Hero Worship

3. Argyle Socks

3Argyle SocksOf the many doctors practicing in Harley Street, Billy had chosen the only one to still wear argyle socks when off the golf course.

He was a tall bone-thin man with a mop of coarse gray hair that sprouted at odd angles from both his head and ears. His gold wire-rimmed spectacles jiggled on his beak-like nose in time to his fingernails pecking at the easy chair he sat in, pulling invisible strands out of the thread-bare arm.

The office had the barren look of accommodation in the process of being returned to a rental agent. There was little furniture, few comforts, and it was grubby in the corners. For Billy, this last point gave it a high creep factor, and he always shuddered on entry and tried not to look at the layers of dust and grime.

Seated, he still had a slight view of the receptionist’s desk through the glass door, but he could no longer see her comely ankles. That was disappointing. He’d hoped to focus on them during the doctor’s more difficult questions.

The sessions always went the same way. They started with the generic queries like “And how have you been, Billy?” to which Billy always replied, “Fine,” regardless of whether that was the case or not, and then moved on to, “Any dreams?”

“How have you been, Billy?” said Dr. McKenzie.

“Not bad!” Billy decided to buck the trend and was rewarded by a sharp look and a scribble on the doctor’s notepad. He glanced out of the window, hoping for a distraction to suppress the giggle forming around his diaphragm. He could see the green waxy leaves of the shrubs which, along with the ornately twisted metal railings, marked the boundary between building and pavement.

A magpie hopped up and down the railing, eyes dancing and head bobbing. The bird’s wings flashed indigo in the sun. For a moment, it looked beautiful. It pecked at something, one beady eye winking at Billy. The heart of a mouse trailed wet and bloody, thinly strung from beak to foot. He shuddered. Bloody flying rats!

As he looked away, the sun flashed off the rows of parked cars, creating a harsh glare that temporarily blinded him. His suppressed giggle abruptly disappeared. Even for August, the weather was unseasonably hot. “Have you noticed how hot it’s getting recently, doc?”

“Hmm?” The doctor was still scribbling.

“The heat. It’s very hot.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful weather.” He made eye contact with Billy again and gave him a big genuine smile, obviously pleased that the sun was always shining these days. He crossed his legs, a frequent habit, to reveal his patterned ankles below slightly too short suit pants. Golf, of course! Mustn’t let the demon-created climate change interfere with your handicap, doc.

“Any dreams, Billy?”

Billy nodded.

“Do you want to tell me about them?”

Not particularly, he thought. “Sure.”

He left three, four, five beats of silence. “The usual. Shapes moving around the bed, shouting at me to wake up. Trying to slap me awake. Blinding light.” He wriggled in his seat. “Then last night one stabbed me with a sword.”

He looked almost apologetically at the doctor. This last detail was new and would, no doubt, send him into paroxysms of delight. It would provide a new image he could dissect and classify, and blame either on his mother’s prescription drug habit, his father’s death, or his early puberty.

Instead, Dr. McKenzie scribbled on his notepad a little more. “Anything else?”

“No.” Billy frowned. “That not enough?”

The doctor shrugged, a quick birdlike movement accompanied with a little twist of the head so he was now looking sideways, making Billy do a double take to check the magpie was still outside.

“I assumed the violence would intensify at some point. Actually, I’m surprised that it’s taken… What is it? Four months since the dreams started?” The doctor flicked back through the pages and pages of notes that were an intimate summary of Billy’s last two years: all the obsessions, s****l exploits, confessions of unrequited love for Tazia, even bathroom habits.

“Yes. About that, but—”

“Yes, they started when your friend went into hospital. That’s right, isn’t it?” He was still flicking through the notebook and ignored Billy’s response.

“Yeah, and—”

“And that’s also the time when you started to see a drop in your libido?” The doctor stopped flicking and looked straight at him with a little tight-lipped smile on his face.

Billy raised his eyebrows, saying dryly, “There’s been no drop in anything. It just doesn’t live up to expectations anymore.”

“Your partners? Or your performance?” The doctor leaned forward and opened his eyes a bit wider.

“Both… I guess.”

“Tell me about that.” Dr. McKenzie turned to a fresh page in his notepad and raised his pen, poised to scratch away at the paper.

Billy gazed through the glass door back at the waiting area where Julie, the receptionist, was tapping away at her computer. He suspected it was just a pretense at busyness.

He struggled to give his attention back to the doctor. “What was the question?”

