Chapter Four

Why not, he thought. The tangy aroma of well-aged, well-fermented liquor swirled and eddied in the clingy kitchen air as some long-forgotten whisky hit a badly-washed, stocky glass. Grey picked it up, thought twice about going to sit down and drink it, and then hit his wrist back. A dose of the sickly mix raced through him. He flinched, and leaned up against the counter. The bitterness took him back to his med school training. The effects of alcohol on the central systems. Impaired behaviour, judgement, hand/eye co-ordination, concentration. Maybe that was why he drank - to momentarily become young again.

He smiled a little at his little aphorism, though it jarred a little. At the same time a tiny, insignificant little voice shouted at him, bellowing to him about his own insignificance. He drank, because it felt sensible. That was all. Because godforsaken, white-collar wrecks did that sort of thing. At that thought, he raised his wrist to his nose and inhaled. It reeked more than the dead-end bars he tried so hard to avoid. All alcohol and stories of loneliness. He couldn't remember when he had last washed this shirt. Then again, after a few glasses of that piss, he'd be hard pushed to remember anything at all.

There was a shrill ringing. At first he wondered if it was a symptom, and stood very still whilst trying to work out what might have caused it. After noting that he was both conscious and standing upright, he realised that the ringing was actually playing out a particularly lively section of Beethoven's Fifth. It was one of his phones. He put down the glass with a dull note and strode back into the living room. On a worn sideboard, two cellphones lay, and one was projecting lurid light onto the walls. It was the In phone.

He called it the 'In' phone simply because problems came into it. This was the phone whose number he gave out to patients. When this one lit up, he would be picking the phone up and talking to people on the edge, people with problems. They would be offloading them onto him, looking for a way out. But whereas they had learnt to cope with their individual worlds of horror, he had to adapt to dozens. One minute he would be inside the mind of a suicidal rape victim. Then the world of drugs addiction. Gamblers. Kleptomaniacs. He wasn't sure there was a term for it, but ever psychologist he had ever really talked to about it got the same problem - if you let too much in, you picked up a little bit of everyone's crazy.

And that, however cruel it seemed to say it aloud, was why he had two phones. It was so that, if he really needed it, if he really needed to, he could deny it.

The other phone was his Out phone. He talked to the businessmen that wanted a consultant. He talked to his few friends, the people that passed by and wanted to talk. He talked to his ex-wife. Sometimes, he talked to his brother. But it was always the In phone that rang the most. And not once had he failed to pick it up.

"Grey."
Slightly fast breathing on the other end of the line, but only for a second, as if he had caught the caller by surprise.
"Doc', I'm... I'm here again."
He disliked being called Doc'. It was a chummy kind of cliché that belonged in Noir movies and bad spoofs. It was also the kind of nickname that only one of his patients would ever use.
"Regal House, Sarah?"
"Yeah..."
The background noise didn't seem particularly great. She was clearly using one of the casino payphones. He wouldn't be surprised if she had gambled her cellphone away. In fact, he was more surprised that she had enough change for the phone call.
"Why did you go there today? I thought you were feeling good right now."
"I... I dunno, Doc', it's jus'... y'know, I got a lot of stick today at work, just wanted to cool off. But then I'm at the table, and I think about putting down my ring. My ring, Doc'. That's when I remember my talk with you, and why I said I'd come see you."
He wasn't a therapist. This was less his concern than it was her family's, or her friends'. But she didn't have many of those. And nor did Grey.
"Ask yourself what you really want to get from being in there, hmm?"
"Doc', I... I don't know any more. I lied when I said it had been a few months. I think it's been nearly a year. I dunno."
"It's fine, Sarah, I know-"
Beep. Beep. Beep. The line goes dead. She must've only had a few coins to offer.

- - -

It's very dark. City parks, in particular, seem to absorb the night skies more than other places, and the Green Park was no different. The trees dripped with shadows and strange noises, and the limp lights that were scattered here and there were nowhere near enough to break through the blackness.
One tree in particular appears dark and powerful when night descends, and manages to paint a silhouette against even the deepest night sky. At the foot of this tree, a woman stands. It's unclear what she's wearing - something that flattens out her figure, makes her a general mass of human. Her shoulders droop slightly. It's possible that she's crying, but she could just as easily be lost in thought.
The tree is a good deal wider than her, and at least five times as tall - still as bushy and evergree as it always is, although at night it is difficult to tell. The bark is aged, cracked, worn with weariness and overuse. At the foot of the tree is a small plaque. Though it is clearly too dark to read, the woman is aware of what it normally reads, as she had ordered it to be engraved especially not two years previous.

"You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough."