Wild About Larry Read online



  Wild About Larry

  By

  G.S. Ryan

 

  This is a work of fiction and all characters appearing in the story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by G.S Ryan

  Chapter One

  The Cracked Up Quack

  A towering building which dominates the rooftops of an ancient city is on fire. Without warning there is a blinding flash of light, closely followed by the echoing boom of an explosion, and plumes of thick black smoke start rising slowly into the sky. Up on the fourth floor, a fair haired woman in a white sleeved dress staggers out onto a balcony. She peers back inside the apartment, using her forearm to shield her face from the scorching heat. A cloud smelling of burning wood swirls around her and she splutters and coughs as it fills her lungs. She frantically looks down below, where a mass of panic stricken people are running away from the building. She opens her mouth and her lips start moving, but for a split second there is silence. Then all of a sudden she starts squealing in a voice which sounds almost like a male straining to reach the feminine vocal range.

  “Somebody help me!” she shrieks. “I’m trapped up here and I'm going to die if I can’t get out!”

  But as her voice travels down to the ground it dissolves in the air and fades away, and not one of the mob even looks up at her. A realisation crashes over her that she is alone and nobody is coming to rescue her.

  She is now wheezing and weeping, and fearfully glances back inside the baking, blackened room. She senses that the opportunity to reach safety has now passed, and the time for deliberation is at an end. She hesitates, then slowly inches towards the balcony railing, hitches her dress up and starts to climb over it. She has decided there is only one option left now, which is to throw herself to the wind and into the arms of a merciful God.

  Suddenly somebody riding a white horse comes clattering around the corner and stops abruptly by the palace entrance. It is a soldier, wearing a green uniform and peaked cap. He quickly dismounts. Then he runs across to a spot below the balcony, looks up and shouts at her in a strange mixed up accent of Australian and American, “Cooee Viv! Don't jump, yer bloody galah! I'm on my way up to get you out of there!”

  The woman looks down at him and smiles. The divine intervention she was praying for has arrived, when all appeared to be lost.

  “Oh Larry!” she squeals, in her unnatural voice. “I always knew I could count on you!”

  He nods up towards her and salutes. His chest is covered with medals and, curiously, he appears to be wearing a false moustache.

  “No worries sport.” he smiles. “I’ll be up in a tick”.

  He runs into the building and bounds up flights of stairs, pausing to usher several confused people down them as he goes. He strides along a corridor until he comes to a particular door where he stops, lifts his foot and kicks at it with the sole of his heel. The door comes away and hangs flimsily from its top hinge. He pushes it aside and dashes in to find Viv lying prone on the floor by the balcony. He bends down and picks her up in his arms. As he carries her limp body out towards the corridor, her eyes open and she smiles contentedly up at him.

  He looks around the room and then down at her, and in his strange accent says “Strewth Viv! This place has really gone cactus! That’s the last time I let you fire up the barbie - from now on it's strictly dunny duties for you!”

  She looks up into his eyes and pleads “Will you always be here to look after me Larry? Say you will, say you will”.

  He smiles and says “Of course I'll always be here for you mate, just as sure as there's cold shit in a dead dingo”.

  Then she starts to speak huskily, in a breathy fashion which is in contrast to her relaxed demeanour. “I love you Larry O and I want your children! I want you to make love to me, right here, right now!”

  He chuckles, leans down towards her and places a slow passionate kiss upon her soft lips. Then he breaks from the embrace, gazes upon her and murmurs “Oh Viv, you’re hotter than a piss in a sauna”.

  Finally he carries her out of the room as a burning beam comes crashing down from the ceiling and falls onto the floor behind them.

  It was lunchtime and Dr Heather Surning, BSc, MSc and PhD should have been helping out in the school cafeteria, but was lying on the couch in her office. She placed a marijuana joint between her lips, inhaled deeply, then exhaled. She watched the smoke slowly waft through the air, illuminating the sunbeams and shadows streaming in through the window. She listened to the sparse echo of a grandfather clock ticking across the room. As the drug travelled through her senses she looked upwards and gazed at a maze of cracks running across the ceiling. She tried to follow the lines and intersections but kept losing her way, and the thought occurred that this might be a metaphor for her life. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound of the clock rhythmically cutting slices through the silence. Then she instinctively shuddered, suddenly aware she might be listening to the sound of her career slowly dripping down a plughole.

