(diaryland) November 07, 2009 - 11:42 p.m.

Hey kids, here it is. The next chapter of Balwyn Fountain.

Chapter the Sixth

The guy in the �I ♥ MELISSA� hoodie nearly leapt out of his skin at the sudden thud outside the door. In the space of a second, he had pulled out a very serious, badass shotgun from God knows where and was wildly aiming at the doorway, shouting, �Who goes there? Who the fuck goes there?�

I didn�t feel nearly as sorry for myself that I didn�t have a partner yet at that point. This feeling would pass, because the person who was about to become my Acephalus Support Group partner was about to enter the bridge club shed. I didn�t have a choice in the matter. It was a destiny of sorts.

�This is the support group, right?� came the voice from the dark, sounding choked, like its owner had just stubbed their funny bone. �Not a gun show?�

�Everybody just calm down, please,� said Doctor Andr�. �Is that Vince? Dave told me about your e-mail. Come on in!�

By the time I looked back at the �I ♥ MELISSA� guy, he had rehidden his gun on his person so successfully that where it actually was was inconceivable. His eyes had glazed over and he looked just as innocent and calm as before.

The disgruntled voice outside started up again. �It�s Vaughn, and I can�t come in. There�s too much of a step from the outside to the inside, there was a giant truck in the way so it took me ten minutes to squeeze through the alley, and there�s no handrails. Am I really paying twelve dollars to have a gun brandished in my face and my dignity stripped from me? For fuck�s sake, don�t just all sit there like thoughtless cunts. Somebody help me into your shitty meeting so I can get the fuck out of all your unimportant lives as quickly as I can, because that would be frigging great!�

Then another thump and another swear. I felt the swears were gratuitous.

While we had all just been attacked for being spineless wonders, it didn�t do a thing about getting us up off our butts to help this guy inside, whatever non-capabilities relating to traversing thresholds he might have had.

Doctor Andr� swallowed. �I�ll do it,� he said. He went over and tentatively reached out of the doorway into the darkness. �Here, HERE!� yelled Vaughn. Doctor Andr� disappeared out the door. What he brought back, after a minute or so of huffing and puffing, was a tall guy wearing an Alien Sex Fiend t-shirt in a wheelchair.

The wheelchair was too small, or he was too tall. Probably the second one. His ripped black jeans-clad knees were sticking up at an uncomfortable looking angle and were just begging to be bumped into things. Obviously they still had feeling in them. He had messy hair and glasses and his face looked like a serious old painting. It looked like he had been using the same wheelchair since he was twelve. That is, if he was only five-foot nine back then. He certainly wasn�t five-foot-nine now. He was now more a six-foot-four type. Well, that is if you laid him out and measured him horizontally, because presumably he lacked the ability to stand up. Hence, the wheelchair.

�OK, now I�m in,� he said. �You can stop staring now, and move the bunch of chairs thrown about everywhere so I can actually exist in here, thanks. Jesus, Christ.�

�Hey, that�s me,� said a thirty-three-year-old man with a very long beard I�d never noticed before. And so, he put the superfluous chairs in a little pile in the corner, which was something somebody should have thought of in the first place. People who are under the impression that they are Jesus aren�t always considerate like that, I�d heard.

This Vaughn character was mildly placated after that. That�s what I figured, because he wasn�t swearing anymore. He backed his wheelchair just enough so that it was so ludicrously uncomfortably close to where I was sitting but not quite touching me. I wondered what percentage that was on purpose, and what percentage it was necessary.

�Alright, Vaughn. Perhaps you would care to move forward just a little bit, and if you could manage a slight 180 degree turn, you might be able to meet your partner for the next group of sessions,� said Andr�.

The back of Vaughn�s head seemed to have a realisation that there was someone very close to the back of it and then he attempted to turn around with a very wide turning circle. He got caught on my chair leg so he craned his neck around.

�Hello,� he intoned.

I didn�t know that people intoned things these days. In fact, was there indeed a popular time in history with which to intone words? I wondered. It was a very uppity thing to intone a first greeting, was my feeling.

�Hello,� I countered.

�Sorry, I didn�t see you there before,� he uttered.

�That�s OK,� I rejoined.

�How�s it going?� he queried.

