"Pixel Juice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Noon Jeff)

QWERTYPHOBIA

The trouble began at the christening. The joyous announcement, 'I name this child Quentin Thomas King', was disturbed by the baby boy's sudden retching cough. The holy water in the font swirled red with blood.

During the first years of his life, Quentin suffered daily from this attack. His mother would call out his name, to stop him from doing that naughty thing, whatever it was, this very instant. The boy would start to cough. His father would read him a bedtime story: '"Off with her head!" cried the Queen of Hearts.' The child's skin would inflame. His mother would say to him, 'Oh, you're such a queer boy!' A trickle of blood would flow from his lips.

Experiments were made on his body, checking for all the common allergic reactions. Neither milk nor pollen nor even the household cat made any impression. All the tests failed to find the cause of Quentin's discomfort. Some small relief was taken from the fact that the abreaction was becoming less pronounced as he grew older, with the shock of blood slowly giving way to a severe, burning rash.

For all the tests done by various doctors and experts, it was Quentin's own mother who first discovered the cause of the problem. This came about when she was trying to teach the young boy the alphabet. When asked to repeat the letters after her, the poor child managed all the way to the letter P, quite successfully, only then to go quiet.

'Come on now,' said his mother, 'the next letter is called Q, isn't that right?'

The usual reaction set in. The pupil's skin was livid with his pain. Mrs King immediately made an appointment for her son to see a psychiatrist.

This psychiatrist, a certain Dr Crombie, confirmed the mother's suspicions. 'Mr and Mrs King,' he said to the parents, 'your son, I'm afraid, is allergic to the letter Q.'

Quentin was in the room at the time, and of course the very sound of the pronouncement was enough to set him off.

'Your child is not alone,' continued the psychiatrist, once Quentin was safely in bed. 'I have found a number of cases in the literature. Most of these have occurred in the last five years, which may prove worrying. There was the case of a young girl in 1999, who was scared of the letter E; a rather more serious case, I think you'll agree.'

'But what have I done wrong?' cried Mrs King, 'to cause this… this disease to happen?'

'Oh, it's not a disease, madam; think of it more as a negative reaction, a mental dismissal. Your dear child has a deep, deep hatred for the seventeenth letter of the alphabet, whether written down or spoken aloud. This hatred causes a psychosomatic response in his bodily functions.'

'Can nothing be done?' asked the father.

'The root cause of the condition is unknown,' replied Dr Crombie, 'although research has shown it to occur mainly in the more well-off, dare I say it, upper-middle-class families, such as your own. Until the cause is found, we can do nothing except treat your son with the utmost tenderness.'

'Oh my poor, poor child!' Mrs King was in tears.

'I would advise', added the psychiatrist, 'that your son lead a more isolated life.'

So Quentin's parents started calling their son by his middle name, Thomas. His bedroom was stripped of all offending posters and all the books, of course, for how could they check every one? Only the simplest picture books were allowed, and even these had to have certain pages torn out. Thomas was not allowed out to play, and none of his friends could visit, except under the strictest instructions, and then only for a few minutes at a time.

At first, the Kings found it hard not to say the dreaded letter in their son's presence. Quixotic, query, quincunx, quoits, quotidian; these words, and others - quaff and quiff, quiver and quagmire and quantum mechanics - all had to be forsaken. Eventually, however, they became expert at their task. They would read to Thomas, see the dreaded letter coming up, and with a deft turn of phrase, substitute the offending word with a more suitable one. By this technique, Thomas received an education of sorts, and even started to write his own stories; magical tales they were, and not entirely because of the restricted vocabulary.

Even in their own private, intimate conversations, and without thinking about it, Mr and Mrs King found themselves avoiding the letter Q. In this avoidance, strangely, they found a renewal of their love for each other.

When Thomas was seven years old, the good Dr Crombie brought news of a new treatment. 'I must warn you,' he said to the parents, 'the drug is still in its experimental phase. Basically, if you agree to his being treated, your son will be a guinea pig. It will not cure him, please take note of this. It will only hold the reaction at bay. If he should desist from the treatment…'

The Kings signed the required paperwork.

The medication turned out to be a cloudy liquor, pale green in colour. Thomas took two portions a day, every morning and evening. Without cease, this washing of the tongue. Until, on one fair spring day, a trembling nine-year-old boy wrote these words in his diary: 'My name is Quentin Thomas King.'

There was a slight quickening of the pulse, a flush of heat to his forehead, a nervous twitch in his arm.

And then a smile, a play of sounds in his mind, on his lips.

At the age of eighteen, Quentin King joined a self-help group called Word Up Positive. They met every Thursday evening, in a room above a public house in the centre of Manchester. At any time there could be between twelve and thirty-nine members present. They led a more or less normal life, thanks to the continuous intake of certain drugs, but at these weekly meetings, all use of the medication was banned. Instead, they talked in their own tongue, feeling more natural doing so, and not wanting to lose the gift it gave them.

The language they used was entirely dependent on which particular members were present. Sometimes, when the gathering was sparse, it was almost English they spoke. Other times, when the room was crowded, they could hardly speak at all, with so many letters dangerous. Even then, they managed to hold real conversations, expressing more in those two hours together than they had all week in more liberal company.

Thirteen of them were writers of fiction. Quentin King, led by their example, became the most successful of them all, with three best-selling novels to his name. The critics praised the 'majestic restraint' of his prose.

At the age of twenty-four Quentin married another member of the group, Molly Unwin, who could not stand the letter U. One year later their first child was born, a boy, a completely normal, healthy boy.

They called him Charles Gordon Alexander King.