going to be fine. They say there’s no cure for the pandemic. But I reckon I’ve found one.”
“Really, Julian?” I said, sitting down.
He paused to sniff some sort of inhaler. “I’ve taken control of my life. I don’t eat bad food any more. That’s why I got ill before—you know. I treated my body like a rubbish bin. God, why did I hate it so much? I do my exercises. And I’ve become a Buddhist.” I noticed, in a corner of the room, a low table with a statue and candles. “I meditate. I picture my body being healthy and fit. And it’s working. Isn’t it, Angie?”
His nurse, had entered the room. She smiled but gave me a knowing look.
“Well, you certainly look better than you did when you came in and no mistake.” Angie checked his pulse. I didn’t know what the exact nature of his condition was—it wasn’t polite to ask and he hadn’t told me. “I really hope it works, Julian. I’ll be rooting for you.”
“You were here yesterday. Has your aunt got you on the payroll?”
I laughed. “No, I’ve brought someone in. A rather special patient.”
His eyebrows lifted and he tried to prop himself up on one elbow but failed. “Really? Do tell…”
I stood up. “Later, Julian. I have to be sure he survives the night first. I’ll be back soon, OK? I just popped in to check on you.” I pecked his forehead and smelt his aroma of stale apricots. “Take care now.”
As I left, I bumped into a boy in the corridor. As soon as he saw me he blinked his eyes and opened his mouth. A roll of paper fed out along his tongue and a photograph materialised on it. He handed me the photo. “See you around,” he said and walked off.
I looked at the picture. It was me: with a huge bleached out nose and rabbit eyes. Did I feel as scared as I looked?
I passed Maeve’s room. She was a thirteen-year-old in a bed specially engineered to accommodate the electronic keyboard that extended from her arms and fingertips. She smiled weakly at me as a nurse gave her a painkiller.
I started as someone pounced on me from behind. “Hello, kid!” It was Cheri. Steel-grey bouquet of hair, piercing grey eyes, tall, and dressed in a new version of her customary blue linen trousers and matching jacket that I thought made her look like a cleaner. She took my arm and steered me down a well-lit corridor bustling with staff and visitors towards her office. “You’ve picked a right one there, haven’t you?” she said.
“What do you mean? How’s Johnny?” I asked.
“Asleep. We’ve put him in Elton John Ward. He’s going to be in la-la land for a very long time if you ask me. Mon dieu, he’s been living on the edge for so long he doesn’t know which way is up.”
“But will he be OK?”
“Not sure yet. He has multiple infections. We’ve put him on the standard course of antibiotics and Stabil-O-Gene. Now we wait for the test results to come in. Here.” She ushered me into her office, which, although she was the director of the hospice, looked much like all the others. “Come and sit down. You look pretty wired yourself.”
“I’m OK.” Cheri’s desk was covered with paperwork. Two monitors blinked. There were flowering plants.
“You picked him because…”
“Er…” I felt put on the spot. “He’s unknown to the authorities and he appears to be a computer genius.”
“And now you’ve met him?”
“He’s…not what I expected. Younger, and more insecure than I thought.”
“Yes. Will you still ask him?”
“Why? Do you think I shouldn’t?”
Cheri pretended to sort through a few papers in a pile. “We agreed to do this, or rather I agreed to your suggestion. We’ve brought him in and now we are responsible for him.”
I hadn’t quite thought of it like that, but it was true. Before, Johnny was a free agent. Because of me his life had been changed forever. “But he couldn’t have gone on living that way. He was lucky he wasn’t at home when that gang attacked his room.”
“Go home, darling,” Cheri said tenderly. “Come back tomorrow. He’ll sleep for eighteen hours at least.”
I could tell I was being dismissed; the great director was busy.
“And not a word to your papa, OK?” she said. I hated it when she was still my aunt.
On the way out, I saw a Gene Police wagon parked round the corner. It followed our 4x4 as we headed back to Docklands. It gave up as we entered the gated area. Maybe it was just there for our protection.
But I doubted it.
5. Playing with the Rhinoceros
In this dream I’m being chased by a rhinoceros around my parents’ garden. I don’t know how old I am.
It begins after the rhinoceros and I have been together in the garden for a while. Suddenly the rhinoceros takes a dislike to me; I can see the change in its eyes. It fixes me with a stare that sees right through to the guilty core of my soul that I thought I was able to keep hidden from everybody. But with its single horn it has successfully probed through my layers of protection, torn the veils of illusion I carefully hung up, tossed aside the blankets of lies I’ve spread and pierced the many masks of normalcy I’ve spent years laying down. And it’s done this so casually and quickly that I’m defenceless.
So the rhinoceros is charging at me and I’m looking around for somewhere to avoid it. I dodge round the pampas grass and the yucca plant, still in flower, but my muscles are damaged and I can’t jump or somersault over the wall. I forget the narrow passage down the side of the house through which I could escape since it’s too tight for the rhinoceros. I fail to spot the rain butt and how I could leap on it and shin up the drainpipe on to the roof of the rear extension. And so I’m powerless to escape from the path of the charging rhinoceros with its unblinking eyes permanently locked on to mine.
This being a dream, the rhinoceros never impacts upon me. I never feel the splintering contact of the first or even the second horn.
Instead, just before the moment of connection, the dream cuts back as if in a loop to the beginning, and here I am hanging out with the rhinoceros again, in the same garden, on the suburban lawn, with the low wall and the pampas and yucca. But this time I know that the rhinoceros is soon going to realise how guilty I am deep inside, and then bristle with immense dislike, work up a head of steam beneath the metallic sheen of its armoured hide and finally launch its attack. Again, I am completely unable to do anything about it.
There’s that look in its eyes again, that timeless stare of cold hatred and judgement, a moment strung out for eternity when we both know what’s going to happen next. But I can’t move until the rhinoceros moves, and then it does, and I’m trying to make my body work, but it won’t, limping, tumbling over the low wall, falling to the right. None of it works, the rhinoceros looms larger and larger and…
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