Cloaking the slow rot of human existence.
On cue, I began to hyperventilate. Couldn’t breathe. Flashes of my Addenbrooke’s ordeal danced before my eyes. Memories of hands pinning me down. Doctors peering at me with disapproving expressions. Nurses stabbing sharp needles into my arms and thighs. Wondering out loud if they should put a muzzle over my mouth. The straitjacket they deployed to restrain my struggles. Muttered exchanges outside the room where they had locked me. Hushed conversations insisting I was a lost cause: Addenbrooke’s could do nothing for me. But a proper psychiatric institution might be able to sort me out.
Pull yourself together, Sophia.
I leaned against the nearest wall and gulped in deep lungfuls of air. Attempted to calm my racing thoughts. Quell the waves of panic breaking over my soul. Flush away the past. Yet it did take every ounce of my willpower not to run screaming from that foyer into the fresh air outside.
Thankfully, my mind soon cranked back into operating mode. Right afterward, I saw a nurse bearing down on me with a concerned, quizzical expression. Knew I had to start moving again. Act normal. Not hysterical. Because the last thing I wanted was to be flung onto a gurney and strapped down again by some enthusiastic Addenbrooke’s staff. Pumped to the brim with sedatives.
Looking ill in a hospital isn’t a good idea. It’s as bad as looking guilty in a court of law.
Even had the presence of mind to figure out she’d long disappeared. Door at the end of the foyer. Long, harshly lit corridor. Passage leading to an adjoining annex. One I knew only too well.
The Liaison Psychiatry Service.
I forced myself to run after her, even though hysteria was still bubbling up in my throat. Aware of the ludicrous irony of the situation: I was voluntarily entering the psychiatric annex in my quest for information. The precise location where my slippery slope into seventeen years of ignominy began. Where my hopes and dreams drifted away into the shadows, way beyond reach.
Keep moving, Sophia.
But I soon realized she’d vanished into a labyrinth of corridors. No idea where she had gone. Staggered up and down for minutes, doing my best not to howl. Certain I had lost her. Then I saw her out of the corner of my eye. Far end of a passage. Breathless, incredulous relief burbled forth.
A distinguished-looking man with a silvery mop of hair, welcoming her into a consultation room. The door closed after them.
I hurried towards it.
ROOM 27: HELMUT JONG, MB, BCHIR, MRCPSYCH, PHD, the sign said.
So Helmut Jong, MB, BChir, MRCPsych, PhD, will be engaging in two types of consultations soon. Only some of them will be taking place within the sterile discomfort of room 27.
Consultations with cuckoos. Or the mentally disturbed, to put it more delicately. One does not visit a psychiatric consultant if one has a sound mind. The woman who had walked through that door must be suffering from dysfunctional neuronal connections.
He will also be engaging with me.
Like Mark Henry Evans, Helmut Jong, MB, BChir, MRCPsych, PhD, has set himself up for a good time in my company.
Lucky man.
10 May 2014
It’s been ages since I wrote. Months, in fact. But there’s little incentive to write when good things are happening. Writing’s much more cathartic when there’s something to rant about. Conversely, it’s much more enjoyable where there’s something to gloat over. That’s the whole point of keeping this little iDiary going, really. Monos and Duos need their diaries in order to survive. I don’t. My diary has a loftier, more noble purpose. Because it’s a fucking revenge journal.
I’m entitled to smirk today. Because things are going my way. The dirt I’m seeking is emerging.
Not just dirt, as it turns out.
It’s serious muck. Gooey, squelchy filth.
Her medical records say as much. Freshly harvested from the recesses of Dr. Jong’s hard drive.
Suppose I should thank Dad for the inspiration. Despite his multiple failings, he did say something useful when he was still alive.
“Success is determined by two variables,” he said.
Will. And money.
Or “determination and dough,” as he had phrased it to Aggie with a flamboyant twitch of his eyebrows. Not realizing I was eavesdropping.
“Problems evaporate when you throw enough cash at them,” he had added for good measure.
Aggie took his words to heart, and with vigor. She must have bribed the doctors at St. Augustine’s in the winter of 2008, a few weeks after Dad’s heart attack. A generous payoff resulting in the diagnosis she preferred. A terse but authoritative certificate confirming that I was still unfit to administer Dad’s estate, causing me to rot in the Outer Hebrides for several more years.
I do not lack either will or money at the present time. I have lots of determination. And much more dough than I did when I was back at St. Augustine’s.
But Dad underestimated the importance of a third variable.
The power of seduction. Especially when combined with slinky black stockings and saucy scarlet knickers.
Men are all the same. It doesn’t matter if they are novelists or psychiatrists. They are all driven by their dicks. To gain access to their hard drives, one merely has to endure a few hard drives of a different nature (or vigorous thrusts, to be more precise). Dr. Jong’s password was easy. Simply his dead wife’s name. It also helped that most physicians have remote access to their work records these days. Nifty palm-size e-devices that they carry around in their pockets.
How convenient.
I didn’t even have to suffer too much as far as Helmut Jong, MB, BChir, MRCPsych, PhD, is concerned. The man had not lost his looks, despite being a venerable sixty-four. He’d not lost his hair, either (the silver in it made him quite a sexy snow leopard). Nor had he lost his prowess in the bedroom, for that matter. Even though he had been widowed for a year and was a little out of practice.
It’s amazing what psychiatrists hide, by the way. Like the fact that he accidentally placed a geriatric patient on 25 milligrams of Valium per day for four weeks, instead of 2.5 milligrams. He later wrote a groveling letter to the poor woman, begging her not to sue him for professional negligence.
He was damned lucky she didn’t get addicted. Or tell anyone.
They settled at ￡25,000.
Claire Evans’s medical records, by the way, are equally fascinating. She has been on antidepressants for a long time. This is where it gets even more interesting. She has a tendency to self-harm, especially when she doesn’t take her prescription pills. Cut herself with a knife on two occasions. Both episodes were bad enough to land her in Addenbrooke’s under Helmut’s watchful eye. Two stitches during her second visit, in April of 2013. Kept under close observation for a night, just so she didn’t try it again. Antidepressants upped to a more powerful daily dose.
She’s still going strong.
Aha. That stick-in-the-mud bitch has been hiding a dirty little secret.
She’s a wrist-slashing, suicidal depressive.