The Buchberger Method

Bosie checked the appointment diary and noted that he was expecting a short consultation with a Mrs Pauline Harbour. He was rearranging his fuscia Holland Cooper tie when there came a peremptory rap on the door. Mrs Harbour, it would seem, had arrived at the wharf on time and was clearly keen to offload her cargo as quickly as possible.

‘Dr Falcon?’ she enquired, as if he could be any other.

‘That is me,’ he said, waving a manicured hand at the commodious faux leather chair set before him.

‘Don’t you have a receptionist?’

‘Indeed, but she’s off with malaria. Caught it on the Limpopo.’

‘Good God!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s wrong with Madeira?’

Bosie shrugged. ‘She is drawn to big beasts—’

‘Talking of which,’ she interrupted, mindful of the expensive seconds winging southwards, ‘I’m here about my daughter, Amy. She’s thirteen, and although everyone warned me that teenage girls were the succubi of Satan, I rather hoped I’d get away with it.’

‘Yes, it’s a shame we can’t whip them anymore,’ said Bosie, dreamily.

‘Quite! My father whipped me on occasion and it didn’t do me any harm.’

Bosie was not entirely sure about that, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

‘Do you have children, Dr Falcon?’

Bosie inwardly shuddered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But they do come in useful at parties. You can always pin the blame on them and you are invariably exonerated because no one believes a word they say.’

‘I might have been inclined to agree with you once,’ Mrs Harbour said. ‘But you will be aware, of course, of this social contagion sweeping through our schools? This belief that you are something other than what you actually are? In Amy’s class there are currently five dogs, seven cats, one salamander, a pullet hen, a Brunswick swan and a giant Seychelles tortoise. The teachers are at their wits’ end, but honestly, Dr Falcon, they are entirely to blame for encouraging this nonsense in the first place! At the last PTA I told them that if self-determination was the only requirement then I was the pope, and I invited them to kiss my ring.’

‘No takers?’ said Bosie, a perfectly manicured eyebrow raised by the very thought of it.

‘So it contradicts your theory about children,’ she barged on. ‘On this occasion the teachers are quite prepared to believe the children but not me! As if anyone could identify as a Brunswick swan! Daisy France doesn’t even have a neck!’

Clearly she does, thought Bosie.

The seconds were just north of the Equator and were now setting their sights on Antartica.

‘But my Amy,’ she said, ‘has decided to go one better, and has declared to the entire class, and to our family, that she is a werewolf. This means that she can go to school wearing her skirts hitched up to the nth degree of decency, wear lipgloss and lord it over the pullet hen, currently her greatest rival in the beauty department. There is a full moon in three days time, and she has told absolutely everybody that if they aren’t extremely nice to her, she will tear them limb from limb.’

Bosie whistled. ‘You have to admire the chutzpah,’ he murmured.

‘I am no mood to admire anything of the sort!’ she grumbled. ‘At the very least, it speaks to a highly manipulative nature!’

‘Are you quite sure that your daughter isn’t a werewolf?’ Bosie asked, after a short silence during which Mrs Harbour fiddled distractedly with her wedding ring.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she cried. ‘Not you too! Of course she isn’t a bloody werewolf! In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t even have any normal wolves left. No one’s seen a wolf since the Armada! You’re more likely to see a fairy at the bottom of your garden!’

Bosie privately conceded the truth of that last statement, but he pressed ahead with the lupine theme.

‘I have a large, grey timber wolf who visits my garden every full moon,’ he said.

Mrs Harbour let out an ungainly snort. ‘Where do you live? Siberia?’

‘Chelsea Mews,’ he said. ‘He’s a huge beast - and the odd thing is that we don’t even have much timber left now, either.’

Mrs Harbour sighed, and a blush of exasperation reddened her cheeks from the cleavage upwards. ‘I understand what you’re doing, Dr Falcon. I’m sure there is some purpose to this, but could we get to the point—’

‘Yes, of course. I propose we use the—’

‘Who do you believe your timber wolf to be? I mean, doesn’t he become three times the size and take on the form of an ugly werewolf just before he leaps through your window and tries to devour you?’

‘Robert Sangster,’ Bosie supplied. ‘A neighbour and one time Cambridge pal. He won’t hurt me. He’d have to fully transition to do that, and Robert is much too vain for it, even in my garden. I also know things about Robert which would make his lycanthropy the least of his worries. No, he just likes to stare at me with his yellow eyes until I close the curtains. It’s not a huge imposition. Indeed, I occasionally leave out Pedigree Chum and it’s always gone by the morning. Of course, that could be the hedgehogs ..’

‘Are you being allegorical?’ she asked.

‘Possibly, Mrs Harbour, and possibly not. But I think that a very small part of you believes it to be true, and that very small part of you is the part that your daughter is so ruthlessly prepared to exploit. She will demand things from you: pizza, new party dresses, unsupervised Netflix, a new iPhone - and she will do the same with her school friends. It will be ‘Oh! I love that necklace, can I have it?’ and the poor unfortunate will be obliged to hand it over due to the recurring anticipation of being mauled to death during a full moon. And so it will go on.’

‘How clever of her!’ the mother conceded. ‘After all, if her peers are prepared to go to school dressed as border collies and only speak in barks and howls, then they can hardly argue that Amy is not, indeed, a werewolf.’

