Idiopathy

He’d perfected a slouchy walk, a controlled loucheness of posture. He’d breezed up to women of all ages, at parties, in bookshops, in the supermarket, and entered into conversations coldly designed to elicit the maximum spreadage of leg within the minimum possible elapsement of minutes using complicated matrices of waking hypnosis and linguistic suggestion. He talked about his ‘new direction’ so that the programmable subject heard, unconsciously, ‘nude erection’. He turned to talk of the stars just so he could say ‘constellation’, on the basis that what his target probably but unknowingly heard was ‘cunt’s dilation’. He was, it transpired, so good at this that he had conned literally hundreds of ‘open’ young women, many of whom later bravely sold their stories for undisclosed sums to drooling dailies, into bed, and had formed a relationship with not a single one of them. Somewhere around thirty, however, he had experienced his Moment of Insight and come to the conclusion that his powers, impressive as they were, should be used for good as opposed to evil. He had reverted to his given name, enrolled on a distance-learning doctorate in behavioural psychology and, as he was at great pains to point out, taken a vow of chastity that forswore not only sex but all contact with women which might in any way be taken as flirtatious, including warm smiles, charming comments and any even remotely sexual or intimate conversations, unless of course it was within a recognised therapeutic context, in which case all bets were off. As Dr Dave himself put it on a brilliantly conceived crisis-limitation
Sit Down With Sally
special dedicated entirely to his own Personal Struggle that pulled in even more viewers than Sally Duvall’s harrowing and award-winning live interview with convicted celebrity rapist Timothy ‘The Terror of Television Centre’ Turner, former children’s TV presenter-turned-social-pariah-slash-cash-machine, the powers of The Penetrator were so … (here he struggled for words) …
powerful
, that they could not simply be ‘switched off’ but instead had to be placed in a kind of sexual vacuum so that no more harm could befall any impressionable young ladies, a subject he went on to write about in a much-praised and oft-cited article in
Personal Growth Monthly
entitled ‘The Dick in the Jar: Putting Away the Penis for the Sake of Others’. It was, even Nathan had to admit, a publicity masterstroke, and the very next day the same opinion columns that had mocked and denigrated his manipulative tendencies, his shonky credentials, his, dare they say it, hypocrisy, were falling over themselves to praise his honesty, his courage, his sincerity. Within six months, although he continued his
Sit Down With Sally
appearances, he was given his own programme, which ran to a rigid and extremely successful formula of two parts telephone counselling to one part inspirational interview, which latter slot was today occupied by Nathan’s mother.
    Like Nathan’s mother and her new-found penchant for snappy clothes, Dr Dave’s mutation carried with it a fashion element. Before his exposure (which he only ever referred to as a confession), he’d favoured pink, slightly formal shirts; brightly coloured ties; chinos. The aim was to give off an air of professionalism. If he dressed like a doctor, went the philosophy, he’d be able to talk like one too. At times, he was even seen with a stethoscope round his neck. Following his decision to share intimate details of his life with his fans, however (which was never referred to as him being forced by the press to fess up to the public), he began to favour jeans and slip-on shoes, T-shirts and, worst of all, extremely low-cut V-neck sweaters worn with nothing underneath, revealing a glowing isosceles of shaved, shined, tanned flesh that Nathan found very difficult to look at but by which Nathan’s mother, who was now only a metre or so away from it, seemed happily transfixed.
    ‘Hi,’ said Dr Dave to camera, giving a nonchalant wave and an intimate smile. ‘Welcome back. Now I for one am very excited about my next guest, because she absolutely exemplifies something I’ve been giving a lot of time to here on my show over the past few weeks, and something I’m going to go on talking about off and on for the next few months. Why? Because I feel in these difficult times it’s a theme we can all relate to, and something which I hope, in its own small way,