“What’s bugging me? Apart from your screeching? Well, it seems that my world has just imploded.”
“Cool. You can bond with Ig!”
“I’d rather bond with a wet fungus.”
“That could work.”
“So, yeah. Things aren’t so hot today. And they’re gonna get even less hot tomorrow, I suspect. By the end of the week, they’re going to be, like, luke-freezing.”
“What’s up?”
“Seems they’ve determined that I need, uh, Professional Help.”
“Like a sports doctor?”
“No. More like a brain surgeon. Who works with a fork.”
“That does sound unpleasant.”
“Actually, I don’t know what it means. ‘Professional Help.’ I just know that I don’t want any.”
“Can’t you turn it down?”
“Apparently not.”
“What would happen?”
“Good question. Something very, very bad, I take it.”
“Why don’t you try?”
“Because I don’t want to experience something very, very bad.”
Harry thought about this. “Good point.” He thought further. “Hm … maybe I can help.”
“You’re gonna help? I’m already getting Professional Help.”
“I mean, maybe I can help you get out of this help thing.”
“That would be helpful.”
“Dunno what I could do. But I’ll think about it. I could maybe enlist some of the guys.”
“What, to think with you? The brains on this floor—even when they try really hard—produce things that look more like, I dunno, mushrooms than thoughts.”
“What’s with you and fungus today?”
“I think it’s the basement. The bonny fragrance of mildew. That is mildew, isn’t it?”
“Nobody’s ever identified the smell.”
“Charming. Anyway, Harry, I really appreciate your concern. And if you can figure out a way to help, however useless—hey, I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“I’ll give it the old school try, Munce. Catch you later.” And with that he returned to his locker, howled briefly for effect, and shut the door.
The only thing Milrose Munce hated more than a dead jock was a live jock. These too would congregate in the basement, snuffling and grunting like a penned herd of bison.
You would think they would loathe Milrose Munce as much as he loathed them, but—unlike the dead jocks, who were resentful in general—the living jocks had a perverse respect for him. Milrose made such a point of not being athletic that they regarded him as an interesting mystery. Milrose, for instance, would be incensed if he were not chosen last to play on a team. Once he had been chosen second-last for a game of baseball, and he had thrown a dramatic tantrum, breaking a bat in the process. It was all for show, of course—Milrose was not the tantrumic type—but it was a very good show.
None of the living jocks now snapping at each other with wet towels would think to snap one of their wet towels at Milrose, for fear that he’d do something, well, odd.
“Munce! You gonna join us for some rugby?”
“What’s rugby?”
“You’re joking, right, Munce?”
“Uh, no. When I joke, people melt with laughter. I was asking a question.”
“Munce doesn’t know what rugby is!”
“What about rugger, Munce? Ever heard of rugger?”
“Somebody who makes rugs?”
“Munce thinks rugger is a guy who makes rugs!”
One of the more helpful jocks was about to go into a long disquisition regarding rugby, its rules and traditions, its fans and foibles, when Milrose sneezed so violently that conversation stopped, for fear he might have broken something inside of his head. This sneeze was a pre-emptive strike: he knew very well what rugby was, and had no desire to learn it again.
“You okay, Munce?”
“Think I broke something inside of my head.”
“Oh man. Bubba, call the sports doctor.”
“Just kidding. I’m fine. Hey, any of you guys ever needed … Professional Help?”
“You mean an outside trainer?”
“No, idiot. He means a physical therapist.”
“Actually, forget it …”
One linebacker, Sledge, was staring at Milrose with something approaching concentration. “You mean, like, Professional Help?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“I had some.”
Sledge was only human in the loosest sense of the word. He had muscles that would have been far more appropriate in the wilds of Borneo; he had a neck like a squat Ionic column; and he had a very, very low forehead—so low that his hair seemed almost to grow out of his eyeballs. His nose had been broken so many times that it was more like a doorknob, and Milrose wondered whether, by turning that nose, the jock’s face might open to reveal the walnut-sized brain behind. He decided not to try: Sledge’s other chief feature was a psychotic stare, accompanied fairly often by psychotic behaviour.
