Watching the Wheels Come Off (13 page)

S
tudents are dispersed around the hall like statuary in a park. A blanket of boredom lies over them. Few talk, and then only in hushed tones. Miles, sitting close to Wally Straw, notices him surreptitiously popping some white pills.

Straw sees Mark watching him. He whispers: ‘I’ve got a serious heart condition.’

‘Really. Why are you here, then?’

‘My boss suggested it. Reading between the lines, I felt I wouldn’t get promotion if I didn’t enrol.’ He puts the pillbox away. ‘Bet the whole thing’s a pile of shit.’ He looks at his watch, irritated. ‘It’s meant to start at six. You’d think they’d at least start on time. It costs us enough.’

Mark stifles a yawn.

Robin Moore removes his spectacles and rubs his eyes.

Roger Buckle is regarding his coated tongue in a wall mirror. He nearly bites it off when Biff, Randy and Rip burst through the door, assaulting their eardrums with bloodcurdling screams.

Moore drops his spectacles, breaking the left lens.

Biff, blood vessels in his neck near bursting point, yells at them in a frenzy: ‘On your feet, motherfuckers.’

The students look at each other with startled eyes, frozen with fear. Mark is the only one to stand, and that in a slow, incredulous movement.

The three instructors dominate the centre of the hall, slavering like Rottweilers. Randy’s eyes are red and bulging with hatred: ‘That was fucking pathetic! Whenever we enter the room, you jump to attention.’

‘Erect,’ screeches Rip, ‘like pricks in a brothel.’

Biff hasn’t stopped running on the spot: ‘Okay, you cunts, assholes, dickheads, cocksuckers… is there anybody I’ve left out? We’ll try that again! Only this time you’d better sharpen up your act. Right?’

The instructors jog off in step and in line, leaving the class bewildered and terrified.
Mark’s maggot curls up, unable to cope
. The prospect is too repellent.

Moore’s hands are shaking as he hitches his spectacles behind his ears. The retreating instructors are reflected in his broken lens.

Wally Straw alone is unshaken, thereby endorsing the effectiveness of his medication. ‘Ill-mannered louts – are we going to tolerate this kind of behaviour?’

His question is answered a few seconds later. For when the three instructors stamp back into the room, the whole class, including Straw, comes to attention as one man. This time, however, the instructors return as mere outriders.

Herman Temple follows them in.

Everybody moves aside for him, silently clearing a
pathway to the stage. His rubber soles squeak as he mounts the steps to stand beside the monstrance.

‘Gentlemen, I am Dr Herman Temple. Welcome to the Personal Improvement Institute. Our training methods are based on forty years’ experience in running courses all across the United States of America. We know what people want, deep down. While other courses – let’s call them fads – in psychological growth have come and gone, the PII is still up there at number one. And you know why that is? Because the foundations of my Institute are strong and resolute and deep, embedded as they are in Christian and military values of leadership.’ He smiles around at each and every one of them. ‘Enjoy. This weekend my senior instructor is Biff Paretsky.’

Biff raises his arms like a victorious boxer.

‘He will be ably assisted by Randy McMingus and Rip Kubitschek. Give them a big hand.’

The class obediently applauds as the instructors swagger among them.

‘Which of you is Mark Miles?’ Temple’s voice is so quiet that Mark is uncertain if he heard correctly. And, if he did hear correctly, he didn’t want to. He’s rooted to the spot while a small shudder passes through his body.

‘Mark Miles, make yourself known.’

Mark looks to the doors, only to see Rip turn the key and pocket it. There’s no escape, nowhere to hide. If there is to be a Last Judgement, like the Bible says, Mark now knows what it will be like. He tries to speak but something worse than a frog prevents it. Fear freezes his
oesophagus. Instead he holds up his hand pathetically, like a little school boy again.

Temple regards him from above but says nothing. At ground level, all three instructors now move in on Mark. As Biff comes face to face with him, Mark, close to fainting, is revived by a wave of halitosis. He fights to hold back the bile that’s gathering in his throat. Hoping for some action, Biff looks up at Temple, who shakes his head.

‘Later, Biff.’

Frustrated, the instructor jogs away, while Temple picks up where he left off. ‘Our task over the next two days is to rid you people of your hang-ups. Your minds are full to the brim with crap of a negative nature, crap that stops you seeing a clear path to the top.’

