Anne’s vibrator broke down and so did Anne.
“Why now?,” she gasped at the point of orgasm.
“Perhaps it’s the batteries again,” said her lover and second in command at the mental health unit whose name was Pippi.
“What mischief shall we get up to today?,” asked Pippi.
“I have my idee fixe as you know,” laughed the unattractive Anne, her ugly soul the source of her problem. “That Nathan, I mean who would mention circumcision three times in their social media and not expect it to be written up in their file as some sort of obsession. How I hate him and his sense of entitlement.”
She slipped on her glasses to hide her red nose from two bottles of white a night and reminded herself not to smile.
“I’m going to humiliate him too,” said Pippi: “He thought I had fat legs.”
“I know, let’s make it like he’s committed a murder! I’ve already started a course of Lithium. He should be feeling like shit and now be open to suggestion. Ahem, I will say to the board in three months time and he can stay another two months… Entitled middle class faggot.”
“What about when he came in? I introduced myself as you,” said PIppi, smiling as she put down the dead vibrator. “See him try to explain that one!”
“I love that one, trips them up every time!”
And the two of them cackled. Anne was a horrid fifty and Pippi only thirty and having been unable to attract men in the hope of spawning something she had turned to Anne.
Nathan woke up feeling like shit as he knew someone had beaten him to the television to watch trucks crossing blizzards or something and the fact that more Lithium was on its way. He couldn’t sleep and had asked for a Temazepam but was told he was better off having some warm milk and counting sheep.
The previous day he had been manhandled by two burly male nurses or orderlies who were both twice the size of him after some punk kept annoying him and Nathan jokingly pulled out an ear phone plug from his left ear. The kid had smiled and then called the police. Nathan thought the punk was reading his thoughts and listening to an audio book of Nathan’s novel which had never been published. It was the lack of royalties that hurt more than the accolades.
It wasn’t long before Nurse Ratshit turned up with the Lithium and a cocktail of other tablets. Nurse Ratshit had worked there for a long time with her dyed blonde hair and glasses at fifty five. Nathan thought she had two sons in the mental health unit from two different fathers who she kept there for free board and rent and to cure them of their Oedipal complaints one of which had manifested itself in a three two litre bottles of sugary cola a day. The other one felt guilty about wanking with his mate.
Not that the word Oedipal ever came into it as the association of ideas and people created an interesting world in what was the most mundane and boring of places.
Nathan was trying to piece together the last couple of days in the unit. Apparently, there had been a party in the courtyard while he was out of it…
“You killed somebody…” while someone else said: “You anally raped somebody…” Nathan chose to believe that he had killed somebody as the word had come from another laughing punk in the next bed. Nathan wondered what he was talking about really. He couldn’t remember killing anybody and felt no associated guilt and wondered if this was one of the lucky things about being able to call yourself a cuckoo. Or the curse of the cuckoo? Hillside Cuckoos of Hillside Hospital.
As for Lithium, it was known to kill you one way or the other, the effect as a treatment only took a few minutes after Nathan swallowed the tablets. There was a sense of physical and then spiritual pain which seemed to emanate towards the heart which it is said it destroys as well. Most cuckoos knew about the drugs they were on even if they were blowing the side effects out of all proportion.
Anne got to her contraption which was in a room where Nathan could see her back as she faced a screen with various monitors of squiggly lines and numbers on it. The machine, Nathan had worked out, picked up and could read his thoughts… everything he said in his head could be picked up by Anne… WHY? Was he really a part of some worldwide conspiracy where NASA had recorded the times of his baths at his grandparents, where the twenty dollar watch he picked up at Woolworths was really a NASA timepiece that was monitoring him and would signal him whenever someone said something detrimental or was it just beeping on the hour every hour?
Anyway, Anne’s contraption was part of the new treatment and the same was probably happening for all the other patients. But Nathan felt the focus was on him that day.
“You genius, Mal Sextant,” thought Anne when she received the device: “Every person that’s crossed me shall pay, every man and his dog.”
Sextant had installed the equipment and with it went the last remnant of Anne’s sanity, not that she was much of a human being anyway as you must have gathered.
Nurse Ratshit knocked on the door.
“Nathan took his Lithium … I was sure to give him an extra dose,” and she then laughed one of those carefree laughs; half knowing, fully superior as they knew they had the mental Act on their side.
“He’s going to be wondering what the hell is wrong with himself,” smiled Anne, the coffee and tea stains on her teeth making her all the more attractive.
