Altered images. 

Chapter 3 - Monster

  

“Paul, it’s alright” my wife said. 

“Paul don’t worry you’re going to be fine” said the paramedic 

“Dad” cried one of my three children huddled together in the bedroom doorway.

I was trying to wake up because it was my bedroom and there were strangers in it. Too much colour again. Lots of green this time. Uniforms, ambulance men. I tried to sit up. Someone had been hurt whilst I was asleep - why didn’t someone wake me? I don’t seem to be able to find the strength to get up or ask the questions I want to ask. 

“Just relax Paul” said a paramedic. “We’re going to get you in the ambulance very soon”.

“Ok” I said.

“It’s ok darling you’re going to be fine” Angela said again. But this time I was scared, because I could tell that she was.

“What’s happened?” I said. It was difficult to talk because I was so tired and because my tongue wouldn’t work properly. It hurt too and I could taste blood.

“It looks like you’ve had a seizure” said the paramedic “we’ll get you off to the hospital and let them take a look at you.”

My grand mal siezure had shaken the house and everyone in it. It must have been terrifying for my wife and young children.

I had been asleep when the first seizure started so I missed the feeling immediately before it’s onset. Different people experience different things. Some get a warning, some don’t. Some experience what is described as an aura. Some get a strange sensation of smell or a feeling of dread. 

I was awake when my second seizure struck. Seconds before, I was consumed by a feeling of dread. As the seizure subsided leaving me exhausted and hollowed out, the feeling of dread remained. But this was real, not the by product of some wayward neuro-electrical activity, this was explainable, justifiable - there had to be something very badly wrong with me. 

At the time I didn’t realise how deeply affected my young family were by my seizures, how destabalised their life had just become. The solid ground that was me, had opened up beneath their feet. I was no longer reliable. I could no longer be trusted. During one of my seizures I had got to my feet and pushed Luke, my 8 year old son, nearly knocking him down the stairs. I was of course unaware of this. A grand mal seizure goes through a set pattern and during this particular phase, a subconscious fight or flight impulse can make the sufferer a bit of a handful - on the move, rolling eyes, blueish complexion, spitting blood from biting their own tongue, strong, determined, scared, unaware and uncaring. 

Or as I must have looked to Luke...a monster.

Chapter 2 - Too much colour

   

It was the most parroty parrot you have ever seen. The kind of blue that can sometimes hurt your eyes. Too much blue info shooting down your optic nerve into your brain. Greens too, reds and yellow.Too much colour sat on a fence by our kitchen window..

I was about 10 when I saw my first colour TV programme. My dad worked for Rediffusion and none of my mates had one. We were the first. I remember it was Top Of the Pops and I remember I didn’t like all the colour. It was too much, it made me feel uncomfortable, anxious even. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t how things were supposed to be. You could rely on the grey world. There was a sort of understanding; a trust between me and the telly that however potentially unsettling the images were, they were at least censored by the absence of hardcore colour. 

The parrot and I watched each other for a few seconds. He (I decided it was a bloke because of his 'you looking at me?' manner) then, started shitting huge amounts of white, god knows what, down my ebony stained trellis work. A strange shrugging of its shoulders, followed by a twisting of its neck, seemed to indicate that he had done it deliberately and was trying very hard to muster up some more. 

Parrots remind me of clowns. They don’t fool me, either of them. I can see the hatred in their painted faces, even hear it in their voices. “Who’s a pretty boy then?” They’re biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to punish us for generations of pointing and laughing and ridicule.

I’ll be honest, when I first saw the parrot I didn’t think  - bloody hell maybe this means I’ve got something really wrong with me. Something like a brain tumour and not just a bad case of earwax. It had been two weeks since I’d seen the doc and if anything I’d thought more about whether the old bum investigation ought to be investigated by the authorities than the Kung Fu lesson on probability. An exotic outcome was unlikely.

I knew though that the parrot bothered me and I knew that there was no control button that would desaturate the colour. No control that would make the parrot become a sparrow and make things normal again.

 

Chapter 1 - More sparrows in the sky than parrots

“Mr Barton, there are more sparrows in the sky than parrots” he explained. He, to clarify, was my GP. The Chinese philosopher trick worked a treat - I was doubly reassured. Not only was my doctor a great thinker he was confident that my dizzy spells were of the common or garden variety - dull, of little interest and he saw plenty every day.

 

Maths had never been my strongest subject, I couldn’t see the beauty in it. I was an artist and art was beautiful. Today though, the laws of probability looked pretty damn good. My ears probably needed syringing - I wasn’t going to die.

I admit my feathers had been ruffled for two or three weeks prior to my visit to the doc. I didn’t do dizzy spells, I didn’t do lots of emotional outbursts either; rage, tears, giggling fits. Nor did I usually have very strong opinions on just about everything. 

I will always remember, like anyone else who saw it, the Melvin Bragg interview with Dennis Potter, as he was losing his painful battle with cancer. He described how simple things, ordinarily passed by in the hectic normality of life, were brought into sharp focus. In the knowledge that they would soon be gone, they burned brighter and were savoured. Or as that extraordinary man put it - “The blossomiest blossom.” “The nowness of now.”

The doctor struggled with this symptom. “Everything seems too real you say? You feel too aware?” he asked. He hadn’t seen the ‘Nowness’ interview unfortunately. Nor was poor Dennis around to make him understand. I was on my own, and presenting all the early indications that I was becoming an adolescent werewolf.

"What possible medical connection could there be to all of the aforementioned symptoms?" I thought as I lay on a paper sheet, trousers lowered and knees bent up towards my chest. Determined to get to the bottom of my mysterious condition, two unreasonably fat fingers nudged their way through the darkness towards some kind of enlightenment. Sadly, even armed with my newly found set of strong opinions, the sun did not shine out of my bum and throw a little light on matters. What he thought might be causing dizzy spells up there, I couldn’t imagine. A forgotten kilo of badly wrapped cocaine maybe? I didn’t smuggle drugs and it was too early in our relationship to push for answers, so I let the moment pass.

 

“Relax” he muttered to himself, as he withdrew none the wiser. “Make an appointment with the nurse and we’ll sort those ears out ” he instructed, peeling the latex from his fingers. No orifice was to be left ‘unsorted’.

I didn’t make the appointment. I decided to leave it for a couple of weeks and wait for my sense of smell to heighten and hair to grow coarser. It would be a full moon by then and everything would become clear.