The Story of John Nightly by Tot Taylor

Author:Tot Taylor [Taylor, Tot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783523214
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout a new way of walkin’

Do you want to lose your mind?

Walk right in, sit right down

Daddy, let your mind roll on

‘Walk Right In’, The Rooftop Singers, 1963

(Vanguard 35017)

Four weeks later… Week 1,339, series 29, session #1.

The consultant psychiatrist paddled through the double swing door, along the plant-infested corridor, into the box room at the end. A cul-de-sac of greenness, the patient’s glass box resembled nothing so much as the subtropical dorm of a local garden centre. Not overgrown, out-there or wild but self-contained, in-here, temperate, cultivated. Safe. A real control zone for a real control freak. An exotic contradiction, the rich man’s conservatory. Like the one Philip Marlowe visits in The Big Sleep, or the spymaster’s glasshouse in Minority Report. Or the greenhouse in outer space in Silent Running. Each fake tropic existing for a reason beyond the cultivation of plants. The room, though airy and spacious, still somehow oppressive. Dead but for plant life. Humid not only with vegetation but also with the uneven inhaling and exhaling of the creature that has made its home there.

Johanna grabbed a high-back chair from a stack. She pulled it over to the left of where the resident lay, as she did twice a week during a ‘series’; the inhabitant never in all this time having been kind or thoughtful enough to place the chair in position for his guest prior to her arrival.

Never a greeting passed between them, but over the years this single piece of business became the first contact-event proper, in analysis terms, of each two-hour stint. Johanna stood for a moment, admiring the bright-orange starflowers neatly arranged along the floor-to-ceiling window. The patient gazed up at her. Deigned to look up. Something was different today; something was wrong. He frowned, trying to fathom as he continued to look her up and down. She seemed younger, for a start, he thought. More girlish… more vulnerable… flimsier somehow. He viewed not admiringly, not desirous, figuring whether or not he had any real interest in the interloper this afternoon.

In normal circumstances, outside of work, Johanna Zorn was an attractive proposition. Happily married with two youngsters, as John had been informed by one of the groundsmen the day of their meeting; she was a statuesque, big-limbed sportswoman. In normal life. And in his own previous life the patient would have been trying to dazzle her. Try it on with her. Charm and capture along with other seductions. But right now, able to think only in the moment, trying to gaze, figure and fathom all at the same time, he looked at her in a most unmanly way.

Johanna turned back towards the patient, a good deal more relaxed in the presence of her charge these past few months. Betraying a relief that there was now an end in sight, a cadence, perfect or otherwise, to these six long, drawn-out summers.

‘flat shoes!’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Flat shoes! That’s what it is! I knew there was something!’ The man seemed worryingly excited. ‘Never seen you in flat shoes before.

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