“We’re implanting the murder. I told my son to tell Nathan he killed someone. Talk about fucking gullible. He should have the full picture by the end of the day.”
“The word’s paranoid. Not gullible. What do you think we’re running here?… Ha ha The full picture. Good old Mr Movies, I’ll get him and his cut knob,” she thought nastily as Nurse Ratshit left and shut the door behind her and left her alone to her plot and her plan to make Nathan totally kaput… Then she and Pippi would be spoken of in high circles, perhaps she would date a Nobel laureate with long blonde hair and one of her papers might be published, maybe even two… Then she and Pippi would eat Indian with pappadum like they always did, maybe a butter chicken … What will I have for lunch, that wrap in the canteen was awful yesterday?… I have a hospital to run … Yes, give me two days and Nathan will be kaput. Especially on this dose. No-one cared about him; his family had abandoned him and as for his friends… Ha!
Who needs friends when you’ve got someone like Anne.
And that is my credo; I help the mentally ill get over that hump like a funeral director helps the dead get over things, thought Anne. And he would be dead; dead to society, dead to his family, dead even to himself. Let’s make sure he knows he killed and this will fry his brain forever.
Anne pressed a button. Yes, and she rubbed her hands together.
Nathan felt the Lithium in his brain and in his blood. It was not going to be in his soul. Things weren’t that bad, he’s made up his mind that the local film corporation was going to make a two hour film of his novel and there would be a four hour director’s cut. It was these thoughts which kept his soul pure and clean, he thought. He had interviewed the director and he had done a good job apparently… But this pain, it was though you could not sleep with things repeating in your mind, and the pain in your heart, it was like it was turning to stone. He had to get out of the unit since his sanity was at stake.
As the day progressed, Nathan from various patients in the unit, got a picture of how he had killed someone the previous evening or the night before. There was no exact date except that these events had happened. There had been a BBQ, a summer one, and the champagne flowed.
The patients were gay, to use a word in the old sense in that I mean they were happy and there was a feeling that, if they weren’t going to get released, they could get leave anytime and go to the pub and get pissed and stoned anyway.
It was some sort of throng of psychobabble and Nathan really knew nobody. Each had their own group of friends and then the rest of them were speaking to each other on the psychic level or trying to influence what the others were doing psychically … this as well as fighting and having sex in their minds with each other. They did it half the night anyway as they lay in bed after the lights were out … If you know what I mean. If you don’t, it really doesn’t matter for a crime was committed at that barby and Nathan apparently committed it!
Music was playing and there was dancing and laughter. Nathan could see a young girl of about fifteen with Down’s syndrome in the middle of the party and she was dancing. For some reason Nathan started dancing with her and then went and stood behind her. It was then that he twisted her neck right round in a snapping motion until unfortunately she was dead. From all the gossip around the unit, this is what Nathan worked out what happened.
“I have him, he will be permanently insane and incapacitated and I hope incontinent,” said Anne to herself watching Nathan sit in a chair and mull over the events all the while listening in on his thoughts on the audio mode of the contraption. “He will never write that insane blog again. Fancy calling himself an intellectual, ineffectual is more like… He’ll be lucky if he can spell again,” said Anne to herself in front of the screen almost to the point of seat wetness.
It turned her on. Her first husband never turned her on, neither did Pippi really but this type of thing; watching a person actually lose the ability to think when they came in sane, then see them lose their faculties on drugs until she rebuilt them into one of her Super Eunuchs. That was pleasure, that was professionalism and that’s what it meant to be head of Hillside Hospital as a doctor of psychiatry.
She looked at Nathan’s thought bubble on the contraption… What was he thinking: “I wonder what his cock looks like?,” Nathan thought randomly… Oh, that sick man, soon he would be cured for good…
Nathan found out that the teenager he had murdered was the daughter of the head Hillside Cuckoo bully and he was a bald headed man with crazed eyes and a muscular build who seemed reasonable otherwise when he was especially medicated… He happened to be in Hillside for being a bikie so Nathan had heard, owning millions of dollars worth of businesses and assassinating his father with a Luger. It was also said the man had no penis due to cancer.
“Don’t you mention his name,” he would say about his father. “See out there?,” he pointed to the courtyard. “You’ll find her singlet the one she was wearing and we spread her ashes on the middle bush.”