�Pretty good, thanks,� I riposted. I could do this for hours.

Doctor Andr� seemed to sense this and interrupted us.

�Vaughn, this is Anastasia. She feels that her house may be haunted.�

�Fountain,� I corrected.

�Yes,� Doctor Andr� continued. �This is very good. Now everybody is paired up. I strongly recommend you both having a short get-to-know-you session after we finish up here as just about everyone else has done such a thing.� He paused to look at his watch. �I thought Dave would be here by now.� He gazed out of the dark doorway looking concerned. We were all imagining him lost somewhere between Officeworks and here, or anywhere, alone and with a pile of bound A4s, wondering why he was holding them.

Doctor Andr� sighed and drew himself mentally back into the room. �Well, we will have to wait just a little bit longer. I will call Dave on his mobile if he�s not back in ten minutes. Officeworks is literally six hundred metres away. How about we have a little bit of an expos� on what brought you to our supportive group today, Vaughn? We�re all here to help you through.�

Jesus winked at Vaughn. Michael Bolton looked hopeful that Vaughn�s story would be more whiny than his own. I hoped this would be good. I was probably going to be dealing with it for the next X number of weeks.

Vaughn settled back in his wheelchair. He tilted his head to the side slightly and breathed deeply through his left nostril. Thusly, he began.

�OK. So my full name�s Vaughn Bourbon. That�s kind of important to the story. Not my first name so much. But anyway. Right, right, right. Check this out. It all started at Christmas. Last Christmas. I had a pretty normal life before then, you know, just working and buying crap for whatever girlfriend I had at the time and thinking about getting a new car. I had always felt like I had a strange destiny. I felt like I owned something; there was something I�d never seen that I was always thinking about, which strained my brain since I didn�t know what that was. My Mum said that was normal for young guys to feel like that. She said it was because men were arrogant and thought they had a birthright. I know my Dad was a lot like that.

�So, my Mum reads National Geographic a lot. She likes the stories about apes and shit. But she saw this ad on one page where if you sent in your hair or your piss to them over in Washington or some other lofty seat of scientific funding, you�d get your DNA read and then you could find out where you came from. She thought it would be good for me because then if I found out that I was half Viking from way back, that would make me feel better and it would explain my unexplained urges to pillage.

�So she stole my hair or my piss or whatever while I was sleeping, and by stealing I mean stealing in a nice way, because she was trying to be nice, and then she sent it to National Geographic and she finally told me she�d done it at Christmas. She couldn�t actually give me a certificate with the results yet because it took way longer than she thought it would take. Too many guys sending in their DNA hoping they�d be part Viking too, maybe.

�She gave me a framed photo of the pet tortoise I had as a kid as a present to tide me over until I got the real present; the DNA thing. But I�m getting way off track here.

�I couldn�t wait until the time when they got the gene test results. I could feel my destiny would be explained to me. My Mum told me not to get my hopes up too much, because she imagined that a hell of a lot of people would get a lot of results like, �you come from an extremely long line of serfs.� But I knew it would be better. The wait went on and on for ages. And then, on the third day of April - I remember that � my Mum got a phone call. And they told her who I really was. And lo and behold, I was technically the King of France. Well, you know. They�ve got a president now or whatever, and they had emperors hanging around there for a while, but I was the guy, you know? I was the guy.

�It explained a lot. It explained why I asked my Mum if I could go to the private school in Camberwell so I could learn French instead of crappy Indonesian, and why I always really liked gold as a concept. I don�t wear gold; I just like gold. And suddenly the hole in my life was filled.

�The reason they took so long to tell me was that they were checking all these bits of dead Kings they had in test tubes. Then they tested a bunch of living royal people, just making sure that they were less King than me. Turned out I was the most King. Well, my last name is Bourbon, and that was their last name, too, those Kings. I just want to add that I was technically King of France as well as Navarre, whatever that might be.

�So reporters got wind of it and one of them explained to me that the son of the last proper King, you know, Louis the sixteenth, must not have died in prison like they thought, but was squirreled away like people had suspected all along. And people wanted to interview me. I told them, �relax. I just feel like a normal guy.�

�But I didn�t. I felt there was more to come. I was right. The French government found out about it, and they rang me and spoke to me through an interpreter. They were really cool, actually, and they said that weren�t all negative about Kings like they had been in the past, and it would just be great if I could come over there and say hi to the French people, and get the keys to a couple of cities, as you do. They said they�d pay for everything. It would just be a symbolic gesture; I knew that. I didn�t think I was about to have to start signing off on laws and carrying out actual Kingly duties.

