20 THE DIAGNOSIS

After Ivan's regression....

Alice Laskey was self-assured, knew her stuff and had been appointed by the local police force to advise the prisoner Ivan Bramble as to his rights under the law. She was too young to have been working as a solicitor for long, but what she lacked in experience she made up for in intelligence.

She also knew a thing or two about what he’d gone through because early in her career, when she’d been a student praying that her university would give her a first class degree, hopefully with honours, she had been virtually savaged in a cheap public house by an obviously under-age hoodlum. He had fumbled with her bra straps and beyond until she had thumped him, and she had thumped him so hard that he had lost consciousness, or said that he had, for several minutes.

So she had every sympathy for Ivan Bramble, and having witnessed his voyage of self-discovery at the hands of a hypnotherapist she even believed that he was convinced that he had spent a day as a woman. But she knew that conviction was one thing and reality sometimes something quite different.

Professor Marmartre was in Inspector Piggott’s office, explaining what he saw as some of the conclusions that could be drawn from his session with Bramble.

“It’s all a load of bunkum if you ask me,” said the good Inspector, convinced that his own view of the world was the only one that really mattered, and his view of the world involved prosecuting the guilty with as much vigour as the law would allow.

“Why do you say that?” asked the Professor mildly. He was used to his expertise being questioned by those who had none and could cope with most cynics.

“Well, this being a woman for a day excuse, it’s impossible,” pointed out the Inspector. “I don’t know how quickly hair grows on the head, but it’s not at the rate of a foot over night, and that business of his man bits suddenly being replaced by girl bits, that’s arrant nonsense.”

“You think so?”

“I darned well do! I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve heard about most things in my lifetime.”

“Have you ever dreamed, Inspector?” asked the Professor.

“I suppose so. In fact, yes I have!”

“And can you recall all of your dreams in exact detail? Can you wake up in the morning and say to yourself that you’ve dreamed of such and such a person or place, and describe them in detail to, say, your wife who is interested in the things your dream about?”

“My wife isn’t that nosey, Professor!”

“But if she were, if, say, you were explaining a place in your dreams, say a house your dream-self inhabited which was different in some respects from your real home, and she asked you what colour the window frames or car or garage door or whatever was, how would you reply?”

“The truth, Professor, is that my dreams tend to be a bit vague...”

“You mean you have no recall of details? Then what about your dreams themselves. How accurately can you recall those, or do you, like me, wake up in the knowledge that you have dreamed but having absolutely no idea what the dream was about? Have you woken up in need of a visit to the toilet in the middle of the night and said to yourself it’s a mighty fine dream I’m having, and I’d really like to continue with it when I get back in to bed only to find that by the time you’ve climbed out of bed you have absolutely no idea what the dream was about and what made it so fine?”

Inspector Piggott didn’t like wasting his time and knew that he was wasting his time now. “It happens, but what’s that got to do with Mr Bramble and his fantasies about being a woman for a day?”

“I believe that, as one of triplets who spent his formative months in close proximity with two others, two who shared almost identical genetic qualities to his own, he was linked to them by what we might look at as an invisible thread. A thread that defied time and space and is still in place fifty years after it was formed, before birth.”

“I’ve asked him, and he has never suspected he was one of triplets, so no, that’s not possible” declared Piggott.

“In much the same way as you have a vivid dream that flickers out of existence the moment you wake up,” murmured Marmartre.

“That makes sense to me,” contributed Alice Laskey.

“Are you trying to say that his conversion to being a woman was all in his mind?” asked Piggott, “because I saw him or her! Her hair was the prettiest hair I’ve seen in a long time!”

“I had it checked out. It was human hair,” added Sergeant Smethson, “and its DNA was his.”

“Of course it was! There are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophies, officers, and even more things than are dreamed of in mine!” said the Professor impatiently, “but we have enough clues before us to see precisely what has happened and why Ivan Bramble should have no idea what’s been going on and that, in fact he’s lucky to be alive. You see, for the past fifty years I’m absolutely convinced that one of his siblings had unconsciously searched for him and recently discovered his whereabouts, and was determined to kill him!”

“But it’s he who has been suspected as a killer, if anyone was,” interposed the Sergeant.

“I have your records of the three born from the same woman on the same day,” continued the Professor, “and it’s quite clear that there were two males, Ivan Bramble and the man who spent his time stealing his electricity in the flat next door. And it’s equally clear that the third member of the triplet trio was neither male nor female but one of those rare unfortunates who has some of the physical characteristics of both sexes, a hermaphrodite. And, if I read things correctly, at the time that Mr Bramble was convinced he was a woman and even had physical reactions like the growth of hair on a balding head, the third and sexually ambivalent member of his trio was on her way to kill him! But her car malfunctioned, fortunately for him, and she was lost in a place where there was no mobile signal, and as she wandered across a muddy field holding her phone in the air trying to find one she suffered a fatal heart attack. But if her car had not broken down she would most certainly have found Mr Bramble, and possibly murdered him.”

“And we’d be regressing her instead?” asked Piggott, a hint of sarcasm in his voice. He was having no truck with fanciful make-believe theories. He preferred to leave those to the fairies, as he put it when he contemplated Professor Marmartre.

“And we’d find one thing,” said the Professor stolidly, “she had no more control over her actions than you have over your dreams! Before she was born there must have been some sort of leakage, maybe of a kind we’ll never understand no matter how hard we try to investigate the extremes of human experience, a hatred for her siblings was planted in a silent part of her developing mind. She was unaware of its existence but it guided her.”

“And how can you be so sure of this?” asked the young solicitor.

“Because she worked at a fish and chip shop, and the missing sibling called in for his lunch,” smiled the Professor, who normally smiled for a pretty face.

“Then I think my client should be released,” announced Alice, still displaying a delightful smile, standing up and waiting to be taken to Mr Bramble and guide him out into the bright free wide world beyond the police station walls.

© Peter Rogerson 04.01.19