Sometimes the affects of an impairment, if you can even call it that, are not immediately obvious. You’d think, in your innocence, that man with a stammer would struggle to find his way in life and that would be his curse. If fact, you’d be strolling away from the truth in precisely the wrong direction like an arrogant, happy fool.
“Bloody bleeding brilliant!” That’s another thing that never got said. Waiting, like an amateur soldier uncomfortable with his rifle, Spencer would stagger around stammering at every slight thing that caught his attention when he was young and useless, before fate got hold of him and turned him around.
“Cook me a sprout!” he would say, not because he wanted one, but because that was all he could say. This was the most peculiar feature of Spencer’s condition. He could say anything as long as he didn’t mean it and, by direct consequence, he could saying nothing at all that was the truth as he knew it. Sometimes he could only say the strangest things, but sitting in silence was so awful, he said them rather than keep quiet. “Sam!” he could say, “Sam, get me some picked gherkins”. He could say that to anyone, as long as they weren’t called Sam that is.
“Excuse me!” he would often declare with panache, “I believe your salami is wilting from your trousers, madam!”. So he did this once too often they locked him away. At the hearing, all the experts thought he was crazy because they couldn’t work out that he was only guilty of wanting to speak. He tried to explain, but of course he couldn’t. How could he make it understood that the only things he wouldn’t stammer were strange and peculiar and, above all, untrue? He couldn’t speak any sense. His mouth wouldn’t let him, so he sat and fumed once again in silence.
After ten long years in his lonely cell, one day he opened his mouth and croaked “I’m happy to be alive”. Soon he was saying it every day and all the time, to anyone who would listen. The warders saw that he’d undergone some kind of transformation, and word got around. Soon people were even talking about him in the corridors of power.
One sunny day in April, a famous foreign lunatic was visiting the prison and, quite deliberately, he happened to stop outside young Spencer’s door. “Are you the fellow?” asked the idiot, hoping to hear the notorious phrase and cheer himself up a bit. Spencer quickly realised that this was the kind of cretin that was exclusively interested in things that were not true, especially lies and nonsense that would be useful to him in some way. Our Mr Sissons decided to seize the opportunity and make a cynical grab for freedom.
“My name’s Anthony” he said, “and I’m on a mission from God to save the world.”