‘Correct!’ said Bosie. ‘And this is where I suggest you deploy the Buchberger Method.’

‘Who was he?’ she asked. ‘Was he another psychiatrist? I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Austria is riddled with them. I blame the mountain air. If they spent as much time on their cuisine as they did on the human condition, they might finally be able to step off the schnitzel and noodle soup merry-go-round. Barely a potato between them.’

‘Dr Falcon—’

‘Yes, the seconds tick by, and my seconds are more expensive than most people’s hours.’ Bosie rubbed his hands at the thought of this. ‘So! Buchberger was the master of curing affectations, as opposed to real psychoses. His method was to pretend to absolutely agree, wholeheartedly, with the various Napoleons who graced through his chambers. Also those with glass buttocks, those who believed they had swallowed magnets, and the whole gamut of all the rotten guff that people espouse in order to gain attention.’

‘And how did it work?’

‘Well, he promised the Napoleons an excruciating and extended syphilis cure, plus a one-way ticket, courtesy of the British, to a windswept Atlantic island. The cure for glass buttocks was to remove all the chairs so they could never sit down again, and the magnet people were threatened with a bullet to the head. Buchberger was many things, but he was not a physicist. That one rather defeated him ..’

Mrs Harbour kept glancing at the clock. She was clearly more worried about the deadline than Bosie, who had always been sangfroid on such matters. Anyway, he didn’t have any further appointments that afternoon.

‘You must take her very seriously,’ he prescribed. ‘When you get home, you must tell her that you believe her with all your heart and are prepared to do, as any mother would, whatever is necessary to keep herself from harm. And obviously from mauling her friends and family to death in a rabid frenzy. You will go to the hardware store on your way home, and pick up any objects that suggest a steampunk type of torture chamber, or knocking shop. Full constraints, iron bars, handcuffs, anything that looks menacing and unassailable. You will remove everything from her room, for fear of damage, including her designer clothes, her electronics, her desk, her hair straighteners, her makeup. And then you will tell her that you are her father are going to, let’s say, Salzburg, for a city break, but leave a few tins of dog food in her room. Ring pull, though, because she can’t be trusted with a can opener. Oh! And don’t leave her a bucket. Werewolves don’t care where they go.’

Mrs Harbour was pleased. Bosie could tell because she made that little noise in her throat for which the English language has no name. It’s like a high-pitched ‘huh!’ as though you had witnessed a miracle but were not quite ready to dance a jig.

‘Trust me,’ he said, as they shook hands in the office doorway. ‘By this time tomorrow, your daughter will just be a horrible teenager who deserves to be lightly whipped. But to be on the safe side, tell her that the incarceration will continue for three full days, just until the moon is waning gibbous.’

Mrs Harbour mouthed the words waning gibbous as though to commit it to memory.

*****

The receptionist returned from her lunch break shortly after.

‘Oh!’ she said, ‘You’re still here, Mr Picard! I don’t think Charles will be much longer. He had a crisis with one of his patients—’

‘He sent me a text,’ said Bosie, waving his phone at her. ‘What was it? Was the patient deciding on whether to be a Scottish terrier or a Golden Retriever?’

‘I don’t quite know what you mean—’

‘Because I would absolutely recommend the Scottish terrier. Much easier to keep the pelt clean.’

Before she could reply, even if she could, Charles Falcon burst into the reception area and spent a golden minute apologising to Bosie for keeping him waiting.

‘No worries,’ said Bosie. ‘I was reading the National Geographic, and I learned two very interesting things. The ancient Assyrian warriors crimped their hair, and you have to wonder where they got the crimpers from. I might ask my barber. He’s from that neck of the desert. And Napoleon had a sister who was a dreadful sl—’

Robert Falcon slapped his forehead. ‘Damn it! I completely forgot about Mrs Harbour. He turned towards Bosie. ‘Did you see her come in? I don’t know what she looks like—’

‘I never saw a soul,’ he said, placidly.

‘Right, good. Perhaps she cried off at the last minute. I’ll call her later. Now, Bosie, full disclosure. Much as it is lovely to see you again, my parents have asked if they can be shortlisted for your parents’ villa in Corfu this summer. Just for a week. Of course, they’ll pay the going rate ..’

‘I’m sure I can manage to soften them up,’ Bosie said, rising from the chair and straightening his elegant clothes. ‘I take it that’s the main reason for the lunch invitation?’

‘It is a reason,’ said Falcon, ‘but not the only one. It really is nice to see you again. I’ve been meaning to catch up for ages. So, where do you want to go? I’ve got two hours until my next appointment.’

‘Oh, I was thinking the l’oie gourmande on Kensington High Street,’ Bosie said. ‘Your treat, you said?’

As they walked towards the auspicious portal of London’s most expensive restaurant, Dr Falcon found that his feet were unusually slow to reach it. The anticipation of the cost, and the burden of family, had put lead in his shoes.

Bosie, who was incapable of feeling anything as remotely ordinary as an obligation, let alone a scruple, felt no such burden. He was anticipating the lobster Thermidore.

He thought he might leave it a day or two to drop Charles a quick line to regretfully inform him that his parents had sold their villa a year ago.