31 - Conscience

4.11 - Confidence (AKA Always Let Your Conscience Commit Suicide)

Ben Chatham stands on a bridge, sweating and swigging from a bottle of cheap cornershop pernod after he finished all the absinthe. Inside his fevered head, his mind is dizzy and gliding. Not much change there, then.

He sees the seven-year-old boy that used to be him, staring down at his mother's coffin as it is lowered into the grave - a truly traumatic experience since his mother wasn't dead at the time but actually leading a Lesbian Liberation Front movement in the Bahamas and just faked her death to make him cry.

The cold hand of his father rests on his shoulders as the grey, earthen faces of the mourners turn away coldly. Ben idly wishes he hadn't turned up naked at the funeral and then decided to defocate on the coffin, squealing "I'm making a chav!"

Then he sees a room where his father is stumbling in from the pub and takes a swing at his younger self. He is lifted from the ground and thrown against a bookcase, crashing down. "You're a useless failure!" the father shouts.

Younger Ben bursts into tears and runs off wailing.

His father shakes his head, wondering why he ever agreed to this confidence building course for alcoholic seven year olds, then decides his son makes a great moving target and opens fire with his shotgun.

Taking another huge gulp of pernod, Ben sees a study at Marlborough School and his teenage self is working hard at his studies on a hot summers day. Everyone else is outside socialising in the sun, but Ben sits working. Well, pretending to work. Well, hiding a copy of Barbie playset accessories inside a text book and wanking furiously over a picture of the smoothe-chested ken doll.

Ben then remembers the teachers finding his younger self masterbating in the study area and taking a dim view of it - Ben wasn't actually a pupil at Malborough School, but was just passing by and things got 'out of hand' as it were. Things escalated from then on and finally he was arrested when found accidentally raping a shetland pony in the mistaken belief it was Joe Absolom.

Through the hazy fog of incoherent memory he sees himself as a student sitting looking at a mirror on the grass of an Oxford college and admiring his own reflection.

An attractive girl approaches him, and says, "Hi, Ben. I was wondering if you'd like to come for a drink of gut-rot absinthe later."

Younger Ben looks up hopefully. "Oh, can I? Please, please, please?"

"No, you can't, you sad little drunk!"

From that moment, Ben vowed to never treat women with respect ever again, and to ensure that anything with even the slightest trace of an XX chromosone would die bloodily at his hand. And that he'd never let anyone tell him how much absinthe to drink.

Three days later he came up with a cutting comeback and located the girl at her home and shouted, "No I can't go for a drink with you! I have to WORK, you filthy little slut! Some of us want to succeed in our finals, you chave scum!"

The girl mutters angrily to herself and has her minders beat Ben unconscious and dump his naked body into the business end of a sewage treatment farm.

Ben unsteadily remembers that even in his fantasy life, everyone hated him. That anyone that could even come close to liking him, he spat on just because they lacked external genitalia and he kept banging on about his stupid degree and expected everyone to love him despite his incredibly immature behaviour...

"Oh, Rose!" he sobs suddenly. "I'm SO SORRY! I can't believe I was such a fuckwit! Thank God none of it ever happened! And Jenna? How could I have been so cruel? Or that girlfriend of Steve Best... I can't believe I told her I was shagging him five minutes after he was filleted by a Tiawanese fishmonger. What kind of fucknuckle was I? Oh, GOD, I AM GOING TO GO TO HELL! AND I DESERVE IT! OH, GOD!!!"

He sees in his head a party in full swing to celebrate his degree - a party function where only he turned up. As he quaffed flute after flute of champagne, the neighbours complained at the level of the music and told him to turn it up for fuck's sake. Idly, he rang the Samaritans and asked the operator to marry him. OK, she might be a woman, but she could be an efficient and essential accessary for promotion purposes.

The operator hangs up.

Ben's excuse for a mind drifts to the scene of another funeral, his father's. Just like his mother, he faked his death to bugger off to the Bahamas and wrote Ben out of his will because he was such a retarded alcoholic. As the coffin is lowered he mutters under his breath, "Not a failure anymore you old bastard!" Ben sneers before his parents sneak up from behind a bush and go "BOO!"

Ben is so terrified he loses full control of his bowels for the rest of his life.

At the bridge, Ben drains the last of the pernod. His mind is floating on a sea of radient swirling colours and disjointed scenes, mainly from Season Two of Coupling for some reason and often involving Ben's bollocks getting caught in mousetraps. Ben realizes his entire life was a bleak collage of grey interspersed with really pathetic gay sex and trips to the lavatory for a wank about how smoothe his chest was.

Slumping against the railing, Ben Chatham's intoxicated mind floats into another humiliating occasion, which triggers a clipshow of pretty much every single adventure Ben has recorded on this blog (only edited to make him look an even-bigger-pratt than before).

Now, Ben sees before him a strange cloaked wraith with glowing red eyes and announces he is Damian Satan and frankly if Ben DOES commit suicide, he won't go to Hell because not even the inhabitants deserve THAT kind of punishment.

"Have pity on me!" Ben wails.

"I HAVE pity for you! Goodbye, Davros! It hasn't been pleasant!"

Ben realizes that Satan has buggered off and left a DVD playing of a Sylvester McCoy episode to continue the conversation instead.

Ben groggily takes his on board and takes out a bottle of pills and swallows them all, miserably wishing that he was still so introverted and selfish he might believe that anyone in the entire created omniverse might give a tinker's cuss about him being alive or dead.

"Oh God, I'm just a university-educated, depressing, unsympathetic alcoholic homosexual male living in the closet with emotional baggage... and somehow I actually thought I was somehow better than anyone else, just because I did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with my life!"

Ben struggles to climb over the railing, but falls off and breaks his spine in three places. The TARDIS arrives and the Doctor enters, swearing furiously. The show is called "Doctor Who" not "Drunken Closeted Wankers Reflect On Why They Are So Pathetic They Kill Themselves"!

Ben sobs, realizing he can't even CONTEMPLATE killing himself without being dull, boring, depressing and pointless! Even by getting drunk and trying to kill himself he has completely failed to improve the lives of others or even encourage others to stand up for what they believe in, and just reaffirmed the depressing, disappointing qualities of life because he is a miserable wasterel.

This in turn depresses him even more.

The Doctor sneers at him. "You're just a drunken loser. Were YOU forced to murder two entire species and then left to wander alone, with your one remaining friend taken from your side?! I think not! Fine! If you're so fed up to the back teeth at living a life-affirming, uplifting existence and all that pap, go on then! KILL YOURSELF! It's not worth it! End it all now! There is no fate but what WE make, you moron!"

Donna quietly points out she could kill Ben in cold blood. You know, if it helped.

"That would be mercy," the Doctor points out. "Are you feeling particularly merciful?"

"Point taken," Donna says, and kicks Ben in the head, destroying his last remaining brain cell, leaving him nothing but the smoothe host of absinthe-marinated compost instead of a mind.

In short, Ben Chatham is back to normal and already cheerfully mocking Donna for possessing ovaries and the Doctor for not having a degree from Cambridge.

The Doctor and Donna exchange looks and together they pick up Ben and throw him over the bridge.


The End.