BY THE FOURTH DAY | Douglas Thompson
Ben Pippin was guilty of the most subtle and forgivable of human failings: the desire to please everyone at once. He had probably acquired this pattern of behaviour from his childhood home where he had been ruled over by domineering ex-military father and a flighty unpredictable mother, an ill-matched couple, constantly at odds. Between these two he had been batted back and forward like a shuttlecock as a youth, when pleasing to one, reviled by the other.
Many of us still have a vague quasi-christian notion in the back of our heads, that a man who tries to help others will eventually end up lauded as a folk-hero. But by all accounts Ben’s kindness in adult life had given him a reputation as a “soft touch” at his work and in his home, his gentlenes had led to him repeatedly being passed over for promotion, his love of children had led him to having five, and his distaste for refusing them anything had led to them being overweight and spoiled and impetuous, lacking in discipline and respect. Brats, you might say. His wife had come from a privileged but dysfunctional background, with an expectation that her and the children must constantly consume in order to be happy, life being a sort of continuous free-range Disneyland. Of course, you may not to be wrong to suggest that such an outlook is increasingly common in our current society. If so, it is not a philosophy per se, but a kind of default stop-gap, a materialist tarpaulin thrown over a gaping hole in contemporary culture. With no meaningful spiritual goals to think or aspire to any longer, instead we play, we watch, we buy, we consume.
Ben’s own account of the days leading up to his mental breakdown and arrest and sectioning under the mental health act and eventual incarceration at this instition, are, we think, illuminating:
Rain, rain. So much rain in that city I was born in. All my life like a burden from the sky. And when I hear it in here some nights within these walls I remember. Remember it on the roof of the house I lived in. Remember it on car roofs and windows, driving around my kids, taking them to and from school to parties and events and friends’ houses, and then I wonder how they all are for a moment. Then I remember. What happened. Why I’m here. A sort of dull mild nausea. No, not grief or remorse. Not even yet.
No one warned me just how much hard work a family could become. Driving them all around everywhere, buying them stuff, keeping up with their classmates, keeping them entertained. My own parents only had me and I never seemed to be the focus of their attention for long. More the other way about. I had to be seen and not heard. And sometimes not even seen either. Maybe we were too poor to ever eat too much either. So I never saw all these dangers.
My wife and I had five children, she kept wanting more, more. And we ate well and the kids ate well, those big portions they serve in all the diners. We lived like that, eating and eating. I had never got much chocolate as a kid, so our kids got as much as they liked, we saw to that. No austerity, just a land of endless plenty.
The last day I remember before I blacked out and found myself here, Dorla had nudged me out of bed early to go pick up our youngest, Edwin, from a sleepover. The rain was on again, sparkling and bouncing in the gutters, the sky grey, the air cold but not fresh, both shivery and clammy. No wonder nobody walks anywhere in this city.
Edwin emerged from his friend’s house at the toot of my horn and something happened to me. I hadn’t had my second cup of coffee yet, maybe I was still half-asleep. But a veil was lifted and I saw for the first time just how obese he was. Suddenly something allowed me to admit this to myself. His elder brother Dwain had asked me to pay for a gastric band for him the week before, and I’d thought he was joking at first. He’s only twenty-one. Was. Maybe that’s what had started it, delayed reaction.
Rain spattered on the car windscreen as he waddled towards me and I found my face was suddenly raining too, tears streaming down my cheeks, my lips contorting in disgust and pity.
I saw or I felt I saw, what the rest of his life had in store, or how little it had in store. A life of ridicule and rejection and self-loathing all just because Dorla and I had given him all the candy and steaks he had ever wanted and never forced him to take exercise when he couldn’t be bothered and wanted to watch TV instead. Are calamities, slow-motion disasters, that easy to let slip? I saw at that moment that my kid was a prime slob, a bloater. So were his brothers and sisters. So was his mother. Something inside me snapped like a belt-buckle.
I drove back via the gun shop and the mini-mart, in that order. Edwin wanted to know why I was crying, but soon I wasn’t any longer, as a cold clear knowledge of what I had to do next began flooding through my veins. God had spoken to me, whispered in my ear and told me. The Chaplin in here tells me it must have been the devil, but I don’t know how he can be so sure, he wasn’t there. Perhaps to be fair, there was also an element of the spirit of my late father, God rest his soul, who had unfortunately planted a seed in my mind by telling me about some of his experiences in Vietnam at the hands of his captors. That’s what gave me the knowledge you see, and the certainty.
When I got home, I got a screw driver and chisel out and put some locks and big chains on the living room door. Then I unplugged the phone and the TV and locked all the windows and brought the blinds down and gathered all the kids and Dorla together into the living room and told them at gun point, how they were all going on a diet, Dorla included. This diet was going to be rice only, that’s right: rice. Nothing else, and nobody was going to leave the house for weeks if need-be, however long it took, for the diet to work.
