The Non-Sense Boy and His Somewhat Unusual Sister

By Saul Marmot

During the magnificent summer of 2012, London was a city transformed. The symbolic light of an unwelcome torch had unexpectedly illuminated the faces of its usually sceptical residents. It became a city in which dreams and fireworks were being painted with the same brush. Life was filled with possibilities, especially if your name was Jules and your mother happened to be the person in charge of meeting the demands of the uncommon residents of the bustling Olympic Village.

But as the Games drew to a close and the aura of the Olympic flame began to fade, Julian’s shining dreams were being rapidly extinguished. His father’s obsession with experimentation in intelligence enhancement, shattered his hitherto peaceful world, splintering his mind and causing it to flee to the sanctuary of his ubiquitous yellow room. Here he would spend his years, cocooned in his bubble, awaiting the only person who might be able to save him; the enigmatic Temporal Lord.

Some fourteen years later, a freak earthquake in Alaska sets in motion a chain reaction which threatens the very existence of the planet. It’s hard to imagine anything that could possibly be more important than the struggle to prevent the forthcoming Apocalypse but Moira Lemmington has found just the thing – the end of the world will have to wait its turn. Julian’s experiences with the wire – a technology used to give ‘ordinary’ people a buzz – has given his mind a tantalising glimpse of normality, has enabled the order to return to his thought disordered brain. However, the effects are short lived and come at a high price. As the physical foundations of his damaged brain start to crumble, he slips slowly into oblivion, perfectly mirroring the plight of the planet.

The road to Armageddon is littered with fools and with politicians (who are often quite hard to tell apart). Fracking had, for a number of years, been a controversial technology but it took a callous disregard for the safety of others, coupled with the omnipotent ignorance of the truly arrogant, to send this technology roaring up the highway to apocalypse.

Ensconced in the Mojave Desert in California, a diverse collection of scientists battles against the rising pressure of the Yellowstone Caldera. Their enormous collective IQ struggles in vain against their gargantuan Ego and the entropy of chaos ensues.

It takes a certain kind of person to be able to see the diversion signs, someone who habitually surfs the boundaries between delusion and reality and who is no longer capable of thinking inside the box, much as he’d like to. Against all odds, Julian’s disintegrating mind has been re-formed and re-moulded. Not only is he now stable but he has unexpectedly gained the illusive enhanced intelligence that was originally intended from his father’s experimentation.

A mind such as this needs allies and so, a myriad of peculiar cronies assembles and at their head, Moira Lemmington prepares to assemble the cast of the unlikely. Clowns on a high wire, psychiatrists and mad scientists who collude and collide, interfering parents of the uncommon variety, outstanding and upstanding friends and above all, the fabulous Tallulah, a most glorious (and somewhat unusual) sister.

If the World had chosen its heroes, it should probably have shopped around a little.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saul Marmot
• Release date: Jul 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311655189

Saul Marmot

Saul was born in the UK in 1971 and has spent his life living in a wonderful assortment of habitats. He currently lives in Hackney, London, as it seems to encompass a microcosm of the entire planet in the space of a few square miles. He lives with his exquisite wife, glow-in-the-dark-Hilary and his three exuberant boys, who he says keep him on his toes and preserve the laughter lines around his eyes. He spends his days practicing as a doctor in Bromley by Bow and his evenings drifting with music, travelling at a blissful 33RPM beyond the Vinyl Frontier.

Book preview

Dedication

For the Yellow-Bellied Marmots of Hackney –

thanks for the Before and good luck for all the Afters.

Table Of Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part II

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part III

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Part IV

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

It had promised to be just another day of despondency, sitting all together at Jules’s bedside, watching him sink slowly back into the abyss of despair.

Much of his agitation and restlessness had abated. There was an air of fragile peace about him, a peace that was borne of acceptance. He had told Dr Brain the night before that he was dying and it seemed to his loved ones, that that was precisely what he was doing – slowly diminishing, wafting away until there was nothing left.

Jules no longer fought, he no longer wrestled with his demons; he no longer cared. His eyes were open but he wasn’t looking. He was barely drinking or eating and had completely given up speaking since the night before, when he’d had his tête-à-tête with the Doctor.