“Tell me about why you now find your s*x life unfulfilling.” The doctor swiped a quick finger at the corner of his mouth and wiped it on his trousers. Is he dribbling?

“I think I always have.” Billy sat up straight in his chair, trying to find his focus. “It’s like this. s*x has always been about discovering something. Different gender. Different positions. Pain and pleasure. Always about seeing—and feeling—a reaction, innit?”

He added the colloquialism to try to dissipate the tension he felt in revealing so much of his thought process. But the doctor hadn’t finished with him.

“A reaction for you or… for them?” He panted a little, and the tip of his tongue peeked wetly between his lips for a moment.

“Both.” Billy sounded very sure, but his eyes desperately explored the back of Julie’s head again, trying to find something as attractive about it as her ankles. He couldn’t, so he said, “We’re just people trying to figure it all out.” Meaningless, but it filled the silence.

“Through s*x?”

“Sometimes.” Always, he thought.

“Does love figure, Billy?” There it was. The question that he’d waited for, the one that made him so uncomfortable. Every time Dr. McKenzie asked the same damn question, and every time Billy’s reaction was the same: a shrug. Love had nothing to do with it.

Today, though, he tried for a little more. “I don’t associate the two, doc.”

Dr. McKenzie caressed the arm of the chair with his left thumb and what looked like genuine affection. A little white spittle had collected at the corner of his mouth again. Billy risked a quick look at his groin. Is the fucker getting off on this?

“You don’t associate s*x with love?” The doctor urged him on, pushing ever harder on the frayed fabric.

“Yeah… I guess.” Jesus, give it up, mate!

The doctor was going down a completely wrong path. Billy’s obsessions weren’t about keeping love or commitment at bay. They were all about discovery, understanding what made him tick and where he fitted into the world. He’d never understood that, even as a little kid. And the more he looked and tried to understand, the more he felt displaced, not part of the world around him.

Slapping a bare behind or gagging a willing partner wasn’t about control, s****l titillation, or the other one hundred labels the doctor had tagged him with over the last two years. It was about getting a reaction that improved his understanding of the human condition. Why did they like it? Why did they let him? If he understood them, then surely he’d start to understand himself.

Instead, he said, “You know, doc, I’m just a freak, right?”

Dr. McKenzie sighed, his excitement subsiding. “Let’s talk about your mother.”

Billy silently groaned. Another rabbit hole he didn’t want to explore. Not today. What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? He was so impatient and… and… itchy! Like he had a coating of something sticky all over his skin he needed to scrub off. He wasn’t normally like this. The tick of his watch sounded loud in the room.

Billy endured another thirty minutes of questions from the doctor before jumping up from his seat and pacing back and forth across the low-pile rug, mumbling monosyllabic answers in response to the doctor’s questions. There were stains on the rug. Large, brown stains which he shuffled around or over, rather than step on.

For five more minutes, the doctor gamely continued with question after question, but eventually, he said, “I think we’ll leave it there today, Billy. I feel we’ve made… progress.”

That was fine by Billy. He already felt rather more vulnerable than he usually did after a bout of questioning, and even though he didn’t believe Dr. McKenzie had made any great breakthroughs, he was tired, irritable, and imagining a cool beer and a smoke.

After saying goodbye, he walked through the door back into the reception area, ready to flash Julie a suggestive smile. Her mid-life years did nothing to detract from the fact she was a masterpiece of female creation.

Instead of returning the smile, though, Julie said something that stopped him short. It wasn’t even so much the words she repeated, but the way she did it, slow and steady, each one pronounced emphatically. “Is. It. Time. To. Wake. Up. Billy?”

Billy turned to face her. “What did you say?”

“Is. It. Time. To. Wake. Up. Billy?” she repeated.

Loud humming rose in the room. It entered his right ear and bashed against the inside of his skull.

At first, his mind was wiped clean, no thoughts, just a tiny bug crashing into the bone until all the synapses at once seemed to trigger and he was bombarded with a succession of vibrant images. Tragic, terrifying, s****l, beautiful, nonsensical images that overwhelmed his emotions.

In that moment, Billy felt he was witnessing every single person in every single location in the world. And they were all in pain, confusion, ecstasy, and despair.

The hum became louder—deafening. He couldn’t hear the groans he felt vibrating in his throat.

Julie grabbed his arm, and this time shouted above the noise, “Is—it—time—to—wake—up—Billy?”

There was a flash of light so intense that Billy closed his eyes against it. And then the room was completely still and silent.