Indecent Exposure

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Do what you like with the bastard,’ Governor Schnapps told the Kommandant, ‘I’ll be glad to get him off my hands. He’s even got some of my warders wearing Maoist badges.’

  The Kommandant thanked him and went down to Isolation Cell Two where the prisoner was deep in Amos.

  ‘It says here “Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time,”’ Geisenheimer told him when the Kommandant asked if he had any complaints.

  Kommandant van Heerden looked round the cell. ‘A bit short of space in here,’ he said. ‘Not room to swing a cat.’

  ‘Yes, there is that to be said for it,’ said Geisenheimer.

  ‘Like to move to more spacious accommodation?’ the Kommandant enquired.

  ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis,’ said Geisenheimer.

  ‘Don’t you talk Kitchen Kaffir to me,’ the Kommandant yelled. ‘I asked you if you would like bigger accommodation.’

  ‘No,’ said Geisenheimer.

  ‘Why the hell not?’ asked the Kommandant.

  ‘It says here “As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.” It seems a sensible point of view.’

  Kommandant van Heerden didn’t want to take issue with Amos but he was still puzzled.

  ‘Must get a bit lonely here at times,’ he said.

  Geisenheimer shrugged.

  ‘I believe it’s a characteristic of solitary confinement,’ he said philosophically.

  The Kommandant went back to Governor Schnapps and told him that there was no doubt in his mind that Geisenheimer was out of his. That afternoon the Marxist was transferred to a ward in Fort Rapier Mental Hospital where he found eleven other beds and the complete works of Marx and Lenin kindly supplied by the confiscated books department of the Piemburg Police Station. As the Kommandant delivered them to Dr von Blimenstein he was reminded of the aversion therapy for the homosexual konstabels.

  ‘One other thing,’ he said when the doctor explained that she had had eleven suitable suicides lined up, ‘I’d be glad if you’d drop by the Drill Hall this afternoon. I want some advice about getting some queers back to normal.’

  14

  As the Kommandant drove down to the Drill Hall where Sergeant Breitenbach had assembled two hundred and ten protesting konstables, he felt pleased with the way things were turning out. Certainly there were still difficulties ahead but at least a start had been made in getting things back to normal. It would take a day or two to get the suicides ready for their arrest and the Kommandant still hadn’t made up his mind exactly how to go about it. Studying the back of Konstabel Els’ head once again he found consolation in its shape and colour. What human ingenuity and design could not accomplish in the way of destroying inconvenient evidence, Konstabel Els through chance and unthinking malice could, and the Kommandant had frequently cherished the hope that Els would include himself in the process. It seemed unlikely somehow. Chance, it appeared, favoured the Konstabel. It certainly didn’t favour those with whom he came into contact and the Kommandant had little doubt that Els would bungle the arrest of the eleven patients to an extent that would eliminate any subsequent attempts to prove them innocent.

  By the time they reached the Drill Hall Kommandant van Heerden was in a more cheerful frame of mind. The same could not be said for the two hundred and ten konstabels who were objecting to the idea of undergoing aversion therapy for the second time.

  ‘You’ve no idea what we might come out as this time, sweetie,’ one of them told Sergeant Breitenbach, ‘I mean you simply don’t know, do you?’

  Sergeant Breitenbach had to admit that in the light of what had happened previously he didn’t.

  ‘You couldn’t be worse than you are,’ he said with feeling.

  ‘I don’t know,’ simpered the konstabel, ‘we might be absolute animals.’

  ‘It’s a chance I’m prepared to take,’ said the Sergeant.

  ‘And what about us, dear? What about us? I mean it’s not much fun not knowing what you’re going to be from one moment to the next, is it? It’s upsetting, that’s what it is.’

  ‘What about all the gear we’ve bought, too?’ said another konstabel. ‘Cost a small fortune. Bras and panties and all. They won’t take it back you know.’

  Sergeant Breitenbach shuddered and was just wondering how he was ever going to get them into the hall when the Kommandant arrived and relieved him of the responsibility.

  ‘I’ll appeal to their patriotism,’ he said looking with evident distaste at Konstabel Botha’s wig. He collected a loudhailer and addressed the queers.

  ‘Men,’ he shouted. His voice, resonant with doubt, boomed out over the parade ground and into the city. ‘Men of the South African Police, I realize that the experience you have lately undergone is not one that you wish to repeat. I can only say that it is in the interest of the country as a whole that I have ordered this new treatment which will turn you back into the fine upstanding body of men you once were. This time a trained psychiatrist will supervise the treatment and there will be no balls-up.’ Loud laughter interrupted the Kommandant at this point and a particularly oafish konstabel who appeared to be wearing false eyelashes winked suggestively at him. Kommandant van Heerden, already exhausted by the swift turn of events, lost his cool.

