Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page A

normal to him and was certainly much cheaper than paying a living therapist, who, chances are, would be nowhere near as good as Carl.
    Fraser had gotten drunk on fame and champagne after the broadcast of Morris’s death. The next few days he was lauded in the Scottish press as a hero for capturing the mood of the nation. He was a star, and by the end of January the following year he had his ownshow. Every night. People wanted him to talk about God, so he did. For cash.
    As it is with success, sometimes he got too excited to sleep. He thought about taking pills to help him but he didn’t want to get hooked on anything, so he just drank whisky instead. One bright night in April, Fraser concluded that he was drinking too much. He had become a little concerned about how much he was throwing down, and the last thing he wanted to do was end up in some crappy rehab or “show business hospital,” as Jack Trampas called it.
    He decided that he would abstain for two nights a week. The first night, a Tuesday, was rough and he didn’t drift off until seven A.M. , when the sun was peeking in through the heavy crushed-velvet drapes of his West End flat. As soon as he was asleep he found himself in a lovely meadow in Switzerland. A round tower was off to his left and he felt an urge to walk toward it; as he did so he became aware that instead of getting nearer to the tower he was sinking underground.
    He found himself in an underground chamber that had curtains not unlike the ones in his flat. He opened the curtains. But instead of sunlight behind them, he saw a giant penis, about the size and color of a bull African elephant, veiny and erect and pointing to the sky.
    Carl appeared behind him.
    “Do you mind?” said Carl in a deep voice, laced with a sweet accent.
    “Mind what?” said Fraser, without talking. He just thought it but he knew the old man could hear him.
    “Do you mind not looking at my penis!”
    “This can’t be your penis,” Fraser thought.
    “It bloody is,” said Carl. “Stop staring at it.”
    “But it’s about a hundred times the size of you, it’d never fit in your trousers.”
    “I don’t want it in my trousers. I like it in this big hole in the ground.”
    “You’re nuts!”
    “No, just the penis. My nuts are in my underpants. Boom-boom!”
    Fraser woke up in a flop sweat. He checked himself. He had a massive erection.
    Jesus, thought Fraser, but he was wrong.
    Fraser and Carl met in the oddest of places. Carl, being dead, didn’t have an office and could only appear to Fraser in his dreams, which in itself was very Jungian. He would only appear if Fraser had taken the requisite break from alcohol, so in a way Fraser could control the visitations, drinking when he wanted peace and stopping when he felt like therapy.
    Although the dreams were Fraser’s, he got the distinct impression that the old man chose the venue and implanted it in his psyche. They met in ancient Greece, in Studio 54 at the height of the cocaine seventies. They chatted as they walked through no-man’s-land between the besieged armies in Ypres in 1917 (Carl had a fondness for the years 1914 to 1918, as, during life, he had had a bit of a breakdown during this period and felt he had missed a lot of what was going on in the temporal world, although he had been extremely busy elsewhere). The collective unconsciousness was their oyster.
    Jung took full advantage of living in dreamland to appear in any guise he wanted, because Fraser would always know it was him, although Fraser put his foot down when he appeared as a ferocious grizzly bear.
    “I don’t feel comfortable with you like this,” said Fraser, using the language of analysis that Carl had taught him. “I find it difficult to confide in an entity that may rip my head off and drink my blood at any moment.”
    “Sorry,” growled Carl through his massive saliva-dripping fangs, and promptly returned to the stately European gentleman he had been in the latter years of