“Yeah. They gave me Professional Help. Din’t help.”
“Er, what precisely did they do?”
Sledge’s face screwed up in a dull approximation of fear, as if in response to a dull but frightening memory, and he made a low, incoherent noise. He began to move towards Milrose, in the purposeful, automatic way that Milrose associated with homicidal robots, and it seemed best to cut the conversation short.
“Great talking to you, Sledge. As always. Been a pleasure. Gotta go.”
CHAPTER
THREE
“MY SON DOESN’T NEED PROFESSIONAL HELP!”
“Would you prefer he had Unprofessional Help?”
The father of Milrose Munce, whose name was (unfortunately) Mortimer Munce, was stymied by this response. “Well, no.”
“There you go. So Professional Help it is.”
“What if he requires no help at all?”
“Then he will be helpless.”
Mortimer Munce, who was less talented than his son in the art of the quick response, was quite silenced by this argument.
And so the father of Milrose Munce signed the papers, which had been laid out on the kitchen table by Mr. Loosten. Papers that said many inscrutable things, but which amounted to a very simple concept: his son was now in Helping Hands, whose iron grasp it was now beyond both Mortimer and Milrose to loosen. Mr. Loosten confirmed as much.
When Milrose arrived home, some minutes after this momentous signing, he found the guidance counsellor—who had put on a special beige polyester suit for the occasion—half sitting on the kitchen table, with one foot on the floor and the other swinging joyously.
“Mr. Loosten.”
“Milrose.”
“To what do I owe this modest honour?”
“A simple bureaucratic necessity. All done. Nothing need concern you.”
“But I am concerned.”
“It’s no concern of yours.”
“It is as far as I’m concerned.”
“Mr. Loosten here has just had me sign some papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
The guidance counsellor hastily gathered up the documents. He placed them in his briefcase as Milrose repeated his question: “What specific type of papers are we talking here?”
“Well, according to Mr. Loosten, it was necessary that I sign a few documents before you could receive the Help which you require.”
“Whoa. Dad. You just signed my life away?”
“Well, it wasn’t put to me in precisely those terms.”
“You just sold me down the river? What were you thinking?”
Mr. Loosten smiled his usual smile of benevolent condescension. “Now, Milrose. Let’s not be dramatic.”
“Hang on. You mean if Dad hadn’t signed these papers, I would have been free?”
“Let’s not concentrate on the past. It’s the future which we’re now looking forward to!”
“That’
s not the past. It’s ten minutes ago!”
“The past ten minutes. Have passed.” Mr. Loosten tucked his briefcase under his arm, in a suspiciously protective manner, and waddled with great speed to the door. “Great to see you, Milrose. Mortimer, thank you for your time.”
“Dad, I think you just destroyed my life.”
Mr. Munce scratched his head, depressed, wondering whether this were true.
Milrose wandered the house all afternoon in despair. Well, the closest thing to despair that Milrose could muster, which was annoyance. The only way to cure annoyance, Milrose felt, was to annoy somebody else even more. So he decided that it might be a good plan to hang around the kitchen while his mother prepared dinner, and to pepper her with irritating questions.
“Mom, why the deuce did you call me Milrose?”
“Please do not use that word in front of me.”
“I’d rather not. But it’s my name, and it’s your fault.”
“I meant the word ‘deuce.’”
“Oh. Is it a bad word?”
“I’m not sure. But I suspect it probably was, once.”
“Uh, okay. Terribly sorry, et cetera. But why my deuced name?”
“Your father and I decided on Milrose for … certain reasons.”
“Which are?”
“Reasonable.”