Over the past few days Jules had climbed so high up his personal cliff-face but now it seemed that he’d lost his footing and had given up flailing for his guide ropes.

The fog of despondency hung around his hospital bed, sucking away the breath of those who sat around waiting. It was going to be another long day.

Part I

2012

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NON-SENSE

Chapter 1

2012

The Beginning Of Time

It had all started ten weeks previously. ‘Non-Sense’ he’d called it. He had tried to explain it all to her – the purpose of the experiment, the science behind it – but all she’d ever got was ‘Non-Sense’.

Stemmil was a brilliant man. He was a man, who was so utterly consumed with genius, that he could not, at times operate in the real world. His neurosciences professor at college used to say to him Stemmil, your mind is obviously on a higher plain of perception. He would then, invariably add is it possible that your homework is also on that same plane? If you happen to come across it on your wanderings, would you please direct it to my office?

‘Non-Sense’ – a catchy title. Stemmil had been so convinced by the rightness of his experiment, by the sheer genius of his thinking, that he’d got somewhat carried away with his own brilliance. He’d finally worked out all the details and it had seemed utterly perfect; he’d become as over-excited as a child on the last day of school before the summer holidays.

He had therefore been persuaded, rather unwisely as it turned out, to go out for a celebratory drink with some colleagues. He disliked socialising and usually avoided such social gatherings in the same way that others avoid the dentist. On this occasion though, perhaps due to the unfamiliar feeling of elation, he’d made an exception – this had been his first mistake. The second was that in his exuberance, he blabbed the details of his experiment rather too loudly. The third (and most serious) mistake, was that fuelled by alcohol, he’d made the cardinal error of doing so in a pub in Stoke Newington, where every third drinker was a journalist. Journalists have antennae on their heads and have ears the exact size and shape of satellite dishes.

Two days later an article appeared in the papers. The timing was so perfect that the fortuitous journalist who had overheard Stemmil in the pub, couldn’t quite believe his luck. Neither could his editor.

Son, the editor had said, it’s a superb story you have here but we can’t just print it you know, not based solely on something you’ve overheard in a pub. Go get me something irrefutable and I might just run with it.

The journalist smiled slyly and held up a memory stick.

What’s this?

Trust me sir, you don’t want to know.

Of course I want to know! The editor was not a patient man.

Err, let’s just say that it’s some recordings of various telephone conversations between Doctor Lemmington and his colleagues that I just happened to overhear.

The editor sighed deeply. And these conversations prove the validity of your story?

Oh yes sir, without doubt.

Then you’re absolutely right, I don’t want to know.

The Leveson enquiry was in full swing but was not due to publish its recommendations for another few months yet. The editor struggled with the morals of the situation but decided not to bother the paper’s owners at this time. The story was just too good to be suppressed because of ethics.

The Paralympics had ended in triumph only a few days earlier. The Media had been working extremely hard over the Olympics and Paralympics but had had it quite easy in reality; most of the stories wrote themselves and the public was so consumed by National Pride at hosting such a perfect distraction to the World’s problems that they became aggressively disinterested in anything that was not, in some way, connected to the show.

The editor of the paper had just had a meeting with his senior staff that very morning, in order to discuss how long they could continue to run stories concerning the magnificence of Team GB and the amazing summer of sport, before the public would finally get bored and then what would the paper find to fill the void with?

Therefore, when the journalist had brought the editor his drafted article, the editor had almost done a little jig and had said a prayer of thanks to St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists. He had one simple instruction for the journalist who had written the article: Make the readers angry, that’ll get them to buy more papers!

The Daily Blog, 12th Sept 2012

SICK SCIENTIST WANTS TO FIX THE DISABLED.

There were reactions of disbelief and of fury last night, at the outrageous comments made by a prominent London scientist.

Dr Stemmil Lemmington, 37, who works in UCLH, has been quoted as saying that people with a disability are inferior and need to be fixed.