They were scared, Dorla particularly, especially when I put the silencer on the gun and fired a few warning shots into the ceiling, but I could see they had no problem grasping the whole diet concept. They had seen and heard enough adverts and stories about whacky fad diets on the TV and internet over the years, so my attitude, harsh and sudden though it was, seemed to make some kind of sense to them.
It was only about a day later, when my second stipulation began to really hurt them: no liquid of any kind. Just more rice. Basmati, long grain, Thai jasmine rice, brown rice. Hell, cattle can manage on just grass can’t they?
Then I simply went on as I had always done my whole frigging life until then: I did what people asked. My five fat kids and wife got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier and kept asking me for food, and I kept feeding them rice from those ten massive sacks of the stuff I’d bought from the mini-mart on my way home. I fed them all that I had…. a whole big heap of rice I can tell you. Loads.
By the fourth day they were, I could see, beginning to literally die of thirst. So again, I just did exactly what I’d done all my life: again, I did what people asked of me. I gave in. I unlocked the door and went to the kitchen and came back with several big jugs of water and glasses and I let them have it, just as much as they asked for. And boy, did they drink that down.
And they all just sat there together on that big sofa, crying with relief and thanking me so much for relenting and allowing them to quench their thirst. How happy they each looked then, I can still see their expressions in my mind’s eye sometimes: Edwin, Dwain, Lucy, Bradley, Britney. The red cheeks, the stress going out of them, the delight that old Dad was back, new crazy Dad had just been a bad dream. Dorla, pouring with sweat, eyed mlovingly, forgivingly, sure in her heart that now my inexplicable episode was over she could find a good psychiatrist and get me back on the straight and narrow, restore the bliss of family life, everything would be alright.
I knew then that was how I wanted to remember her and the kids, and not pollute my good memories with what would come after. So after ten minutes, I just stood up and unlocked the door, locking them all in behind me and left the house for the last time. I decided to leave the car behind for a change, enjoy the walk, even in our neighbourhood where nobody ever walks, where there aren’t even pavements in places. I don’t think I had any real idea where I was going. But I remember I was smiling, like a prisoner set free. The rain had finally stopped.
I walked down the street and away from my old life, to the sound of a loud bang behind me followed by some muffled screams, as the first of my family exploded.
Of course, in here they call me Uncle Ben. I prefer pasta.
Ben Pippin was guilty of the most subtle and forgivable of human failings: the desire to please everyone at once. He had probably acquired this pattern of behaviour from his childhood home where he had been ruled over by domineering ex-military father and a flighty unpredictable mother, an ill-matched couple, constantly at odds. Between these two he had been batted back and forward like a shuttlecock as a youth, when pleasing to one, reviled by the other.
Many of us still have a vague quasi-christian notion in the back of our heads, that a man who tries to help others will eventually end up lauded as a folk-hero. But by all accounts Ben’s kindness in adult life had given him a reputation as a “soft touch” at his work and in his home, his gentlenes had led to him repeatedly being passed over for promotion, his love of children had led him to having five, and his distaste for refusing them anything had led to them being overweight and spoiled and impetuous, lacking in discipline and respect. Brats, you might say. His wife had come from a privileged but dysfunctional background, with an expectation that her and the children must constantly consume in order to be happy, life being a sort of continuous free-range Disneyland. Of course, you may not to be wrong to suggest that such an outlook is increasingly common in our current society. If so, it is not a philosophy per se, but a kind of default stop-gap, a materialist tarpaulin thrown over a gaping hole in contemporary culture. With no meaningful spiritual goals to think or aspire to any longer, instead we play, we watch, we buy, we consume.
Ben’s own account of the days leading up to his mental breakdown and arrest and sectioning under the mental health act and eventual incarceration at this instition, are, we think, illuminating:
Rain, rain. So much rain in that city I was born in. All my life like a burden from the sky. And when I hear it in here some nights within these walls I remember. Remember it on the roof of the house I lived in. Remember it on car roofs and windows, driving around my kids, taking them to and from school to parties and events and friends’ houses, and then I wonder how they all are for a moment. Then I remember. What happened. Why I’m here. A sort of dull mild nausea. No, not grief or remorse. Not even yet.
No one warned me just how much hard work a family could become. Driving them all around everywhere, buying them stuff, keeping up with their classmates, keeping them entertained. My own parents only had me and I never seemed to be the focus of their attention for long. More the other way about. I had to be seen and not heard. And sometimes not even seen either. Maybe we were too poor to ever eat too much either. So I never saw all these dangers.
My wife and I had five children, she kept wanting more, more. And we ate well and the kids ate well, those big portions they serve in all the diners. We lived like that, eating and eating. I had never got much chocolate as a kid, so our kids got as much as they liked, we saw to that. No austerity, just a land of endless plenty.