Images of the path to Calvary immediately crowd Mark’s quaking mind. Confused, he can’t understand why a faith he discarded decades ago should suddenly return so vividly to haunt him. He can actually feel the Crown of Thorns pressing into his skull, the blood pouring down his face. It even drips to the floor. He looks down: it’s only sweat.

Temple smiles: ‘Our course acts like a mental laxative. And like most laxatives, it can be both pleasurable and painful – depending on how constipated you are.’

The students laugh nervously.

‘Now, the more observant of you will have noticed some unusual props standing around the room.’

While the instructors guffaw, the students only manage a few bleak smiles between them.

‘Biff, if you wouldn’t mind?’

Biff jogs over to the coffin in the centre of the hall, patting it friendly-like. ‘Take this little fella, for example.’

Temple intones: ‘There may well be someone in this class who is dead but doesn’t know it. A lie-down in that coffin will soon make him realise what it means to be alive. It will spur him to join in the human race and, more importantly, to
compete
in it. Rip, please.’

Rip crosses to the cage and, running on the spot, points to it as if it is a prize in a TV show. Mark reels from the nightmare scenario unfolding before him. Each move in their perverse game turns him inside-out. Until now he’d never thought of the human race as literally a race that you ran in. No wonder he felt so fucking tired all the time. And now there’s this cage.

Temple proceeds to fill them in on its significance.

‘Someone else here may feel that he’s trapped, that he’s all penned up, that something is stopping him from reaching the top. A spell in the cage will…’ He pauses, letting their imaginations take over. ‘Do I have to go on?’

The class remains silent, still contemplating the cage, too stunned to reply. Temple casts his eyes across them, his gaze pausing on each face, cold as a camera. He suddenly yelps: ‘Well, do I, you dummies?’

‘No,’ the class stutters uncertainly, and certainly not as one man.

Randy adds to the growing hysteria, yelling: ‘No, SIR!

‘No, sir,’ they yell back.

Temple closes his eyes, bowing his head over hands
flattened for prayer. His voice is barely audible: ‘“Forgive them, O Lord, for they know not…”’ He pauses to change tack. ‘Let me hear that again.’

The class, pleased with itself for not missing his instruction, lifts off as one: ‘No, sir!’

Only to be ambushed by the instructors: ‘You dickheads!’ they bellow in unison.

‘No, sir?’ screams Biff in disbelief.

‘NOT no sir!’ screams Randy.

‘YES, sir!’ screams Rip

‘Yes, sir!’ screams the class, corrected.

‘That’s better,’ says Temple. He steeples his hands and contemplates the crucifix standing against the stage: ‘Then there are those of you who think they’re being persecuted. Who think they are –’ His words are cut off by someone shouting. He jerks like someone being electrocuted. Nobody has ever before interrupted Temple. Spasms ripple through his body, before reaching his eyes which spin in their sockets, seemingly incapable of accepting the signals from his ears. They finally settle on Wally Straw whose simmering anger has boiled over.

‘This course is a pile of crap.’

Straw turns to Mark standing beside him, but Mark looks at him like he’s a leper.

He then shakes his head wildly as if denying Wally’s very existence and tries to escape.

Straw catches his arm. ‘I told you it would be, didn’t I? A pile of fucking crap.’

Mark shakes himself free and Straw swings around
making for the double-doors but not reaching them. The instructors descend on him like starving wolves. Mark gets out of their way as they expertly belabour the old man with boots and fists. It’s all over in seconds, leaving him groaning on the floor, bloodied and bemused. Such malevolence is beyond his comprehension. Nobody in the class moves. They seem to have stopped breathing. Their bloodless faces, white as snowmen, observe everything and do nothing.

Temple’s soft voice insinuates itself into their frozen consciousness. ‘Listen, everybody, there’s an easy way to get through this course. All you have to do is tell the truth. You know what, though? You
won’t
. You’ll lie and take all kinds of punishment and pain before you’ll face the truth. Yet that’s the secret: telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

Biff has positioned himself by the bank of light switches. On a cue from Temple, he plunges the hall into darkness. Not a speck of light reaches the windowless room. It’s as silent as a tomb. Mark feels his heart racing, pumping blood back to his face and the furthest outposts of his body. He’s been scared of the dark since birth. That
is
the truth; not just an excuse for never sleeping alone.

‘Gentlemen, this is your goal.’

Temple’s voice cues the strobe light to cut through the blackness. It hits the monstrance on its plinth, causing it to sparkle and shimmer, scattering iridescent shafts of luminance across the room, giving it an almost mystical aura. He raises it on high like a priest. ‘As each of you
finally reaches that moment of truth, you will be allowed to take this ancient holy grail into your hands and pass on to the Other Side.’

