Erazofuge

 

‘It was my uncle who invented it, Uncle Clive, he’s always been a very..unusual man, very clever. He designed the font that they use on tax forms. The thing is you have to meet a certain criteria in order to have the use of it..Oh and only he can operate it.’

 

‘How much does he charge?’

 

‘It’s free, he loves helping people, as long as you meet the criteria.’

 

‘But,’ Becky shrugged, ‘what is the criteria?’

 

‘Your intrusive thoughts must be based in the future. Uncle Clive isn’t in the business of erasing memories because there’s a big moral aspect to that. It’s really about those things you can’t stop thinking about, even though they haven’t ever happened and probably won’t.’

 

Becky thought hard for a few seconds, she rubbed her furrowed brow. ‘I think that’s me,’ she said. ‘I just keep thinking about that ugly guy at work, Rob. There’s literally nothing attractive about him but whenever he speaks to me now, I just go red in the cheeks and silly and now he thinks I fancy him and because I think he thinks that. I just can’t act normal around him anymore. It’s almost like I pre-ept what he is going to think and then I make him think it.’

 

Tara gave her friend a questioning look. ‘Becky?’

 

‘Yes?’

 

‘Are you absolutely sure that you don’t fancy him?’

 

‘Positive, he’s such a creep, nobody fancies Rob…and he’s married. He’s not even that good at his job but he has a lot of sway at work, he’s been there ages so if I keep being weird around him then I’ll just be categorised as one of those silly girls.’

 

‘And you can’t just squash it and get over it?’

 

‘No! I keep thinking about him, the creep. I sit there at my desk, dreading him coming over to speak to me and then when he does, I imagine us together, it plays like a film in my head, a horror film. I hate it. It’s almost like I’m torturing myself and then I open my mouth to speak, I just erupt like a volcano. I get all flustered and don’t know what to say…’

 

‘Oh no.’

 

‘And then he looks all pleased with himself because my behaviour only reinforces his perception that I do fancy him.’

 

 

‘That does sound quite bad. Uncle Clive deals with all sorts of cases, he’s probably done one like before. He does a lot of phobias too, and people with crushes, maybe that’s what this is, a crush.’

 

‘A crush. I feel crushed yes but I feel repulsed too, utterly utterly repulsed.’

 

‘Come over to his house on Wednesday night. I must warn you, his house is quite messy. I’ll be there too. It doesn’t hurt, I promise.’

 

Wednesday:

Number thirty nine Bell Street was an unremarkable road of nineteen thirties semi-detached homes, most of which had been extended in unflattering ways but Uncle Clive’s remained in its original format. He hadn’t even put in a driveway, keeping the original front garden, albeit quite overgrown.

 

Becky sent a message to Tara to say that she was outside and after a few minutes, Tara came to the door. They picked their way through piles of magazines, unwatered houseplants which were just about hanging on to life, there were photographs everywhere, mostly of people dressed in suits, civil servants maybe.

 

‘It’s through here,’ said Tara, smiling. ‘It’s in a sort of anti-room.’

 

Becky followed her through a small doorway and they walked up some narrow stairs, carpeted in dark red. It wasn't the main staircase though because they passed that in the hallway. At the top of the stairs was an open space full of computer equipment. The loud humming from the fans was quite overwhelming and soaked right into your brain until it felt as if it were simply the sound of the workings of your own brain.

 

Uncle Clive was dressed in a dirty lab coat. He spun around on his chair and smiled at Becky. ‘Right young lady. You’re going to sit in this seat. I’ve warmed it up for you.’

 

Becky sat down. She noticed his hands, they were enormous, like slender white paddles. He leant over and put a pair of complex-looking earphones over her head. ‘Can you hear me?’ he said. Becky nodded nervously, she glanced at Tara who gave her a reassuring nod.

 

Uncle Clive was tall and thin and had a smell of somebody who doesn’t really eat very much and has a layer of grey dust just beneath their skin instead of fat. He turned on a monitor in front of her and then twisted some knob on the side of her headset. She experienced an odd sensation of clamping and drawing, like her brain was being milked. 

 

After a few seconds of tweaking, Becky’s thoughts began to appear on the screen in front of her. It was alarming at first but she was quite used to seeing her thoughts and after a short time, she felt relaxed among such familiar images. 

 

Uncle Clive smiled proudly. ‘Welcome to the power of my Erazofuge,’ he said. ‘When you see your rogue intrusive thought on the screen, point at it and we’ll home in on it.’

 

Becky had actually forgotten about her intrusive thought. The bizarreness of her surroundings had pushed it into her outer inner files but now it returned with clarity. Her creepy male colleague smiled back at her through the screen, she gasped and tapped the screen with her index finger. ’There!’ she shouted.

 

Uncle Clive blinked. ‘Please don’t touch the screen,’ he said, trying to control his rage. He hated it when people touched his computer screens and it went right back to when he was at the tax office and the first monitors arrived in the nineteen seventies.

 

Becky pulled her right hand in her left and gripped it firmly as if to comfort it after being scolded. Now she felt the milking sensation in her brain more acutely. Other thoughts came into sharper focus on the screen, images of what she was planning to bake at the weekend, Vatrushka Buns with cherries and then some random images of her dream house, the dog she had as a child and lots of micro-images of places she’d visited and friends. 

 

Creepy guy at work appeared more clearly at first then he became distorted and began to  turn cartwheels across the screen. Becky thought she heard his voice shouting, ‘stop’, until he had vanished out of the corner of the monitor and out of sight. The process continued for another minute or so then Uncle Clive leant over and removed the headphones. ‘Is he still there at all?’ he asked.

 

Becky tried to imagine him. She closed her eyes and attempted to conjure the thought of him into her mind but however hard she tried, she simply couldn’t picture him or any thoughts associated with him except for his name which only appeared in sterile form, just letters. Rob Gletherby in Courier font.

 

‘All done,’ said Uncle Clive.

 

‘Thank you,’ said Becky. She felt slightly dizzy and struggled to get up at first.

 

Tara shrugged and smiled. ‘You’re so clever, Uncle Clive.’

 

‘Well…I try,’ he said. ‘Now would you two like to stay for a mushroom omelette?’

 

Becky glanced around at the state of the place, shook her head firmly and made a stride towards the exit, ‘No..no. I really must go now but thank you, thank you so much for letting me do this.’

 

Tara agreed. ‘Thank you, Uncle Clive but we’ve got some plans. I’ll check in on you on Sunday though. I’ll bring Mum.’

 

Uncle Clive looked slightly sad, standing in his lab coat as he waved them off. Becky waved back and she tried again, as hard as she could to imagine the creepy guy at work but all she could see were the words, ‘Rob Gletherby’ and it might as well have said, ‘Draft Excluder’. The intrusive thought had been fully expunged by Uncle Clive’s incredible machine, the Erazofuse.