednesday having been forced into fiction by the total lack of anything better to do with his brain. Pickle it Nikkie had said).

  ‘…She’d asked him why the job wasn’t finished.

  ‘I’m recovering from a hysterectomy,’ Wright stated boldly.

  She laughed for a week at this and rang all her friends and told them what the mad Wright had told her. So then they began ringing him to laugh at his ailment which forced him to invent an equally dubious explanation in defence of his error...’

  This is what he then told Nikkie:

  ‘…He said that nervous and perspiring he’d sat at the surgery awaiting an appointment with the dentist. And the dreadful drill. Sitting back, trying to look calm and unruffled but feeling about as comfortable as a heretic during the Spanish Inquisition, he told her how he’d sifted through the stacks of aging magazines that lay perennially yellow on the small teak veneer table in the waiting room. He went on to claim that he’d picked up a 1984 copy of Cleo Magazine and begun leafing through its dog ended pages until he came across a short article on Hysterectomy’s (which had, later in the article but too late for Wright, who by then was firmly strapped in a chair having a tooth chiselled, explained that this affliction was a strictly female complaint. Which was also a fair description of Wright Nikkie had interrupted).

  Wright said he’d liked the sound of it so had decided there and then to adopt the illness having, since the play pen, swallowed anti-histamines for hay fever so had naturally, phonetically assumed the complaint, because it sounded similar, was similar.