  ‘Listen, you shower of filth,’ he screamed voicing his true opinions with an amplification that could be heard two miles away, ‘I’ve seen some arse-bandits in my time but nothing to equal you. A more disgusting lot of gobblers and moffies it’s never been my misfortune to meet. By the time I’ve finished with you I’ll have you back to fucking normal.’ He singled out the konstabel with the false eyelashes for personal abuse and was just telling him that he’d never look another sphincter in the face without coming over all queer when Dr von Blimenstein arrived and restored order. As the doctor walked slowly but significantly towards them, the konstabels fell silent and eyed her large frame with respect.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Kommandant,’ she said as the Kommandant’s blood pressure fluttered down to something approaching normal, ‘I think I’ll try a different approach.’ Kommandant van Heerden handed her the loudhailer and a moment later her dulcet tones were echoing across the parade ground.

  ‘Boys,’ said the doctor using a more appropriate epithet, ‘I want you all to think of me,’ she paused seductively, ‘as a friend, not as someone to be afraid of.’ A tremor of nervous excitation ran down the ranks. The prospect of being a friend of someone so redolent of frustrated sex, whatever its gender, obviously appealed to the konstabels. As Doctor von Blimenstein continued her talk the Kommandant turned away satisfied that everything was under control now that the doctor’s magnetic hermaphroditism was exerting its influence over the queers. He found Sergeant Breitenbach in the drill hall checking the transformer.

  ‘What a horrible woman,’ said the Sergeant. Dr von Blimenstein was telling the konstabels about the pleasures they could expect from heterosexual intercourse.

  ‘The future Mrs Verkramp,’ said the Kommandant lugubriously. ‘He’s proposed to her.’ He left the Sergeant mulling over this fresh proof of Verkramp’s insanity to deal with another problem. A deputation of ministers from the Dutch Reformed Church had arrived to add their objections to those of the konstabels.

  The Kommandant shepherded them into an office at the back of the hall and waited until Dr von Blimenstein had got her patients seated before discussing the problem with the black-coated ministers.

  ‘You have no right to tamper with man’s nature,’ the Rev Schlachbals said when the doctor arrived. ‘God has made us what we are and you are interfering with his work.’

  ‘God didn’t make all these men poofters,’ said the doctor, her language confirming the minister’s opinion that she was the instrument of the devil. ‘Man did and man must put the mistake right.’

  Kommandant van Heerden nodded in agreement. He thought she had put the case
very well. The Rev. Schlachbals clearly didn’t.

  ‘If man can turn decent young Christians into homosexuals by scientific means,’ he insisted, ‘the next step will be to turn blacks into whites and then where will we be? The whole of Western Civilization and Christianity in South Africa is at stake.’

  Kommandant van Heerden nodded again. It was obvious that the minister had a point. Dr von Blimenstein didn’t think so.

  ‘You clearly misunderstand the nature of behavioural psychology,’ she explained. ‘All we are doing is rectifying mistakes that have been made. We are not altering essential characteristics.’

  ‘You’re not trying to tell me that these young men are essentially, er … homosexual,’ said the dominie. ‘You’re impugning the moral foundations of our entire community.’

  Dr von Blimenstein refused to admit it.

  ‘What absolute nonsense,’ she said. ‘All I’m saying is that aversion therapy can exert a degree of moral pressure which nothing else can match.’

  Kommandant van Heerden, who had been giving some thought to the matter of turning blacks into whites by electric shocks, butted in to point out that if that were the case thousands of blacks would already be white.

  ‘We’re always giving them electric shocks,’ he said. ‘It’s part of our normal interrogation procedure.’

  The Rev. Schlachbals wasn’t impressed. ‘That’s quite different, punishment is good for the soul,’ he said. ‘What the doctor is doing is tampering with God’s work.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that God ordained that these konstabels should remain fairies?’ the Kommandant asked.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said the minister, ‘all I’m saying is that she has no right to use scientific means to change them. That can only be accomplished by moral effort on our part. What is needed is prayer. I shall go in to the hall and kneel down …’

  ‘You do that,’ said the Kommandant, ‘and I won’t be held responsible for what happens.’

  ‘… and pray for the forgiveness of sins,’ continued the minister.

  In the end it was agreed that the two approaches to the problem should be tried at the same time. Dr von Blimenstein would proceed with the aversion therapy while the Rev. Schlachbals conducted a religious service in the hope of affecting a spiritual conversion. The joint effort was entirely successful, though it took the Rev. Schlachbals some time to accommodate himself to the prospect of leading the congregation in ‘Rock of Ages Cleft for Me’ to the accompaniment of slides depicting nude males of both races projected twice lifesize above his head. To begin with the congregation’s singing was pretty ragged too but Dr von Blimenstein soon picked up the beat and pressed the shock button most emphatically whenever a particularly high note was called for. Strapped to their chairs, the two hundred and ten konstabels gave vent to their feelings with a fervour the minister found most rewarding.

  ‘It’s a long time since I’ve known a congregation to be so enthusiastic,’ he told the Rev. Diederichs, who took over from him after three hours.

  ‘God works in a mysterious way,’ said the Rev. Diederichs.