Over the past few weeks the Nation has been warmed by images of our supreme Paralympian athletes, giving their all for Team GB. Tough competitors such as Jonnie Peacock, Ellie Simmonds and David Weir have become household names. Britons across the country have taken these athletes into their homes and into their hearts. Our very image of what it is to be disabled has been completely transformed by their dedication and bravery.

But it seems that one man has not been impressed by the athletes’ endeavour.

Dr Lemmington believes that people with a disability should be experimented on to make them better and to add insult to injury, he claims that he has been working on such experiments for some time now.

He openly brags about his perverse beliefs, seemingly with no idea of why decent people would take offence.

Dr Lemmington has been working on a plan; a plan that has turned the stomachs of those who have discovered it and which is reminiscent of the tortures inflicted on innocent women and children by the Nazi butcher, Dr Josef Mengele, one of Hitler’s right hand men.

This newspaper feels that Dr Lemmington should be locked up and the key thrown away! We condemn his unethical and immoral experiments and we abhor the slap in the face that he has given to our brave Paralympians!

To join our campaign to stop this outrage, TXT STOP to 89644 or log into our website to sign the petition, at: www.saveourdisabledkids.co.uk

Moira wasn’t quite certain how she’d allowed it to happen – not the article, that she cared little about. She could see now though, that the article had been the start of what came after.

2012 was a busy and exciting time. The greatest thing to happen to London in many a long year happened in 2012 – The Olympics came to town and the Olympic flame ignited the nation. It had taken some time though for the nation’s enthusiasm to be kindled. Long before the thousands of magnificent volunteers materialised out of the ether, long before the Olympic Lanes were pointlessly opened and before Danny Boyle’s extraordinary opening ceremony, Moira had been very busy, beavering away in East London.

She was in charge of the Olympic Village. Well, not exactly in charge of the whole village but being the housekeeping manager effectively meant that she was responsible for the day to day running and upkeep of the village. When she’d first accepted the job, she’d been so excited. She had imagined working shoulder to shoulder with the superstars, in a collective bid to make the Olympic World a better place. In reality though, she’d ended up having to deal with all the pettiness and the unreasonable demands of a bunch of primadonnas.

On reflection, she considered that she was possibly being a little unfair in tarring them all with the same glitter-encrusted brush. The athletes were indeed demanding but these were the most important few weeks of their lives.

Once the Olympians had moved in, her day to day life became rather demanding. Moira’s role involved everything from fetching more toilet paper from the stores at 2am (which was not strictly speaking her job), to mopping up some bulimitous vomit from behind someone’s bed when everyone else refused to do so (for ‘health and safety reasons’, they said), to separating the Israeli and Iranian shooting teams after an argument broke out as to who the bathroom on the second floor belonged to. This incident gave her more insight into the strife in the Middle East than she’d ever gained from reading the Independent.

In consequence, for the weeks leading up to the Greatest Show On Earth and the weeks of the show itself, she was as exhausted as the athletes themselves and so didn’t pay enough attention to her husband, Stemmil, when he was busy enthusing to her about the machinations of his wondrous experiment. During the time of the Olympics and then the Paralympics, her mind was often to be found wandering, lost in her own thoughts, like how did the Chinese delegates manage to fill quite so many rubbish bins? Why did the Russian shot-putter Maksim Sidorov insist on practicing juggling with his 7.26kg shots? (And why was it always in the bathroom?) And why a certain unnameable paralympian star’s bed never appeared to have been slept in?

Over the weeks and weeks (which seemed like months and months) of the Olympics and Paralympics, she hadn’t really been a very attentive wife and had spent hours pretending to be listening to what Stemmil had been saying. He himself was so engrossed in the fine detail of his explanations, that he didn’t appear to notice Moira’s apparent disinterest and disengagement.

It was only after the incident in the Pub in Stoke Newington and the subsequent aftermath, that Moira attempted to ‘replay’ some of those conversations in her mind and realised instantly that she should have been paying far closer attention to what he’d been telling her. If she had, then it is just possible that she may have altogether avoided the dire calamities of the following fifteen years.

