Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver

Author:Lionel Shriver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

7

Fun with Dr Mimi

“Mum! Where are the tablets?”

“. . . In the fridge. A black box, top shelf, back left.”

Having dashed through the kitchen and scuttled up the back stairs, Cyril was crouched at the door of the master bedroom listening to his daughter’s screeching below. He was quaking with rage. Imagine, not only had his own wife grassed their plans to the one child certain to make a maximum palaver over the disputable but much-touted sanctity of human life, but now Kay had given up the decades-long hiding place of their magic beans without a fight.

“It’s not there,” came accusingly from downstairs.

That’s right, he thought, clutching the bottle in his pocket. It ain’t.

“Then ask Cyril,” Kay said. “He’s the master of ceremonies.”

“You mean Dad is the homicidal maniac, from the sound of it!” Hayley exclaimed. “Another Dr Kevorkian! Or Harold Shipman! He’s obviously brainwashed you into going along with one of his blinkered, fanatical socialist fixations! This whole nonsense is so like him I could be sick!”

Cyril felt a great welling up from a place in himself with which he was little acquainted. The force arose unbidden; so involuntary was its eruption that the closest comparison he could contrive was to vomiting, although the sensation was not so unpleasant. This—quantity, this—substance, this—enormous, formless thing wasn’t outside of him, or alien to him; it was him. And this deep very-self was affronted. How dare these women stand in his way? Should these weaker-willed creatures be allowed to defeat his plans of some thirty years? Should these soft, maudlin pussycats be allowed to hinder the courageous, honourable climax of an illustrious career? The consternation was blinding. He would show them what he was made of: fire, not their women’s water. For they had no right to thwart him, no right to demand he, too, wither, crumble, and evaporate like every other addled old cretin clinging to the thinnest excuse for being alive, raging in hackneyed, over-cited poetry against the dying of the light. Those two had no right to compel Dr Cyril J. Wilkinson to implode into one more gibbering, palsied parody of his formerly formidable person, becoming one more burden on the state, one more burden on family, one more source of resentment, boredom, mockery, pity, and endless eyeroll. With all their sentimental wittering, they had no right to insist that he demean himself like all the others, conspire in his own ridicule, and obliterate all he had been and all he had achieved by growing witless, dependent, and enfeebled! He had the tablets and he had the power.

Yet amidst his flaming indignation, Cyril had not altogether lost his capacity to think methodically. In his panic of a few minutes before, he had hesitated in the kitchen, torn between fleeing upstairs and absconding out the back door to conceal himself in the garden. His choice of upstairs had made emotional sense, for he associated their bedroom of nearly half a century with safety, succour, and refuge. But, in practical terms, the unlit garden would have been more strategic.

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