The last day I remember before I blacked out and found myself here, Dorla had nudged me out of bed early to go pick up our youngest, Edwin, from a sleepover. The rain was on again, sparkling and bouncing in the gutters, the sky grey, the air cold but not fresh, both shivery and clammy. No wonder nobody walks anywhere in this city.
Edwin emerged from his friend’s house at the toot of my horn and something happened to me. I hadn’t had my second cup of coffee yet, maybe I was still half-asleep. But a veil was lifted and I saw for the first time just how obese he was. Suddenly something allowed me to admit this to myself. His elder brother Dwain had asked me to pay for a gastric band for him the week before, and I’d thought he was joking at first. He’s only twenty-one. Was. Maybe that’s what had started it, delayed reaction.
Rain spattered on the car windscreen as he waddled towards me and I found my face was suddenly raining too, tears streaming down my cheeks, my lips contorting in disgust and pity.
I saw or I felt I saw, what the rest of his life had in store, or how little it had in store. A life of ridicule and rejection and self-loathing all just because Dorla and I had given him all the candy and steaks he had ever wanted and never forced him to take exercise when he couldn’t be bothered and wanted to watch TV instead. Are calamities, slow-motion disasters, that easy to let slip? I saw at that moment that my kid was a prime slob, a bloater. So were his brothers and sisters. So was his mother. Something inside me snapped like a belt-buckle.
I drove back via the gun shop and the mini-mart, in that order. Edwin wanted to know why I was crying, but soon I wasn’t any longer, as a cold clear knowledge of what I had to do next began flooding through my veins. God had spoken to me, whispered in my ear and told me. The Chaplin in here tells me it must have been the devil, but I don’t know how he can be so sure, he wasn’t there. Perhaps to be fair, there was also an element of the spirit of my late father, God rest his soul, who had unfortunately planted a seed in my mind by telling me about some of his experiences in Vietnam at the hands of his captors. That’s what gave me the knowledge you see, and the certainty.
When I got home, I got a screw driver and chisel out and put some locks and big chains on the living room door. Then I unplugged the phone and the TV and locked all the windows and brought the blinds down and gathered all the kids and Dorla together into the living room and told them at gun point, how they were all going on a diet, Dorla included. This diet was going to be rice only, that’s right: rice. Nothing else, and nobody was going to leave the house for weeks if need-be, however long it took, for the diet to work.
They were scared, Dorla particularly, especially when I put the silencer on the gun and fired a few warning shots into the ceiling, but I could see they had no problem grasping the whole diet concept. They had seen and heard enough adverts and stories about whacky fad diets on the TV and internet over the years, so my attitude, harsh and sudden though it was, seemed to make some kind of sense to them.
It was only about a day later, when my second stipulation began to really hurt them: no liquid of any kind. Just more rice. Basmati, long grain, Thai jasmine rice, brown rice. Hell, cattle can manage on just grass can’t they?
Then I simply went on as I had always done my whole frigging life until then: I did what people asked. My five fat kids and wife got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier and kept asking me for food, and I kept feeding them rice from those ten massive sacks of the stuff I’d bought from the mini-mart on my way home. I fed them all that I had…. a whole big heap of rice I can tell you. Loads.
By the fourth day they were, I could see, beginning to literally die of thirst. So again, I just did exactly what I’d done all my life: again, I did what people asked of me. I gave in. I unlocked the door and went to the kitchen and came back with several big jugs of water and glasses and I let them have it, just as much as they asked for. And boy, did they drink that down.
And they all just sat there together on that big sofa, crying with relief and thanking me so much for relenting and allowing them to quench their thirst. How happy they each looked then, I can still see their expressions in my mind’s eye sometimes: Edwin, Dwain, Lucy, Bradley, Britney. The red cheeks, the stress going out of them, the delight that old Dad was back, new crazy Dad had just been a bad dream. Dorla, pouring with sweat, eyed mlovingly, forgivingly, sure in her heart that now my inexplicable episode was over she could find a good psychiatrist and get me back on the straight and narrow, restore the bliss of family life, everything would be alright.
I knew then that was how I wanted to remember her and the kids, and not pollute my good memories with what would come after. So after ten minutes, I just stood up and unlocked the door, locking them all in behind me and left the house for the last time. I decided to leave the car behind for a change, enjoy the walk, even in our neighbourhood where nobody ever walks, where there aren’t even pavements in places. I don’t think I had any real idea where I was going. But I remember I was smiling, like a prisoner set free. The rain had finally stopped.
I walked down the street and away from my old life, to the sound of a loud bang behind me followed by some muffled screams, as the first of my family exploded.
Of course, in here they call me Uncle Ben. I prefer pasta.