Nightmare Free

An extract

Someone was pounding at the door of the man who never had nightmares. The pounding was blunt and low, and was paced for the most part with comparative deliberation; every so often the impacts rose in rapidity and timbre as the furious flat of the palm stood in for the bruised yet persistent fist. Nagged from oblivion, the man who never had nightmares opened his eyes to the daylight. Through the yellowed window he could hear the chanting of children, to which the pounding on his door provided an eccentric bass-line. He listened through a cycle of punches and slaps, wondering vaguely who the percussionist might be and why they did not use the doorbell, which played brief tunes that changed automatically at random intervals to prevent the hearer becoming inured. The man who never had nightmares had missed no rental payments, had asked for no repairs, was not expecting a package and was in no trouble with the law. That seemed to exhaust most of the possibilities, except for a sudden emergency; but the man lived and slept on the top floor of a tall, elderly building with minimal amenities and no lifts, so his door would hardly be the first choice of anyone seeking immediate aid, and if the emergency concerned himself he would surely have noticed by this time.

In any case, it was becoming apparent that whoever was pounding on the door had no intention of giving up and going away. In fact, a further element had now been introduced into the morning's music, namely a muffled, incomprehensible, but imperious baritone. The man pushed back the bedclothes and sat for a few moments with his feet on the floor. One foot started tapping in time to the children's chant outside, but the next bout of beating on his door disrupted the rhythm.

"All right," called the man who never had nightmares. His throat was dry and his voice cracked into a cough; but his activity must have registered on the other side of the door, because the pounding stopped in the middle of a volley and the muffled baritone took on a querying note.

"All right," the man called again. His dressing-gown was draped over the back of the chair, and seemed to have adapted itself during the night for a different anatomy to his own. The sleeves were in the wrong places, and the collar and hemline had apparently undergone some sort of unnatural coupling. The noise from the door started again, more loudly than ever, but stopped when he ordered it to wait. The dressing-gown was fitted with a hood; once he found this and ascertained that it wasn't inside-out, the rest was relatively simple. He pushed his arms through the sleeves, tied the cord around his waist and pulled the hood up over his dishevelment.

Once outside his bedroom, the front door was along a short passage and round a bend. However long the pounding had been going on before he woke, there was no sign of any damage. Evidently the emergency was not, in the opinion of his guest, sufficiently severe to justify kicking the door down, at least for the moment.

The door was solid, with no window and no spy-hole. "Who's there?" called the man who never had nightmares.
"Logue, it's me, it's me." The voice was indistinct and excited. "Open up now. Open up this minute."
"But what's going on? Who are you?"
"It's me, I told you. Don't you recognise my voice? Open this door."
"What do you mean, me? What do you want, what's your name?"

There was a pause, as if the voice's owner were attempting to gather his patience, or perhaps to gather the strength for another assault. Then the voice spoke again, very slowly; far more slowly than necessary in fact, with a suppressed and trapdoor-rattling undertone of haste that made it sound almost inebriated: "Slee," said the voice. "Slee. Practitioner Slee. Do you understand? Slee. Now open this door. Open up. Open up."

Although the sounds of Logue taking off the chain and turning the key must certainly have been audible outside, the litany continued all the while. As soon as the door began to move Slee gave it a violent shove; perhaps he had even taken a few steps back and charged. He stumbled heavily inside, knocking Logue sideways against the wall. Slee turned too fast, stumbled again and pushed clumsily to close the door. His fat hands scrabbled at the lock and chain, and he tugged a couple of times at the latch to make certain. He and Logue stared at each other.

"What's going on?" demanded Logue, and Slee gestured frantically for silence. Under his light raincoat, the practitioner was dressed as Logue always saw him during their weekly appointments, in the casual-professorial style designed to exude whatever combination of authority and friendliness might be necessary to place the average patient at ease: the jacket smart and discreet like a diplomatic spy, the shirt-collar loose and open to avoid unsightly bulging of the neck. Logue's next appointment was two days away, and was supposed to take place at Slee's office. Logue had not even been aware that Slee knew where he lived, although of course his address and various other details had been required of him when they began his therapy. He had assumed that the information was needed purely for administrative purposes, or for occasional written correspondence, rather than for the practitioner to drop in on the patient whenever the fancy took him.

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Voices of Virtue

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Classroom Ventilation

Legislators in the God-fearing state of Tennessee have responded to last year's school shooting at Nashville in the most Murcan way imaginable: namely by licensing teachers to carry concealed handguns in school. According to a survey by the wishy-washy liberals at the Rand Corporation, a fairly large majority of American teachers believe that pedagogues who pack would not make schools safer, and more than half believe they would make schools more dangerous; and this in a country which has boasted a school shooting resulting in injury or death once every nine and a half days this year. Nevertheless, parents and teachers protesting against the law were removed by armed men on the orders of the state's house speaker; which demonstrates, if nothing else, that unconcealed weapons also have their advantages when it comes to imparting appropriate social values.

