Chapter 5

As Lord Balah and the Witches ran fleeing from the godforsaken Sophia Town shopping center parking lot and turned the corner onto the passing main road, a speeding white Mazda 2 with the music blaring turned in front of them and unexpectedly clipped the side of poor Trudie’s torso.  The driver- a ghastly lesbian by the name of Harriet, was in a rush to buy dog food before her lesbian lover, Tabita, got home from work.  As it happens, the young lesbian couple were at the difficult 18-month hump in their relationship:  where the intimacy-inducting hormones have worn off and the relationship has been unwittingly reduced to a monotonous routine of work, sleep and feeding the dogs (also known to those in the know, dear reader, as Lesbian Bed Death).  Harriet had already forgotten to feed the poor creatures thrice before that week, and after a long, 2-hour coffee-fuelled therapy session with her mother/BFF, Tabita had decided that should it happen that Harriet forgets to feed her “kids” again, that it would mean their love has died and their relationship would be over.  And so it was that Harriet, fearful that Tabita would actually follow through with her threat this time, rushed out to the nearby Sophia Town shopping center in order to buy the dog food she had forgotten to purchase the previous day, and in her haste hit poor Trudie who now lay broken and bleeding on the sidewalk.

Lord Balah stood motionless as poor Trudie lay moaning in pain on the ground before them.  Unsure of what to do or where the nearest hospital was, Lord Balah watched hopefully as Harriet pulled into the parking lot.  Expecting her to rush over and assist them, Lord Balah was unfortunately disappointed, as her watched her hurry desparately into the Shoprite supermarket in search of her coveted Pedigree meat-stew flavored dog bites.  During this time, the twins had mysteriously managed to communicate with a passing petrol station attendant, who had indicated to them using a complicated diagram drawn in the sand next to the sidewalk, that there was indeed a hospital just meters away from where they stood.

It was at this moment that Lord Balah was grateful for all the years his adopted parents, the Chisseltons, had sent him on rigorous summer camps as a child- where his body was crafted into a tough, well-built machine.  A reluctant athlete (despite his innate prodigious athletic abilities) at best, Lord Balah had always preferred to live a life of the mind- spending his free time immersed in the books that filled the Chisselton Country Estate library.  All of that physical exercise he was subjected to as a child, however, had finally come in handy- and so it was without effort that Lord Balah swiftly picked poor Trudie off the ground and onto his shoulders, and they made their way to the nearby Helen Joseph Hospital.

Nothing in his opulent, aristocratic upbringing could have prepared Lord Balah for the carnage that met his eyes when he entered the Helen Joseph Hospital.  As he would later be informed, Helen Joseph Hospital is a government-funded hospital, and since the government had stopped funding it sometime back in the late 90’s, the result was that the Helen Joseph Hospital is today nothing more than a cargo hold for the diseased and dying.  In order to deal with the lack of funds required for medical stock and functioning equipment, the doctors and nurses of Helen Joseph Hospital had desperately turned to alternative medicine in their effort to continue saving lives.

After one of the student doctors had read an article on the healing power of positive thinking- in which a Japanese man had put labels on bottles of water with  different words on each one and it was found that the bottles of water with the positive messages became better (in molecular structure) and the bottles with negative messages became somehow worse- it was agreed by the rest of the hospital staff that their primary method of treatment for their patients would now consist of applying sticky labels inscribed with positive words and phrases on patients heads.  As a result, Lord Balah could see, every patient that lay in a bed- and even the ones lying on the floor- had a small white label stuck to their forehead.  Some labels had simple, generic messages such as  “get well soon”, whilst others had more serious messages such as “I really hope you make it through the night xxx”.  Doubtful of the efficacy of this eccentric healing technique, Lord Balah nevertheless decided to hand Trudie over to the nurses.  Delirious and slipping in and out of consciousness by this stage, Lord Balah hoped that the happy thoughts and positive phrases of this tireless team of underpaid medical staff would somehow manage to heal the broken bones in poor Trudie’s lifeless body.

Despite the unfortunate setback of poor Trudie’s seemingly untimely demise, Lord Balah decided that his journey must go on.  After agreeing with the twins to meet back at the hospital in three days time, Lord Balah and the twins parted ways in search of their destinies.