The Nemophile (5)

“Want some tea?”

Suzie made herself at home, whilst Gregory relearned the art of making the tea he had just offered.

“Hadn’t you better ring her?” she said, idly looking through the parlour window at the empty street.

“Ring who?” came the voice from the kitchen.

Suzie scratched the back of her neck. “Scat!” she said absentmindedly - more to herself than anything else. “Your Mum … to tell her that you’re out of hospital.”

“Oh … yes, I suppose I’d better. Not that she ever cared about me. She never visited. But you say I was only in for three days? Hmmm. But I don’t know her number since she moved.”

“Try her mobile. She won’t have changed that. She’s had the same mobile through six husbands!” Suzie laughed. “Anyway, how are you really? Got rid of the gremlins?”

The word ‘gremlins’ was a euphemism for Dream Sickness, a plague of which had only recently been taken under control by the authorities. The difficulty was to trust that the doctors weren’t under its influence themselves because different forms of the complaint would have caused them to practice equally different methods of treating it. Now the plague was effectively under control, indeed almost one hundred per cent eradicated, anyone claiming to be suffering from it was immediately branded a malingerer or simply work-shy. Gregory was one of the very last patients credited with the validity of the sickness. In various forms, it had different names, most of which Gregory had now forgotten or been forced to forget as part of the treatment. It was still unclear if any form of the sickness was indeed just another way of saying it was a perception of it by someone who was also suffering from it (or not). The names were merely labels of convenience whatever the setting. Once one started studying these factors and sorting them out into the carrel's correct pigeon-holes, the hazier became the task itself that had started so clearly. Even writing about these factors at all made them worse. One started with a clear mind - but such clarity laid bare the implications of the sickness which in turn radiated back to the clear mind that one tried to remember as the one you had started off with before commencing the analysis with a subsequent confident hope of future synthesis … thus making even the earlier conversation about tea, mobiles and mothers just a misty memory from another world.

Gregory picked up the phone and dialed the number he found in a notebook as being for his Mum’s mobile. A man’s voice answered: “Yes?” There was a background noise of children shouting in play.

“Is Mum there?”

Suzie stared meaninglessly upon the tea’s meniscus as if scrying it for omens, whilst Gregory held the phone away from his ear: his turn for staring … in disbelief. The clatter of wooden wheels outside the house filled the empty hot street with a sign of the Weirdmonger’s return. A wind-ballooning canvas zeppelin marked with signs of a circus… followed by a troop of clowns dressed in advertising sandwich-boards each bearing a single truth.

Suzie shrugged off what was hugging her like a winter coat.

Gregory, in turn, shook his head as he emerged from his own misty memory. He stared at Suzie. “Yes, I’d better ring my Mum. She may have my bank book.”

CONTINUED HERE.

==================