The Treatment and the Cure Read Online Free PDF

faaarkin noise or I’ll give yer a faaarkin needle in yer faaarkin bum!”
    George Pratt’s yells fade to low sobbing and you go back to sleep.

2
    You’ve been here a few weeks now.
    It’s hard sometimes, having to go into your cell at six o’clock every night, especially on hot stuffy nights when the walls seem to press in on you and you know you won’t be able to sleep for hours yet and you don’t feel like reading. You can stand at your window and look out at the patch of grass and wall and the dulling edge of sky above the wall, but you’ve stared at them so often and so long that they seem to be closing in on you too, just like the cell. At times you feel so closed in you almost panic and have to get a grip on yourself. And when you’ve got your panic under control a little and are feeling better, you realise you’ve only been in the cell for maybe an hour and there are more hours to go before you’ll be able to sleep, then you get panicky again. All you can do is lie on your bed, with your face turned away from the light and think, except that you don’t want to think too much.
    The cell is about the same size as the little rented room you had when you were free. You lie thinking about the last night in that room, when you were preparing to do the thing that you got the Life Sentence for.
    You were sawing the barrel from a .22 rifle. The hacksaw blade was too light for gunmetal and kept bending and warping. You were also worried about the noise of it. The walls were very thin and you were afraid the men in the other rooms might get suspicious. They might even be spying through some crack or peephole, though you’d often examined the walls for openings and could find none. Still, you couldn’t be sure, and the thought bothered you, especially whenever you masturbated.
    When the barrel was off you began sawing the stock, halting every few seconds to listen. The stock came away after a long time. You put the sawn off pieces in the bottom of your wardrobe and then sat looking at the gun. It was small and neat, yet somehow larger than itself, as though huge forces lay inside it. You imagined it displayed one day in a glass case with a printed card describing what it had done.
    For a long time you stood posing with the gun in front of the dressing table mirror, striking attitudes, experimenting with angles and postures. It was a new self you saw: the set of the shoulder, the curve of the cheekbone, the elbow cradling the gun, all seemed suddenly significant. You felt a kind of hum coming from inside yourself, like the hum of a live bomb.
    You were thinking, again, about the problem of the photograph. It seemed impossible. You’d wanted to leave a picture of yourself where the police and reporters could find it; one showing you at just the right angle, with the gun held just so, and a smile on your lips. The smile was important. You weren’t a glowering maniac, but a young instrument of fate. A blond death bringer. Your smile, frozen forever on the photo, would symbolise the poignant tragedy of everything. The picture mustn’t look posed, though, more like a lucky accident that future historians would be grateful for. But how to do it? You couldn’t ask anyone to photograph you. You knew nobody. Besides, the gun would cause alarm. For weeks you thought you’d had the answer—you’d take a photo of yourself in the mirror: then you realised you’d only get a picture of yourself taking a picture. You weren’t stupid, exactly; it was just that your mind ran into blind alleys like that. Now it was too late to arrange anything. You didn’t have a camera nor any money to buy one. The last of your money had gone on the gun.
    You’d put the gun back into the brown paper wrapping and into the old carry-bag with the box of bullets. You thought vaguely of trying to tidy up the room. The police and reporters would be coming here and you wanted to make the right impression. Some things would have to be got rid of,