She was a maddening woman, his mother, although he loved her, of course: she had perfected a form of stubbornness so subtle that it could barely be perceived. If she did not want to do something, she would simply become slightly absent, and no amount of pressure could make her present.
It was something that only occasionally bothered Milrose, his first name. “Munce” was more of a problem, what with its possible variations: Dunce, Monkey, Muncemeat. And his mother had never had much choice in that one—although perhaps she might have married someone else.
“Milrose,” on the other hand, was simply a bit peculiar, and potentially a girl’s name. This last problem did not bother him as much as it would have most young males. Milrose was in fact a touch less masculine than many other boys. He had delicate features and longish dark hair, and his intelligent eyes were filled with empathy, warmth, and sarcasm. Rather than sinewy, he could be described as willowy (if you were generous); Milrose had definitely been gifted with brains over brute brawn. He carried these features well, however, and many lunkheaded football captains were truly annoyed to find that some girls found Milrose Munce more attractive than hyper-trophic morons.
No, his problem with the name Milrose was more a question of balance. If your last name is Munce—a weird name, at best—then your first name should be something like Jeff, or Douglas. Something solid and uninspired. If your last name is Smith, certainly, by all means pair it with Milrose.
Still, his mother seemed to have had her reasons for this graceless combination, and he wasn’t about to elicit them. He rubbed the side of his nose in silence, trying to think of another annoying question.
“So what’s for dinner?”
“Food,” said his mother. “Followed by dessert.”
Milrose stared at her with admiration. His mother was one of the few people on the planet with an even greater gift for sarcasm than his own.
“Isn’t dessert a kind of food?”
“Not this dessert. I’ve decided to poison you.”
“Mm. Will it at least taste good?”
“For a minute. And then you will fall into it, face first.”
“Are you sure you want to murder your only son?”
“Quite sure, darling. Would you set the table, please?”
As he set the table, Milrose realized that his mother had succeeded in cheering him up. All of those mothers out there who read books by specialists—witless books about how to bring up perfect children—probably never threatened to poison their offspring. His mother, on the other hand, never read these books—and in fact held them in contempt—as a result of which she knew how to make him happy when he was annoyed.
Dinner was indeed food. His mother had baked lasagna, something she did surprisingly well, given that nobody in the family had an ounce of Italian blood and she had never been to Italy.
“The lasagna’s great,” said Mr. Munce, his mouth still full of lasagna.
“Don’t speak with your mouth full, Dad,” said Milrose.
“Please don’t tell your father what to do,” said his mother. “And Mortimer, please don’t speak with your mouth full.”
They avoided the topic of Help over dinner. It was not an appetizing subject, and neither Milrose nor his father had yet revealed the situation to Mrs. Munce. Both of them, however, thought about it a great deal as they polished off the lasagna.
Milrose was feeling increasingly unnerved—anything that required his father to sign legal papers was probably very serious indeed. Did those papers perhaps relieve the school of responsibility if Milrose were, for instance, horribly maimed in the process of Help? This was the kind of legal paper that Milrose enjoyed, in general, but not when it applied to him. Did the papers perhaps consign him to decades of slavery in the basement of the school? This seemed less likely, but who knew, given that neither he nor his father had read them. Perhaps the papers stipulated that Milrose would have to donate all of his organs to science. Next week.
The vibrant, baroque imagination of Milrose Munce produced numerous variations on this, until he had pretty much exhausted all of the unspeakable possibilities suggested by those papers. At which point dessert was served.
Dessert was not poisonous. His mother had been lying. Dessert was in fact a substance that Milrose valued even more highly than rubidium: lemon meringue pie. He gazed at his mother lovingly. Her intuition was such that she always knew when it was necessary to blindside her son with a massive slice of his favourite stuff.
For some hours after dinner, Milrose wandered about in a joyous lemon meringue haze, but the effects wore off as bedtime approached. By the time he was ready to go to sleep, he was once again obsessing about Help, and dreading the thought of school the next day.
