Chapter 9

After saying goodbye to Godfrey and Maurice and promising to visit again soon, Lord Balah decided to make his way back to Helen Joseph Hospital in order to check on poor Trudie… 

As Lord Balah walked into the ward where he had left poor Trudie three days before, he was pleasantly surprised to see that she was still alive.  It seemed, Lord Balah surmised to himself, that the sticky labels had worked, and so he made a mental note to himself to google “alternative medicine” and read up about it the first opportunity he got.  Also, he remembered, he needed to check his email and Facebook profile, since he hadn’t been online in what seemed like years.

Standing next to Trudie as she lay in her not-so-comfortable hospital bed was a large, bear-like man sporting a shaved head and a goatee around his muscular face.  Trudie introduced Lord Balah to the man.  His name was Fernando, and the happy couple had met two days prior when Fernando had walked into Trudie’s ward carrying an injured woman he had found lying in an alleyway.  Fernando stood silently watching Lord Balah as Trudie told Lord Balah how their eyes had met that fateful day and that they were now deeply in love and were making plans to get married.

Fernando, as it turns out, worked as a paramedic in the greater Johannesburg area, and had always had a thing for damsels in distress.  The only child of a Maunchhausen mother, Fernando had spent the entirety of his youth caring for his hypochondriac of a mother, ensuring that she took her medication on time and driving her to the hospital (his mother taught him to drive when he was 10 years old specifically for this purpose) on almost a daily basis.  After Fernando had finished school, it was an easy guess as to what career path he would choose:  indeed, it seemed that Fernando was predestined to become a paramedic, since he had unknowingly been one since the first day his mother had faked an illness to get attention when he was 3 years old.  It could be admitted, dear reader, that the love between Fernando and poor Trudie bordered more on severe co-dependency, and it could also be argued that poor Fernando has some serious mommy issues, but let us not needlessly tarnish their burgeoning romance just for the sake of cynicism.  Whilst certainly no relationship expert himself, it was clear to Lord Balah that the happy couple had formed some kind of pathologically symbiotic bond, but he decided nonetheless to be happy for them.  The fact that poor Trudie was still alive, Lord Balah thought to himself, was a miracle in itself.

Curious as to where the twins were, Lord Balah asked Trudie if they had come to visit her at all.  As if she had almost completely forgotten they existed, Trudie shook her head uncertainly and looked up at Fernando with a confused and fearful expression on her face.  It seemed, dear reader, that the acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which had begun ravaging her psyche in Hillbrow some two days before, had begun the slow, insidious process of eating away at her brain.  Much the same as Alzheimer’s disease, Fernando knew that it wasn’t long before all of poor Trudie’s memories would be erased forever.

It was at this point that Fernando spoke for the first time.  Looking down at both Lord Balah and Trudie (Fernando was very tall), Fernando explained to Lord Balah how for the last two days- since the first day they had met- the pair had been trying to get pregnant.  Unfortunately, and despite their best erotic efforts, it seemed that try as they might, poor Trudie could still not conceive.  Lord Balah could see the pain and disappointment in poor Fernando’s eyes as he spoke, and wondered curiously why the huge olive-skinned man was so desperate to have a child with a woman who would probably a vegetable in a few weeks.  If you are wondering, dear reader, how Lord Balah could have possibly known this without ever being informed of poor Trudie’s “condition”, then it is time to let the proverbial cat out of the proverbial bag:  our hero had, at this time, begun to develop the dual mental powers of clairvoyance and mind-reading.

Clairvoyance, dear humble reader, is the ability to see the future.  For Lord Balah, however, his power did not consist so much of envisioning future occurrences so much as seeing into the hearts and minds of individuals whose eyes he looked into.  From this ability, Lord Balah was able to then predict how individuals would react to different events and circumstances, and in this way be able to “predict the future”.  As with the other abilities he would later develop, Lord Balah never questioned them, but rather just accepted them as if they had always been there.

The story Lord Balah’s new paranormal ability told him now as he looked into poor Trudie’s eyes was a sad one indeed…After she and Johnny (remember, if you will, Lord Balah’s angry accoster at the airport) had gotten married, they had settled down and bought a small townhouse in Boksburg, where they had planned to start a family immediately.  Having been high school sweethearts, it was almost a given that they would have at least 5 children and undoubtedly live happily ever after.  Unfortunately, however, no matter how hard they tried, poor Trudie could not fall pregnant.  Johnny knew that there was nothing wrong with his sperm, since he had impregnated Trudie’s best friend Vicky a few years back after they had had a fight and were “on a break”, so he quickly blamed Trudie for their inability to conceive.

Life in the Theron household grew unpleasant as Johnny began to drink heavily and Trudie spent more and more time at her mother’s house.  Trudie was at the store buying cigarettes one day when she ran into an old childhood friend, Pieter, and the two decided to go for coffee at the nearby Wimpy.  It wasn’t very long (mere minutes, in fact) before the two had fallen in love and were on their way to a nearby motel to spend the rest of the evening together.

From that first day her extra-marital affair with Pieter had begun, Trudie felt happier than she had in years.  Johnny, on the other hand, grew more and more angry as he realized that he was no longer the sole cause of his wife’s happiness.  As it so happens in matters of the heart, dear reader, circumstances beyond the couple’s control had caused them to grow in separate directions, and the pain of that impending separation caused them to behave in separate ways:  Trudie having an affair, and Johnny drinking himself into an angry stupor every evening.

It wasn’t long after Trudie’s affair had begun that she discovered that she was pregnant.  Knowing the child wasn’t Johnny’s, she feared his reaction should he find out.  Unfortunately, however, the women in Trudie’s family had a genetic condition, which often resulted in fetus’ spontaneously aborting, which is what happened to poor Trudie’s as well.  Shortly thereafter, Pieter ended the affair and Trudie never saw or heard from him again.

Having read all of this information just from looking into poor Trudie’s eyes, Lord Balah understood the unspoken agreement between Trudie and Fernando (which it must be added here, dear reader, that even they themselves were not consciously aware of): he would look after her until the day she no longer recognized him in return for her producing a child for him.  Granted, dear reader, that such an arrangement is somewhat disturbing on a deep, visceral level, but let us not judge them- lest we be judged ourselves.

Slightly overwhelmed by the pathological co-dependency he was witnessing at that moment, Lord Balah decided to bid the not-so-happy (as it turns out) couple goodbye and set off in search of the twins.  Having agreed to meet him there, they had not pitched up, and so he decided to would find them and make sure they were alright. Although he had no idea where they could be- or even if they had survived the dangerous streets of Johannesburg (which was voted the “crime capital of the world” by two independent polls)- Lord Balah set off in search of the terrible twosome.