There was nothing extraordinary about Julian. He was an eleven year old boy, he had short, dirty, indistinctly brownish hair, he didn’t enjoy having showers and spent most of his time on the computer, in front of the telly or reading his favourite series of teenage spy books. He was relatively happy most of the time, got unreasonably frustrated with his parents when they suggested that he clean his teeth before going to bed and reasonably frustrated with them when they suggested that he should keep his room tidy (their room was hardly spotless).

He was quite bright and actually enjoyed school (though of course he couldn’t admit this to his friends, for fear of being instantly disowned). His favourite subjects were English (he had a flare for creative writing) and PE (he didn’t have much of a flare for anything PE-ish, but what he lacked in skill, he made up for with overwhelming enthusiasm.)

He was loving the Olympics, which were taking place right on his doorstep and which, to everyone’s surprise, had completely taken over the lives of folk who had been disinterested at best, the previous week. He watched as many events as he could, on digital TV, on iplayer and on the internet. His constant flitting between different sports and events would have severely irritated his father, had he been even in the slightest bit interested in sport himself. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t even notice. His father was rather preoccupied over this period, as was his mother. Julian didn’t mind, or even notice, with the exception of when his food didn’t arrive at dinner time.

Moira had got Jules and Stemmil some tickets for finals day at the artistic gymnastics and also for some swimming but had been too busy behind the scenes to be able to attend herself. Jules was ecstatic and hyperactive with excitement but only just managed to drag Stemmil away from his ‘really important’ work to take him along. He managed this through sheer force of will and a promise to never forgive Stemmil if he made him miss this dream day. Stemmil was reluctantly persuaded to take him along. A keen observer may have been interested to note that the immense joy that Jules got from the day, was in absolute perfect balance with the misery experienced by Stemmil. He hated sport, disliked crowds, found the over-friendly volunteers terribly irritating (and ‘un-British’) and spent the day thinking how much he could have achieved had he stayed back at home. Stemmil wasn’t one to take other people’s desires and needs into account. It’s not that he specifically ignored them, rather that he didn’t particularly notice them.

A few weeks later, just after the Paralympics had finished, the fateful newspaper story appeared in the Press. The trumpets sounded their blasts and the walls around Julian’s ordinary life came tumbling to the ground.

Moira couldn’t quite believe that the ‘Dr Lemmington’ in the article was the same Dr Lemmington who was at this moment walking in through their front door. She couldn’t reconcile the image of the evil, fascist, disabled-childexperimenting-monster of the article, with the intelligent, distractible man she was married to.

He walked into the kitchen where Moira had been busy preparing supper, dropped his bag onto the floor in an unusually untidy way and without saying a word, walked over to the wine rack, selected a bottle at random without even checking the label, opened it, poured himself a large glass and downed it in one. He poured himself another and stomped out of the room. Moira was not certain whether to follow him or to leave it a while. She opted for the former, turning off the stove and setting the oven to pre-heat and gingerly tiptoed after him. She found him half way through his second glass, staring down at the patterns in the floorboards, with a carefully blank expression etched onto his face.

Is everything OK?

No. Not OK! Stemmil took another hefty swig of wine and some dribbled down his chin. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid! He shook his head and looked down at the dregs in his glass. There was a dark sediment swilling around the bottom. He stared at it like a man trying to read his future in tea leaves. All he saw was shit at the bottom of a glass – which was a pretty accurate summation of his future prospects. And how could they print such nonsense anyway? He smeared the dribble of wine with the back of his left hand.

Oh God, what have I done? Stupid idiot! What am I going to do now? Though he looked at Moira, the question was clearly a rhetorical one.

He whimpered in a way that only a man who feels overwhelmingly sorry for himself (and has drunk too much, too quickly,) can whimper. My beautiful experiment. It would have been so wonderful! His voice changed to anger for a brief moment Those bastards, he shouted, those lying gits!

Moira opened her mouth, thought better of it and closed it again. She couldn’t really think of the right way to put her thoughts into words and was trying to decide how best to tackle him. She took a few deep, controlled breaths to keep her voice calm. She felt that whatever she said would probably be misunderstood anyway. Stemmil had an uncanny way of misunderstanding whatever Moira said when she was trying her best to be tactful. She would then be forced to try harder to be subtle and non-judgmental and he would just get all the more defensive for her efforts. If she hinted gently, he would accuse her of being obtuse or manipulative. If she spoke her mind and said what she meant (which was what he always told her to do), he’d then demand that she be less aggressive and could she stop picking on him?