Rip has activated a CD player. Synthesised violins seep from wall speakers, melding with Temple’s oratory into a sugar-sweet aural melange which now turns ultra-sickly at his mention of the Other Side. ‘Over there you’ll be enveloped in a sublime feeling of achievement that’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. Over there all your latent talents will blossom like spring flowers. Over there you’ll have great wealth and good health.’

As he returns the monstrance to its pedestal, the strobe light and violins are rudely cut off and the harsh overhead lights are snapped on, returning the class to a bleak reality. Wally Straw drags himself to a chair. Blood drips onto his suit.

‘If you motherfucking dickheads think passing to the Other Side is easy,’ Biff shouts, ‘think again.’ The staff sergeant that he once was inhabits his body like a voodoo spirit. Nothing and nobody will ever exorcise it.

Temple smiles, glad that Biff’s on his side. ‘Words of wisdom, gentlemen. But then Biff has a way with words. During the next two days we’re going to turn you into leaders. To do that we first have to unscrew your heads and take a look at what’s in there. Then we’ll throw away the garbage and reload you with motivation of a positive nature.’ Another smile even more sickly than the synthesised violins plays across his lips. ‘More words, Biff, please.’

‘Okay, guys, back this stuff against the walls. Move!’

Randy and Rip enjoy the ensuing bedlam, bellowing: ‘Move, motherfuckers! Move! Move!’

The class jump into action, stacking the coffin, crucifix, cage and chairs against the walls. Of all the props, only the hangman’s rope remains, dangling ominously from the ceiling.

Biff circles the room, supervising the evacuation, while Temple descends from the stage into the space now cleared. He moves from student to student, stopping to look at their faces and name tags: ‘This space, gentlemen, is known as the “Ring”. From now on, when I say “into the Ring”, I want you in here faster than greased lightning.’

‘Quicker than you can crap your pants.’

‘Thank you, Randy.’

Temple can’t hide his distaste for the instructor’s simile as he again addresses the whole class. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

A
Yes
comes loud, clear and as one collective sound. The meltdown into tyranny is complete. And Temple isn’t even sporting a silly moustache.

Mark stands as rigid as a guardsman. Only the occasional shiver differentiates him from a figure in a wax museum. When Temple pauses in front of him, Randy’s prediction nearly comes to pass. His bowels come close to evacuation. Temple leans imperceptibly forward and whispers: ‘Mr Miles, I’m saving you for later. Something to look forward to. Like after-dinner mints.’

He turns away as a distant and muffled scream filters into the room from across the communal area.
High-pitched
and horribly distressing, it underscores the fear factor already gripping the class.

Temple smiles. ‘It seems like there’s some traction happening on the women’s course.’

Nobody laughs.

T
he Ring has already been cleared in the women’s course. Loreen and Marjorie watch as Alice circumambulates it, perusing each student in turn. ‘Everything we are doing
to
you, we are really doing
for
you. It’s out of love. Love of freedom. Love of democracy. Love of the individual.’ She pauses to stroke a student’s cheek, whilst glancing at her name tag. ‘That may be hard to understand right now, Lizzy, but once you pass to the Other Side all will become clear.’

Loreen leans into Marjorie’s ear and whispers: ‘I’m on the
other
side already.’ They smile conspiratorially as Alice continues: ‘On the Other Side all the pain, sweat and tears will be forgotten.’ She stops in front of a student with blood streaming from her nose.

‘Do I make myself clear, Sylvia?’

Sylvia Merton is pitiful. She doesn’t even bother to staunch the blood.

‘Did you hear me, Sylvia?’

‘I still can’t see what I did wrong.’ Sylvia bursts into tears.

Alice produces a paper handkerchief and gently wipes
the blood and mucus from Sylvia’s face.

Loreen, watching intently, is incredulous. Her eyes sparkle with excitement as she again whispers to Marjorie: ‘Who’d believe it? Alice Humper
dyke
is on my team, sure as shit.’

Sylvia snivels some more.

‘I only asked about society as a whole. Where it fits into PII thinking? Vis-à-vis the individual.’ She blows her nose. ‘I only asked.’

Alice stands aside, calling sharply to her assistant. ‘Loreen!’

‘Don’t ask!’ screams Loreen before smacking Sylvia across the face.

Alice winces at the ferocity of the blow.