Sin by Shaun Allan Read Free Book Online

needed some help
in calming down. Being trussed up tighter than a turkey eagerly
awaiting Christmas lunch isn't as attractive a proposition as it
might at first sound. Saying that, I'm sure there are those who
would, and do, pay very good money for such a 'pleasure’. I, for
one, am not amongst them, I have to say. Naturally, Dr. Connors
didn't realise I'd be vacating my cell that lunch time. I somehow
neglected to inform his good self of my intentions. I doubted he
would be too happy.
    But then again.
    If he had, then maybe he'd have
plumped for something a little more fashionable. Straps and belts
are something of a fashion necessity nowadays, but there is a
little thing called overkill. I didn't think the flames that would
be dining on me would mind though, so I didn't mention it. I was
pleased the good doctor had decided against medication and had
restricted his treatment to just the jacket. Being pleased about
one of his decisions didn't sit particularly comfortably at my
table, but I needed to be at the very least lucid. I worried that
any amount of drugs, even though I'd often requested their
administration in the past, would prevent me from doing the
diddly-doo. So, yes, I was pleased, relieved and not at all peeved
that I hadn't had a breakfast of needle on toast, washed down with
a cold glass of Risperdal.
    As far as I was concerned, I was
interred at Insanity Central purely of my own accord. It was for
the safety of everyone else, not for myself. The medication was
there to numb me. It was meant to blot out that damned coin,
erasing the possibility of me taking another bite out of
population's pie. I didn't need it because I was psychotic. I
wasn't. Nor was I half a dozen different people all squashed into
this one body, each vying for control of the only mouth. I was
normal, in a completely abnormal kind of way, of course. But Dr.
Connors didn't know that. Even if he knew it on some level, he
couldn't believe it. I was talking crazy dude! Rambling a-ho worse
than Bender Benny down in Room 101.
    There wasn't actually a Room
101. That was just a cell a little smaller than the rest, with a
little extra padding, where they put you if they wanted to forget
you. ‘In need of extra support’ was how they'd put it, but it
essentially meant the same thing. Bender Benny was crazy. He really
was. Nuttier than Dr. Connors thought I was. Bender Benny's mind
was bent so far round on itself, it could tickle his tonsils if it
so wished. Don't ask me to tell you just what was wrong with him.
Dr. Connors is the expert in matters of the mind.
    Hah, I made a funny! Dr. Connors
was an ex-spurt. That's about as far as I'd go. Trust me to
voluntarily put myself in the care of someone who needed treatment
more than his own patients! To be honest, I should have known,
really. That kind of thing just seemed to happen to me. Fate's
fickle finger always ended up picking me out of its nose and
flicking me flat splat on the dirty pavement. When Life played Spin
the Bottle, that old empty beer bottle always ended up settling on
me.
    Bender Benny was a danger to
himself, apparently. He mumbled constantly in fractured sentences
that only ever made a weird kind of sense when you half heard them.
I'd never seen him become violent. He'd never so much as raised his
voice or his fist. He simply sat there in the so-called common
room, chained to the tubular steel chairs which were in turn bolted
to the floor. After five minutes of his nonsensical mutterings he
was returned to 101 before he made the other residents nervous.
Every three or four hours, sometimes it was as much as six or
seven, he'd appear again, head slumped, shoulders hunched, mouth
twitching an ever constant stream of nothing. But he was a danger.
Apparently.
    As I was nice and sane and
crispy, Risperdal, Valium, paracetomol and vitamin C were far more
than I needed, but Dr. Connors, as he would, disagreed. Maybe he
had shares in a pharmaceutical company. Perhaps he was on
commission.