The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(8)

“Dr August,” he said with a shimmering smile, “you’re ill. You are in no fit state to practise, least of all on yourself.”

“I want you to call my wife,” I replied firmly. “She has a legal say in what you do to me. I refuse to take phenothiazines, and if you are going to force me to take them, then you have to get permission from next of kin. She is my next of kin.”

“As I understand it, Dr August, she is partially responsible for suggesting your confinement and care.”

“She knows good medicine from bad,” I corrected. “Call her.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Don’t consider it, Dr Abel,” I replied. “Just do it.”


To this day I don’t know if he called her.

Personally, I doubt it.

When they gave me the first dose of the drug, they tried to do it discreetly. They sent Clara Watkins, who looked so innocent and had such a malicious pleasure in her job, with a tray containing the usual pills–which I palmed–and a needle.

“Now now, Harry,” she chided when she saw my face. “This is good for you.”

“What is it?” I demanded, already suspecting.

“It’s medicine!” she sang out brightly. “You love to take your medicine, don’t you?”

Ugly Bill was at the back of the room, his eyes fixed on me. His presence confirmed my suspicions–he was already waiting to strike. I said, “I demand to see a legal consent form, signed by my next of kin.”

“You just do that,” she said, grabbing at my sleeve, which I pulled away.

“I demand a lawyer, fair representation.”

“This ain’t no prison, Harry!” she replied brightly, waggling her eyebrows at Ugly Bill. “There’s no lawyers here.”

“I have a right to a second opinion!”

“Dr Abel is just doing what’s best for you Why be difficult about that? Now, Harry…”

At these words Ugly Bill grabbed me in a bear hug from behind and, not for the first time, I wondered why in over two hundred years I’d never got round to learning some form of martial art. He was an ex-con who found being a nurse at an asylum just like prison but better. He worked out in the private garden of the house, an hour every day, and took steroids that caused his brow to perpetually glisten with sweat and, I suspected, a shrinking in his testicles that he compensated for by taking more exercise and of course, more steroids. Whatever the state of his gonads, his arms were thicker than my thighs, and wrapped themselves around me tight enough to pull me from my chair, feet kicking uselessly at nothing.

“No,” I begged. “Please don’t do this please please don’t…”

Clara slapped the skin on my elbow to bring a reddish flush to the surface and then managed to miss the vein entirely. I kicked and Ugly Bill squeezed harder so that heat rose to my eyes and wool filled my brain. I felt the needle go in, but not come out, and then they dropped me to the floor and told me to be,

“Not so silly, Harry! Why do you always have to be so silly about things what are good for you?”

They left me there, sat on my own sprawling knees, waiting for it to happen. My mind raced as I tried to think of an easily available chemical antidote to the poison currently slipping through my system, but I had only been a doctor in one life and hadn’t yet had time to investigate these modern drugs. I crawled across the floor on my hands and knees to the water jug and drank the whole thing down, then lay on my back in the middle of the room and tried to slow my breathing, slow my pulse and respiration, in a futile attempt to limit the circulation of the drug. It occurred to me that I should make some attempt to monitor my own symptoms so I swivelled round on the floor to keep the clock in sight, noting the time. After ten minutes I felt a little light-headed, but that passed. After fifteen I realised that my feet were on the other side of the world, that someone had sawed me in half but left the nerves still attached, even though the bones were broken and now my feet belonged to someone else. I knew that this could not possibly be so, and yet processed the fact that it quite clearly was with a resignation that dared not fight the simple truth of my predicament.

The Twitch came and stood over me and said,

“Whatcha doing?”

I didn’t think she needed an answer, so didn’t give one.

There was saliva rolling down one side of my face. I rather enjoyed it, the coldness of the spit on the hotness of my skin.

“Whatcha doing whatcha doing whatcha doing?” she shrieked, and I wondered if they’d heard of adrenergic agonists in Northumbria, or if they were a thing that was yet to come.

She shook me and then went away but was clearly still leaving something behind because I kept on shaking, head banging against the floor, and I knew I had wetted myself but that was OK too, interesting and different like the saliva, the way it was all the same temperature as me until it dried and began to sting, and besides that was a long way away and then Ugly Bill was there and his face had been destroyed. It had been broken against the ceiling above my head like a ripe tomato, the skull smashed in and only a nose, two eyes and leering mouth left in the swimming remnants of blood and dripping brain that surrounded it, and as he leaned over me, bits of his cerebellum dripped round his cheek and rolled to the corner of his mouth and formed a tear of grey-pink matter that hung off his bottom lip and then fell, like mashed apple from a baby’s spoon, straight on to my face, and I screamed and screamed and screamed until he strangled me and I didn’t scream any more.