  Her thoughts drifted away and she fell into a trance, floating down a daisy chain of memories which her subconscious mind collected together. She found herself transported back to the first memory, where she was wearing a black cloak and mortarboard. Ah yes, she was graduating from Yale a year early, majoring in psychology. Flags were waving, balloons were popping and applause was being poured all over her like it was raining champagne.

  People were cheering “Heather, you are so the most likely to!”

  “Likely to what?” she felt herself smile.

  “Likely to succeed!” they chorused.

  “In what?”

  “In anything you choose, of course!”

  She nodded to herself. She’d long been aware of the resolve she carried inside her, an unstoppable determination which drove her relentlessly towards success in whatever she did and then, once there, restlessly moved her on. She was also aware that although she was passionate about her work, she had never felt a need for the passion of love. Neither the instant passion of a stranger, nor the lifetime love of a partner, parent or friend. She didn’t understand why she should be like this and she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. But nonetheless, after her Bachelor of Science degree she went on to study hard and completed her Masters and Doctorate degrees in record time with record grades.

  She now travelled on to the next memory, where she was newly qualified and had just started a post at the research hospital. Billy Maple was one of her first patients, and as well as suffering from severe depression he was delusional. He was easy enough to handle most of the time, when he believed himself to be Clark Kent, but things became more difficult whenever he turned into Superman. She recalled counselling him one grey afternoon, the dark winter days making him even more depressed than usual.

  “Now then, Clark.” she softly admonished. “You must both face up to and accept reality. You do not possess, nor will you ever possess the ability to fly like a bird”.

  Billy decided to prove her wrong there and then by jumping out of the nearest window, but all he did was prove her right and damn near kill himself.

  She remembered feeling a new sensation at the time. It was the crushing weight of responsibility and it had caused her to pause for long reflection. Likeliest to succeed in anything she chose? It seemed like a lame joke, and it had been easier to leave that place than stay. And once again she felt herself abandoning this memory.

  She hurried on to the next one, at the Department of Education in Washington, where the politicos had loved her work. They praised her visions, and the words she used to carve them out, of an educational system which reached out to boys as well as girls. And then they passed it all off as their own idea. She didn’t mind them stealing from her because she was happy there, but after a while there was an election and a new administration with a new agenda. Suddenly every word she wrote was examined for its spin potential instead of its truth and altered by unknown, bloodstained hands. She’d been angry at the time, but she didn’t want to ruffle any feathers or cause a fuss, so she said nothing and did nothing.

  In the meantime a local newspaper editor got to hear about her. “Do some writing in your spare time.” he’d said. “And pass it on onto me. I’ll see what I can do”.

  Within weeks she was reading her unadulterated words in the Lifestyle supplement and realised it was time for her to move on again.

  She suddenly remembered a photograph of herself, diligently writing at a desk in a study. Was it a book or news article? It could have been either, seeing as she had become both a journalist and novelist. Without even trying she somehow became a darling of the supermarket tabloids. “Heather Forever” sang a headline. “Doc Clocks Another Award” trumpeted another. But as it became clear she felt no reciprocal love for her smitten admirers, the accolades melted into a battery of camera flashes, prying eyes and lurid lies. She’d always been taught that if trouble stands in your path it’s better to walk away from it than it is to try and walk through it. And that’s exactly what she did. Rather than stand up for herself and fight them she decided to simply walk away, back into obscurity.

  Then an orchestra started playing a waltz in her head. It was The Blue Danube and she imagined herself wearing her ball gown, dancing with an invisible partner. As her posture rose and fell along with the musical tempo, she slowly travelled down a spiral of circles. When she reached the centre she saw a piece of paper on the floor, bent down
and picked it up. It was a letter from her first true love, academia. Actually, better than that, it was a job offer. Her and Harvard were drawn to each other as an artist to a canvas, and she became a professor of psychology. Here she drew a wide reputation for dispensing her illuminated intellect like a full moon shining through the darkness of a clear harvest night. With hindsight she wished she’d stayed there and remained thankful for the happiness she inhabited, instead of allowing her vanity to accept the post of Chief Executive at the American Congress of Psychologists. She still harboured last minute doubts, but allowed the ACP board to pressure her into making the move. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere if she’d realised the amount of travelling the new job would involve, because – and this is pretty ironic, given she was regarded as such a high flier - she’d always been terrified of flying.

