Bak in the chare agane

I thought he had taken the roots out last week. I am laying back in the chair, conscious that I slept poorly last night, wishing I had the nerve to sit up and cancel this session. But the injections have already gone in, and the new assistant is far too pretty for me to throw a wimpish fit. My pride, which will always be my downfall, is up again. I am too tired to resist. How did I manage to find myself in this predicament?

Well, a long time ago, there was a mummy and a daddy. Enough. Apart from childish irreverance, there are images of penetration, of helplessness, of a wide-open wet orifice and a long intruder. Turn it off, go elsewhere. The patterns on the overhead lamp go to orange upon blue when my eyes stop searching for a meaning in them, and I see a picture of sailing boats on the calm blue surface of Poole harbour. Shimmering water under a friendly sun. Flowing water that is everywhere, and goes nowhere.

I woke at four this morning, hearing the rain beat randomly on the window glass. I got up, put on a bathrobe, and went outside. The row of solar lamps still shone their pale moon-like gleam upon the wetness of the ground. I watched the silver stream of water overflowing from the second water butt and felt compelled to catch it in a watering can, then in a bucket beneath the lip of the can, and stayed long enough to watch both fill and spill. Beyond the pool of pale lights the vegetables sat there drinking up the long-awaited rain with their thirsty roots.

Roots, why did I think of that? He's just called for 'A thirty-two'. What is this, a golf course? Oh no, flags and holes, try another tack. What can he mean by thirty-two? Not inches. It must be millimetres. What is thirty-two millimetres in inches? Take away 25.4 that leaves 8, 8 into 25 goes 3 times without putting too fine a point on it, oh no, don't think of points. He's rachetting away inside my tooth with something that's one and one-third of an inch long, my tooth is only half an inch, the point will be in my nose at this rate. Stop, break off this engagement now, fly away.

Breath calmly, unclench your fingers, uncross your legs, and sit up when he asks you if you'd like to rinse. The new girl has made her mark in less than a week; a box of tissues has been fastened with a pair of rubber bands to the stainless steel mast beside the porcelain spit-bowl. It is a touch of simple genius, and I shall add her to my list of angels to be revered, remembered, roped and ravished - stop that now. Desist. She'll notice, move your hands a little, flutter the tissue, as if that would be enough to hide it. He might see it as well, and it will distract him, and he'll poke just once too deeply and... That is most definitely enough. Stop thinking of the letter R.

Go somewhere else, somewhere well away from here, far in time as well as space, to the Old Schoolhouse in Penzance, where you first came home from the sea to try and calm your worn-out nerves. Contemplate the keening of the seagulls in the morning on the tiles, the coolness of the downstairs space behind the massive wooden door, the lack of windows in the wall between you and the lane that made it such a private place to live.

Consider the differences, and also similarities, of a life nearly two hundred miles and twenty-five years away. The sudden shock, then and now, of no longer earning a steady income but having instead to live on meagre savings. No television, no phone, just a radio, a music centre, and books. No computers. You punched holes in cardboard torn from cereal packets and pushed silicon chips through them, to be joined with copper point-to-point in lieu of printed circuit boards. LED's glowing, or not, as they flashed up the answer to the question presented to the inputs by paper-clips and drawing pins for keypads. One and one gives nought and carries one.

No emails, no web-sites, no search engines to answer questions instantly. Knowledge coming instead from books, committed to the vagaries of a shattered mind trying to rebuild itself. Books on psychology side by side with books on silicon circuitry. The circuits of the brain, the logic of the mind, the muddle of the dream. Remember B F Skinner's 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity', which you read in preparation for an attempt to go to university as a mature student, and how you became side-tracked by a trivial piece within it? Rats, in cages, given food pellets in response to pushing a treadle several times, in a simulation of work. One group of rats were fed at fixed times for a fixed number of presses, the others fed at random intervals. The rats on the random cycle pressed the treadle more often than those on the regular cycle. They expended more energy, pressing the treadle in a frenzy until a food pellet appeared, then almost immediately returned to their task of trying to score another jackpot, sometimes not even bothering to eat their reward. The gambling urge is not exclusive to man.

In a moment of clarity, I saw the similarity between those gambling rats and myself, trying to earn a living from an inbox full of emails. A muddle of sales on ebay, sales of car spares from the website, offers of contract work; pointless spam advising me that my bank account has been compromised, I need to buy these shares, my aid is most solicitiously required to further a transaction subsequent to the unfortunate death of a cabinet minister, somewhere lonely housewives are ready to fuck and suck me, my penis length could be as much as thirty five.

'Will a thirty-five one be enough?'

'I hope so. The next size up is three hundred and fifty four.'

No, please, not that long, it'll rip through the top of my head. I'll stick with what I've got, I'll just use it more. Thirty five is fine, so long as it's mine.

I was doing fine until I remembered the rats, damn that letter R.