Moira couldn’t even begin to understand Stemmil’s lack of grace when it came to accepting constructive criticism. She reflected that it was actually not just Stemmil, that it was a trait of all men to get angry at the suggestion that they may not be completely perfect. Women, on the other hand, were better at accepting criticism – perhaps because they all believe that they’re rubbish anyway and are just having their low self-opinion confirmed? Men are much better at accepting praise – perhaps because it simply confirms to them what they already know?

In the end , Moira opted for the role of supportive wife, in order to be able to ask the questions she wanted to ask without risking Stemmil plunging into a testosterone sulk.

Oh dear! Poor Stemmil! She tried hard not to make her voice too sickly, otherwise he’d be on to her. She sounded her next sentence in her head before speaking it aloud. What did those nasty-wasty horrid men do to my little Stemmy-wemmy? – No, definitely not appropriate!

Instead, she went with what they’ve been saying in the papers, about your experiment… well, it’s not true is it?

A look of annoyance crossed Stemmil’s dazed features of course it’s not true!

This was delicate, she’d have to tread cautiously but your experiment… it does involve disabled children, doesn’t it? And… well… you are sort of trying to make them better, improved, aren’t you?

He looked directly at her. She couldn’t read his expression at all. Was it safe to plough on? She gave him a few more seconds to find his balance, before gingerly tip-toeing on. So, what is it about what the media are saying that’s so wrong? She wondered how accusatory she sounded. She hadn’t meant to sound accusing – had she?

Stemmil had obviously made the decision that she was on his side and didn’t pick up on the undertones of aggression in her questioning. It’s just this whole thing about the Paralympics, they’ve got it so wrong! I’m not experimenting on people with disabilities. ‘Our brave athletes,’ – what bullshit! A few months ago, the nation couldn’t give a damn about people with disability. They were hidden away, to be ashamed of. People abort foetuses who have such minor deformities and now, suddenly we’ve ‘taken them into our hearts and homes’. Give it a few months and they’ll just be an embarrassing nuisance again! That’s what makes me so angry – the bloody hypocrisy of the whole thing!

But are you experimenting on disabled kids? Impatience was creeping into Moira’s voice.

No! Well… yes. Yes and no. Not in the way they’ve been saying – I mean, comparing me to the Nazis! I just had the idea that I could help kids with learning difficulties; kids who have low intelligence, low IQs. I can make them better – more intelligent. What parent would not want that for their kids? His look was so intense, his eyebrows knit in concentration, his brow furrowed with passion, so clear and earnest. Moira was almost taken in.

All I’m aiming at, he continued, is to give these kids a chance, a boost in intelligence. I mean, imagine if our little Julian was born with learning difficulties, Moira physically flinched at the thought, she couldn’t help herself, would you want him to have the chance to have normal intelligence, to lead a normal life?

Moira was horrified at her own reaction. The liberal, accepting, thoughtful Moira wanted to protest, to say that children who have learning difficulties have the right to be who they are, have the right to be viewed as ‘normal’ and not to be ‘fixed’. The mother in her had no difficulty what-so-ever in accepting the truth of what Stemmil was saying. She was relieved that this was not a choice that she would ever have to consider.

Despite herself and despite not yet being certain what she actually thought of what he was saying, she was non-the-less swayed by his passion and sincerity. Stemmil, she said, you are a wonderful man. I think that you actually believe that you can heal the world with this experiment, don’t you?

She leant over and put her hands on his. Will you be able to continue with it? Once the furore dies down I mean?

He looked terribly bitter. They portray me as being a mad, evil Nazi who preys on the disabled. He shook his head in bewilderment. He looked so hurt, Moira’s heart went out to him. And this bollocks about the Olympics. The country’s gone mental. I couldn’t give a toss about the bloody Olympics!