  Then, without warning a rumbling, shaking volcanic memory erupted out of her mind. She was inside a crowded airplane but she couldn’t understand why she was there. People were shouting and screaming accusations of terrorism at her, a mass of anonymous bodies were lying on top of her and somebody somewhere was handcuffing her hands behind her back. The judge later remarked that the pint of bourbon she’d drunk to stiffen her nerves prior to boarding the flight was probably a mistake, but he was going to have to incarcerate her as an example to others.

  A voice inside her howled at him “But your honor, don’t you realize I was voted the most likely to succeed?”

  The supermarket tabloids saw it differently however, with the front page headline “Quack Cracks Up In Air Rage Terror”.

  She now imagined herself curled up into a foetal ball, tumbling through a black void with no sense of whether she was upright or upside down. She’d reached the end of the memory chain and arrived back in the present with a bump.

  So here she was, washed up and wasting her life away at this school. After all those years of success, she now spent her days teaching messed up rich kids and her spare time smoking weed, trying to make sense of how she'd ended up as a comedy caricature. The crazy psychoanalyst, a ridiculed laughing stock, the person nobody else wanted to be. As these thoughts swept around her mind she felt her stress level shoot up, her heart started thumping violently and the floodgate finally burst open. Adrenaline gushed out of her brain, pumped into her bloodstream and spread through her body, seeping into her tautening, tensing muscles.

  After a short while the tingling in her fingertips and tongue faded away. She felt layers of shame for working herself up into a frenzy yet again, swinging between extremes of moods to force her mind to find those lost memories of her mental breakdown in the plane. But, as usual, they remained tucked away somewhere in an unreachable recess of her subconscious. She still couldn't remember a damned thing about the events leading up to her moment of public ridicule.

  The grandfather clock struck two chimes and she opened her eyes. She rose unsteadily from the couch, tottered across to her desk and slowly thumbed through her diary. Ah yes, she was supposed to be assessing those three boys from this semester's grade twelve intake in a couple of hours. She stubbed out the joint and opened a window to clear the air. She briefly glanced outside at the green hills and fields, the sea, the cloudless sky and the white dot of an albatross hovering in the distance. With hardly a pause she vacantly drew a curtain across the window to block out the invasive light. Then she sat at the desk, slipped into her practised professional mode and started making some notes. Marcia had mentioned these boys were all from particularly rich, expectant families, and she had a feeling they might be damaged goods.

  While Heather Surning was serving her prison sentence, a public trial started online with discussions questioning her state of mind springing up all over the internet. Lynch mobs of total strangers assembled and before long the rumours of her descent into permanent madness became an unquestionable truth. She was convicted in absentia. So it was hardly a surprise that when she came out of jail she discovered she was alone. Her job had mysteriously disappeared along with old friends and casual acquaintances who were always busy when she called them and never called her back. Just as she resigned herself to living in her own personal leper colony and never working again, an old college classmate named Marcia Givens phoned. Heather remembered Marcia as being a campus warrior, forever organising marches to highlight the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Back in those days she was always lecturing her fellow students that fighting for the rights of those less fortunate than themselves was part of the price of enjoying their own privileges. Heather had largely ignored her, feeling that her reasons for student protest lay somewhere between guilty conscience and youthful pretension.

  Marcia explained that nowadays she was more interested in creating solutions than protesting against problems, and had embarked on a long term project to take kids out of the ghettos and give them the chance of a better life. And that was why she had used her own money to help finance the purchase of Marvin Hopkins Progressive College at Santa Domingo, California. She described how she launched herself into her new mission, becoming the cook, cleaner, teacher, principal and owner. But she found the rest of the world didn’t share her interest in talented poor children. Funding had dried up and the project was close to failing. So, in desperation she had recently resorted to also promoting the school as a haven for wealthy children with learning difficulties. She was astonished to discover she’d stumbled upon a gap in the educational market, and a horde of wealthy young misfits beat a path to her school. The fees she was charging the rich kids were just about funding the free places for the poor kids, but it was all getting too much she said. Many of these new children required psychological treatment and she wondered if Heather might possibly be in a position to assist? Heather listened to this sweet melody of noble intentions and couldn’t help but be impressed. Marcia seemed to be far more interested in making a difference than in making money, but Heather wasn’t sure idealism was a path she wanted to travel down herself. She muttered something about it being very different to what she was accustomed to, and she’d have to think about it and call back. But Marcia also read the supermarket tabloids and spent time online, and knew she wouldn’t have to wait long. Five minutes later the phone duly rang and Heather agreed to give it a go, but said she wasn’t making any promises. Marcia said that was fine and, by the way, she couldn’t afford to pay much.

