Creative
Writing: Portrait of Fredrick Clegg
Two
days ago I met the strangest client, probably, I’ve ever treated in my whole
career.
It was dark
outside and I was sure my wife was at home waiting for me. Probably dinner was
already on the table and, as usual, I was late for it.
‘One
last client for today, let him in’ I declared to my secretary. It is not at all
simple being a psychologist. The alliance of yours and other people’s problems
tightens around your neck, in a suffocating manner. Next thing you know: you
are the hangman.
I
was too busy moaning about my job to notice the newcomer’s entry. He was
sitting on the chair in front of me, but was taking no notice of me being
enveloped in his own self, totally self-absorbed. He fiddled non-stop with his nasty fleshy white pink, female like hands. He
did so as if they were two opposite poles of a magnet: impossible to keep
apart.
The way he bit
his lips was egomaniacal, the battling of his nails was megalomaniac. These
minimal gestures created a rhythm (the only sound antagonist to the silence in
that moment) which initially appeared muddled. After a while instead I found
myself hypnotized by the pattering of his niggling. Unconsciously I was scared
by the mysticism of the situation: he had not spoken a word, he had not taken a
breath, but I felt I had understood loads about the character situated in front
of me.
He
lifted his too long, alien-shaped, visage and stared at me, still inevitably
indulgent, and challenged me with his two black murky dungeons. They say the
eyes are the mirror of the soul. Having encountered this man’s eyes has made me
completely devoted and witness to this statement. If Dante Alighieri would have
seen those eyeballs he would have described them when having to depict hell.
I
penetrated right through him. His mind was a gymnast, an ungraceful and
traumatized one however. It was terrified, incapable of walking on a beam:
totally unbalanced. I am not an exorcist and it is not my business to free the
devil out of the madman.
‘Shall
I speak about myself?’ he murmured in a macabre chant, turning the room into an
obscure, haze reality. His words were thick with mist, mysterious, menacing and
they immobilized me. I don’t usually let clients speak at first. His eagerness to speak, however, showed
her dagger-like fangs menacingly. It daunted at me monstrously and I was forced
to let him vocalize. I muttered a ‘Yes’ to find the shock had deprived my lungs
of air at its arrival.
He
started decanting irrationally. He was mindless, totally in a delirium. In
front of me, I had an extremely vainglorious specimen. He justified every
little bit of his existence, every action, every choice he’d ever taken.
He
was not all that strange, I confabulated with myself: the classic fanatic ‘ It
wasn’t me, I didn’t do it purposefully’. I was starting to calm down encouraged
that the victim I had in front of me only suffered from common complexes of
inferiority and insecurity. I walked right behind his stream of consciousness
as it marched on. I understood he’d certainly had an uneasy family situation,
which is quite fashionable these days; I was not worried, not a bit. He was
making his closing remarks when I got wind of: ‘ I had her as a guest for some
months, then she died, I wanted to avoid that, but she didn’t. She didn’t like
life and I did not want to go against her will. I loved her.’
The
black murky dungeons he had as eyes had now been lit by smoke blackened lamps.
He continued with his self-commiserating mission for a while. I could picture him embracing his own self so
tight he would almost bring himself to bleed.
Pure ego-centrism and victim-attitude that was.
I
could not forget the phrase he’d said about himself being so kind in hosting
this girl, (‘M’, for all I knew, was her name) who had then died. I went passed
that and let him express his aberration. He lectured me about morality and I
paid attention: it was as if he was vacuously reciting the Bible to me: reading
it upside down, however. I’d never understood diffraction in my science classes
back in college, but now it appeared so clear: this phenomenon was represented
by his view of morality. He emptied his mind for the next hour: nothing much
filled my room as he appeared to me as being bird-brained, blank, drained,
void, completely inane.
He
appeared to me as a 2D character, totally flat. I could not accept this vision
however, I knew he was hiding something, I saw it in his look: his soul was
covered in scars of disturbia. Delirium
was devouring him. He was undextrous and unproficient, clumsy and cumbersome,
gauche and gawky. He was just that piece that puzzle piece that fits nowhere
within the great frame of society: he was an exclusion, he was different,
incongruous, totally. He continued with his theatre production where he’d cast
himself as the victim and one and only character.
Outside
the sun had fired itself for the day: everything was black, creating a perfect
habitat for his dull black hair and eyes. My office has become so sinister that
it would have suited perfectly as setting for a horror movie, and I myself was
actually starting to feel part of one together with… I did not know his name, I
thought to myself; I interrupted rapidly and asked him.
The leaves were
rustling outside whilst the wailing wind tortured them. The door of my small
old closet, behind me, creaked whilst the flames, in the fireplace of my
bureau, crackled. The man in front of me spoke in assonance with the squealing
of the closet’s door and began to lower his pace. He would not find peace in speaking
of the dead girl. Suddenly he stopped. The brakes of a car in the distance
screeched suddenly.
He whispered:
‘Ferdinand. No, excuse me, my name is Frederick Clegg’.
I was stunned,
I had already heard about this murderous, lunatic, deranged, mean-spirited
killer and kidnapper. I had heard of him from another client: Mrs Grey, she’d
told me all a range of strange episodes concerning this character, who used to
be her family’s neighbour. I managed to hold the twitches in my face and
invited him to speak again.
He spoke again
about pictures he had taken of the dead girl. He was obsessed with photography
and with his own style of pursuing this art. I stared for a second,
unconsciously, at the saliva dripping from his mouth. It was similar to an
animal’s, a hungry animal’s one. He looked as if he was possessed by Satan in
that moment, as if he wanted to get the dead girl back to life and violate her
in that moment. He was an unsatisfied animal. I could see that from the
maliciousness evaporating from every single pore of his skin. F.C was mad at
life and mad full-stop.
If I were to
described his pathology I would say he was totally took over by senselessness
and preposterousness, because the complexity of these two words reflect Frederick
I was
meditating on the subject I had in front of me and did not take care of the
fact that silence had fallen: his malevolent voice was no longer describing his
maladjusted mind.
‘ That’s all
for today, I am tired’. He ordered. I gave my consensus with a minimal nod of
my head. He stood up: he was tall, about six feet, but as I said before he was
totally unbalanced. No gracefulness in his walk, he stomped towards the door,
waving his tyrannical gangly arms right and left. I watched, disgusted, the
invertebrate shifting his presence out of my office, finally. I had ingested
much more hysteria than my usual daily ration and I was full, it had gone over
the top. I gave a sigh of relief ,watching this last neurotic’s backside leave
my room, when suddenly he turned at me again and questioned me randomly:
‘Are you father
of a family?’
I had no more
energy to seek the source of the crazy question. I answered automatically:
‘Yes, two
girls: Melissa and Michaela’
‘Oh, what two
wonderful names’ echoed his thundering speech.
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