It hadn’t escaped her notice that he’d managed to drown his sorrows with the entire bottle of red – Liquid Analgaesia. The fact that he’d just dismissed the last couple of years of her life’s work, was irritating enough; the fact that he hadn’t even noticed that he’d done so, made her feel much less inclined to pity him. She sometimes wondered if there was a special place on the autistic spectrum, labelled Stemmil Lemmington.

I know that you’re not really a mad scientist. Well, not an evil one at any rate. She tried to sound jovial despite her irritation with him.

I’m not any sort of scientist. Not anymore. The ethics committee will never approve the experiment now, even if they do agree that it is ethical, they’ll never take the risk of being seen to be in agreement with Dr Mengele. Stemmil was a little calmer now, more melancholy than angry. And besides, no one will ever consent to having their kids worked on anyway now, will they?

So what are you going to do now?

Oh, I don’t know, he sighed, something will turn up I guess. I’ll get it sorted somehow. Moira was not certain she liked the way he said that. She knew how he thought and he seemed a little less despondent than he should.

Moira remembered that the oven had been pre-heating for rather a long while now. Jules was due home from his friend Joe’s house at any minute; she’d better get a move on with supper. She’ll have to wait to find out what Stemmil thought might be the ‘something’ to ‘turn up’.

A few days later, when the pressure from the media had not abated and if anything, had turned into a good old fashioned witch-hunt, Moira found out what it was that Stemmil had ‘got sorted’.

The ‘something’ which ‘turned up’ was their son, Jules.

Once the Paralympics had finished in an explosion of glory, Moira had had a few days to relax (to collapse in an exhausted heap), before the story of ‘Non-Sense’ broke in the press, and her world flipped on its head. She had been due to go back to work and to help supervise the disassembly of those parts of the Olympic Village which were not going to become a part of the famous legacy. She was not looking forward to sorting out all the stuff that the athletes had left behind. It did appear to be mainly sweat-stained underwear that had been abandoned when she’d done a similar clear out before the Paralympians had come to inhabit the Village.

She had wondered how much Usain Bolt’s sweaty jockstrap would sell for on ebay but there was absolutely no way at all she was going to touch the thing. There was also a profusion of lucky charms – likely abandoned after failing to deliver on their promises, some ipods and mp3 players and a surprising assortment of sex toys. She supposed that without partners being allowed on site, the athletes had to relieve their tensions somehow. It had just never occurred to her that the nickname Sandra the plunger Pipe, had nothing to do with the fact that she was a diver.

After the article had appeared about Stemmil, she had received a prompt call from Lord Coe’s office, explaining that they no longer required her services. Someone else had been found to do her job (the subtext of the conversation was clear: someone else – who was not an embarrassment to the 2012 Committee and the untouchable Lord Coe – had been found to do her job).

Initially she was infuriated by this. She had an image of herself marching into the office and telling them exactly where they could stick their bloody job (especially Sandra ‘the plunger’ Pipe’s lost property) but events had taken over pretty quickly and it rapidly became clear to her where her priorities lay.

At first, she couldn’t quite grasp what was happening, it all seemed somehow detached from reality. Her husband was going to use their precious son as his guinea pig. On an intellectual level, the experiment seemed plausible, even sensible to her (when she thought of Stemmil experimenting on other people’s children), but on her Julian? She knew that there was a kind of disconnect between the logical and the emotional parts of her mind, a detachment which momentarily paralysed her.

Stemmil was trying to prove to the world that he was not an evil monster and that his experiment was both safe and efficacious; it soon became clear to him that there would only be one way of doing so.

It was likely this hesitation on her part that gave Stemmil the opportunity to enrol Julian. Before she could even begin to get her head around it, he had already had his clothes and his spongebag packed and was being whisked off to the Institute of Medical Technology at UCLH where his father worked. The press were confused by this move and had decided to watch and wait, to decide at a later date what kind of a story they would write about Stemmil Lemmington.

Moira often wondered what would have happened if she’d been more on the ball from the start. Would she have stopped Stemmil? Could she have stopped him? In the years that followed, she was never completely certain why she hadn’t. Could it have been that on some level her paralysis of