  Heather’s first appointment that afternoon was with an eighteen year old boy who breezed into the room without knocking on the door and greeted her with a cheery quip of “Yo, cracked quack doc, s'up?”

  “Excuse me?” she replied suspiciously, looking up from the notes she was working on.

  “I been told to paddle off the line-up and into the zone and surf on in to you. Hope it's nothin' tonar”.

  The doctor gave this strange boy a stern glance. “Young man, will you please speak proper English when you're addressing me?”

  His demeanour immediately disintegrated into an uncontrollable nervousness. He drew several deep breaths, firmly clutched his groin and blurted “Can I use the restroom please?”

  He then shot out of the room and several minutes later he returned, looking slightly more relaxed. “Er, sorry ma'am. I was way stoked up there.” he said. “But I'm okay now, it’s cool. I'm Neil Petit and Principal Givens has told me to come and see you”.

  “That's better, Neil. I'm Doctor Surning and I've asked you here for the purpose of conducting an informal character assessment.” she replied, shuffling through the notes.

  “I’ve been looking through the profile supplied by your previous school. They imply you might have some minor passivity issues”.

  “Er, what’s that mean, doc?”

  “Essentially it means you take your lead from other people instead of ever attempting to take a leading role yourself in relationships and social situations”.

  “Oh yes, dude. I totally agree with that.” he smiled.

  “It also means you have a tendency to not express your own opinion and simply agree with whatever other people say”.

  He nodded his head and beamed “Yep, I totally agree”.

  Doctor Surning glanced at him directly, her eyes probing his, questioning his motives. Was he trying to make a fool out of her?

  “So why do you agree?” she asked.

  “Well doc…” Suddenly his smile transformed into an uncomfortable vacant expression. He paused for thought and silently shrugged.

  She looked into him and could tell he wanted to speak but something was holding him back.

  “It’s okay Neil.” she urged. “Whatever you say in my office is entirely confidential. It stays between you and me and no one else”.

  He stared at the ground for what seemed like a long time. Eventually he looked up at her. “It’s like this.” he said, almost whispering. “If you’ve got a mother and stepfather who kick the crap out of you every time you disagree with them, after a while you kinda learn to agree with everything they say. Then you find out pretty quickly how life is much easier with other people if you agree with them, so you end up agreeing with totally everyone all the time”.

  “And do you think this is any way to live your life Neil? Not having any views or opinions of your own?”

  “Oh yes, I agree with that totally.” he smiled once again and then grimaced. “No, hold on, I don’t agree with any of it. Oh I don’t know doc”.

  He started shifting and squirming in his seat. “Can I use the bathroom again?”

  Her brow furrowed. The symptoms he was exhibiting were far more pronounced than those listed in the report from his previous school. It was almost as though they’d taken a vow of silence and simply moved this boy elsewhere so he could become somebody else’s problem.

  Once again he retu
rned from the toilet and she continued the interview. “I'm going to ask you a few questions. It's entirely routine and there's nothing to worry about. It'll be a bit like a test, except there are no right or wrong answers”.

  Neil looked at her, perplexed. “If there are no right or wrong answers then it's not a test, is it ma'am? I should know 'cos I've been doing tests for practically my entire life”.

  “What sort of tests were these Neil?”

  “Oh, mainly ones my parents put me on. They were supposed to make me more intelligent but seeing as I'm here now, I guess they didn't work”.

  She looked at him, inquisitively yet with a vague recognition. “Tell me Neil, what are your ambitions for the future? Where do you see yourself in, say, five years’ time?”

  “Well, before I came here to Santa Domingo I didn't have any ambition of my own. My mom and stepfather always took care of the career side of things for me. But now I've had a chance to think it over and decide where my future lies”.

  “And where's that Neil?”

  “I want to be a professional surfer ma'am. I want to surf all over the world. I want to be as famous as George Freeth”.

  She glanced up from her notepad to survey him. With his scrawny frame, lank hair and thick glasses he didn't strike her as any surfer she might imagine.

  “And have you done much surfing Neil?”

  “No ma'am, no surfing yet. To tell the truth I can’t even swim, but I can sure talk the talk, so I guess I'll be able to walk the walk without any trouble. And after all, we’ve got the best surfing beach in the damned country on our doorstep”.

  Doctor Surning added to the observations she'd been scribbling and made a mental note to check out the local beach some time. It was just down the road, yet she hadn’t bothered to visit it yet.