Compassion Actually

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Putting Our Money Where Our Morals Are

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Britain First

Since Labour is the party of working people, it is only natural that the CEO of Team Starmer should be burbling rah-rah and goo-goo at the readership of Britain's great Press bastion of bile-spewing senility. In a meditation upon patriotism for St George's Day, after the style of St Anthony of Baghdad before his transfiguration, the apostle proclaimed that the Conservative Party has forfeited the right to call itself patriotic; apparently on the grounds that it cannot withstand dissent sufficiently to denounce its leadership's critics as antisemites. The Conservatives have also trashed a number of national institutions, in whose foundation any patriot would be proud and grateful to have played the usual retrospective part between winning world wars. Cited examples include the NHS, to whose continuing effective abolition Team Starmer has repeatedly committed itself; and NATO, an organisation for killing people in the interests of transnational corporations. For good measure, the CEO of Team Starmer also shrugged off concerns which have been raised by the lesser breeds over the orgasmic splurging of the St George cross and its subordinates across Labour's election propaganda. Along with all the other democratic virtues, dissent combined with tolerance is a famously British trait, and readers of the Maily Toryguff will doubtless rejoice that their votes are so much more tolerable to Team Starmer than those of the fuzzy-wuzzies.

Dastardly and Mottley

Extreme woke elements in the secessionist Republic of Barbados are angry at plans to purchase land from Richard Grosvener Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax, whose family was prominent in the Atlantic slave trade. Mia Mottley's government, which has pledged to build ten thousand new homes and seems to have a bizarre un-British obsession with following through on the pledge, is negotiating to buy a few football pitches' worth of the Drax estate for housing. A number of Barbadians have expressed dissatisfaction with the idea of Drax profiting by his ancestors' plantationeering, apparently under the impression that a squillionaire British Conservative expenses claimant might somehow be induced to substitute reparations for rah-rah. For his own part, Richard Grosvener Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax does not believe that people should be judged by events that happened hundreds of years ago, having evidently earned his sixteenth-century ancestral mansion and substantial chunks of Dorset and North Yorkshire purely by the sweat of his brow.

It's Not How Fast You Grind, It's Who You Grind

Italian prosecutors have ended the seven-year trial of a German NGO rescue boat crew by the quaint expedient of admitting straight out that there is no evidence against them. This technicality went unnoticed until now thanks to the indisputable heinousness of the crew's conduct, which included endangering some fourteen thousand jobs and conspiring to dilute the heritage of the master race. In response the Italian government pumped money into the Libyan coastguard, which has done so much to help matters in the Mediterranean ever since Britain's glistening pink Head Boy helped bomb the country into freedom. The crew was bugged, and other crews were infiltrated with government spies; while others suspected of fraternising with the migrant hordes have been reporting levels of threat and harassment worthy of the British scumbag press. On the bright side, the rescue boat crew have endured seven years of stress and defamation; and thousands who might otherwise have been rescued will have drowned or been forcibly removed to somwehere most of His Majesty's Government probably wouldn't know from Rwanda. Whether prosecutors will be permitted to re-start the wheels of justice turning all over again on the basis of new non-evidence remains as yet unclear.

Wrong Side for a Street

There is more than one way to execute a rodentine maritime evacuation manoeuvre. One can charge crudely for the lifeboats, elbowing aside the women and children while trumpeting one's devotion to duty and humble pleasure in public service; or one can pull in one's scaly tail, dye one's fur a pleasanter shade, temporarily forego the perks that accrue to a messenger boy for the plague, and pretend to be a hamster. One or two staunch Conservatives have taken the latter course, including Brand Andy, the mayor of the West Midlands. Brand Andy describes himself as more of a businessman than a politician, presumably in order to differentiate himself from Fishy Rishi, whose business connections are purely marital and therefore nearly as negligible as his political skills. Brand Andy is also pushing himself as a rebellious sort who stands up to Westminster: a line also taken by my own soon-to-be-erstwhile expenses claimant, who trumpeted his independence from Westminster shortly before taking a job as a whip for the National Johnson. Brand Andy's defiance of Westminster has so far consisted of calmly accepting Fishy Rishi's cancelling of HS2, though whether he did so as a result of his political instincts or his commercial ones remains as yet unclear. For the moment Brand Andy and others are removing from their propaganda all mention of the party they proudly support, while hoping to crawl back into office on a delicate combination of personal charm and voter stupidity. If one didn't know better, one might think they had something to be embarrassed about.

Worthy of Our Trust

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