Nathan had no reason not to believe what he had been told was the absolute truth and he went out in the courtyard and found a slip of a girl’s pink singlet. He picked it up after looking at it for a while and threw it deep into the bush with the ashes on it. It was over, done, finished. There was nothing he could do except pick up the pieces.
He couldn’t believe he would commit a motiveless murder. There had to be some other reason for it to have been committed. And Anne Shitforbrainsforfucksakeyouslut had something to do with it.
Pippi crept along the halls of the unit at night with her long socks and tasteless dress. Nathan was in the high dependency ward this night with two others and she was going to check him out. It was around two am and Nathan tried to stay awake through the pain of Lithium. It was eating him up inside, it ate at his mind, but yet he was still able to think that they were about to give him electro convulsive shock therapy some time that night, either through voltage or a syringe. The other two slept in the room while Nathan peered out of the third floor window trying to stay awake as the time clock read three.
It would be three thirty before he lay on the bed and closed his eyes. He awoke to find PIppi with a syringe in her hand which contained a new ECT drug which she had injected into his penis.
“I am Pippi,” she said under her breath as if he would never forget her name. And he probably wouldn’t. It was then he felt the humiliation when she held up her limp pinky and departed swiftly….
“There’s your ECT,” said the nurse pointing to a locked metal box on the wall and Nathan wondered if they had given it to him anyway and he just couldn’t remember.
I’ve got to get out of here thought Nathan. It wasn’t as bad as last time when he had jumped three stories off a building and woke to find that Indonesia had invaded Australia! Armoured vehicles were driving down the road next to the hospital.
Nathan had to ring Graham Swoon the director of the film version of his novel. If there was anyone who could help him, it would be him. He could make another movie.
“Nathan you’re a genius,” said Swoon and Nathan reassured him that he must contact Mal Sextant and use a remote contraption to find the truth about the motive behind the killing.
Anne checked off her latest list at the morgue.
“Another useless scumbag. Farewell friend!,” as she slammed the body fridge door shut.
It wasn’t Nathan, yet.
“I don’t know why I bother, they never seem to get well, this one in particular. Tell his mother it was natural causes… Lithium in other words. Sleep apnea should be on the death certificate… You gotta love your work.”
“They don’t call you Anne of a Thousand ways for nothing.”
“Kill em all with sleep apnea… just another heart attack.”
“And torture them at the same time,” laughed the morgue attendant.
The collective of the Hillside Cuckoos had departed after dinner and in the courtyard awaiting their medication were a dedicated few around the ashes of the girl Nathan had murdered. There were only a few and one was Nathan. He had heard on the grapevine that not only was the four hour cut of the movie version of his novel finished but Swoon had contacted Sextant and after blackmailing him about his homosexual son and corruption got the information needed for Swoon to make a documentary about the murder.
It had been recorded on the closed circuit camera as well as on the contraption. It showed Nathan twisting the head of the girl at the exact moment a champagne cork exploded. It would appear, thought Nathan, that he had been hypnotised or preprogrammed to act at that exact moment. How did they do it? Swoon said it could also be seen that Anne Whateveryouwanttocallher nodded at the father of the girl, not so much nodded but sent a thought. It was like NOW! The signal for the cork to be popped. And snap!
Five of them had stood around the courtyard as Nathan was possessed of his favourite Earl Derr Biggers’ character. He had seen all the movies three or four times each… It was then that Nurse Ratshit came out with the medications. Only Anne and Pippi were missing with their butter chicken.
“You dispenser of said medications,” said Nathan, all joking aside, in the silence and not really affecting a Chinese accent.
“Yes. Me dispenser.”
“You measure doses. You have key to cabinet? Scuse please, you have only key to cabinet?”
“No, there are three keys, the pharmacist has one and Anne Meggs has one in her possession.”
“Honourable bikie with key cutting business not cut any keys?,” said Nathan pointing to the bald fellow who frowned.
“No, I don’t believe not. Are you trying to pin something on me…”
“Please humour humble mental patient whose mind like hundred year old egg, not necessarily hard boiled but almost kaput… But how much Lithium in said cup you hold for self.”
Nathan took the little dixie cut with the tablets.
“How much Lithium is prescribed for Nathan?”
“Three twenty milligrams. That’s your dose.”
“Scuse… Watch please take note as humble mental patient pours tablets into his hands and counts four Lithium and two unidentified tablets…”
Nathan shoved the tablets into his mouth and took them with one gulp and used a second dixie cup to wash them down.
“You are murderer,” he said and cleared his throat.
Cult Film Alley 