  “Thank you Neil.” she murmured. “We're finished for now, but I’d like for us to have another chat this time next month”.

  After Neil left the room and closed the door behind him, she realised she hadn't gotten around to asking him any of the assessment questions she'd planned.

 

  Her next interview was with a boy of the same age named Kenny. His notes described him as basically sweet natured but a hopeless dreamer, determined to see shades of wonderment around him instead of stark black and white reality. He also had a tendency to stammer when placed under the slightest level of duress.

  When she did the standard ink-spot test on him he was adamant he could make out a surfboard. “That's... way weird.... totally KO.... it's... a fish board with.... four... fins, if I'm not mistaken”.

  He eventually calmed down sufficiently to speak fluently.

  “It’s my stepmom.” he explained. “She wants my old man because he’s loaded but all she wants from me is to see my back as I disappear down the road. My real mother died and my father was okay back then, when it was just me and him, but when step mommy arrived on the scene things changed between us”.

  “How did they change, Kenny?” asked Heather.

  “Well for a start she got pregnant. So not only did I have a new mom I didn’t want, but I also got a new sister I didn’t want. And my father finally got the daughter he always wanted. Then step mommy started turning the heat on me and making it clear three’s company but four’s a crowd. She turned him against me by doing stuff like stealing from his wallet and planting it in my room, or saying I’d deliberately hurt the baby. And of course he always took her side. They started punishing me by taking my things away, like my laptop and my games console. Finally, when they’d taken everything away from me they took me away to boarding school”.

  “How did you feel about this?”

  “I hated it. I kept begging my father to let me return home but she wouldn’t even let me come back for school holidays. She said they didn’t have any room in the house anymore, what with her having another baby girl in the meantime. And every time I started getting miserable I started getting low grades, and every time I started getting low grades they just sent me to a new school where I had to start all over again”.

  Kenny went on to explain how he wandered aimlessly through his own life, with a lacklustre disinterest in anything and everything, but how this evaporated within him when he discovered the joys of surfing via the internet.

  “Actually I was the first of the three of us to get into surfing. The truth is I totally misunderstood what surfing the internet is all about. I thought it was something to do with sea surfing, so I started learning about it by mistake. Then the other two dudes kinda tagged along”.

  “Who are these other two people?” she interrupted.

  “Neil Petit and Brian Lovett, ma’am. I told them if we were going to look cool when we start surfing we have to learn to speak the language first, and we should practice it every day.” he proudly informed her.

  He secretly harboured his new love interest, protectively cradling it within his gently rocking arms because as he himself said, “I thought my parents would take it away from me if they found out about it”, as though he might be forced to abort an unwelcome baby. His parting words were “Please don't tell my… step mom… about the surfing, doc. Can it be… our secret? Please?”

  She promised to keep his secret safe so long as he turned up at her office each month. She shook her head and tutted to herself as she annotated and corrected the notes supplied by his previous school.

  Her last interview was with a sullen boy named Brian. She pored over his notes, which variously described him as possessing potential yet displaying episodes of anger caused by a lack of self-esteem. Of the three of them he certainly seemed the brightest and most realistic and thus, in many ways the saddest and most aggressive. She couldn't help but notice he also suffered from a facial tick whenever his emotions got the better of him.

  “Listen, doctor!” he raged, his face twitching like a lunatic. “For as long as I can remember my parents have been telling me how stupid I am and what a loser I am, and how I’m going to waste my life away. Every goddamned day of my life. You wanna know why I wanna surf for a living? Because it's the only damned career idea I ever had which was my own idea, and not something being pushed at me by them, and I think it's way cool and it's gonna totally weird them out. That's why. And I’ve had enough of this fascist interrogation. I’m outta here”.

  He stormed out of the office, his face launching into a paroxysm of spasms, and slammed the door behind him. Unbeknown to anyone, he then tearfully ran out of the school building and trudged his way through the town and onto the solitude of the beach. Here he spent the sunny afternoon sitting alone on the sand, quietly sobbing a cocktail of tears of rage and sorrow, as the waves gushed back and forth with their slow ebb and rushing flow.

  That evening Heather Surning lay on her couch in the dark, smoking a glowing joint and staring up into black space. She reflected upon the three interviews she’d conducted earlier that day. Those boys weren’t just damaged goods; they were broken and the more she conversed with them the more she realised she was broken herself. Given enough time she was confident she would be able to piece the boys back together, but who was going to collect her memories for her and make her complete once again?

  Chapter Two

  One Great Guide, One True Faith