  *

  In Fort Rapier Aaron Geisenheimer was having much the same thought though in his case it was not so much God as the process of history whose ways were so mysterious. The arrival of eleven patients whose intelligence was proclaimed by the fact that the political situation in South Africa had prompted them all to attempt suicide without being foolish enough to succeed gave the eminent Marxist food for thought. So did the attitude of the hospital authorities, who put no obstacle in the way of his lecturing them on the intricacies of dialectical materialism but seemed anxious that he should. Mulling over this extraordinary change in his fortune he came to the conclusion that the police were anxious to obtain fresh evidence for a new trial though why they should want to increase a life sentence any further he could not imagine. Whatever their motives he decided to afford them no opportunity and resolutely refrained from discussing Communism with his new companions. Instead, to give vent to his need for conversation which had been compulsive enough before his confinement and hadn’t been improved by six years in solitary, he instructed the eleven men in Biblical history to such good effect that within a week he had rid them all of their suicidal tendencies and had turned them into convinced Christians.

  ‘Goddammit,’ snarled the Kommandant inconsequentially when Dr von Blimenstein told him that Geisenheimer wasn’t co-operating. ‘You’d think the bastard would be only too glad to poison their minds with Marxism. We can’t have twelve ardent Christians in the dock.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the doctor, ‘after all you did have the Dean of Johannesburg.’

  ‘That was different,’ the Kommandant told her, ‘he was a Communist.’ He tried to think of some way round the problem. ‘Can’t you hypnotize the swine or something?’

  Dr von Blimenstein could not see what good that would do.

  ‘Tell them to wake up Communists,’ said the Kommandant. ‘You can do anything with hypnotism. I once saw a hypnotist turn a man into a plank and sit on him.’

  Dr von Blimenstein said it was different with ideas.

  ‘You can’t make people do things that they wouldn’t want to do in their ordinary life. You can’t make them act against their own moral sense.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that bloke wanted to be a plank,’ said the Kommandant, ‘not in ordinary life anyway, and as for moral sense I should have thought your suicides have a great deal in common with Communists. All the Communists I’ve met have wanted to give the vote to the blacks and if that isn’t suicidal, tell me what is.’

  He left her with the warning that something had to be done quickly. ‘Pretoria will be sending down a team of investigators shortly and then we’ll all be in the shit,’ he said.

  *

  Later the same day he had the same trouble with the Rev. Schlachbals, this time over the introduction of nude women into the treatment for the queers.

  ‘That doctor wants to bring girls up here from the strip clubs in Durban and parade them up and down in front of the boys,’ the Rev. Schlachbals complained. ‘She says she wants to test their reactions. I won’t stand for it.’

  ‘It seems a good idea to me,’ said the Kommandant.

  The Rev. Schlachbals looked at him disapprovingly.

  ‘That is as maybe,’ he said, ‘but it’s too much for me. I’ve stood for men but naked ladies are another matter.’

  ‘Have it your own way,’ said the Kommandant. The Rev. Schlachbals blushed.

  ‘I don’t mean what you mean,’ he said and walked out.

  The Kommandant gave Dr von Blimenstein permission to go ahead with the test and later in the day several blowsy girls from Durban went through their routine in front of the konstabels while Sergeant Breitenbach went along the rows with a swagger stick making sure that everyone responded properly.

  ‘All present and erect, sir,’ he said when he had finished.

  Kommandant van Heerden thanked the doctor for her assistance and accompanied her to her car.

  ‘It’s been no trouble,’ said the doctor, ‘I found the whole experience most valuable. It’s not every woman can say she’s had such a stimulating effect on two hundred and ten men at the same time.’

  ‘Two hundred and eleven, doctor,’ said the Kommandant with unusual gallantry and left the doctor with the impression that she had made a conquest. He had just caught sight of Els who was apparently about to rape one of the chorus girls.

  ‘Amazing woman,’ said Sergeant Breitenbach, ‘I don’t envy Verkramp’s chances with her.’

  ‘That’s one marriage that wasn’t made in heaven,’ said the Kommandant.

  *

  At White Ladies Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon had come to much the same conclusion about her own marriage to the Colonel. Ever since her brief taste of happiness in the dell, her thoughts had turned again and again to the Kommandant. So had the Colonel’s.

  ‘Damned man comes here, ruins my best r
oses, flogs an expensive horse to death, pollutes a tank of tropical fish, poisons poor Willy and finally goes off with a damned good whipper-in,’ he said irritably.

  ‘I had rather a soft spot for Harbinger,’ said La Marquise tenderly.

  For the most part though, the Kommandant’s visit was forgotten and the brief glimpse of fearful reality his presence had given to the members of the Dornford Yates Club lent a new and frenetic gaiety to their efforts to revoke the past. They drove over to Swaziland to gamble at the casino at Piggs Peak in memory of Berry’s great coup at San Sebastian in Jonah & Co. where he had won four thousand nine hundred and ninety-five pounds. Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon lost forty before giving up and driving home through a thunderstorm trying to maintain an insouciance he didn’t feel. They went racing but again without luck. The Colonel made a point of backing only black horses in memory of Chaka.