With a heart heavy with annoyance, Milrose set out for school in the morning. The walk was short, especially if you disregarded the signs trying to dissuade you from taking the shortcut along the railway tracks, and as Milrose almost always took this route, he had regular encounters with Severed Sue.
Severed Sue was a not-very-bright young phantom who, when alive, had been wearing headphones while sauntering down the track, and had thought the screeching approach of the train was simply part of the music she was enjoying, until she ceased to enjoy it.
“Hola, Sue,” said Milrose to his friend—a friend who came in two very distinct parts, separated by a thin rail’s width of air. He tried to disguise his leaden mood.
“Hey, Milrose!” said the half of Sue that contained a mouth.
“What are you up to today?”
“Not much. Thought I’d just watch the trains, you know, go by.”
“You do that a lot, I’ve noticed.”
“Yup. Never gets boring.”
“Excellent.”
It was a general truth that ghosts would not stray too far from one place. Often this was the place where they had died, but sometimes it was a favourite area they had chosen to haunt. Milrose had strained to understand this—“Don’t you guys like to travel?”—but for whatever reason, most of his friends preferred to stay completely put. This was doubly perplexing to Milrose, given your average ghoul’s power of wafting. A ghost could waft great distances with little effort, and if Milrose had been able to do this himself, he would have wafted to the beaches of Mexico during long weekends. Perhaps you really do become lazy when you’re dead, thought Milrose.
He rarely gave much thought to his ability to see and converse with ghosts; it was something he had always done, and it seemed quite ordinary to him. From his perspective, however, he was not odd: the rest of the world was weirdly blind.
Once, when he was very young, he had shared with
his kindergarten teacher his excitement over making a new dead friend; her response had been so disappointing that he had never tried this again. His teacher had pretended to be excited as well, but Milrose understood immediately that she was merely humouring him. She kept praising his “imagination,” and it was obvious, even to a young boy, that he was being accused of making things up. And so he had kept this rare faculty to himself. Or so he had thought. Clearly, he had not been careful enough.
During biology class, despite Kelvin’s antics, Milrose Munce could not be cheered. He was as blue as the flesh of Kelvin’s forehead. And his chilly friend did his very best: he dipped his finger into Mr. Shorten’s coffee between sips, so that the drink went instantly from nicely hot to disgustingly cold. But even the sight of Mr. Shorten spluttering decaf across his desk was not sufficient to lift the spirits of Milrose Munce.
Kelvin enlisted Stuck Stu, who also put on his finest show: he sent off torn bits of himself, one at a time, and a particularly gruesome piece of flesh hung quivering from the tip of Mr. Shorten’s nose—but Milrose would not so much as smile.
No, there was no consoling Milrose Munce. A great doom hung upon him, like a wet lab coat.
Milrose had, thus far, assumed that his Help was to be imposed on school grounds, but he had no idea where in that building something as terrible as Professional Help might be inflicted. Surely a special chamber would have to be outfitted? Or a pit lined with soundproofing materials? Milrose had been everywhere in the school, or so he thought, and had never encountered anything remotely like such a place.
Nor did he have any sense of when this process was destined to begin. Would he be given some warning? Or would he suddenly find himself caught in the vise-like grip of a Helping Hand, to be dragged off and improved?
These were the thoughts that consumed Milrose Munce, as he walked with leaden steps down the usually hospitable hall.
It did not help that his next class, Our Natural World, required him to spend an hour on the second floor, among dire dead dilettantes. And the hallway on this floor was unusually pungent today. It smelled, in fact, a bit like a funeral home. A botany experiment had gone wrong in room 212 just after lunch and had introduced a storm of pollen into the environment; the stuff was clustering in corners like yellow dust bunnies, or drifting like tumbleweeds over the sneakers of sneezing students. Milrose assumed that this must be the cause of the overwhelming scent. He was wrong.
Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help Page 4