�So I went, and they asked my Mum if she wanted to come too, but she said no because she said that she didn�t want to be a nuisance, because she knows she does dither, so I went on my own. As soon as I touched down in France I wished that I had paid even the slightest bit of attention in French class at school. I knew how to say, �Bonjour,� and the �where is the toilet� one, and that I urgently required a typewriter.

�But that was cool � it turned out that the French had organised a litany of events in which I would merely stand and wave. I would stand and wave in cars down long, wide roads, and appear in front of palaces, and thousands of people came to see me and cheer me on. God, it felt good. They all waved flags with little pictures of crowns on them. I even got to meet the French President�s wife. She presented me with a special ring that Kings wore on important occasions. It weighed a ton. It was at a day when I got to go on a tour of the palace of Versailles with no restrictions � I could go and poke my head in anywhere. I went through secret passages and saw this room that was empty but they said no-one from the public was allowed to go in there usually, and I finished my tour and went out to have a little look at the huge, overwhelming grounds.

�I had a whole entourage of people following me, and everyone was taking photos, and I was striding through hedges and down the Paterre de Latonne and some unknown arsehole shoots me twice through the abdomen. Everyone ducked and there were so many hedges, you know? It could have come from anywhere. So there I was, bleeding to death on what was supposed to be the day I finally had it all fall into place.

�I laid there for ages, blacking out all the time, and a helicopter came and got me, and for some reason everybody got a bit angry at me from that time on and people started asking questions about why I should even be running around France like I owned the place, and why the government had spent so much money on me when I insisted on speaking English all the time at everybody, so five months later, after lying in a stupid tiny room in a hospital, and with everybody speaking in copious amounts of French to me in terse tones until I signed things, I was sent home.

�My Mum had this wheelchair waiting for me at home. She obviously can�t remember how tall her only child used to be. My knees are sore, and there�s no point doing anything I used to do. My Mum doesn�t understand. She keeps telling me to go to physiotherapy more often, but she doesn�t get it. I�m trapped in a chair from now on. I still have no idea who shot me; probably some French communist bastard with nothing better to do that day. It�s not like I�ve gone back to normal. I had reached the place where I felt everything was explained to me, and now I�ve hit the rocks. I tasted the wine of gods and then had my tongue ripped out. I fucking hate this shit.�

�Wow, thanks Vaughn,� said Doctor Andr� in a really positive tone of voice. �We�ve had two really great outpourings of honesty tonight, haven�t we, guys? I�m impressed with our progress. Maybe Anastasia will find it in her heart to give us an insight into the fundamental reason why she�s here soon, hey?�

Everyone except Vaughn looked at me with big eyes. I just shrugged.

I could see through my sunglasses the edge of Vaughn�s face, smiling to himself.

Doctor Andr� looked at his watch again. �I think I should give Dave a call now. I�m worried. I hope he didn�t forget and go to his sister�s house for dinner. Just excuse me for a second, would you?�

Doctor Andr� went out the door. Vaughn leant over and whispered to the bearded man, �Thanks for stacking up the chairs for me. I just wanted to ask, are you really Jesus?�

�That�s the thing,� he said. �I�m not 100% sure.�

�OK,� said Vaughn, and laid back in his chair. One of his wheels was still stuck in the legs of my chair. My feet were in a weird position, trying not to touch it. It seemed disrespectful to touch it. My left foot was slowly succumbing to pins and needles.

He smiled to himself again. I didn�t know what the smiles meant.

Doctor Andr� came back in, trailing a pink workbook-laden Dave with him.

�No need to panic � the books and Dave are here,� he said, clearly relieved. �It turned out that Dave was waiting quietly just outside the doorway in the dark for most of the last ten minutes, just waiting to be let in. Phew!�

Dave waited until further instructions before he put the books on the table.

�Alright, now the real tasks begin. Everybody grab a book and a biro, and let�s get started!